#20 whole American dollars

[slav-every-day]

[shithowdy]

had a somewhat disheartening encounter on reddit after i suggested an artist raise her commission prices, where she told me that they are so low because in her country the value of the us dollar is much higher so $20 is more like $100 to her.

international artists, that $20 is still only worth $20 to your american customers! no one is taking currency exchange conversions into account when it comes to buying art. a piece is not suddenly worth half its value in usd because it can go twice as far for the recipient, that's called taking advantage of you. i understand the desire to keep prices low to cast a wider net but to do so devalues the labor as a whole. get those sweet american dollars and up your prices.

[celestie0]

gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch4. in a mother’s eyes

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 4/x

ᰔ words. 10k (omg a whole number...very sexy)

a/n. hellooo my ihm friends! hope you're all doing well. ahh i'm glad to finally be posting this chapter lolol. it's a littleee off tangent from what happens in ch3, but still has some important plot developments. it does dive into feelings of depression & anxiety, so just wanted to give a warning on that! but yea other than that i hope you enjoy and see you at the bottom!! :) also so sorry if there are errors i only had time to skim through it once :((

nav. ch1 :: ch2 :: ch3 :: ch4 :: ch5 (pending)

“Just go ahead and sign right here for me.”

You take the pen from the hospice nurse’s hand. It’s cheap black plastic with a pink fuzzy pom pom attached to the end of it with peeling glue. 

Your eyes briefly flit across the paragraphs detailed in printed ink until your gaze lands on the highlighted lines at the bottom of the page. Your signature. Spouse’s signature.

“We’ll need to have your husband come here to sign the paperwork as well, since he’ll have to add your mother on his list of dependents, but we can certainly get started on expediting this process for you since the insurance has already been pre-approved,” the nurse tells you as she accepts your signed paperwork and then neatly tucks it into one of the compartment holders. 

The afternoon goes by smoothly, with your mother surprisingly patient as she sits in the waiting room while you wait for the nurses to formally show you to her new room.

You thought that you could put off putting her in hospice for a little longer, because in all honesty, you weren’t prepared to let her go just yet. You weren’t prepared to not have her in the house anymore. But lately, she’s been putting herself in lots of danger, like attempting to take her own medications when she does not know the correct dosing, and forgetting things on the stove when she attempts to cook.

But the last straw was when you came home from a very brief run to the grocery store at night a couple days ago to see a handful of your neighbors out on the front lawn with your mother at their side. She had apparently gotten out of the house and walked down the neighborhood, then fallen on the sidewalk but was unable to get up. When your neighbors had found her, a miracle as they were just coming home from dinner and caught sight of her in the illumination of their headlights, they tried to help her get up but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell the firefighters that came by to help her what her name was, or what year it was, or where she lived.

It was when you realized you couldn’t even keep her safe anymore that you had to let go.

“Is that a wedding ring?” your mother asks, pointing a trembling finger to it as she lays tucked inside her new hospice bed, “are you married?”

You glance down at the ring Gojo gave you in the courthouse, almost surprised to find that you were still wearing it in good faith. “Yes, mom. I am.”

“Why am I here?” she asks you, “I don’t want to be here.”

You stiffen a little. Although you were mentally preparing yourself to answer these questions, the preparation didn’t make it any easier. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just for a little short while, okay? The doctors want to run some tests on you.”

“Who are you married to?” she asks.

“To Satoru,” you tell her, “our neighbor.”

She lets out a small gasp. “The sweet boy who fixed our A/C?”

You roll your eyes. not sure why your mother has hyper fixated on that memory with Gojo when most days she’ll look at you like you’re a stranger. “Yes mom.”

“Oh, I like him,” she tells you with an affectionate nod. She hesitates slightly, wearisome of some other thought that flashes through her mind. “How long have you been married?”

You let out a small sigh. This is already a conversation you had with her a couple days ago, and it doesn’t feel good to lie to her. It was hard enough to do once, but to have to constantly lie to her over and over again over all the smallest things just so that she stays calm and safe and happy seems to drain you of all your energy and happiness you had left in your bones.

Little white lies, that’s what they are. Harmless ones. That’s what you tell yourself to absolve yourself of the guilt.

“I’ll come back soon, okay? I’ll tell you more about him some other day,” you say to her, speaking gently in the way an adult would speak to a child. The way she used to speak to you. You could never exactly pinpoint when those roles became reversed.

You finish discussing some more insurance matters with the front-desk nurse as she puts together a small folder of documents for you. While she works, you glance at the little counter shelf that includes a plethora of pamphlets on how to deal with the complicated feelings that arise from putting a loved one in hospice care, and dealing with the emotions of having a relative with advanced stage dementia. They are pretty brochures, lovingly creased at the folds as if looked through multiple times by people who walk in and out of this facility, but seemingly only few take them home. You slip one of each into your folder when the nurse hands it to you, manage the best smile possible, and then turn on your heel to head out the hospice doors.

The sun is setting outside as you take the walk back to your car, which was purposefully parked a half mile away to afford you the luxury of a melancholic stroll. Somehow, you feel like you’ve left a piece of yourself back at the hospice. A feeling you can’t quite shake from your bones.

Your feet stop walking somewhere along the sidewalk on their own, the street lights above you flickering brighter into life as the sky is now a dusty gray with only streaks of purple. There’s a liquor store you spot across a small parking lot to your right, and you’re guided towards it, but not without a sickening feeling in your chest.

When you open the door, the bell at the top jingles, and you glance to the right where you see a lanky young man playing some sort of shooter game on his phone by the cash register. You grab a bottle of vodka, a bottle of white wine, some packs of skittles, one of the mini pizza boxes at the hot food station, and then dump it all onto the counter.

The young man scans all your items without even so much as sparing you a glance, but does take a look at your ID, then says, “Total’s $68.65, cash or card?”

“Card.”

Just before you tap your card, something displayed behind the cashier counter catches your eye. Something familiar, something tempting, something you weigh in your head about twenty times within one millisecond all due to the cortisol coursing through your veins and you eventually say, “Uh, and could I get one of those, too?”

The cashier looks behind himself to what you’re pointing at before turning around. “Sure.”

The same jingle is heard on top of your head as you leave the store, now with a burning hot mini pizza box in your hand as well as a plastic bag that carries your candy and the two clinking bottles of alcohol.

“Oh!! omg, y/n,” you hear a feminine voice call out and you’re instantly wincing. The last thing you wanted was to be bothered right now. You just wanted to go home and get drunk and then pass out on the floor of your living room. But alas, the world is small.

You turn around to see Hana come running across the sidewalk lot towards you, and when she’s about a few feet away, she glances down at your hands and all the things you were carrying. You quickly shove your last-minute purchase into your jacket pocket with a shameful conscience, and try to hide the plastic bag of liquor behind your calves. There was no hiding the pizza box, but at least that was the least incriminating.

“Oh, Hana, wow! What a coincidence seeing you here,” you say to her, pressing your lips into a small smile.

“Yeah, I um,” she points over her shoulder towards the hospice that’s standing tall in the darkness of night, cells with windows illuminated with light. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a prison. “Remember I told you my friend’s mom is sick and she’s at this hospice?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“I was just visiting her mom with her,” she tells you.

“Aw,” you comment, “I see, I see.”

You adore Hana, you really do. She was there for you when the whole Yuna and Choso thing went down, picking your shifts up for a good week when you couldn’t stomach going into work when your ex-best friend’s stupid face was gloating in the halls over how she stole your boyfriend. Hana was there for you when you were a new hire and all the doctors were being bitchy about a “newbie in the ED”, but she stood up for you, even cussed the fuck out of one of attendings for the whole hall to hear when you were being disrespected by one of them. She’s someone you can beam about how hot the EMT and Firefighter men that stroll into the ED are, too. A priceless companion.

And even though you two have hung out after hours sometimes, it was still always a little awkward to see a coworker outside of work.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I actually, um, was going to tell you at our shift tomorrow, but I just admitted my mom to the hospice too,” you say, “and…thanks a lot for telling me about it. I really appreciate it. It seems like a wonderful facility.”

Her eyes briefly widen with surprise before they soften once again. “Oh, that’s wonderful, love. I hope all goes well. And your little insurance scam worked! Good for you!”

“Shhh,” you hiss at her, looking around yourself with paranoia, “the feds are everywhere.”

She laughs, sweet in the air, before the sound settles and she looks at you with something reminiscent of well-intentioned concern. Her eyes flit to the plastic bag you were still holding behind your legs. “Hey…um, if…if you ever want some company when you come to visit your mom, just let me know. I hope you know you don’t have to do everything alone.”

You blink at her, sucking in a short breath to respond, but it only leaves you as a slight puff of air. There’s a silent gratitude that you give her, because it’s hard for you to express any feelings with words, but you’ve found that the people in your life who know you best can always read you without them. 

“Thank you, Hana,” you manage to say with a slight croak to your voice because you were fighting back tears.

She smiles at you. “Take care, okay? And see ya tomorroooowwwwww,” she coos at you, coming up to you to give you a small hug, a squeeze of your upper arm, and then she heads back towards the direction of the hospice.

You watch her walk away until you can’t see her anymore. And then you head towards your car.

When you arrive at your neighborhood, you park in front of Gojo’s house. You have a feeling that you won’t be able to bear the vast emptiness of your home now that your mother is elsewhere, and so you drag your feet up the stone stairs of his house with a heavy heart instead.

The spare key that he gave you weakly pushes into the keyhole with about as much force as your fingers can manage, and you realize they almost feel atrophied. 

The house is dark when you step inside, spare for the ambient street lights shining through cracked open blinds on the windows, and the curtains rustle gently from the draft of the AC, a chill that reaches you too by the time you make it to the staircase.

It doesn’t seem like Gojo’s home. A glance at the clock tells you it’s close to 8pm. You briefly consider texting him to ask where he’s at, why he’s out so late, when he’ll be home, and what’s for dinner, but you can’t even bring yourself to pull your phone out of your coat pocket.

Weak legs manage to take you upstairs and you’re about to pass through to your room when the slightly open door to the master bedroom taunts you, like a peephole into some other wordly dimension. Like the wardrobe in the chronicles of Narnia. A portal into your fake husband’s life.

With a palm pushing on the door, you slowly crack it open, and you know the anxious voices in your head are getting worse by the day when the creaking of the door hinges sounds like a lullaby to you. 

Was this an invasion of privacy? And did you really care if it was?

The room is big, with a king sized bed off to the left, sheets neatly made and duvet primly tucked under, like the way hotel beds are set up. You feel a slight flush of embarrassment when you remember you haven’t been making your bed in the mornings for the past couple days you’ve been living here so far, and you wonder if Gojo would judge you for something like that. If he’d think you were a messy or undisciplined person. If he would think less of you.

Truthfully, in a lot of ways, you still felt like a child. You barely weathered a lot of your formative adolescent years when dealing with your parents’ divorce, and you’ve had to put so much of your life on pause to take care of your mom ever since she got diagnosed. So here you were, in the body of a 29-year-old woman, yet still feeling so painfully juvenile. One that forgets to make her bed in the mornings, and on most nights can’t seem to stomach anything other than cereal for dinner. It was like you were still at a party that everyone else had left, except all it ever was is hell. Your life was such a stark contrast to the lives of other adults you’ve come across. The ones that wake up at six to go on runs, the ones that have paid off mortgages with five figures in their retirement accounts, oh god, the ones that meal prep, and the ones that, all things considered, have their lives together. The ones that don’t spend at least an hour of every day, in fetal position on their bed, sobbing until tears soak through the sheets of the pillow down to the feathers like bone, because you’re so overwhelmed with stress and preparing yourself for the grief of losing your mother which you know that, no matter how hard you try to save her from, will inevitably one day come. 

You used to cook dinner every night, make your bed every morning, and go to pilates on the weekends. Back when you were a little younger and healed and excited to live life. But now, you barely get by. Your priorities are with your mother. You can’t remember the last time you did anything nice for yourself, including something as simple as the luxury of getting to come home to a clean house because you hardly ever had time to clean it, not with all the doctor’s appointments you were driving your mother to, not with all the extra shifts you were picking up at the hospital to pay off your debt, not with all the times you felt too depressed to even get out of bed. 

But your mother is in hospice now, so you’ve made time, right? You’ve made the decision that everyone in your life has been begging you to finally do. So why do you still feel so empty inside?

By a quick survey of the room, you notice Gojo doesn’t really have many framed photos hung up on the walls or perched up on surfaces. None, actually. Only a contemporary painting above his bed frame and then a faded vintage horror movie poster plastered up near his desk. Not terribly odd, since in your experience most men don’t really do the whole “cluttering the house with millions of photos of their family” thing until they at least have a couple of kids and some purebred dog. The thought of Gojo someday setting up a little portrait photo at his desk with his wife’s—his eventual real forever wife’s, pretty face in it, posing with their two beautiful kids, makes an oddly melancholic feeling waft through you. You wonder if he would keep a two-by-two in his wallet, too.

Your feet move one in front of the other as your finger traces the surface wood of a dresser cabinet, something that looks a little vintage and oaky, in stark contrast to the modern minimalist vibe Gojo has set up in the rest of the room. A family heirloom, maybe? There’s no dust that coats your finger, which surprises you. If you were to run your finger across your dresser at home you’d have collected enough dust to snort down your windpipes like a recreational drug. But Gojo’s a real estate agent, making a living off of dressing houses up in perfect cosplay so that monetarily stable middle class families feel inclined to buy them. So you’re not exactly surprised he’s invested in keeping his own house in pristine condition too. 

There is a little bit of chaos, though. Like the shirt he has haphazardly hung over his chair at his office space over to the right. There’s a coffee mug sitting there too, porcelain and reflecting the moon light off, but upon peering inside you see that it’s half empty with stale coffee. He’s got pens sprawled across the desk, in a fashion that suggests he accidentally knocked them over in a rush, and slowly, like some grounding exercise, you place them one by one back into the paper mache pencil holder. It briefly occurs to you that he has a lot of paper mache containers of sorts around the house. You lift up the pencil cup, turning it in your hand until your eyes catch something written on it with glittery pink gel pen.

i luv u unkle toru! -yur BEST FREND 4EVUR juno!!! :D

A small smile makes it onto your face. The handwriting was messy, more like scratches than smooth lines, and nothing less than what you would expect of a child. You remember making paper mache and clay trinkets at preschool for your mom and dad when you were younger. And you’re sure if you were brave enough to open the box of memorabilia that sits in your attic some day, you’d see your own scratchy scribbled handwriting on them. An innocence that is long gone and buried, never again to be delicately placed on desks or counters for all the living.

The draft from the AC reaches you once again, brushing over your skin and causing a chill to shiver down your spine. It kicks at the curtains as well, causing them to ruffle up towards you, baring the dark outside world into the streets. And you notice in that momentary glance that there’s a roof just outside the window that overlooks the backyard. A roof? Spotted by a depressed woman going through a quarter life crisis? There was nothing more tempting than that. 

The window was easy to open, which only caused unease over the revelation of how easy it would be for someone to rob this house. You make a mental note to tell Gojo to get a ring camera or security system of some sort since he doesn’t seem to have one, but you can already picture him telling you something about how statistically low the crime rates are in this neighborhood compared to all the other neighborhoods, and then you’d tell him that it’s just for your peace of mind. But whether he’d compromise or not after that, you’re really not sure.

You take a seat on the roof, a little scared as you sit because of the slight slope, but it’s comfortable once you’re settled. You sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, staring out into the neighborhood of perfectly lined up suburban houses. You’ve got a better view into some neighbors' backyards, noticing that a couple of them had pools while some of them have big gardens. There's a cat resting up on a fence in the distance. A car drives by with headlights illuminating everything in its proximity briefly before zooming off. You glance up at the sky, and notice the full moon, but it’s too cloudy to see any stars. Or perhaps it was just the light pollution from the lamps making it difficult to see.

On instinct, your hand reaches inside your coat pocket for your phone, but your knuckles hit something else instead. A moment of brief confusion flickers through your head, but then you immediately recall the last-minute purchase you made at the gas station.

Your hand pulls out the object, and then you stare down at it. Squinting your eyes a little, because it’s a sight that feels familiar but also one you haven’t seen in so long: a pack of twenty Marlboro red cigarettes. 

You’ve tried a lot of things to manage your stress over the years. Excessively working out, eating a lot of sugar, going on six hour hikes to touch grass, flirting with random men at bars, fucking Choso until he was rendered speechless, multiple types of antidepressants, you almost tried smoking weed once with your roommate in college but you wimped out last second. But the habit that had gotten you through the years of 21 to 24 is held loosely in your hand right now. It’s been five years since you quit, but resolve was often a fickle thing. As the saying goes, once an addict, always an addict. 

There’s a brief moment of hesitation as you slowly peel the plastic off of the back, but then it all comes back to you like a reflex you’ll never forget up to where you slide a cigar up out and then pinch it between your two fingers. Forgetting to buy a lighter with the cigarettes is definitely something you would do, but because you remembered it was something that you would do, you remembered not to do it. The flick of the flame coming to life is ASMR you didn’t know you were painfully nostalgic for, and you balance the cigarette between your lips in that sort of movie-star way people used to obsess over back in the day. But just as you bring the lighter up to the end of the cigarette, and just before you can light it—

A hand shoots out in your periphery, grabbing your wrist and entirely stalling the movement.

You gasp, lips parting enough for the cigarette to fall from them and into your lap. The hand wrapped around your wrist is large and masculine, and you briefly consider screaming, but when you snap your neck to look at the perpetrator, you see Gojo crouched down next to you on this roof. You notice he’s wearing a black suit, a tie that was loosely secure hanging from his neck into the space between his spread thighs as he’s crouched, and whatever gel he had in his hair from earlier only barely remains as strands fall over his forehead haphazardly. He looks like he’s on the other end of a long work day. 

You blink at him, expression plastered with surprise, but his is only earnest. With breathtaking blue eyes that you realize he could easily use to surrender a person just by looking at them, like the way he’s looking at you right now. His lips are pressed together into a firm line, as if to suppress some emotion, but the slight crease to his brow makes you feel like you’re in trouble somehow. Like he was silently scolding you for something.

“I—” you stutter.

He lets go of your wrist and discreetly pulls the lighter out of your hand. And then his hand reaches for the pack of cigarettes you were balancing on your knee, but on some reflex that you don’t even think about, you try to snatch them away from him, and now you’re both tugging at the same pack of cigarettes.

“y/n,” he says, “let go.”

“No,” you say stubbornly.

He sighs and tugs a little harder. “Give them to me.”

“But—” you stammer, voice becoming softer to see if that’d work on him, “I’m…” Your grip on them tightens. “I’m stressed.”

He raises an eyebrow at you, then finally loses his patience and snatches them right out of your hand. He stands up from his crouched down position to toss the pack off to the side onto the roof somewhere. You’re surprised when he lets out a sigh and sits down next to you on the roof, as if he felt the obligation to. His legs stretch out in front of him, but still bent slightly at the knees, and he leans backwards with his body weight braced on his palms laid flat on wood paneling behind him. “There are better ways to relieve stress,” he tells you candidly. 

“Like what?” you ask, and just when he opens his mouth to speak, you clarify, “and don’t say sex.”

He shuts his mouth and his eyes flit up to the sky for a brief second. “Damn. I didn’t have a back-up answer.” 

You roll your eyes, releasing a deep breath, then draw your knees to your chest before resting your chin on top of them. 

“I didn’t know you smoke,” he says after a century-long minute. 

You wince a little, because you were half hoping he was going to just drop the subject all together. 

You bite your lip nervously and hug your knees to your chest tighter as if to hide yourself from him. “I don’t. Well, I haven’t. Um, not for a while.”

“Huh. I see,” he says.

Another silence passes, and as he shuffles next to you, the fabric of his suit brushes against the fabric of your coat, and you’ve become entirely too aware of the feeling.

“So,” he says, breaking the awkward silence, “your mom’s in hospice now?”

You nod, enthusiastic enough to where you won’t look like you’re entirely depressed about it.

“That’s good,” he says, “no issues with the insurance?”

You shake your head. “They need you to sign some papers by the end of the week though,” you tell him. “We’ll have to go in person.”

He nods slowly to affirm he’ll make time for it. “I really hope things get better for your mom,” he says, voice soft as he stares off into neighbors homes like you had been doing ten minutes ago. You see the cat that was resting on the fence get up, do a big stretch, and start walking along the length of the fence. Your eyes briefly glance at Gojo, and you notice his gaze is tracing the cat’s path. 

“My—” you start, hesitant all of a sudden by the vulnerability you already feel swelling within you, most definitely due to sitting with someone on a rooftop late at night, but you decide that you’ll be nice to him for once, “…my mom seems to remember you a lot. More than she remembers me.” You let out a small humoring laugh, as if that fact doesn’t completely destroy you. “She was blabbering to me again for the seventh time about how you apparently fixed our AC.” You try to bite your tongue, but can’t help it when you say, “although I’m pretty sure you just pressed a bunch of buttons until it started working again.”

“Yup. That’s exactly what I did.”

You roll your eyes and sigh.

Another awkward silence.

“Can I ask you a question?” you say.

“Sure.” His voice sounds deeper, like he’s sleepy. 

“Why did you agree to marry me? That’s not something people just do out of nowhere.”

He glances over at you, and you flicker your eyes to him. “Why? Having regrets?” he teases, with a slight nudge of his elbow to your side. 

“Just answer me.”

He lifts his palms up from behind him and leans forward, placing his hands on his knees instead. “I don’t know. If something I could do would help someone out that much, I wasn’t going to say no.”

You hum quietly, still confused by his intentions. But you’re too jaded to question them.

“It costs nothing to be nice,” he adds. 

You run soothing circles over your thigh through the fabric of your jeans. For some reason, your mind wanders to Choso. Thinking of all the years you wasted staying with him even though you knew his affections were long gone, just because you didn’t want to break his heart. Only to realize that you never had that privilege in the first place. 

“I think,” you say, your voice barely above a whisper as you draw your knees closer to your chest, “that sometimes it does.”

A gust of autumn wind breezes by, ruffling the trees that the two of you are at eye-level with at the moment. You're pretty sure you’ve completely lost Gojo’s interest at this point, where he’s finally too tired to deal with your oddly cryptic attitudes and overall generally displeasing vibe, assuming this based solely on his prolonged silence beside you. You’re ready for him to get up and abandon you here on this roof, left to ponder every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life. It was any second now.

“Sometimes,” he instead speaks up, and it’s so surprising to you that you jolt a little bit, “you can do everything right, and people will still find a way to fuck you over. But I don’t think that’s any reason to stop being nice to others.”

You glance over at him, your eyes widening slightly, but he just continues to peer off straight into the night. His blinks are slow, lingering on being closed for a moment before he opens them again, and you’re mesmerized by the sight. The skin under his eyes is slightly dark from exhaustion, heavy with character that makes you aware that he’s just a person too. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, you realize that he’s—…handsome. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, your heart flutters in your chest.

He scoffs suddenly and dusts his hands off. “I sound like a fucking youth pastor.” He lets out an exhale before suddenly standing up onto his feet before you can think more on it. He looks off into the night again and lets out another exhale that sounds more like a sigh this time. “God, it’s getting a lot colder these days. Might have to start running the heater.”

You blink up at him with no commentary to add. 

He looks down at you. His face is relaxed, but you can tell those eyes are distracted. A shimmering blue ocean in its own world while he attempts to stay present in this one. 

He holds his hand out to you, and you stare at it blankly like you’ve got no clue what he intends for you to do with it. But you finally take the hint and curl your hand around his palm so that he can pull you up onto your feet too.

You stumble a little, falling forward from the sudden blood flow to your brain, but he holds you steady by the strong grip of his hands on your elbows. He’s close to you, close enough to where you can smell the faint lingering scent of his cologne. Something different than that expensive one he wore to the courthouse, but it’s comforting somehow. A fragrance that’s more him. And you feel nervous as you look up at him underneath pale moonlight. 

He lets go of your elbows. You feel cold from the loss of his touch. But his right hand moves to gently hold your left hand in his palm, holding it curled as his thumb barely grazes the stone you wear on your ring finger; the one he gave you.

The way his thumb prods at the silver band is like he’s inspecting its quality, as if it has to pass some test to be worthy of sitting on your finger. Or maybe just any finger, if you were to quell the delusion. You’re not sure if he’s satisfied with his inspection.

“Where did you get it—” you blurt out.

His gaze flickers up to your face briefly before he’s back to examining the ring. “It was my mom’s.”

Your mouth gapes slightly in shock, heart dropping a little in your chest, and all of a sudden you feel guilty. Guilty that he put his mother’s ring on your finger for something that was fake, something that was essentially a business deal, something exchanged to you out of fraud when it was a precious family heirloom that should be exchanged with love. And maybe he didn’t care about it much, some people don’t care about the sentiments of objects. But your mind thinks of the oaky vintage dresser in his room, so out of place in the aesthetic of its surroundings, a decision you can only imagine him of all people, mr. “everything in this house has to look like an IKEA catalog”, would do if the dresser held some importance to him that was more than meets the eye. And so you’re compelled to think that maybe this ring did, too. 

“Why would you give me this?! You could’ve just gotten a cheap fake diamond ring from a pawn shop and called it a day,” you ask him, suddenly feeling burdened by it.

“Well I wasn’t exactly given much time to think of other options.”

“But—” you start, only to realize you have no counter arguments for that.

He lets out a huh noise, like the sound someone makes when they’re pleasantly surprised by something, as he looks down at your hand that he still held in his. “It’s kinda crazy that it fits you perfectly. I wasn’t sure.”

Your mind wanders to when he slipped the ring onto your finger in the courtroom, followed by the kiss. Soft, sweet, the lingering warm sensation of his palm on your cheek as he cupped your face, the same way those heartthrob actors do in all those romance movies and kdramas that you watch on Friday nights while snuggled up in a blanket, wondering when anyone will ever kiss you like that. You remember the ghost sensation of his hand hovering over the small of your back, fingers lightly grazing the nape of your neck, his frame blocking out everything around you as he kissed you, just to pull away and for the two of you to then pretend like it never happened, as if it wasn’t one of the sweetest kisses you’ve ever known.

You slowly pull your hand out of his, the moment feeling too tender for your liking, and you clear your throat before flitting your eyes up to his. 

“Rule #1,” you remind him with a soft whisper, “no touching.”

You purse your lips, watching his round eyes blink once, then twice, before he shoves his hands in his suit pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels for a few seconds, nodding slowly in submission, and then he turns on them to head back to the house. You’re standing a little stunned from the abrupt ending to this trance of a moment on the roof, and you’re also a little surprised with how your chest is heaving a little bit with fast breaths, but you eventually snap out of it to follow him inside too. 

You two make it back inside the house, with little words exchanged. You pretend to not notice the way Gojo tilts his head at his desk, like he’s confused about why it looks tidier than when he left it. You’re prepared to feign innocence or ignorance, but he doesn’t press you about it. 

“Y’know,” he says from behind you, his chest briefly brushing against the back of your head as he pushes the bedroom door in front of you open so that you can head out into the loft, “those oversized 1800s-esque nightgowns you’ve been wearing around the house kinda make you look like a less-hot version of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

“Sign right here for me, sir.”

You watch as the nurse slides the papers across the high-raised counter of the hospice nursing desk towards Gojo, his eyebrows narrowing as his eyes skim the words on the paper and land at the highlighted lines where he’s been intended to sign. You feel nervous for some reason, as if he’d suddenly find something disagreeable and refuse to sign, then take you to the courthouse first thing to finalize a divorce and send you off to prison while claiming he was blackmailed into the whole marriage in the first place.

Instead, he pulls a pen from the chest pocket of his suit jacket, clicking the end of it and scribbling his signature onto the paper with some jet black ink that looks like it takes a second to dry. How pretentious of him. The pink pom-pom pen was right there.

The nurse behind the counter continues to chat with him about something, blah blah dependents, blah blah tax claims, blah blah you’ll receive an itemized bill in the mail. You’re trying your best to eavesdrop in on the conversation, but most of your senses are being occupied by examining all your surroundings. When you dropped your mother off at the hospice, your feelings were at the forefront of conscience, but now that you’ve had a couple days to come down from that overwhelming emotional high, you’re here to scope out the quality of this place you’ve just dumped your mom at.

The facility is clean and sleek, with a color theme of red and an ocean blue across the signs, the furniture, even with the paperwork they hand out. All the workers had color-coded scrubs based on their occupation or specialty, and none of them had stains on the fabric. You take a glance down at the modest leather pumps you were wearing past the creases of the long skirt, and notice that the floor was shimmering off their reflection in a perfect polish. It wasn’t bad, this place.

“Thanks, you too,” you hear Gojo say to the nurse behind the counter. He has a professional smile on his face, but still kind and genuine, which makes the woman at the computer something bashful and unable to make eye contact. He folds something that looks like a receipt into his chest pocket before tucking his pen back in there too and then turns to face you. You make a mental note to pay him back for whatever he just paid for, at least once you move some money around. 

Your eyebrows lift, feeling a little dazed as you blink at him blankly.

“Alright,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets, the sound of his shoes on the polished hospital floors satisfactorily tapping in your ears as he took a couple steps towards you, “where’s your mom’s room?”

“Huh?”

“What’s her room number?” he asks you.

“Y-You wanna go see her??”

“Of course I want to,” he says, “she’s my mother-in-law.”

You roll your eyes and pet the fabric of your skirt to smooth the wrinkles out. “You’re getting a little too invested in this role of fake husband.”

“I get to annoy you all day and ride the adrenaline rush of committing a federal crime,” he says, “of fucking course I’d get invested.”

You sigh, tossing some of your hair to behind your shoulder before glancing up at the signs, squinting slightly to locate the ward where your mother’s room is, before you hear an extremely high-pitched and somewhat catty feminine voice call out from behind you. You glance at Gojo’s face as he peers off to whoever’s behind you, and you see him visibly stiffen a little.

“Is that Dayton county’s sexiest realtooorrr???” the voice purrs, and you turn on your heel to see a blonde bombshell of a woman clacking her kitten heels down the glistening floors of the hospice, with another brunette bombshell just a few paces behind her. Bombshell #2 sighs something like “it issss” before they walk right up to your fake husband and take turns at giving him a playful squeeze of his bicep. You have to physically stop your jaw from dropping at the sight. 

“Wow! Ladies, so–...so great to see you two,” he says out of polite obligation, and you immediately clock the fact that he doesn’t address them by name.

Bombshell #1 turns to look at you, all of her hair moving as one solid entity with the motion from all the hair spray that’s probably holding it up, and she points at you with a long slender finger that narrows into a french-tip. “Oh who’s this?? Another one of your clients??”

“Oh, no, she’s my–”

“I’m his wife,” you interrupt him, irritated for some reason. 

Both the women chirp something out like oh! before their faces twist with confusion. 

“I didn’t know you were married,” Bombshell #2 says in a thick New Jersey accent.

Gojo lifts his left hand up, the silver band on his hand glimmering under fluorescent hospice lighting. “Very happily,” he says, as if someone was holding a gun to his head.

Bombshell #1 crosses her arms, and you try not to stare at how nice her boobs look in the low scoop-neck jaguar print top she was wearing. You were no better than a man. And now you’re pissed off at the idea of Gojo glancing down too, but a flick of your gaze up to his face tells you he’s safe. For now. 

“You weren’t married when I asked you if you were a month ago,” Bombshell #1 sneers at him. It’s true, the math wouldn’t make sense, but in his defense, this marriage was a fraud.

“Or when you took me out for dinner last week after I bought my house,” Bombshell #2 snarls with an undertone of hurt. 

Gojo clears his throat beside you before pointing at Bombshell #2. “How is that, by the way?” he asks in an attempt to change the subject, “the half acre down on Maple Ave, right? You, uh, enjoying the pool?”

The woman let out an offended scoff and–were her eyes sheening with tears?? She puts her hands on her hips. “No. Mine is the three bedroom house with the cedar gazebo on 14th street.”

Her friend next to her rolls her eyes and smacks her gum between her cheek. “I’m the one that bought the half acre down on Maple Ave, jerk. Ugh!�� She grabs her friend’s arm with a high-pitched hmph noise leaving her throat, and you can hear the other one sniffling subtly as she wobbles on her heels with her friend’s pull of her arm. 

Right before leaving the two of you alone, Bombshell #1 turns to you and says, “I hope you find someone who treats you better,” and then they storm off together down the hallway, their perfectly blow-dried hair bouncing in sync with each stomp.

You blink at the sight, a little flabbergasted from the interaction, and then flit your faze up to Gojo. You see him awkwardly scratching at the back of his head with a grimace on his stupidly handsome face. 

“That’s what you get for being a manwhore,” you tell him.

“I’m not a manwhor–”

“You went on a date with another woman while you were maaaaarrrieeeddd?!” you coo as you let out a fake gasp and slap your cheeks with your hands, “despicable, really.”

He lets out some disgruntled noise, the source coming from deep within his throat. “No. We weren’t fake-married yet,” he vindicates himself, “and it wasn’t a date. I just bought her dinner as a congrats for buying a house. Not a big deal. I do it for all my clients.”

“Satoru. You do realize you’re leading these women on, right? I mean, I’ve seen the way you talk to them. Even if you think you’re just being friendly, please know that your definition of friendly is most people’s definition of flirting.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true.”

He raises an eyebrow as he glances down at you. “Alright, how come this flirting in disguise of friendliness hasn’t worked on you then?”

You scoff in disbelief before crossing your arms. Maybe you did deserve a better fake husband. “You’re never friendly with me. You’re always rude to me.”

“What? I’m not always rude to you.”

“Well, you’re certainly much more rude to me than you are to other women,” you say, tapping the tip of your shoe with irritation.

“Can we not do this right now? We’re in the middle of a hospice.” 

“God, you’re such a cop-out,” you mumble as you forcefully push past him towards the hallway that’ll lead you to your mother. You can hear that Gojo’s on your tail, following you down one of the more dimly lit hallways, and you can tell he needs to stall the strides of his Daddy Longlegs to not overtake your pace.

“What the fuck is a cop-out?” he asks you from behind.

“Look it up on urban dictionary, Grandpa. Unless you don’t know what the Internet is, either,” you spat. 

You waltz right up to your mother’s room just in time to see a nurse making her way out with a clipboard in her hands. She glances over to you when she sees you approaching in her periphery.

“Hi! How can I help you?” she asks.

“Is it alright if we visit my mother?” you ask her.

“Oh! Sure, let me just clean her bed pan really quick.”

Your brow furrows. “B-Bedpan?? Why is she using a bedpan??”

The nurse stops in her movements. “Well, yesterday and today, that’s just what she has decided to use.”

You immediately become hostile. “That’s not right. She never needed to use one at home. Why is she suddenly using one here? Is that not a clear sign of deterioration? The restrooms must not be kept well enough here if she doesn’t want to use them.”

The nurse becomes something meek, her eyes widening as her mouth gapes slightly. “Ma’am,” she squeaks out, “we see this commonly with patients as they begin to adjust to hospice life. We’ll urge her to use the restroom, but as of right now, we need to prioritize what she finds most comfortable.”

Your expression softens, your shoulders relaxing from their tense position, and you duck your head a little with guilt. “Right…I’m sorry.”

The nurse presses her lips together with a well-meaning smile before shuffling into the room and closing the door behind her. You sigh and lean your back against the wall next to the number plate, cheeks flushing slightly from the confrontation. You have no idea how loud your voice was or who heard you. But you try to convince yourself that you’re just stressed and trying to look out for your mother, although the guilt still sits.

You glance up to see Gojo staring at you with slightly wide eyes, his hands shoved into his pockets, and he tilts his head to study your expression.

“What?” you snap at him.

“Are you doing okay?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Satoru,” you cut his questioning off by raising a palm into the air, “just—…just stop.”

His brow furrows together slightly, but before he can show any further concern, the nurse exits the room and holds the door open for the two of you. 

“All set!” she chirps, and Gojo moves to hold the door open in her stead, and then the nurse bolts down to disappear somewhere down the hallway.

You hear Gojo let out a small huff of a scoff as he stares down in the direction the nurse ran off in. “Glad to know I’m not the only one that’s scared of you.”

You roll your eyes and walk into the room through the open door.

Your mother lays in her bed, looking out the window with her hands resting on top of layers of white linen sheets, her skin looking slightly paler than usual. You approach her bedside slowly and she finally turns her head to look at you.

“Hi mom,” you gently greet her, sitting down on the stool beside her bed, “how are you doing?”

Her eyes dart across the features of your face, and you briefly glance towards the wall to the right where you see Gojo standing from a slight distance.

“Oh, hi dear,” she says with a smile, and relief washes over you.

You match her smile with your own. “Mom, I brought someone here to see you.” You glance over at Gojo, who starts to close distance now as he approaches the foot of the bed, “this is Satoru, my husband.”

Your mother’s eyes widen, “Oh! I know him,” she scoldingly swats a hand at you, like you’ve embarrassed her somehow by assuming that she doesn’t know who he is, “he’s my neighbor!”

You sigh, “yes mom, the one that fixed the A/C?” You attempt to finish her sentence for her.

She looks confused for a moment, but slightly nods as if to avoid any further confusion for herself. “But—…but, why…” she trails off and then looks at you, “I’m sorry, are you my nurse?”

Your shoulders drop slightly. “No, mom, it’s me. Your daughter. Do you remember?”

Her face scrunches before it entirely relaxes to keep some image of composure despite the haze you know she feels in her head. “Oh…yes, yes…my little girl. I remember you, of course!”

Your eyes become layered with a slight sheen of tears, “I’m glad.”

“Where’s your father?” she asks, “he said he’d bring me some…oh dear, what—…he said he’d bring me tea. I’ve been waiting.”

“Mom, dad is—” you pause for a moment to think on your feet. You could either tell the truth, or a little white lie. You never know what to do. And either one comes with either guilt or sorrow. “Well, he’ll be here soon, I just wanted to come see you.”

“Oh okay…” she trails off, her eyes squinting at you once more with that same look of confusion on it, but then they drift towards Gojo. “Oh you’re a very handsome young man! You look just like my neighbor.”

Your eyes flicker up to Gojo, and he walks up to your side by your mom’s bed. “Yes, Mrs. l/n, I am your neighbor.”

“With the lemon tree!”

“The avocado tree,” you correct her with a small sigh. “And he’s my husband mom. And also our neighbor.”

“Oh I see I see…” she says, looking up at him, and in a moment that shocks you, she holds her hand up for him to take.

There’s a slight moment of surprise on his face too, but he accepts her frail hand in his, and you glance over to your mom to see her look at him with some look of peace on her face.

“Oh, sit down here, won’t you?” she tells him, and you both blink at her in a moment of hesitation.

He pulls a stool up to the side of the bed right next to you and takes a seat down onto it. Your mother holds his hand with both of hers now, soothing her palm over the back of it before she taps on it lightly.

“Oh, my little girl is very sweet. She would bring me flowers from the garden when she was,” she glances at you, confused once more, “well I remember her when she was so little but she looks…a little older now. Ah, but she would bring me such pretty flowers.”

Your heart aches in your chest. You never knew what version of you your mother would remember. Some days, you’re still supposed to be an angsty teenager that shuts doors in her face, some days you were just as you are right now, and other days, you were just her little girl. And it confused her, the image of not seeing you in the way that she remembers. In the only way she knew how.

“You’ll take good care of my sweet girl, won’t you?” she asks him.

And it knocks the wind out of you.

It drops your heart to the center of the earth.

The thought that, after so many moments where she doesn’t remember you, she still knows that you’re someone she wants to keep safe.

Your mouth gapes slightly, tears welling in your eyes and you try your best to blink them away, but you see Gojo’s hand slip out from being held by your mother’s hands, to instead use both of his to hold hers. Your eyes snap to his face, and you see that same earnest expression you’ve been growing used to seeing these days. 

“Yes,” he responds, eye contact level with hers, “I will.”

A small puff of air leaves your lips, a single tear streaming down your cheek and you quickly swipe your trembling fingers to remove any evidence of it before you huff out a shaky, “excuse me.” And then you’re standing up off the stool, and in a few hurried steps across the room as more tears continue to stream down your face, you make it to the door to push out into the suffocating air of the hallway.

It’s hard to breathe, huffs and puffs barely leaving your lips as you struggle to pull air into your lungs while you storm down the hallway at a fast pace, your heels clicking underneath you in a way that only sets you off further. Suddenly, all the sounds around you make you sick to your stomach, a wave of nausea washing over you, and your nose burns with the intensity of the tears that continue to stream down your face. A few hospice staff look at you with concerned expressions, and you eventually reach a heavy-duty door that leads you out into a secluded staircase hallway where the dim lighting serves to relax at least some of your senses, but you still feel like you’re about to pass out.

Even in the haze of your emotions, there’s this glimmer of a memory that comes to mind. One from when you were younger and you were pushed on the playground at school. You cried and cried and cried in your mother’s arms, but even then, you didn’t want her to baby you. You would say to her, I’m a big girl now! in that same way a child knows nothing of what it truly means to brave the world. 

That little girl had no idea that one day, there would be moments where she wouldn’t be remembered as her mother’s little girl anymore. 

No matter how old you grow, you will always be my little girl, your mother’s voice echoes to you, the feeling of her squeezing you in her arms as she holds your sobbing little form in hers casting a ghost sensation across your skin.

In a mother’s eyes, you’ll always be her baby.

And that’s why it hurts.

Because it’s all fake.

It’s phony.

It’s not real.

This arrangement you have with Gojo.

And if your mother were to die tomorrow, there would be no one to take care of her little girl anymore.

Not in the way she believes there will be.

Of all the white lies, this one pierces you straight through your heart in a way that leaves you gasping for air.

Amidst your whirlwind of thoughts, you hear the door push open harshly, and when you glance over, you see Gojo standing in this dimly lit hallway as he turns his head quickly to the left and sees you standing there.

“Hey,” he says, catching his breath as he lightly jogs up to you, “hey, hey, hey,” he repeats with more concern now when he sees the state you’re in, and he seamlessly pulls you into a hug, your cheek pressing against his chest that feels warm even through the fabric of his suit jacket and shirt, and that familiar scent of him completely engulfs you.

You sob quietly, wiping your snot on his tie and your tears on the felt fabric beside it, your hands balled into tiny fists at your chest, squeezed between the two of you. You feel him tuck your head under his chin and his arms wrap around you tighter. You don’t even realize it at first, but suddenly, it has become easier to breathe.

Then, you wail, and you cry, and you sob, because you don’t have the words to even explain how you feel, about not just this, but with everything, a buildup of everything that has been suffocating you in your life that just comes crashing down on you all at once.

“I know,” he says, his palm resting on the back of your head as he holds your face to his chest, his voice soothing in your ears while you sob until there’s nothing left to cry. “I know.”

You two stay like this for another minute or so as you come down from the cries, your remnant sniffling echoing in the hallway while you wipe more of your snot on his jacket. You make the first move to pull your face away from his chest, but he still keeps his arms wrapped around you when you look up at him.

With your gaze darting across his face, you take in the blue in his eyes. Eyes that are looking at you so softly it’s suddenly hard to breathe once more. And when those eyes flit to your lips, your mouth parts slightly as you two breathe in unison.

It’s possible that you could have dreamed the moment you saw him lean down slightly towards you, his eyes still set on your lips, but it didn’t matter because you’re pushing him away with strong fists before you can even register the thought in your head.

He lets go of you entirely, his eyes wide once more, and you glance down at your feet. 

A tender moment, just like on the roof, broken just because you can’t handle that—…that way, that intense way that he looks at you. New rule, no looking at me longingly like you want to kiss me. I won’t allow it.

“I want to go home,” you whisper, still examining your shoes. And you suddenly feel embarrassed that he had to see you this way. He’s supposed to be scared and intimidated by you, not holding you in his arms while you cry. 

He’s silent for a moment, but you can tell he’s searching for things to say. “You don’t want to say bye to your mom before we go?”

You swipe your palm against the wetness on your cheek. “No. I just want to go home.”

“y/n,” he tried to convince you.

You finally look up at him. “Please.”

He breathes in a few breaths as he studies the features of your face in a way that makes you feel so seen that it’s frightening. But he slowly nods, then says,

“Okay.”

.

.

.

.

.

[end of chapter 4]

a/n. hi friendsss i hope you enjoyed :'') yea like i said at the a/n in the beginning, this chapter is a slight off-tangent from last chapter, but ch5 will continue with a lot of the stuffs that were brought up in ch3. but yea i wanted to explore the whole process of emotions reader would go through putting her mom in hospice, since it kinda felt like a big thing, hence why it got its own chapter. aaa i hope to see you in the next one!! much love from me :''0

➸ take me to chapter five!

note: please do not ask me for updates or when i will next update (read rules)

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[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

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[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #10

March 15-22 2024

The EPA announced new emission standards with the goal of having more than half of new cars and light trucks sold in the US be low/zero emission by 2032. One of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, it'll eliminate 7 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next 30 years. It's part of President Biden's goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 on the road to eliminating them totally by 2050.

President Biden canceled nearly 6 Billion dollars in student loan debt. 78,000 borrowers who work in public sector jobs, teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters etc will have their debt totally forgiven. An additional 380,000 public service workers will be informed that they qualify to have their loans forgiven over the next 2 years. The Biden Administration has now forgiven $143.6 Billion in student loan debt for 4 million Americans since the Supreme Court struck down the original student loan forgiveness plan last year.

Under Pressure from the administration and Democrats in Congress Drugmaker AstraZeneca caps the price of its inhalers at $35. AstraZeneca joins rival Boehringer Ingelheim in capping the price of inhalers at $35, the price the Biden Admin capped the price of insulin for seniors. The move comes as the Federal Trade Commission challenges AstraZeneca’s patents, and Senator Bernie Sanders in his role as Democratic chair of the Senate Health Committee investigates drug pricing.

The Department of Justice sued Apple for being an illegal monopoly in smartphones. The DoJ is joined by 16 state attorneys general. The DoJ accuses Apple of illegally stifling competition with how its apps work and seeking to undermining technologies that compete with its own apps.

The EPA passed a rule banning the final type of asbestos still used in the United States. The banning of chrysotile asbestos (known as white asbestos) marks the first time since 1989 the EPA taken action on asbestos, when it passed a partial ban. 40,000 deaths a year in the US are linked to asbestos

President Biden announced $8.5 billion to help build advanced computer chips in America. Currently America only manufactures 10% of the world's chips and none of the most advanced next generation of chips. The deal with Intel will open 4 factories across 4 states (Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon) and create 30,000 new jobs. The Administration hopes that by 2030 America will make 20% of the world's leading-edge chips.

President Biden signed an Executive Order prioritizing research into women's health. The order will direct $200 million into women's health across the government including comprehensive studies of menopause health by the Department of Defense and new outreach by the Indian Health Service to better meet the needs of American Indian and Alaska Native Women. This comes on top of $100 million secured by First Lady Jill Biden from ARPA-H.

Democratic Senators Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, and Jacky Rosen (all up for re-election) along with Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sheldon Whitehouse, introduced the "Shrinkflation Prevention Act" The Bill seeks to stop the practice of companies charging the same amount for products that have been subtly shrunk so consumers pay more for less.

The Department of Transportation will invest $45 million in projects that improve Bicyclist and Pedestrian Connectivity and Safety

The EPA will spend $77 Million to put 180 electric school buses onto the streets of New York City This is part of New York's goal to transition its whole school bus fleet to electric by 2035.

The Senate confirmed President Biden's nomination of Nicole Berner to the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Berner has served as the general counsel for America's largest union, SEIU, since 2017 and worked in their legal department since 2006. On behalf of SEIU she's worked on cases supporting the Affordable Care Act, DACA, and against the Defense of Marriage act and was part of the Fight for 15. Before working at SEIU she was a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Berner's name was listed by the liberal group Demand Justice as someone they'd like to see on the Supreme Court. Berner becomes one of just 5 LGBT federal appeals court judges, 3 appointed by Biden. The Senate also confirmed Edward Kiel and Eumi Lee to be district judges in New Jersey and Northern California respectively, bring the number of federal judges appointed by Biden to 188.

[nostalgiclittlespace]

Wishlist Ideas for Closeted Regressors

So, it’s a little early to be posting holiday stuff, but I wanted to get this out there so since I know a lot of people start their holiday shopping around this time. So, If you’re looking for agere gear as a closeted regressor, or you just want something that’s subtle, here are 12 ideas-with pics. Note: pics are not mine, they are screenshotted from Amazon. prices are in USD, as Im American. Happy regressing and happy holidays!

1.Kawaii water bottles, specifically in the style below. The straw on most of these is a lot like a sippy or bottle, so if you can’t have/don’t want one of those, then these are a great alternative! Just look up ‘kawaii water bottle’ on Amazon and a whole bunch will show up. Most are between $15-25 USD

2. Funko Pops. I actually use mine as action figures and play with them (just be gentle with them if you do this!) so they can be great agere toys and decor! You can find just about any character and any fandom too. The prices very greatly, depending on what character and where you buy from. Black Friday deals on Amazon and Five Below are great ways to find them for only a few dollars.

3. Fidget toys; they can make great Agere activities! Because they are designed to stimulate your senses, many function similarly to baby toys. Note: when buying in bulk packages, the quality isn’t great. So consider whether you want to invest in better quality or quantity. Most bulk fidget packs are about $25 USD on Amazon. Dollar stores often have similar products as well, though once again the quality is unknown.

4. Fleece throw blankets. They are super cute, soft, and cuddly! Not only can they keep you warm, but I like to use mine as a playmat. Once again, price can very greatly; typically anywhere from $10-30 USD

5. Coloring books. I think this one is pretty self explanatory, as lots of regressors love coloring. If you’re worried about rousing suspicion, then just ask for an adult coloring book; these often have more intricate patterns, but if you ask for a fandom themed one, it’ll still have some awesome characters to color! Typically around $5-10

6. Silicone night light. These are available in so many colors, animals, and foods—and they are appropriate for any age, thanks to their kawaii esc appearance; they usually cost about $15.

7. Snack boxes. If your dietary needs allow for it, then these can provide some really cool little space snacks. They’re all pre packaged and come with a wide variety of things, ranging from crackers to cookies. And if you want something unique, you can try snack boxes that feature food from other countries. Prices will vary greatly, mostly dependent on the size

8. Lava lamps. These are just cute and make for a neat visual stim. Plenty of colors to choose from too! If you wanted, it could be used as a sort of substitute as a baby mobile since it’s very colorful and relaxing to watch. These can go for anywhere between $20-40

9. Microwaveable plushies. Super comforting, and for any Littles with cramps or chronic pain, they can be disguised as heating pads. Many of these also come with a scent, typically lavender, though you can find them without too. Cost around $20-40, depending on brand.

10. Scrapbooking materials. Kind of a random one, but they can be used to decorate a journal, you can make a physical photo album like many of us had in our childhoods, etc. Just a fun craft project you can consider! Typically, scrapbooking kits that include some paper, washi tape, and stickers can be around $10-15

11. Onesie pajamas. Lots of options, and are great if you live somewhere cold! Usually $25-40. These can be animal shaped, character themed, or more subtle like a plaid pattern. Very comfy and make for great little space clothes.

12. Glow in the dark stars. They are cute, fun, and aesthetically pleasing. You can get them in a who,e bunch of colors too! Typically $5

[octuscle]

Cursed Ken, part 7: The Greaser

Daniel's whole body was shaking. He had leafed through all the catalogs. He had been on various forums. This Ken figure didn't even exist. And yet it was offered here on ebay. It could be a prototype that had never been produced. Or a small series that had never gone on sale officially. But the doll was there. Of course, it could also be something else. A product from another company. A fake would not be out of the question. But there was currently no bidder. The auction ran for another eight minutes. The seller wanted a paltry 10 dollars. The risk was minimal. And the chance? Prototypes of such dolls had already been sold for thousands of dollars. Daniel was a cautious, no, a fearful person. A person who enjoyed collecting dolls. To put it mildly, Daniel was overweight, didn't leave the house and lived on welfare. But he had an impressive collection of Ken figures. And now he was bidding 20 dollars on this doll. Ping! He was the highest bidder. Six minutes to go. Three more. 50 seconds. No more bidders! 3, 2, 1. Mine! He had the doll. Without a counterbid. For 10 dollars. He couldn't wait. He paid immediately via PayPal. And waited…

Daniel had to wait two weeks. Two bloody long weeks. And then he held the parcel in his trembling hands. He was wearing gloves. The doll was too perfect to be a mass-produced product. The hair wasn't plastic, it had actually been waxed into an oily quiff. The jacket was made of leather, the jeans of real fabric. The doll even smelled real. Like leather and pomade. Daniel breathed heavily. With excitement. And from exertion. He had almost run up the stairs to his collection. He draped the latest doll in a place of honor. Shit, he'd left his cell phone downstairs. Panting, he went downstairs. He had to capture this moment in a photo. Downstairs, he searched for his cell phone. He had left it somewhere… "Mamma, dov'è il mio cellulare?" he called out. No answer. Where was his mamma? There was a note in the kitchen. That he should remember to buy tomatoes at the market before he came to the restaurant. What time was it? 10:30. Shit, he had to hurry. The first guests were due in an hour. And if the pasta sauce wasn't ready by then because there were no fresh tomatoes, he'd be in big trouble with his mamma and his nonna.

Danilo was the typical Italian-American in his early 20s. Hot and testosterone-driven. But a bit on the simple side. He had forgotten something upstairs. He wanted to do something upstairs and for that he needed something from downstairs. And now? He ran back to his room. Logically, he had forgotten his comb and his leather jacket. He stood in front of the mirror and smoothed his hair. The pomade was shiny. Yes, he looked pretty retro. But that was part of the family home. It was the place to go for fans of good Neapolitan cuisine. And the 50s. Well, and a lot of guests came for Danilo's sake.

"Excuse me, may I take a photo of you?" Danilo heard this an average of 1.8 times as he walked from his parents' house, where he still lived, to his parents' restaurant, where he worked. Danilo was good at striking a pose. He was a star in Little Italy. And on Instagram. And even if his mamma and his nonna didn't know it, also on Grindr.

[lexithevalkyrie]

Wieght gain tip number 2: what should i eat 🤷‍♀️

Now that we talked about the best nutritional intakes to gain weight, both healthy and unhealthy, next next question to ask yourself is: what do I eat?

Now, let's start with you unhealthy piggies first. Good news for yall! You get to have all the fatty and delicious food you want 😋. Now, what is a good meal plan that will last you a week and won't hurt your wallet 🤔

Well any American knows the magnificent super store called Walmart 😌. Now what if I told you this bad boy can get you so fucking fat with only 40-50$ a week?

At 35-50$ a week: you can get around 3k calories per day for 1 whole week

Let's get the fun stuff out of the way. For your morning snack should be light compared to your afternoon snack, I recommend getting fritters. You can scarf down 720 calories with 2 fritters. A whole box of 6 fritters is merely 4 dollars, sooooo you should pick up 1-2 boxes. Your breakfast should be your lightest of your meals. If you want to go the extra mile and be lazy, I highly recommend Jimmy Dean Sausage, Egg & Cheese Croissant Sandwiches, each sandwich is 400 calories and one box has 4 sandwiches in it, so once more get 1-2 boxes for the week at this point you've spent between $10-$20 and eaten around 700-1.2k calories so far. It's not bad for a start, but im sure that tummy is still very hungry 😋. So let's move on to some lunch, and I know just the meal that will fill that gut! Starting off with your sides, you should pick up some Great Value Seasoned French Fries. 11 servings per bag with 140 calories per serving and only $3.75. As always, I recommend getting 1-2 bags like usual, of course, the more the merrier 😁. For your main meal, I recommend eating some nice and healthy American made burgers 😋, so grab some patties (recommend 20% fat 80% lean). The All Natural brand sells 12 patties per pack at $10! And if course you can eat a burger without buns, sooooo let's grab some big carb filled buns 😌. Great Value Jumbo Hamburger Buns should be the cheapest and most carb heavy buns you can get at only $2 (although you have to pick up 2 for all 12 patties). So let's have the final snack before bedtime, I think something light like walmart's famous Freshness Guaranteed Frosted Sugar Cookies should do, hehe 😉

In total, this should set you around 2.7-3k calories worth of food, which is more than enough to fatten up anyone under 200lbs

(The second part of this post will be about healthy gain, which I will post later today)

[sreegs]

‼️READING COMPREHENSION WARNING‼️

Read and comprehend the topic of this post above the "read more" link before attempting to respond. This is your only warning. Violators will be mocked and blocked.

A GUIDE TO TIPPING IN AMERICA FOR TOURISTS AND VISITORS

AND ASSHOLES WHO SOMEHOW LIVED HERE THIS LONG WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THIS

This post is going to cover tipping people in restaurants/eateries and private transportation. Tipping can also apply to many, many other service industries including but not limited to: movers, handypeople, mechanics, etc. Since this is meant to be brief and focused on info relevant to visitors and tourists, I won't discuss that here.

You're tipping 20% minimum on your food and public/private taxi rides (including lyft, uber, etc). Include this in your budget calculations for engaging with these services.

I was going to jokingly just end the post here but let me explain. Minimum wage laws in the US allow employers to pay their employees UNDER FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE if they're in an industry that receives tips on the regular. Taxi drivers are self-employed and have to pay for the costs of the lease on their vehicle, gas, and give a cut to their garage or ride service provider.

Therefore, capitalists have shifted the cost of paying a living wage to these people on to the consumer rather than the employer. No amount of arguments against tipping culture is going to magically fix this overnight. That's the long game and we're trying to abolish this shit. Therefore, you are tipping 20% minimum. Today.

Even if you did not like the food.

Even if the food was cold.

Even if the server didn't seem cheery and smiley.

Even if the taxi wasn't as fast as you wanted it.

Even if the taxi smelled a little funny or the driver didn't talk the amount you like.

If you did not suffer immediate physical harm or harassment or discrimination at the hands of the service person who provided you the service, full tip. Five stars if you have to rate them in an app. Perfect marks.

Does the above statement seem strange to you? It shouldn't, because remember: capitalists have forced you to cover the full cost of the service. THIS IS NOT THE FAULT OF THE SERVICE WORKER.

Cash is King

Tip in cash if you have it. Credit card companies can't take a chunk out of cash tips. And if someone who works a low-paying job can grab a bit of cash under the table, away from the eyes of the IRS, then they will do more economic good with that money than the tax cut that goes to pay for bombing other countries.

How do I figure out a 20% tip?

Easy. Look at the total (THE TOTAL, WITH TAX YOU FUCKING CHEAPSKATE). Double it, then divide by 10 (move the decimal place one over to the left). Round up the remainder to the nearest dollar. That's going to be at least 20%.

What about counter workers?

There is some confusion on how to tip people who work at a counter in cafes and fast food establishments. Because they are not considered tipped employees and they get minimum wage.

The rule is, if during your transaction the POS (point of sale) register asks you to add a tip, you add a 20% tip. If you see a tip jar, you tip. If neither of these things happen, you don't tip

What about food delivery?

20% minimum tip. You called/ordered via an app, and magically food showed up. In any weather. 20% tip.

Bonus Holiday section:

Let's say you're visiting America during the peak American holidays when it's either a common "dining out" holiday or a holiday where you usually spend time at home with family. This includes, in chronological order:

Valentines Day, Fourth of July Weekend (the whole weekend), Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Eve and Day.

You tip even more on those days. 30% minimum. I've tipped 100% on meals and rides on Christmas and Thanksgiving. Because those people are taking the time out of spending the day with friends and family, what everyone else is doing, to make sure they have enough money to pay bills and survive in America. And no you fucking bigot, you don't get to eye up the server and figure out if they celebrate Christmas or not.

FAQ:

I can't afford a 20% tip. How do I pay for this?

You can't afford the full service or experience. You don't buy it. Next question.

Where I come from, we don't tip that much/not at all. Why do I have to do this?

You're in America now. You have to do this. Please, feel free to engage the worker in a spirited debate about tipping culture if you feel like you need more info. I'm sure you'll learn something new.

I have a tipping system. You see, first I start at 10% and for every...

Your system is bad and you're a cheapskate. 20% minimum.

Hey wait a minute, I'm an American and I have strict rules about who I tip and how much. And 20% is too high! What are you talking about?

Every decent human being quietly judges you for being an asshole. You are disliked by the people around you who tip like normal people. You are not going to become rich some day because you saved $5 on a tip. Own up and tip.

I ate at an expensive restaurant. Surely I don't have to tip 20% on a bill like this, do I?

Yes you do.

Holy shit. I'm going to follow this guide but wow. Do you Americans really live like this?

Oh buddy wait till you encounter states that don't list the tax on the price tag.

OH MY GOD TUMBLR KEEPS BREAKING THIS POST. ANYTHING BELOW THIS GIF GETS FUCKED PLEASE TRY TO BEAR WITH ME

[darkeagleruins]

Mayor Of Border City El Cajon, California Interview

- They’ve received over 250,000 Illegal Migrant drop offs JUST SINCE OCTOBER

- Illegals get free health care & free transition surgeries

- New $19 million dollar Mega Migrant welcome center being built

- Free 20% down on home

- Free college tuition

- They have an existing Migrant Welcome Center nobody asked for

- City is paying up to $10k per month in hotels every month for each of these illegal immigrant families

“Who are you?”

“My name is Bill Wells. I'm the mayor of the city of El Cajon and here in San Diego County, we're seeing a lot of stuff happening here at the border.

And you guys being a border town, how is it affecting the city here?

Since, um, October, we've had over 250,000 drop offs in San Diego, these street releases. The county of San Diego already spent, $6,000,000 on a a migrant welcome center, which I’m not sure why we need that, but they've just allocated another $19,000,000 for that.

But, you know, there are also costs that you don't see.

You know, everybody that that comes across, whether they're a citizen or not, is entitled to full health care. That even includes having sex change operations.

That's an expense for the whole family.

Uh, people that come over with kids are put up in hotels. Those hotels cost $8- $10,000 per month, and that's paid for by the city. So the these are expensive things.

Now there's a a bill in California that says that if you're an illegal alien, you can get, um, free college tuition, even a 20% down on a house.

These are things that American citizens are not getting.”

[celestie0]

gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch5. child's play

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 5/x

ᰔ words. 4.8k

a/n. helloo my ihm friends! long time no see. hope you're all doing well and thank you so much to everyone who sent me kind messages about the whole ihm gojo ex wife thing haha. i really appreciate it :) i feel more confident about my writing decisions now, and that's all thanks to you guys! anyways, i will be posting shorter chapters for ihm going forward, so sorry if some chapters have slightly abrupt endings or stuff like that. i guess my goal is to post shorter chapters but more frequently! we'll see how it works out. anyways, hope you enjoy this chapter and see you at the bottom!!

nav. ch1 :: ch2 :: ch3 :: ch4 :: ch5 :: ch6 (pending)

Ever since admitting your mother into hospice, things have been calmer inside your mind. After passing the initial wave of agony that came with no longer hearing her voice down the hall or seeing her silhouette in her bedroom as you walked past it, you realized that…a weight has been lifted off your shoulders. No longer setting alarms at the height of every other hour to remind your mother to take her medication, no longer viewing every interaction you had with her as some form of study you needed to jot down in a binder for her neurologist’s records, and no longer driving her to all of her chemotherapy appointments, only to leave them feeling like you purposefully just took your mother to a place where they sucked all the life out of her in exchange for the slim promise of giving it all back to her someday.

Maybe it was evident in the way your shoulders felt less tense as you rolled them back, tilting your neck to the side and no longer feeling the painful strain that tugs a wince onto your face. The other day, you caught yourself humming a song as you drove to work. Your skin, usually feeling cracked and dry from stress and exhaustion, now has a slight plumpness to it like before. A more youthful glow, like the version of yourself you were before your mother became sick. The version of you that so quickly deteriorated, and one you didn’t even know still existed somewhere within you. 

There has also been time for hobbies. Rarest of occasions, you find yourself sauteing some yellow and white peaches in a saucepan over medium heat in Gojo’s kitchen, humming that song once again that’s been stuck in your head. The sundress you’re wearing matches the pink of the syrup that pools at the bottom of the pan, and you feel like you’re living your cottage core dreams in this brief moment of reprieve you’ve allowed yourself to fall into.

The sound of slippers tapping down onto the hardwood floor startles you out of your gleeful trance, and you turn your neck to the right to see a pajama-clad messy-haired Gojo shuffling his feet across the open area into the kitchen with a dark black mug in his hand.

“Why aren’t you dressed??” you ask him in a panic.

“I’ll get dressed later,” he tells you dismissively as he grabs the glass pitcher of coffee from where the coffee machine was nestled up against one of the counter corners.

“You’re stressing me out. Your mom told us to be there in two hours,” you say, putting your hands on your hips in disapproval as you hear the sizzle of the peaches in the saucepan. 

He entirely ignores you, choosing to instead drag his gaze down the form of your body. “Woooow, twice this month I get to see you in a cute dress,” he comments, pouring coffee into his mug but his eyes are still on you, “lucky me.”

“Oh Shut. Up,” you sneer at him with a harsh roll of your eyes, “your fake flattery might work on the lonely middle-aged women you seduce to make a living, but it won’t work on me.”

His shoulders push back before he slumps them slightly, his brow lifting with confusion. “It’s not fake though? I mean it. You look really nice right now.”

You point an accusatory sugar-syrup coated wooden spatula at him. “You’ve just been conditioned by the patriarchy to get a boner at the sight of a woman in a kitchen.”

“What–...no–...why do you always have to say stuff like that whenever I compliment you? Can’t you just accept it?”

You cross your arms over your chest. “I refuse to be flattered by an insolent man like you.”

He sighs, setting his coffee mug down on the counter, and you watch the way the fringe of his hair hangs over his forehead as he gazes into the contents, swirling it around with a loose grip on the handle. “Is this how it’s going to be everyday? I try to be nice, and you–...well, you know, are you.”

“Well who else should I be?”

His eyes lift up to meet yours, the slightest of a cheeky grin on his face as his eyes wander down the form of you again. “I don’t know. Someone a little…softer? Like, you’ve got this really pretty dress on, and then you’re telling me off about patriarchy-induced boners. It’s a little, uh, contradictory?”

You gasp. “You’re trying to control me. I knew it. You are poisoned by the patriarchy.”

“What?”

Your eyes narrow at him. “You have this image of a perfect and cute little wife, who’s gonna wear pretty dresses all the time, and bake stuff in the kitchen, and get all blushy when you tell her she looks beautiful, and you expect her to have this soft little personality that never argues with you or disagrees with you…ALL BECAUSE OF THE PATRIARCHY!!!”

“...I–...Okay, you’ve lost me.”

You let out a hmph! noise. “Can’t even discern his own brainwashing. Sad.”

“All of this just because I tried to tell you that you look nice?”

“I know what your ulterior motives are, you creep.”

His eyes spark a little at that, the corner of his mouth tugging up into a cheeky grin as he sets the coffee mug down onto the marble counter and he straightens his spine. You blink, watching with confusion as he crosses the distance between the two of you, to where you’re taking a small few steps backwards until your lower back presses against the edge of the island countertop. He cages you into the surface with his frame, followed by the palms of his hands sliding over the marble on both sides of you, and you feel his forearms press against the curve of your waist as he traps you in with no way out.

“S-Satoru,” you stutter, looking up at him with wide eyes, “what are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” he says, his voice deeper with a nonchalance that has you shiver, his gaze dropping to your lips when you part them slightly.

“T-The patriar–” you squeak out, but he suddenly dips his head down to kiss you.

Your breath hitches in your throat, eyes immediately closing when he moves his lips against yours, one of his strong arms wrapping around your waist to pull you closer to him and your hesitation is something that only lasts a brief second before you find yourself kissing him back. Some noise leaves his throat, deep and raw and sounding pleasantly surprised as he captures your lips more fervidly now, his hands smoothing down to hold your hips and his teeth slightly nip at your bottom lip. 

You grab a fistful of his shirt, unsure of whether you want to pull him closer to you or push him away, but the moan that you mumble against his lips only makes his grip on your hips even stronger, fingers digging into the softness through the thin fabric of your dress. 

The oven suddenly starts beeping, startling you and you pull away from the kiss with a gasp, eyes rounded as you look up at him, but his are lidded and dilated as his gaze remains glued to your lips. 

With a heaving chest, you try to push him away by a weak fist to his sternum but he’s unrelenting.

“You taste sweet,” he says, like some comment he noted in his head but accidentally voiced out loud.

“I–...” you inhale sharply, “I just ate three macerated peaches.”

“Uh-huh,” he barely acknowledges before leaning in to get another taste, but you push him away harsher this time.

His hands let go of your hips entirely, finally breaking out of that kiss-induced trance he was in, but he still remains close to you in proximity, so much so to where you can feel the heat from his body. It’s comforting almost, radiating through the soft cotton of his long sleeve shirt, and you find yourself subconsciously leaning towards him before you snap out of it too, and rock your weight back against the island countertop.

You cross your arms over your chest, hoping the flush to your cheeks isn’t showing. “Oh okay so we just casually kiss now?”

He shoves his hands into his plaid pajama pant pockets, leaning away from you slightly. “For as long as I can get away with it, yeah.”

“You are breaking the rules.”

“You never said no kissing.”

“I said no touching.”

“Ehhh kissing isn’t really touching, though, is it?”

“You sound stupid.”

“I always sound stupid to you.”

The oven starts beeping again, and you realize it’s long been preheated to the setting you had placed earlier. You slip away from him with haste, feeling his gaze on you as you press a button on the oven to turn the alarm off, and you stare at the handle for a moment or two to calm the beating of your heart down. 

Your eyes catch sight of something on the side of the fridge. A little magnet made of rubber that has the word London on it as well as the design of the Westminster Cathedral with golden accents. You recall that Gojo went on a trip to London recently, and that he didn’t bring you back any souvenirs from there like he did for your other neighbors. And you want to pretend, you want to shove it down, that incessantly childish feeling that wonders why he didn’t bring you anything back. You want to continue to pretend like it doesn’t hurt your feelings. Something so miniscule and small. But you–...well, you can’t.

You spin around to face him. “Do you hate me?” you bluntly ask.

He blinks at you. “Huh?”

“Do you, what, I don’t know, think I’m annoying or something?”

He shrugs with his hands still in his pockets. “I mean, yeah, I do think you’re annoying sometimes. But in a silly way. Like we’re just pals horsin’ around, y’know?”

You snarl at him, putting your hands on your hips and narrowing your gaze until he’s hardly even visible anymore. “No. I actually find you annoying. Like, wanna-run-you-over-with-a-bus annoying. You just have horrendous social awareness and think that everyone loves you.”

“You actually don’t like me?” he asks, like he can’t even believe that someone wouldn’t.

“Yes,” you say, “now get out of my way.” You make an attempt to push past him, purposefully knocking your shoulder into him to assert dominance but he is unfortunately much bigger than you and so all it does is make you stumble ungracefully from the recoil.

He quickly grabs your arm to steady you, and you glare up at him before yanking yourself away and then step backwards until your back hits the fridge.

He studies your demeanor for a second before taking a deep inhale, and then lets it all go in a heaving sigh. “What do I have to do to get you to lighten up a bit?” he asks.

“You really want to know?” you sneer at him.

“Yes,” he says with a slight hint of frustration in his tone.

You cross your arms. “Pay for the fucking fence.”

He blinks at you, confusion replacing whatever frustration was previously decorating his tone. “What?”

“The fence,” you reiterate with a step forwards towards him, “the one I built six months ago. The one where you laughed in my face when I told you to help pay for it.”

He leans forward. “Yeah. Because I never wanted that fence built. Like I said, it fucked up the roots on my avocado tree. You should’ve asked me before building it. In fact, it’s illegal to build a fence without joint consent of both neighboring property owne–”

“Oh my god, okay, see? This is why I can’t stand you,” you snarl at him and make another move to get past him but he easily steps in front of you to keep you from going anywhere.

With a sigh, he relents. “Fine, I’ll pay for the fence.”

You try to keep the twitching muscles of your face still as you resolutely stare up at him, pressing your lips into a thin line. Through a strained tone, you say, “No. I don’t want you to pay for it anymore.”

He lifts a brow, utterly bewildered at this point. “Huh?”

“Now it just feels like pity. And I don’t want your pity money.”

“Two seconds ago, you did.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. That was two seconds ago.”

“So…let me get this straight, you don’t want me to pitch in?”

“No. I want you to have wanted to pitch in SIX MONTHS AGO.”

“Okay but what the fuck am I supposed to do about that now?”

“NOTHING!!!” you finally snap at him, the shrill to your voice startling him slightly to where you see his shoulders jump, and his eyes are now rounded blue as he looks at you. “There’s nothing you can do about it, there’s nothing you can do to get me to ‘lighten up’ or ‘act softer’ or whatever the fuck kind of damage control you aim to achieve with me due to your pestering incessant need to be liked by every fucking person you come across. So just deal with the fact that I hate you and let me do it in peace.”

He’s silent for what feels like a long time as he blinks at you, his bottom lip pushing up slightly in a way that suggests he’s almost impressed by your little outburst, then he takes a step forward, and in that one large stride, he’s closed any distance between the two of you. Your back is up against the frigid steel of the fridge, your heels tucked under the warm rubber at the foot of it, and you’re looking up at Gojo as he towers over you, his hands still annoyingly and relaxedly shoved into his pockets.

“Do you think it’s gonna be a problem that I think you’re kinda hot when you’re mad?” he asks you.

A small puff of air leaves your lips, like you just can’t believe the audacity, but also having him this close to you suddenly made it a little harder to breathe. “C–...Can you just be fucking serious for one second?”

His head dips down, the fringe of his hair tickling your forehead, tip of his nose slightly brushing against yours, but his gaze never falls to your lips. “You think I’m not being stupid fuckin’ serious when I say that you’re hot?”

“S–” your breath hitches in your throat, and his gaze finally falls to the lick you pass over your lips, “Satoru–”

Like God himself answered to your (cognitively dissonant) prayers, the bell rings, and Gojo leans himself away from you, straightening his spine so he can glance over his shoulder towards the door, a slight look of irritation on his face through the furrow of his brow.

You blink up at him. “A–...Are you expecting someone?”

He rubs the back of his neck. “No. Don’t think so.” He sighs before shuffling around the kitchen island and across the dining hall towards the entryway of the house, and you peer at the sight from across the hall.

When he opens the door, you see Sana standing outside, dressed in mom jeans and a t-shirt with her black Coach purse slung around her shoulder, arms crossed, and you barely register the fact that she looks pissed.

“Sana?” Gojo says, “what’s up.”

She entirely ignores him when she catches sight of you, pushing right past him and into the family room that you were currently finding solace in.

“You,” she points at you, storming right up to your personal space, “what the hell did you say to Juno when you were babysitting her?!”

“H-Huh??” you squeak out, taking a step backwards. “What are you talking about?”

“You told her to fight kids at school?!” she snarls at you, and your eyes widen.

“What?” you say, your face twisting with confusion, “I–...I never said that. I just said that she should stand up for herself if she needs to.”

Sana inhales deeply with rage, leaning back and jutting her hip out as she crosses her arms again. “Yeah, well, I had to pick her up early from school today because the principal called and told me she shoved a little girl on the playground during recess, and now she’s facing suspension.”

Gojo approaches suddenly from your periphery, standing in front of you as he faces Sana. You stand on your tiptoes to peer at her over his shoulder. “What? Why would Juno do something like that?

You hear Sana start to tap her foot impatiently against the hardwood floor, and then she turns her head away from Gojo as a slight hmph! noise leaves her throat. “The why is irrelevant.”

You poke your head out from behind Gojo and glare at her, but then Gojo turns around suddenly to look at you.

“y/n,” he says, “what’s going on?”

“I–” you start, glancing at Sana again who now has a solemn look on her face with pursed lips. You glance back at Gojo, who’s looking at you with confusion and anticipation. A heat spreads down your neck from the attention of the both of them on you, and you’re not sure what the smart thing to say is, so you figure you’ll just tell the truth as it is. “...I just didn’t want her getting bullied and thinking she can’t stick up for herself.”

At that, you see Gojo’s shoulders stiffen. “Bullied?” he repeats after you, then quickly turns towards Sana, “what does she mean, bullied? Juno’s getting bullied at school?”

Sana faces him full-on, raising a stern pointed finger between the two of them “No. Satoru. Stop. You always do this. This has nothing to do with you, so don’t even start. It’s not a big deal, let’s not make it one.”

“The fuck do you mean it’s not a big deal? She’s getting bullied at school, and you want her to just suck it up?” he asks, venom dripping from his tone. 

“It’s for her benefit!” Sana exclaims. “Jun and I have spent months trying to get her into this school! We don’t want her getting kicked out.”

“Y’know, I’m–” you stutter, “I’m gonna–...I’m just gonna go upstairs,” you say, “this seems like a family matter. I think you guys should probably just settle this on your ow–”

“No,” Gojo says, pointing to the couch that you were standing in front of, “sit down.”

You sit.

Gojo turns to face Sana again, and although you can’t see his face, you imagine he’s pissed off from the way Sana’s shoulders drop slightly and her sharp expression is cut into a more sheepish one.

“Who cares if Juno is suspended for sticking up for herself? It’s the teachers’ fault for not making sure she’s safe,” he says.

“Shoving other kids is not the solution.”

“Well if you fuck around, then you find out. Kids are too soft these days.”

“This is not the 90s, Satoru.”

You watch the back and forth between the two of them for the better part of an entire minute, feeling uneasy in the hostile environment of the room, but there’s a sense of underlying familiarity between the two, one that is recognizable amongst family. And you feel rather foreign, but then remember that, technically speaking, now that you’re married to Gojo, this is your family too.

Amongst the arguing of the adults, none of you noticed that Juno had gotten out of the car in the driveway and was now standing in the doorframe of the front entrance. She looks scared and guilty, fidgeting with her fingers in front of her, and you notice her scrapes and bruises that you tended to last week were now mostly healed. 

Gojo catches sight of her, and you see his shoulders relax. “Juno, c’mere.”

With the permission, she instantly runs towards him and into his arms from where he was crouched down to the floor in order to welcome her, and then she starts sobbing.

“I’m–hic,” she cries, “I’m so–hic–I’m so sowwyyy Uncle Toru…I’m–hic–I’m sorry mommyyyy.” 

You see Sana sigh and she makes a move to brush Juno’s tear-dampened hair out of her face when Gojo pulls her away from his shoulder by a delicate hold of her bony little shoulders.

“Juno. Listen. If people are being mean to you, then you do exactly as your auntie y/n said. You stand up for yourself. And if that doesn’t work, then you cuss at them and threaten to shove their faces into the dirt until they run away with their tails between their legs. Do you understand me?” Gojo tells her.

Sana gives you a pointed look.

“Oh, I–” you put your hands up in front of you, “I didn’t say any of that last part.”

“Do you understand me?” Gojo repeats again, and Juno nods her head slowly before she falls back into him and soaks his shirt with tears. “I’m soowwwwwyyyyyy.”

Gojo pats her back a few times to comfort her, and your heart breaks for the little girl. It’s bad enough to be bullied at school, but then to be reprimanded by your mother the one time you stand up for yourself…you can imagine how emotionally exhausting that would be for a five-year-old. 

Juno sniffles, rubbing her snot all over the cotton of Gojo’s shirt, and then pulls her face away to rub at her eye with a weakly closed fist. “I–hic–I just…I just wanted him to feel–hic–the same hurt.”

“Huh? Who?” Gojo asks.

“The boy,” Juno says, “the one that shoved me today.”

“It was a boy?!?!?!” Gojo yells. “Alright. That’s it. I’m grabbing my bat.”

“Satoru.” Sana deadpans.

Sana and Gojo continue to bicker about the ethics of threatening five-year-old boys with baseball bats, going back and forth about how Gojo wasn’t actually going to do anything but just wanted to instill fear (he’s lying), while Sana isn’t exactly sold on a single pacifist thing that he says, and you sigh, because you realize you’ve become invested in one of, what you feel like will become many, of their family quarrels.

Juno sneaks around Gojo’s legs and comes up to you while the arguing is taking place in the background, and she gently taps your knee as you’re seated on the couch. “Auntie y/n,” she whispers.

You rub an eye crustie from her face and then hold her hand in yours. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“Mm? For what?”

She smiles at you, her cheeks pink and flush from crying but rounded now in glee. “My mommy and daddy spoke a lot today at home for first time in long time because of me. Because I listen’ded to you. Thank you.”

Your eyes narrow. “What do you mean by that, sweetheart?”

Why wouldn’t Sana and Jun be on normal talking terms? What does Juno mean that it’s been a long time? What exactly was going on at home?

“Juno,” Sana’s voice interrupts your thoughts, her arms crossed across her chest, “c’mon. Let’s go.” She points a stern finger at Gojo. “Seriously. I mean it. No baseball bats or rodent traps involved. I’ll talk to the teachers and sort something out.” She glances at you, that strict look on her face now dissolving into one of pure exhaustion. One you can imagine only a mother can face. “See you later at dinner, you two.”

Juno runs up to her mom and grabs onto her outreached hand, and you see Gojo ruffle her hair as she walks past him, her giggles ringing in the air, and then he sees them out the door. 

The air is awkward, at least to you, the second he closes the door, and when he turns around to face you, your body stiffens up.

He leans back onto the front door, crossing his arms over his chest. “Thanks,” he says, “for telling Juno to stick up for herself.”

You blink at him. “Well. I don’t feel too great about it at the moment, to be honest.”

He sighs. “I just think that Jun and Sana are raising her to be…kinda meek. I wish they’d teach her to be more confident and take up space.”

“Mhm,” you nod. Because you agree. Little girls need to learn how to be that way at a young age, because the world is seldom very kind to them.

“Well, what you said to her is what I would’ve said to her anyways,” he says.

You roll your eyes, standing up from the couch and heading back into the kitchen to presume your work on your peach cobbler. “I never told her to shove kids’ faces into the dirt. But, uh, sure, I guess so.”

You see Gojo enter the kitchen too in your periphery, but you don’t give him any glance or look or attention. From what you can see as you stir around your macerated peaches in a Pyrex bowl, he’s leaning against the island counter about three feet away from you, his hands shoved in his pockets, and he’s watching you. A slight warmth radiates in your cheeks, but you attempt to ignore the nerves by being hypnotized by the pink syrup that pools at the bottom of the bowl.

My mommy and daddy spoke a lot today at home for first time in long time because of me. Because I listen’ded to you. Thank you.

An unsettling feeling takes over your senses. It could be the past few years you’ve spent walking on eggshells around your mother, or the way you’ve become so keen to her energy as a way of staying on top of any shift in her symptoms, any single sign of disease progression, any clue that she wasn’t getting better. Any clue that she wasn’t doing okay. And you feel a sense of dread, because that skill, you realize, has now made you aware of similar circumstances in the people around you.

Not to mention, you are a child of divorce. You know what that fear feels like.

You just want to know if Juno feels safe at home.

“Hey, um…” you start, turning slightly to finally face Gojo, your eyes hesitantly flickering up to meet his gaze, “when was the last time you saw your brother-in-law? And with Sana?”

He raises a brow at you. “I just saw them last weekend for one of Juno’s dance recitals.”

“Ah…I see,” you say. You purse your lips together. 

Right. Kids say things all the time. They believe in Santa Claus and think that blueberry pancakes are called blubbery pancakes. And they sometimes read too into things, and they sometimes read too little. Surely, things must be okay. Maybe Sana and Jun had had a little argument with some stubbornly thawing cold shoulders, a demeanor that was noticed by their child, and now things have resumed to normal. That was normal. Part of every family. “That’s good to know…” 

You turn away from Gojo to stare back down into the bowl of macerated peaches again. With a furrowed brow, you close your eyes tightly to try to shake the chilly feeling in your bones, and you feel better when you open them again. The slightly numb sensation in your hand dissipates and you have enough dexterity to mix the peaches around in the bowl.

“I wonder what news they want to share with us over dinner,” you say, to quell the awkward silence.

“Hm?” Gojo hums, and you see him turn around face the counter now, hovering over the bowl of raw crumble topping you had mixed together, prodding at it with the wooden spoon. “Oh, they’re moving.”

Your head snaps to look at him. “W-What?”

“Yeah,” he nonchalantly affirms, scooping up a spoonful of the crumble. “They wanted to up-size, and move a little closer to the school that Juno’s at. I found them a nice place about an hour from here on the outskirts of the city. They just signed the papers a couple weeks ago.” And then he shoves the spoon into his mouth.

“Oh…wow,” you say. “Okay…”

“Damn,” Gojo says with surprise laced in his tone, "this is really good.” He’s staring into the bowl in awe and then scoops up some more crumble with a spoon.

You blink at him, irritated that he’s eating all your ingredients without even asking, and before you’ve even finished your dessert. It’s like he was born to piss you off.

You walk up to him and yank the bowl away, “Gimme that.” Then you pull it into the divot of your waist possessively and glare at him. 

He sighs, and then says something out loud that you’re sure he meant to keep in his head:

“I’ll get used to it.”

.

.

.

[end of chapter 5]

a/n. it feels so strange to post such a short chapter bahaha hopefully the ending isn't too abrupt. but hope you enjoyed! i'm so sorry ab the slow burn in this series aaa but i can try to assure you that it'll all be worth it hopefully lol i'm really excited for what i have planned for this series!! alsooo sorry if there are errors or anything, i'm trying to spend less time editing since it really stalls me n leads to writer's block lol. hope to see you in the next one :) much love! - ellie

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[ceasarslegion]

Do you think visiting America changed your political views?

Honestly no, my political views are a bit too weathered to be too rocked by a week in a country I have been to before (been to NYC once before, plus Montana, Seattle, Oklahoma, and Texas before, I was just either a kid or a dumb college student for all of them so those trips were very much led by either the adults around me or my terminal disease of being 20 years old and in the same room as my dorm buddies at the time. What made this trip different was that it was entirely sponsored by me as an independent adult who pays his own bills, so I could really stop and take in the americanness of it all)

What it did do was give me some more depth regarding my political views around the US. Of course you're going to think easy access to killing machines is cool and progressive when there's guns on display for sale in Walmart. Of course you're going to act like the way they do about strategic voting when you've been entrenched in the sheer individualism in every mundane little facet of life that they are. Everything about that country screams "im special" rather than "im one part of a global community."

My doctor told me he couldn't let me in good conscious go to the US without travel insurance because if I got sick or injured I'd be in medical debt to a foreign country for the rest of my life. And I saw military discount stickers on street food carts and hometown heroes banners in every hovel we drove through because their military gobbles up every red cent of their tax dollars instead of a functioning healthcare system. It's so isolated and bubbled away it reminds me a bit of those bubble wrap kids but if it could be a country, and if those bubble wrap kids wrapped themselves up and then watched the rest of us playing and cried that we were doing it wrong

Idk man, ive always kinda suspected the whole "you only think the US is right wing because of gerrymandering without it we'd out-progress the whole world!!" thing that gets touted every US election season was hot horseshit. Like don't get me wrong gerrymandering does skew results in favour of Republicans but I don't think that person I saw with the trailer car that just said "LAW + ORDER" on it with a bunch of guns hanging off it and a dummy in a maga hat sitting up top would be a shining communist leader if there wasn't any gerrymandering. I think a lot of Americans are just organically fucked up as a result of the self-isolation and I don't think a lot of them even realize that. Even the ones who say they do

[ajmakoko]

Summary of evidence and concerns:

Trump is a Russian asset working for Putin (see book American Kompromat by journalist Craig Unger or Active Measures documentary with Hillary Clinton(1), sources below). Elon and Trump are working together (2). They both have substantial ties to Epstein (3) (4) (5) (6). Trump stole election software in 2020 (7). Similarly, Elon Musk has been in contact with Russia for the last 2 years (8). This includes during the Ukraine War when Russia began using Starlink (9) while it was claimed they got them third party and not from Musk himself; however now appears imo to show Elon is a doublecrosser.

Starlink, Elon's satellite company, was installed in some voting machines across the country (10) and may have interfered with vote tabulation. Voting machines were found to be connected to the internet (11). An independent report on voting machines concluded that tabulation tampering was possible with current voting machines, so hand counts are vital (12). In September, Politico had an investigation finding Russian malware on a state voter registration database (13). Also, there were malicious fake texts from fake DNC organizations, connected to Elon who donated to them, that were fishing voter info (14).

Elon had results of election on an app 4 hours before official counts had it (15), per Joe Rogan podcast in a discussion to Theo Von. Earlier this year, Tana Monogeau, released info that she'd been offered millions of dollars to endorse the Trump campaign and that she knew others had taken the deal (16).

They will release more info admitting their fraud because they are a Russian asset trying to start a civil war here (speculation). They want us to be confused about sources and who to trust and what's real, they want to release the truth to anger us and lies to anger us. Trump has refused to write an ethics statement for transition of power saying he will transition peacefully (17). JD Vance has also told the EU that unless they allow X unfettered access to the EU (to spread propaganda), they will withdraw the US from NATO (18) - which will prompt wars or takeover either way and weakens Germany, who is entering an election since their government couldn't agree on Ukraine budget. A Russian space chief said Elon Musk’s plan to bomb Mars is a cover to put nuclear weapons in space (19).

Also speculation, are reports of widespread ballot rejection, especially for signatures. There are articles claiming already that it is because GenZ does not know cursive (20) - except the signature simply must match your driver's license. It's not a cursive writing test. Avocado toast but with gen z voting fraud. We do not yet have the ballot rejection rates but typically they are around 1% to 1.5% (21).

Crypto is how right wing conservatism got funded here. It's why it took off- it was basically UBI for those men, funded by foreign intelligence for this purpose along with other uses for crypto like dark money, drugs, trafficking, etc (22)(23). The least informed people we knew were investing in crypto when it was starting, mining bitcoins. They couldn't tell you what a stock or tariff is, yet they were making bank in crypto trading. Crypto trading, especially memecoins, appears to be an obvious scam to most because it's the stock market without ownership. So why were these 4chan pedophiles and nazis doing so well? Because it was just meant to give them money the whole time. And crypto is great for transferring money internationally from shady organizations to shady people (24). Far right catchphrases and meme campaigns dispersed online including X, give out the key words/catchphrases for the new coin that isn't a scam and will disperse money. People who are deep in these groups interner algorithms get these keywords first and normal outsiders will either not notice or will stay away. No normal person wants a coin that references Hitler if they are just scrolling memecoins.

Once the government has been taken over, they can force their memecoin as the national currency and then rug pull, which is also what Musk is likely going to do to Tesla at the same time. The entire point is to bankrupt America for Putin and his cartoon villain cohorts. Musk is already saying he wants to withdraw from US currency due to national debt (Trump added most of the national debt) (25).

If you're in Germany, take note. They are coming for you next, your election is soon.

News Links

(1) https://youtu.be/5umiMThrlsA?si=mwgr4U2c2jleJEBj

(2) https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/elon-musk-weighing-trump-staffing-decisions-sources/story?id=115730434

(3) https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/trump-infiltrate-voting-machines-georgia-2020.html

(4) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-interview.html

(5) https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfriend-dated-kimbal-musk-brother-of-tesla-founder-elon-musk-2020-1

(6) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fire-and-fury-the-podcast/id1750757108

(7) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/trump-jeffrey-epstein-tapes

(8) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-elon-musks-reported-phone-calls-with-putin-and-why-it-matters

(9) https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-using-thousands-spacex-starlink-terminals-ukraine-wsj-says-2024-02-15/

(10) https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnewsvideo/comments/1gnxqmw/elon_musks_company_starlink_praised_by_tulare/

(11) www.nbcnews.com/news/ncna1112436

(12) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/inside-georgias-effort-to-secure-voting-machines-as-experts-raise-concerns

(13) https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/01/us-election-software-national-security-threats-00176615

(14) https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/10/pro-trump-dark-money-network-tied-to-elon-musk-behind-fake-pro-harris-campaign-scheme/

(15) https://grabien.com/story.php?id=499986

(16) https://www.buzzfeed.com/natashajokic1/tana-mongeau-paid-political-endorsement

(17) https://apnews.com/article/trump-transition-planning-ca3a6be50d147b04b6498184e5599b1e

(18) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jd-vance-elon-musk-x-twitter-donald-trump-b2614525.html

(19) https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/499968-russian-space-chief-elon-musks-plan-to-bomb-mars-is-a-cover-to-put/

(20) https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-voters-struggle-signatures-cast-mail-ballot-problems-2024-11

(21) https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots

(22) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/far-right-extremists-raise-millions-cryptocurrency-bitcoin/

(23) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/opinion/crypto-cryptocurrency-money-conspiracy.html

(24) https://apnews.com/article/cryptocurrency-coronavirus-pandemic-technology-business-europe-f7f754fc2c68b0eb0d712239323f26c3

(25) https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/10/its-unsustainable-tesla-ceo-elon-musk-issues-us-serious-bankruptcy-warning-amid-huge-bitcoin-and-dogecoin-price-surge/

Personal Testimony from the dickbags themselves:

youtube.com/live/HBPNfAUPz08?si=PZQa_D_wbN9VoA6y

In the first minute:

"Your votes are rigged. We can win New Mexico."

"If you can watch your vote counter, if we can bring God down from heaven (he's referencing Starlink), we can win this, win California, win a lot of states."

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/if-trump-loses-im-fcked-elon-musk-in-interview-with-tucker-carlson/articleshow/114024254.cms

“If [Trump] loses, I’m f*cked… How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”

Why does Elon think he would go to prison though? For what crime?

youtu.be/Zmc0EN8XAY8?si=5u_mJNte37r4JmUb

Trump:"Our little secret is having a big impact"

If Trump was so sure the election was rigged and they were going to turnover every state including California, then why hasn't he asked for a recount in all the states with representatives that didn't get elected that he thought would be? Shouldn't he be suing for recounts? He did it last time. Why doesn't he want an investigation this time?

#AssetForfeitureTrumpMusk

If they get locked into years of asset forfeiture from layers and layers of state and municipal claims and lawsuits (which will require discovery lol), we may be able to stop them. Which is likely part of why they are moving to bitcoin as well.

[ladycamdens]

hi friends. i removed my post from reddit, not because i retract my statements about kong, but because this whole thing has been too triggering for me tbh.

this post is sort of a way for me to vent and provide some clarifying statements for anyone who is interested. feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear.

kween kong and i were "drag family" from 2019 to 2020. in that time, we saw each other basically every weekend she was home. i worked hours and hours of unpaid work for her, as did the rest of her drag family. which she would later completely discredit and talk shit about us all for.

when we first met, she just didn't talk about her race much. she lip synced the n word (as pictured in this video)

and wore box braids and things like durags. she also strictly performed songs by African American artists. at first, i did presume she was black. then, within that time, when actively asked by us, according to her, she was of strictly Pacific Island descent. on both sides of her family. and still only publicly claims that.

i also remember being out with her @ lunch once, she looked at the Cafe staff and said (loudly) "these *n slurs* clearly want us to leave". i also then wanted to leave. it would be very shortly after that that we would have a very public falling out. where i called her out for this post on her insta story

keep in mind she did nothing but yap about how she was creating a "safe space" for all of us and had multiple plus sized daughters.

now flash forward to her time on drag race !!!

she was still doing looks like this and not addressing her racism

i love all the zebras and black girl magic in *checks notes* Polynesia...

she would finally claim some of her actual identity, only to play activist, whilst promoting a bar that she knew employed abusers

now the final nail in this goddamn coffin is how she lied about her children

1. all of her children, bar two of us had perfectly fine relationships with our parents. and most of them lived at home lmao

2. one of her daughter's CHOSE to do escorting. she still does.

3. on average the members were about 24. there were zero minors in the haus of Kong. you cannot work bar gigs in australia under the age of 18.

4. whenever her daughters, usually young POC trans kids, asked her for help, she would demonise them and say all they did was take from her.

5. as i mentioned before, we were largely unpaid. our actual lipsync numbers were paid through tipping - which is near unheard of here. most queens get a booking fee. if you didn't have a lot of friends or family you'd be lucky to make $20

photo of me with the fucking "kong dollars" as she called them

if you got through this entire post. thank you. that means a lot to me. i love you all. if you do wish to share this it would be really helpful to me. okay bye xo

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Is Lula Anti-American? It's complicated.

It’s the question in Washington that won’t go away: “Is Lula anti-American?” Since returning to Brazil’s presidency on January 1, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has repeatedly caused alarm in the U.S. capital and elsewhere with his comments on Ukraine, Venezuela, the dollar and other key issues. An unconfirmed GloboNews report in June said President Joe Biden may have abandoned any intentions of visiting Brasilia before the end of the year because of frustration with Lula’s positions.    

The question causes many to roll their eyes, and with good reason. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, some in the United States continue to see Latin America in “You’re either with us or against us” terms. Washington has a long record of getting upset with Brazil’s independent stances on everything from generic AIDS drugs in the 1990s to trade negotiations in the 2000s and the Edward Snowden affair in the 2010s. A large Latin American country confidently operating in its own national interest, neither allied with nor totally against the United States, simply does not compute for some in Washington, and maybe it never will.   

That said, there is a long list of reasonable people in places like the White House and State Department, in think tanks and in the business world who are perfectly capable of understanding nuance — and have still perceived a threat from Lula’s foreign policy in this, his third term. The list of perceived transgressions is long and growing: Lula has repeatedly echoed Russian positions on Ukraine, saying both countries share equal responsibility for the war. In April, Lula said blame for continued hostilities laid “above all” with countries who are providing arms—a slap at the United States and Europe, delivered while on a trip to China, no less. Lula has worked to revive the defunct UNASUR bloc, whose explicit purpose was to counter U.S. influence in South America. He has repeatedly urged countries to shun the U.S. dollar as a mechanism for trade when possible, voicing support for new alternatives including a common currency with Argentina or its other neighbors. Lula has been bitterly critical of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela–”worse than a war,” he has said—while downplaying the repression, torture and other human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship itself.    

For some observers, the inescapable conclusion is that Lula’s foreign policy is not neutral or “non-aligned,” but overtly friendly to Russia and China and hostile to the United States. This has been a particular letdown for many in the Democratic Party who briefly saw Lula as a hero of democracy and natural ally after he, too, defeated an authoritarian, election-denying menace on the far right. And for the record, it’s not just Americans who feel this way: the left-leaning French newspaper Liberation, in a front-page editorial prior to Lula’s visit to Paris in June, called him a “faux friend” of the West.  

To paraphrase the old saying, it’s impossible to know what truly lurks in the hearts of men. But as someone who has tried to understand Lula for the past 20 years, with admittedly mixed results, let me give my best evaluation of what’s really happening: Lula may not be anti-U.S. in the traditional sense, but he is definitely anti-U.S. hegemony, and he is more willing than before to do something about it.  

That is, Lula and his foreign policy team do not wish ill on Washington in the way that Nicolás Maduro or Vladimir Putin do, and in fact they see the United States as a critical partner on issues like climate change, energy and infrastructure investment. But they also believe the U.S.-led global order of the last 30 years has on balance not been good for Brazil or, indeed, the planet as a whole. They are convinced the world is headed toward a new, more equitable “multipolar” era in which, instead of one country at the head of the table, there will be, say, eight countries seated at a round table—and Brazil will be one of them, along with China, India and others from the ascendant Global South. Meanwhile, Lula has lost some of the inhibitions and brakes that held him back a bit during his 2003-10 presidency, and he is actively out there trying to usher the world along to this promising new phase—with an evident enthusiasm and militancy that bothers many in the West, and understandably so. 

Continue reading.

[just-your-average-tangerine]

I had typed up a whole post about someone fitting the average tumblr demographic (american, gen z) has likely only been exposed to country music in the form of 'bro country", the "i love my guns/ beer/ truck/ pretty-girl-in-cutoff shorts" type of country music. So its not that strange that those people would dislike country music. But that form of country music was an intentional campaign post 9/11 to erase the roots of country and turn it into the violently nationalistic, misogynistic, racist crap that has plagued country charts for the past 20+ years.

but tumblr deleted that post and i don't feel like retyping it so here's a selection of my favorite country music that doesn't fall in to that category.

side note: this is a mix of older and newer country so not all of it is pre 9/11 and some of it has been on country top 40 charts since then, but its still not bro country

side note 2: these are recommendations for individual songs, not necessarily artists, some artists here do have 'bro country' songs just not these ones

I am a chicks fan from birth so I will not apologize for the number of their songs I'm including

the ultimate example of country music written by angry women. Who doesn't love two best friends getting together to murder ones abusive husband then live the rest of their lives as lesbian famers?

a haunting reflection on trauma and abuse, especially being abused by someone who's well loved by others.

a mothers words to her son following a divorce and subsequent abandonment by his father

following 9/11 the chicks were outspoken against Bush and the invasion/ war in Iraq and Afghanistan, due to the changing politics of country music this got them death threats and got them blacklisted from country radio. this song is about that.

-this list would not be complete without some Johnny Cash

a perfect example of the more progressive politics in country music. How can we as a country claim to be a pillar of progress just because we have nice things while were spending millions of dollars to send young men to die in Vietnam but cant afford to feed the hungry at home?

-cant mention Johnny Cash without including his cover of Hurt

for all your gay and tender needs

I was pretty neutral on this song until I saw Darius Rucker perform it at the Grand Ol Opry and it just makes me happy now

for all your gay and sad needs