you lose your kids you lose your wife :(

[the finch]

((FUN FINCH FACT: I didn't think this through.))

Hi, I'm Soumitra Finch. I have decided to take Advanced Placement Research this year to earn a capstone diploma for God knows what reason and also to develop and answer a question about how indigenous art has influenced and shaped modern industrial and architectural design. And also because I hate myself.

This is what Soumitra, crammed in the library the day before his paper was due, thought he must have decided a year ago when selecting his senior year courses. He was blessed enough to have a free period at the end of the day, and he was locked and loaded to write his final draft. Four to five thousand words, due the next morning. He had an outline. And multiple drafts. it was all a matter of letting the words flow, but there was probably a clog in the system because, hey, those words were not flowing.

He had the title page down - prolificity at its finest. He opened Spotify, hoping that on his laptop it wouldn't lag as extensively as it did on his ancient phone. Noah Kahan - Stick Season (Forever). 30 tracks could do no wrong. Northern Attitude, first track, full locked into writing mode. But actually, on that note, he wondered if Clarissa liked Noah Kahan; she seemed the type, in terms of vibes. If not, he needed to, like, put her on. Wait, no, that sounded like he was getting her hooked on drugs. He didn't do that.

Oh, right, focus. It didn't take long to focus; it was like he was naturally gifted or something (be serious, though). He breezed through that abstract, actually. That was sort of just the last thing he remembered.




He woke up to You're Gonna Go Far. He'd listened to the album enough times to know that, hey, that was actually over an hour. But it didn't take a genius to figure out he'd fallen asleep, because ignoring the fact that he generally felt like shit and had a woefully unwritten paper, he sat in a sparsely populated room that suggested the day was over and he missed, like, an hour of window that he should have spent writing.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes that stung slightly for no particular reason other than the fact that the world was probably out to get him or something. This was fine.

[Applesintime]

((Michael Goldstein continued from Jesus, Where am I?))

Among the shelves piled with books, the chairs and tables filled with groups quietly studying or collaborating on a project and a lone guy who'd just spent an hour sleeping instead of writing, Michael was hunting for a goddamn printer. One that was actually working.

He needed to print something out for his applications - he'd sent them all out, or so he'd thought. But in light of Everything... he was sending a few to overseas universities. The UK, Australia, even Israel (he'd try and finally learn Hebrew if he had to) just in case things really got bad. Like, 'you need to get out now' levels of bad. Michael didn't know if it'd get that bad and he hoped that something would break and give, that the American people wouldn't tolerate this level of abject corruption and idiocy and... fascism felt an appropriate word to use now.

Relying on the median voter to do the morally right thing was a Hail Mary, but, you know, what else was he to do?

Back on topic. Today had just been an exercise in finding broken printers - the one they had back home hadn't worked for a solid year or two and it seemed that every single printer in Red Rock had decided that they were gonna break today just to spite him. They'd ran out of ink. They had no paper. They'd ran out of ink and had no paper.

But he had one last hope, one last shining beacon of hope in the darkness.

The library printer.

The issue was he didn't actually know where it was and he wasn't going to log on and dig through websites and student portals just to learn that the printer here was broken too. So now he had to hunt for it, as the librarian had either gone for the day or disappeared into a cloud of pencil sharpenings and dirt. Michael was pretty sure he looked like the grumpiest guy on the planet

"Where would I be if I was a printer..." Michael grumbled to himself as he stepped past Soumitra's desk. "Hey, uh..." Oh, that was one of Clarissa's cheerleading buddies, Soumitra. "Soumitra. Uh, do you have any idea where the printer is?" He was starting to wonder if the library had a printer at this point.