gwyn | I'm faded

Man, I know lately it's been a struggle for me, with so many things that keep piling up and piling up on the depression (watching my fandom get eaten alive, constantly getting confronted with these people who hate my fic/me and the really shitty things they say, my pain levels getting worse and worse and no real way out of it, that feeling like everything's falling apart in slo-mo and I don't have anyone left in my life to help me put the brakes on, they're all dead), but I wasn't expecting to have a guest lecture tip me over the edge into full meltdown mode yesterday. I don't know how people who teach for a living do it. My hat is off to you. Seriously. Especially people who teach adult learners who act like they actively don't want to learn.

I used to teach in the editing program at the University of Washington, but I can't say I ever enjoyed it, though there was always a rock star student or two who made it feel worthwhile; then the program wanted to make my optional practicum course mandatory and I was like, nope, not enough spoons, too busy with paying jobs (the sheer volume of work it would have entailed at the laughable compensation they were giving me was ridiculous), and ended up creating a one-day proofreading workshop through the program instead. I really enjoyed that so much more, despite the constant fucking-up the program support staff did on it, and the people who took it seemed to mostly enjoy it and get a lot of useful information. Then the U decided to not offer it, without telling me or involving me in the decision, and so now I just do guest lectures on some of the stuff I used to teach in the practicum at the now-mandatory class. I went a few weeks ago to the first of the spring classes--two different units, one in a.m. and one in p.m., and then the second set yesterday.

And they're completely black and white: what I'm talking about is kind of boring and unpleasant, building an editing career stuff, so I try to make it funny and engaging and lively, and the morning crowd both times was enthusiastic, engaged, laughing at all my jokes, asking lots of questions. Thanking me afterward for coming. The afternoon crowd is…well, dead, my friend who runs the class called it, but it felt almost hostile both times. They sat there unmoving, staring at me, even a couple who had resting hate face maybe but they seemed like they were glaring, unresponsive, never laughed or even smiled except one lone woman, and had no questions. Either time, not a single question. Both times this guy sat sort of right in front of me so I couldn't avoid him in the sight line and he never moved once, just sat there staring at me with what felt like contempt, it was downright creepy.

And something about that just made all this other stuff (and there's a lot of it, not just those things I mentioned) just implode inside me and it was a struggle not to come home and buy a package of double stuff Oreos and a carton of Ho-Hos and a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi and maybe a bottle of vodka and eat until I barfed myself into a coma (I didn't though). I don't even know why that was the final straw, but it just…ugh. And then reading this constant attack on characters I love in the Cap-verse made me wander around the house wringing my hands and urgently texting people my anguish, who couldn't respond because they have, you know, a life.

I have to get the energy/motivation to work on a VVC premieres vid but I'm at sea about what to do with it; I feel like the last couple vids I've made have been pretty abject failures. I came out of Winter Soldier with at least 12 story ideas and a burning desire to write; the closing of the canon in Civil War makes me not even want to finish the unwritten things I have, though I'm officially signed up for the Stucky Big Bang and have sent in my summary, so I have to do that.

Maybe I should take a page out of

sholio's book, which is always a good book to take from: Send me a prompt with Captain America-verse characters and I'll write at least a 100-word ficlet for you in comments. I can't promise it'll be right away, and I can't promise to do all of them (especially if it's not in my wheelhouse) but I'll do my best with my admittedly limited spoons right now.

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From:

gwyn

By the time he'd landed in Romania, the little glimpses of the life he'd once led were coalescing into a larger picture, a simulacrum of Bucky Barnes: one Steve Rogers might even have recognized if he'd stayed still long enough to let him see it. He found a dingy, smelly flat in a rundown Bucharest building full of other people who looked as hard-up as he did--it might have been terrible, but it was his, and for now at least, he could stay put. There was enough of an active economy to provide work for someone willing to do manual labor and who had the basic language skills, yet it was easy to be invisible here, to get paid under the table, to live without a lot of questions asked.

One of the first things he'd bought, back in the States, were some notebooks he could log his rediscoveries in--the taste of fresh fruit, the smell of soap, the texture of new clothing against his skin. The sound of laughter instead of screams. For a while he'd been satisfied with the place as it was--even a hovel was an improvement over a frozen coffin and he didn't need a palace to sit on a mattress and write down memories that were coming back and the horrors of the past seventy years. But even the dim light didn't hide the grime, and one day he bought some cleaning supplies on his way home from work. Just to spruce it up.

Except he liked the cleaning. He started by scouring the rust stains out of the kitchen and bathroom sinks, the stains of he didn't even know what in the toilet and tiny metal shower stall. The floors he tackled the way his ma had done, at least what he thought he recalled her doing--on his hands and knees with two buckets and a brush, and it took him some time but when it was done he started all over again. The cabinets, the refrigerator all got scrubbed and scrubbed again, the shelves dusted regularly, his laundry washed at least once a week.

It wasn't that he kept the place tidy, and it was certainly nothing to look at with the papered-over windows and cheap old mattress with a worn sleeping bag rather than a decent made-up bed, and the small appliances were scavenged from the streets or charity shops, but it was nearly spick and span and the only smell now came from the lemon-scented cleaning products.

Steve would have laughed: there was nothing they'd cared less about back then, and though his memory was fuzzy about so many things, Bucky was pretty certain he'd never been the one who finally broke down and cleaned their little place when it became almost unbearably filthy.

When he was cleaning, he thought about cleaning--not the people he'd killed, not the faces of his torturers. Just how much elbow grease he needed to remove that stain, what would get the mineral buildup out of the tap or the shower. It was calming and he ended up satisfied with a simple job well done, and there was a hell of a lot to be said for that.