Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
i have to believe somewhere, someone is trying a taco for the first time. someone is taking their first shower. someone is coming home to a new puppy.
i have to believe that this winter, someone new to snow will pull out a 5 dollar plastic sled and throw themselves down a hill, just to try it.
i think i’m probably lucky to be familiar with sunrises. i live in an area where the lightning bugs dance in their cocktail hours. i take chickadees for granted.
today i saw a tree that had changed to fall colors, and my first reaction was to grimace. i love autumn, but i hate the cold. i don’t want it to be winter yet.
but how lucky, to live in a place where the leaves do change color - so bright and vibrant that people make treks from around the world just to look at what i grew-up-with. my mom’s friend was a teacher in florida. she used to ask us to mail her an assortment of leaves, just to show her children - to prove to them yes, they really do turn yellow and orange and red.
last year i finally tried pumpkin spice for the first time. someone this year will find a new favorite knitting pattern. someone’s favorite band will drop a new album. artists will make things we haven’t yet imagined. there will be chalk drawings and magnet poetry and karaoke and recipes and laughing.
it is easy to forget. this was all new to me, once. and when it was - well, it was just all so easy to love.
some facts about my father, a perfectly ordinary human being:
got tenure in two years by getting two 2.5-million dollar grants from the government and he’s now held that job for the longest time any faculty at his university has ever been tenured. literally almost longer than his entire school has existed.
he’s won a fullbright…thrice.
speaks five languages (fluently: english, hebrew, russian; functionally: polish, dutch) and can get around in three others (german, japanese, and “pidgin arabic” whatever the fuck that means)
he was once locked inside the great pyramid at giza. on purpose.
one time i went to austin when he was out of town and when we got back to his house the only food in his fridge was 1) bulk family size cocktail shrimp from costco with all the shrimp eaten out of it and only the marinade left, 2) three boxes worth of frozen yoghurt bars, 3) two bags of frozen mini-wontons that expired two years earlier
has only one demand for his funeral and it’s that while his casket is being lowered into the ground i make sure they play “whatever it is, i’m against it!” from the marx brothers film horse feathers
broke into (and out of) martial law poland in the early 80s and brought four hams in his back seat so he could spent six months living with his girlfriend, including a short period of time where he tried to drive from białystok to kraków in the middle of a blizzard, got lost, had no phone, no map, ran into the police, accidentally gave them his fake texas passport and almost got deported, bribed them with a ham, and then somehow ended up at his girlfriend’s brother’s apartment by complete happenstance and got blind drunk for a week
made friends with his assigned kgb agent in the 70s in russia
his car broke down in the middle of the sinai desert in the 70s and was saved from dying by a roaming passing band of bedouin car mechanics who took his entire car apart and put it back together and drove off without saying anything except “it works.”
convinced me and one of my childhood best friends that he had found a way to time travel an hour into the future through the careful use of daylight savings, a radio station, a car clock, and the fact that he has never been on time for anything in his entire life
when he got his house renovated he decided that two attics and two cleverly hidden crawl spaces wasn’t enough, so he added two more attics and another cleverly hidden crawl space, and i wish good luck to whatever poor schmuck (my cousin) has to sell his house someday.
broke his cherry-wood dining table under piles of papers…twice.
when in grad school, pretended to be a visiting russian statistics professor named “professor blowjob” (in russian) and somehow got away with this in order to teach a lecture on how s of x = f of n (sex is fun)
conned me into the belief that i had a magical color-changing guinea pig and kept this act up for literally a decade before admitting the truth
became a fellow on one of the yellow river restoration projects by making friends with an old man doing tai chi with a sword in a park in beijing. turned out that old man with a sword in a park in beijing was the head of the national environmental protection office at the time.
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