#I have added 40 to my to read later list

[dreamingofthewild]

Does anyone have Gale x Tav (any gender) fic recs?

(Feel free to shamelessly self-promote).

[romana-after-dark]

The Wrong Way: Chapter 2

Raider!Joel Miller x Fem!Reader

DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT

Masterlist

Summery: You are sold to Joel to clear up some of your fathers' debts, and he takes you back to his house where him, Tommy, and high ranking members of his raiding trope stay. Joel is mean, cruel, and hash, but had small moments of softness that confuse you in your venerable state. Over time, you get to know him and Tommy, and see different sides of each, an both are hiding secrets. Was it possible to fall in love under these circumstances? Or was that just another way Joel was fucking with you?

WARNINGS FOR FULL FIC, NOT CHAPTER BY CHAPTER UNLESS SOMETHING NEW IS ADDED AFTER MASTER WARNING LIST: DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!!!! Fic contains graphic depictions of sexual assault, rape, molestation, dubcon/non con. Blow Jobs, PIV sex, lose of virginity, sex trafficking, past incest, death/people dying everywhere, Stockholm syndrome, falling for your rapist, victim blaming, torcher, branding, physical abuse, attempted sexual assault (not Joel), somno, self-harm/depression/suicidal thoughts (not a lot)but fair warning, major age gap

This is a reader fic, reader is early 20's, Joel is 40's at this point, reader is small enough that the men can lift her, but these are strong men. Reader is also refered to as little one, little girl ETC, but that's more in reference to her age/innocence than physical size.

Please make sure you read the warnings, this chapter will have some of the most intense stuff of this fic!

You woke up with a start, scrambling on the dirty mattress to sit up. It was Tommy, not Joel.

“It’s just me” He said with a plate of food. “He’s doing business, he’ll be back later.”

You knew what ‘later’ meant for you.

Tommy set down the plate and stepped forward, making you scramble back against the wall. “Relax, honey, I ain’t gonna touch yuh. Joel made sure to give a  big speech full of vivid details on what he’d do to anyone who did” He pulls something out of his pocket; a deck of cards. “You know how to play solitaire?”

You nod.

“Good, you can have these. I imagine it’s gonna get real boring here when he-” Tommy stopped himself. Your purpose here was for Joel to fuck, and not much else, this was sure to lead to intense boredom in your solitary confinement; Tommy was offering you a small mercy, something to do.

“Go fish?” You asked softly.

*

You and Tommy end up playing the world quietest game of go fish, slowly easing up to him. You learned a thing or two from him in the small pieces he gave you, like that Joel was his older brother. You found it odd at first, to be sure, but the parts came together the more you thought about it. Their personalities were different, Tommy was much softer, kinder, gentle; it gave you an idea.

“Whats it like?” You asked.

Tommy looks up from his cards at that. “What’s what like?”

You don’t look at him. “Joel… he’s gonna…  and I’ve never” You feel your heart rate pick up, anxious for his reaction.

You hear a loud sigh, and see Tommy scrub his face. “I can’t be having this conversation with you” He starts to get up.

“NO!” You lunge forward, grabbing his hand and looking him dead in the eye. “No, please, I need to know what’s going to happen.”

With a groan, he sits back down, looking up at the ceiling. “Well, you’ll probably bleed, but not everyone does. And it’s gonna hurt. I doubt Joel’s gonna take it easy on you.”

There’s a long period of silence before you say your next words. “Can you do it?”

In a flash, Tommy was standing up and walking to the door.

“Wait! Please!” you scramble up, grabbing his arm before it turns the handle.

“No! I’m not participating in this! I got enough on my conscience as it is!” His eyes are shut tight as you pull on him to turn to you.

“Please, Tommy, you’ll make it easier, I don’t want it to hurt!”

He opened his eyes wide, gripping your shoulders. “It’s going to hurt either way! There’s no ‘easier’, you’re fucked!”

You freeze, tears welling up in your eyes. “Tommy, please. I need you to do this.”

The desperation in your eyes gave him pause to consider. He had tried to stop this whole thing from happening, tried to pull back his brother the way only he knew how, to give Joel some sort of moral compass that he lost the day Sarah died… but even Tommy wasn’t enough. He saw the look Joel had in his eyes, that intense focus, that desire, not just to fuck her but to control her, own her in every sense of the word… and if Joel ever found out he did this, he’d be fucked. But Tommy was trying his best to make things easier on the young girl, and she was right; he’d be easier than Joel.

“You can never tell anyone, or we are both dead.”

Tommy was careful, opening you up with his fingers first, then fucking you, placing his pants under you, stopping the bleeding from staining the bed; a dead giveaway. He tried to touch you, out of courtesy, give you at least something, but you declined. Joel wouldn’t do that, you shouldn’t get used to it.

When it was over, Tommy couldn’t look you in the eyes as he wiped you off, putting on his blood and cum stained pants and leaving the room.

You played solitaire for hours until Joel stomped in.

With wide eyes, you stare up at Joel, setting down the cards.

“Get on the bed” He spoke harshly, dirt and blood on his skin and clothes and you could tell it had been a long day, and you were about to get the end of it. You did as you were told, getting onto the ‘bed’ which was a mattress on the floor, and waiting for instruction. Tommy was right; it had hurt, and Joel was bigger, and much, much angrier.

“It’s simple, little one. All you have to do is lay there and take it. Don’t gotta do nothing fancy, no tricks, no skills.” he took a few steps closer, beginning to undo his belt. “I’ll take care of you, I’ll make ure everything is okay.” he pulled off the belt, and slid down his pants before stepping out of each leg, moving slowly towards your shaking form, towering over you. “ I don’t want to hurt you, and I ain’t letti’n none of them touch you, so no more worrying about whose cock is going to be in your pretty little mouth.” 

Joel bent over and you whimpered as he took your chin in his hand, forcing you too look up at him. “It’s yes sir, no sir, you don’t talk back, you do as you’re told, don’t try to escape and you’re good to go.” He let go of you, standing straight up and god, he was intimidating from where you sat. “You’ll never have to wonder where your next meal is coming from., you just get to sit pretty for me.” Joel finally pulled down his boxers, spitting in his hand before beginning to stroke his extensive length. “And really, isn’t this just better?”

Despite at least know what to expect, you were terrified. You had seen Joel kill your brother only yesterday, you knew what he was capable of, and you didn’t believe his ‘I won’t hurt you’ spiel for a second.

“Please don’t” you plea softly. “I don’t want to…”

Stepping out of his boxers, he huffs a laugh. “Funny, I don’t remember askin’ you”

Picking you up, Joel flipped you onto your stomach and straddled your legs, pinning you to the bed as you squirmed, quite ‘no’s’ and ‘please’s’ slipping out of your mouth, getting louder until he tugged down your pants and it all culminated in screaming while you twist and turn, trying to get away and hit him. “GET OFF ME! YOU FUCKER!”

Joel did not like that, turning you over fully onto your back and slapping you, hard. Your head rang from the force of his large hand, and you tasted blood in your mouth. Everything was hazy as you stilled in shock, and you didn’t even realize what he was doing until a second stinging pain pulled you attention.

“Ah, AH!” you shout as Joel thrusts into you in one go, splitting you open, and if you had any sense in you, you’d be thankful Tommy was your first; you couldn’t imagine the pain you’d be in right now. However, in the moment, you were only concerned with the pain as you continue to whimper.

“Shut the fuck UP!” Joel shouted, covering your mouth as he thrust into you, looking down to watch himself disappear into you. “You look so good like this, little girl, all stretched out around me, fuck. Awww you're bleeding?” Joel patted your pussy. "Am I braking you? Just a lil bit?" He picked up the pace, harsh and brutal, and you begin to cry, as quietly as you can.

“Fuck, you cry so pretty, no wonder all those men wanted to hurt you, so fucking gorgous” Growing more eratic, a thin sheen of sweat grew on his forehead and he smiled cruelly, slipping his hand around your folds "But they don't get to, not anymore" you were wetter than you'd like to admit. “Sure you don’t want this? You’re awfully wet. Think I can make you come huh? While you cry and pretend to hate the feeling of me filling you up?” Joel touched your click, and laughed when he felt you clench around him. “Yeeeeah, yeah you like this, sweet thing”

There was something warm brewing in your stomach, a warmth that spread to your skin, and you weren’t entirely sure what was happening. Were you poisoned? Is he fucking your dying body? But it felt good. 

“Let go, little one, come on my cock”

A pleasureful pulsing in between your legs and suddenly your body felt great, and you didn’t know why; it didn’t last long, however, not long enough to distract you from what was happening. When it faded, you realized Joel was coming on your pelvis and the dirty shirt you still had on from yesterday. You didn’t look at him as he got up, turning your head to look at the wall, trying to stop existing in the moment. When you heard him leave, you curl over on your side and keep crying, too tired and too upset to notice when he came back until Joel arms wrapped around you again.

“Please” You whimpered, too tired to put up much of a fight. “It hurts too much.”

“Shh, shhh sweetness, we’re not going to do anything.” Joel scooped you up, wrapping the ratty blanket around your exposed bottom before carrying you out of the room. You were disgusted with him and yourself, but you were scared and lonely, so you clung to him; you didn’t want to be alone. 

Joel carried you into the bathroom, pulling off the blanket and laying you down into a hot tub of water, pulling off your old shirt.

“There we go, little one, just relax, close your eyes and relax” Joel spoke softly, washing you with the harsh soap and gentle touches speaking softly into your ear. What did he think this was? What were you to him? When you were cleaned up, he put you in his clothes, whispering promises to get you your own. You could tell, as you walked from the bathroom to your room, that the men were watching you, but Joel arms around you left no room for them; you were his.

This was the routine for nearly a week. Joel would fuck you, and it would hurt. He never kissed you, but he always made you come, slowly conditioning you to have a pavlovian response to him; your body associating him with an orgasm, making you start to get wet when you saw him, despite how afraid you constantly were. This made things a little easier, but Joel never took it easy on you during sex, and it was multiple times a day. Afterwards, however, it was strange… sometimes he’d draw you a bath, sometimes he’d bring you food, clean you off, small, soft moments that never failed to confuse you with the juxtaposition of what was happening. You took it, however, whatever he gave you, because you were lonely, and you were scared. You saw Tommy sometimes, every day he brought you food and stayed to talk for as long as he could, even if just a few minutes, but sometimes long enough to play a card game or two. You felt like you were going crazy, secluded enough that you almost found yourself looking forward to Joel. Almost. 

Despite his insistence he didn’t want to hurt you, he did. Not on purpose, you didn’t think, but more that he was careless as he manhandled you, the painful grip on your face in he covered your mouth, the punishing pace he set, your face hitting the wall when he turned you. In the moment, it was painful, but after he came and he calmed down, he seemed to almost feel bad, hence taking care of you.

But tonight it had simply been too much, everything hurt, your heart ached, and you were going stir crazy in your room with nothing to do but play solitair and get fucked. You had been assessing the room and different options, and you realized while the window didn’t open, it wasn’t bared. If you broke the glass and climbed out fast, you could get a head start in the woods. It was spring, cool but not cold, and certainly you could find somewhere to go, right? Run away, somewhere far, far to where Joel could never find you.

That's how you found yourself, running in the woods, blood on your hands from punching the window open despite wrapping the thin blanket around your hand, fleeing for your life. You had heard shouts from the house as you escaped, they knew you were gone, and were after you. You could hear the sound of a horse, although the lay out of the woods made it impossible to tell where the hoof prints were coming from as Joel, Tommy, or one of the other men chased you down, you weren't sure who. Weak from lack of food and sleep, and the cold air in your lungs, you tried to run, not getting very far when Joel nearly trampled you with his horse, picking you up by your shirt and throwing you over it on your stomach. You kicked and screamed and pleaded and cried, but it was no use. Joel didn’t say a word, quickly riding back to the barn and yanking you down. His silence was terrifying, and eerie calm before the storm you knew was coming. 

“Joel, please, I’m sorry!” You shout, trying desperately to make things better, but Joel was on a mission, dragging you by your hair out of the bar and grabbing something you couldn’t see.

“JOEL!” You hear Tommy shout from across the field of grass, running over to where you were desperately attempting to keep up with Joel’s long strides and he pulled you by your hair, not caring if you tripped and it hurt. “Joel, stop, you need to calm down” Tommy tried to calm his brother, but Joel wasn’t listening, an Tommy attempted to pull you up to ease the weight on your scalp. When you got inside, the other raiders had gathered in the living room, and you expected Joel to take you to your room where he’d do whatever he was planning as punishment; instead, he stopped by the fireplace, throwing whatever it is he grabbed from the barn into the fire.

Joel pulled you up, hand still deep in your hair as he thrust your back up against the wall. “Don’t I treat you good?” He asked, oddly calm. “I take care of you, I feed you, I don’t let anyone else touch you.” Is that what he thought? That he was taking care of you? “You don’t have to do a damn but sit in that room and cum. You think things are so bad here? You think I abuse you? I’LL FUCKING SHOW YOU WHAT ABUSE IS!” Joel suddenly screams, loud and in your ear. “You think I treat you like a whore? I’ll show you how a whore gets treated!” Joel let go of your hair, but you were too terrified to move as Joel grabbed the collar of the shirt and ripped it open and pulling it off before yanking down your pants, exposing your naked body to Tommy and several hungry looking men in the room.

Tommy stepped forward, talking quietly. “Joel, don’t do this-”

Joel pulled out his gun, pointing it at Tommy, “Stand against the wall, you don’t get to play knight in shining armor this time.” 

Tommy looked at you apologetically, then backed away. Your eyes turned to another man you recognized from the first day, the redhead, was staring at you like a piece of meat before Joel yanked your face back to his. “Tommy ain’t saving you this time, neither is Nick.” He throws you over the table, bare stomach to the cold wood, and handcuffing your right arm to the leg. “Fucking ungrateful bitch!” You heard him unbuckle and before you had a chance to blink, he thrust into you violently. “This is how whores get treated, is this what you want?” When you didn’t answer, he screamed again. “IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?!”

“No” You sob, looking up to Tommy for help, but Tommy stood where he was told too, closing his eyes. There was no point in trying to stop Joel on a rampage, unless you wanted to die.

You do as Tommy did; you close your eyes, and try to pretend you weren’t here, that the pain wasn’t happening, that you weren’t being violated in front of several men, including one that was the only person you could consider even close to a friend. From where you were bent over you could feel Joel hitting your cervix. Joel continued to degrade you, telling you this is what whores get, that dumb bitches don’t get cared for, that this was all you were good for before pulling out and cumming on your back.

You thought it was over, but Joel had one last trick. 

“Since you want to try and run away, despite how good I’ve been, better make sure anyone that finds you knows who you belong to.”

“STOP!” Tommy shouts, one last try. “This is enough, she’s learned her lesson Joel, you're going to fucking far!”

Joel didn’t listen, and when you turned to see what he was doing, you realized what he grabbed from the barn

A cattle brand, his initials on the hot iron. 

“Jo- AHH!” Your final attempts at begging for mercy are cut off by the searing pain on you hip, burning, blinding pain as you were branded. You were vaguely aware of Tommy yelling something, but you couldn’t tell anyone. Still handcuffed and bent over a table, Joel slapped the fresh burn as a last bit of punishment, and you were so exhausted you were only capable of a whimper. You could smell your own chard flesh in the air as the adrenaline coursed through you.

Joel walked around to the other end of the table and bent down to be face to face with you, brown eyes large and intense even in your bleary vision. “You’re gonna be thankful for just me, little one”

Joel stood up, and announced to the men there that they could all have a turn with you tonight, and stormed off into his room.

You were out of tears, out of pleas, ready to just lay there and take it until it was over, and hope to god if you behave Joel would go back to how he was.

You could see the redhead, step forward and begin to unzip, but Tommy, forever your savior, pushed him away. “Back off Nick”

“Oh I suppose you want her first?” 

“No one’s touching her” 

You felt a warm blanket draped over you, before Tommy knelt down and picked the lock on the handcuffs

Nick argued. “Joel said we can have her”

“And I said no. I can’t stop Joel’s bullshit, but I can draw the line with you all”

“What, so you can have her but we can’t?”

“No one but Joel is having her, fuck off”

"He said"

"And I said no"

Wrapping the blanket around you to cover your modesty, Tommy picked you up and carried you into your room, carefully laying you on the side that wasn’t burned. “I’ll be right back” he promised.

And he did, gently putting ointment on you and bringing his clothes for you to change into, but you were so shaken you preferred to just stay wrapped in the blanket.

“I’m sorry, honey” were the last words he sent to you before he left. You lay in your shitty bed, awake for hours, crying on and off.

When the door opened again, you thought maybe it was Tommy, but you recognized Joel’s footsteps, and froze in place. You weren’t sure how much you could take, at this point, how much more he could do to you before you gave up, before you found some way to end it all. For now, however you were going to behave, you were going to be good; you didn’t want to be hurt again. So you laid there, ready for Joel to take you how he always did, hoping to god he’d protect you from the other men and not hurt you again, not like he had, anyway.

But he didn’t.

Joel laid down behind you, pulling you in so that his body encased yours, wrapping his arms around you with a tender touch. Suddenly, your exhaustion took over the alert terror in your body that was keeping you up, and despite the fact he was the one that hurt you, you felt relaxed and safe. Before you drifted off to sleep in his arms, he gently placed his hand over the burnt skin where his initials were permanently etched on you. "Mine" he whispered in your ear. “No one else gets to touch you, little one”

*****************************

Thank you all sooooooooooo so much for the outpouring of support for this story!

I hope I got all the tags, if you'd like to be added to the tag list let me know!

I got two anons due to this side account, one telling me they lost all basic respect for me, and one saying that if i have a rape fantasy, then my real-life rape that i've talked about on my main page, wasn't really rape.

But I've gotten such an outpouring of love from this series, it makes up for it.

If you want a bonus chapter of Tommy taking Little One's virginity, let me know!

Next weekend i have a wedding i gotta travel 10 hours for so there wont likely be a chapter for over a week, SORRY!

Real quick promo for my main blog @romanarose , I have two Joel fics there, one one shot and one series, and if you like wild sex and Triple Frontier, consider checking out the Awakening series!

@my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction @howaboutcastiel @tidlewav3 @bunnnyy-dummy @slutfortimotheechalamet @foggymoonbanana @dinsbaby @miraclesabound @jenna-ortega

[paladin--strait]

paladin's 100 follower celly and new request list!! ✨

ahhh thank you so much for 100 followers! im so happy 🥳 and on my birthday too?? its like a gift 🎁 but, i hope that you guys like these prompts and the people i chose but if you have anybody that you want me to write for or a different prompt you wanna read you can still send it in and i'll see what i can do! as stated in the polls, i have some matt rempe requests sitting in my inbox that i really need to get to writing 😭 so keep in mind that there is some stuff for matt rempe coming!

I love you all so much! keep reading to see the prompts and the people for your requests! ⬇️

the people who you request for are referred to as "name" in the prompts. and sorry, but none of these will be NSFW. even though i read it sometimes, im not comfortable with writing it just yet. all fics written will be under the tag "paladin's 100 follower celly!" make sure to check it out and drop a follow to see when a new fic comes out!! ❤️

some will be written in headcanon form and some will be in fic form! but let me know which one you want it in! ❤️

please let me know if you want the reader to be plus size, i'll happily write it for ya!

current request status: open!

✨ prompts!! ✨

1 - "I'm sick, don't get near me" "I don't care"

2 - "I want you to meet my parents." "but we just met!"

3 - crying in his arms

4 - him crying in your arms

5 - "listen to me, everything is going to be alright."

6 - "I'll take care of you."

7 - "they didn't deserve you."

8 - sugar baby x sugar daddy

9 - "I'm gonna be here for you whether you like it or not."

10 - bodyguard!(name) x reader

11 - sunshine!reader x (name)

12 - lazy morning

13 - team staff member x (name)

14 - comparing hand sizes

15 - cooking for his team (athletes only)

16 - cooking for his parents

17 - meeting his team (athletes only)

18 - (name) x baker!reader

19 - reader brings cookies or cupcakes for players team after a huge win (athletes only)

20 - reader gets hurt and (name) takes care of them

21 - wearing another players jersey (athletes only)

22 - (name) cooks for reader and it goes terribly wrong

23 - (name) cooks for reader and its good

24 - reader cooks for (name) and it goes terribly wrong

25 - reader cooks for (name) and its good

26 - reader hosts a suprise party for (name)

27 - rival player chirps player about reader, player goes crazy (athletes only)

28 - reader is a ref for the nhl, slowly falls for player (athletes only)

29 - reader cooks for (name)'s friends

30 - reader's child takes a liking to (name)

31 - reader is a storm chaser

32 - reader meets (name)'s pet and the pet loves reader

33 - reader watches an episode of her and (name)'s show without him knowing

34 - (name) comforts reader in a storm

35 - reader and (name) go to a pet store and reader convinces him to buy them a pet

36 - going to the eras tour with them

37 - going to a nba game with them

38 - going to yours/his little siblings sports game

39 - hairstylist!reader / doing his hair

40 - he teaches you how to play hockey (athletes only)

✨ nhl players! ✨

matt rempe

jack hughes

luke hughes

quinn hughes

trevor zegras

jamie drysdale

sidney crosby

cole caufield

nico hischer

timo meier

dawson mercer

andrei svechnikov

arturs silovs

sergei bobrovsky

matthew tkachuk

brady tkachuk

auston matthews

igor shesterkin

connor bedard

jeremey swayman

andrei vasilevskiy

stuart skinner

marc andre fleury

✨ other fandoms! ✨

tyler owens (twisters)

javi (twisters)

boone (twisters)

daryl dixon (the walking dead)

rick grimes (the walking dead)

carl grimes (the walking dead)

negan smith (the walking dead)

eugene porter (the walking dead)

abraham ford (the walking dead)

(there may be more added later)

[blacklesbothatlovestowrite]

Familiar Pt. 2

CHAPTER SONG: Good Pussy Problems - Jada Kingdom

Tag list: @lppriceisright @callmewifey @briacreations96 @ilovelulu @doramilaj233 @littlebizcuit @ziayamikaelson @andibecamethestars @6-noir @s0lam33y @briacreations96 blacknthick7

-

"Jay, betta yuh did put seh yuh waan ah fiftee percent fih yuh royalties dem." (Better you did put that you want fifty percent of your royalties) Dom ran his fingers over his face, you'd both been in his living room going over the proposed contract N'Jadaka's assistant had sent.

"Mi know weh mi ah do. If mi tek a bigga cut dem nah guh waan me fih own mi masters dem." (I know what I am doing, If I take a bigger cut they won't want me to own my masters) You respond.

"Jah, yuh really ah guh tek twenty five percent fih now doh?" (You're really going to take twenty five percent for now though?) Dom hisses his teeth and you shake your head.

"Yes, Domingo." You roll your eyes, sighing in frustration. He couldn't see the bigger picture. If I owned my masters, later on I could sell my catalog for way more. "Mi haav mi yiy dem pon eh goal. Mi know weh mi ah guh do." (I have my eyes on the goal, I know what I'm going to do.)

"Wah bout yer name and merch rights?" (What about your name and merch rights) He asks, raising a brow. "It seh dem waan gi yuh twenty percent wah di rassclaat kinda deal is dat?" (It says they want to give you twenty percent what the fuck kind of deal is that?)

"I'd own my name, and be able to get 40% of the tour profits." You explain. Owning your masters and your name was the way to make money. You could get brand deals that were 100% all yours by owning your name and as far as your master's, you could sell your catalog to the highest bidder later on.

"Ah. Is yer money, mi nah guh three meds it." (It's your money, I'm not going to stress about it.) He says, handing you back your iPad.

You finished all your adjustments before sending the email back. You'd spent the two days given to read over every fine print before adding that You'd own your masters and name. You were smart, your grandma raised you. She taught you about looking out for yourself and your little brother. She'd taught you about hoe ruthless and wicked people could be over money.

You'd come from nothing and did everything you could to ensure you never were in that position again financially. You still had a long way to go before you were happy with your finances but for now you were comfortable.

"Mi ah come guh mi yaad." (I'm going to my house) You say, hugging Dom before grabbing your stuff and heading out.

_

"The sound already has 15,000 videos under it." Shuri says, as you gather your things. You'd just signed to their label, after they'd agreed with your terms for the contract.

ShuriUuu and 983,201 others liked.

UdakuRecords Welcome @Twinkle to the Udaku Family <3

RiriWi Real music, Real Girl #IDG1F

ShuriUuu They're not ready for you yet #idg1f

NjadakaU Pretty girl love money #idg1f

RamondaUdaku Welcome to the Family, can't wait to meet you.

DestinYyy How cute

The label posted a picture with you in the studio today, doing vocals for the track. The picture had went viral, several blogs and news stations picked up the story of you signing onto Udaku Records. N'Jadaka had you scheduled to do several interviews that would be released Thursday in time for the songs drop on Friday. It was Monday.

Tomorrow, and Wednesday was going to be packed. You had the interviews, and a photoshoot that all needed to be up by Thursday. They planned to break the internet Thursday before dropping your song.

So far the song was on Tiktok, Instagram reels and Youtube shorts. People were already singing the few lyrics and posting themselves to the trending song. You made several alluring videos with your best friend/hairstylist Azura filming you. Your hair had changed several times in the span of a weekend.

You'd went to your condo, where Azura filmed you in a bathing suit as you posed and made faces at the camera. Once you'd gotten the video and layered a new snippet of the song, you posted it to your Instagram.

Azuradidollie and 235,012 others liked.

Twinkle Call me what you want #idg1f

RiriWi Damn ma...

ShuriUuu God took his time with you.

Azuradidollie Whew mumma heavy, look how di gyal batty fat ehhhh? Yuh angle, triangle dat.

NJadakaU I wanna call you mine

BadGalRiri @Twinkle Caribbean girls run tings

Spiceofficial Big chuneee

chrisbrownofficial Check your dms mama

ChampagnePapi Ass on houston texas but the face look just like Claire Huxtable.

MayaBee Pretty girl

"Yuh see di amount ah celebrities inna yer comments?" (You see the amount of celebrities in your comments) Azura laughs, as you both ate fried chicken with rice and oxtail gravy.

"I know." You feel your face heat up as you shovel rice into your mouth.

"Wah Maya ah duh inna yer comments? Unnuh neva agree fi nuh comment, like or follow one anudda?" (What's Maya doing in your comments, Haven't Ya'll agreed to not comment, like or follow each other?)

"Yah ask mi? Mi nuh see nor hear from di gyal since Saturday mawning." (You're asking me? I haven't seen or heard from the girl since Saturday morning) You shrugged.

"Da gyal deh sick mi fucking tomach, mi nuh know why yuh ah pree har. She all fi har self." (That girl there sicks my fucking stomach, I don't know why you take her serious. She's all for herself.) Azura kissed her teeth as she drank her sorrel.

"Zur, mi like har. She haav sum bad ways but she's a good person." (I like her. She has some bad ways but she's a good person.) You defend her.

"Tan deh mek har tun yuh inna yamhead. Yuh coming like jelly back. Da gyal deh naav nun bout har. She don't waan yuh win, look how she did diss yuh and yuh let it go." (Stand there and make her turn you into a fool. You're weak. That girl don't have anything about her. 'worthless') Azura declares and you shake your head.

"Not too much on my girl." You cut your eyes at her and she laughs.

"Tan deh wid di likkle badmind gyal." (Stand there with the little jealous girl) Azura sticks her tongue out and you roll your eyes.

"Gweh!" (Move) You joke.

"Nyam mi front and gweh." (Eat my pussy and go away) Azura retorts, rolling her eyes and you laugh.

"Been there, done that." You wink.

A knock on your door, has you up and headed for the door. There's only three people that can come up without the front desk alerting you. One of which is here and the other was out of town. Your face set into a scowl and your nose wrinkled as you opened the door to see Maya.

"What?" You say, looking her up and down in annoyance.

"Baby, I'm sorry." Maya says and you sigh.

"Is this going to be a reoccurring thing? You being in your feelings because I'm pursuing music?" You ask. She'd walked out on Saturday upset when you told her you planned on signing onto Udaku Records. She'd tried to convince you to sign onto her label despite you having told her before it would never happen.

"It's not about the music, Jay..." Maya muttered. "I don't like Rina and it's not just about her dissing my album. She wants you, I saw how she looked at you that night at the club. Hell look at what she and that skinny giraffe are saying in your comments."

Did she really just call Shuri a giraffe? Dis girl...

"Maya, you've got to get over that. People are always going to want me. You think I don't deal with this shit with your label mates and the industry community dicks that are always aimed at you?" You hissed your teeth. "You can either choose to accept the fact that I'm yours and deal with whatever comes or we're going to have to just call it quits from now."

"You'd break up with me?" She whispers, her eyes wide and tears already starting to leak.

"Yes. I wouldn't want to but it's not fair what you're doing, you're punishing me for other people's actions. You were pissed when you hadn't heard from me Friday night but you've ignored me since Saturday morning. That's a double standard that I will not put up with." You insisted, crossing your arms as she cried. You wanted to hold her and wipe her tears away but she couldn't treat you like this and think sorry and some tears would fix things.

"Ok, I understand. I'm sorry for ignoring you and for punishing you." Maya croaked out, her voice low. You nodded.

"I forgive you." You assure her but when she moves to step forward you place your hand on her chest. "You ignored me for 2 days, now it's my turn. Talk to you Wednesday evening."

Her mouth dropped open as you closed the door in her face laughing, you always gave in to her when she acted like a spoiled brat but this time you wouldn't. She needed to tighten up and give you the same energy you gave her when it came to her career, the spotlight and the many people lusting after her.

"Yes goodie... yuh gag har backside." (Yes, beautiful. You gagged her ass) Azura was dying with laughter.

"Yuh seeh yuh..." (You see you) You shook your head before climbing back on the couch to finish your food.

You can apologize with chocolate - You 6:57 pm

Understood baby, I'll see you Wednesday. - Babes 7:00 pm

Wednesday evening. I love you spoiled brat - You 7:03pm

-

"Hi, Twinkle. It's so good to meet you! I've been obsessed with your song." Nessa says, and you smile at her.

"Thank you for having me." You say.

"So, everyone's dying to know. Who was Which Gyal meant for?" Nessa asks, and you laugh as she butchered the words in a fake patois accent.

"Just a likkle song fi any gyal weh haav mi name inna har mouth. Mi nuh inna di chattings wid people pickney so mi mek eh song fi any gyal weh waan trouble mi or has troubled mi." (Just a little song for any girl that has my name in her mouth. I'm not into the talking with people's kids, so I made the song for any girl who wants to trouble me or has troubled me.) You see she looks lost so you say everything again in english.

"You have a beautiful accent." Nessa compliments and you thank her. "You recently signed on to Udaku Records and have been teasing a song. Idg1f. Can you tell us what inspired the song?"

"Well I had the lyrics in my head and a little melody. I've had so many people come at me crazy because I was in a very public relationship almost 2 years ago. I've said before and I'll stand on it, I love money and anyone who wants to give me money can definitely do it. I'm a pretty girl, I know what I deserve and that's how I've made a living just being pretty." You explained and Nessa raised a brow.

"You were with Chris Brown, no?" Nessa asks coyly, and you roll your eyes playfully.

"Yes, I was. However he's irrelevant now." You reply with a shrug.

"Many people speculated Which Gyal was about Ri, are you and Rihanna cool now?" Nessa asks and I shake my head.

"I barely know her personally. We never had any problems, so I don't know where that narrative came from." You answer, honestly. "I love her, she's so creative and multifaceted. There's nothing but respect for her."

"We all saw Drake and Chris in your comments. How do you feel about that?" Nessa questions.

"No disrespect to Drake but he's too corny for me personally. I can't get with his antics and as far as Chris, well he knows what's up. That's it." You lick your lips.

"Rihanna was also in your comments, giving you a stamp of approval." Nessa continues. "What do you think of that?"

"As I said before, I have the utmost respect for Rihanna. She's an icon, I look up to her. She's paved the way for Caribbean girls and I can only hope that I make her proud." You felt conflicted because while you grew up liking Rihanna, you knew she could be very shady. She'd never spoke on you before besides saying you were a non factor when asked in an interview when you and Chris were dating.

The rest of the interview goes pretty smooth. Towards the end as Nessa's closing out her producer comes over and shows her something on his phone. Nessa looks from the phone to you before nodding at whatever the producer says. He walks off camera and Nessa looks at you again.

"So what do you have to say about Maya posting you on her social media?" Nessa inquires and you stare at her in shock .

"We're cool, so--"

On the screen in between Nessa and I on the wall is Maya's latest post and you blink as you see it.

Kyliebabe and 1,249,865 others liked.

Mayabee I love you, baby. You are my sunshine. @Twinkle

Azuradidollie dutty tinkin gyal, weh di fuck yuh ah post mi bomboclaat fren fah? yuh is ah waste gyal fi tru, only batty bwoy do dem tings deh.

You can't find anything to say as you stare at the screen in shock. She hadn't even discussed this with you before she went ahead and posted that. You were angry beyond words.

"Still cool?" Nessa laughs, and you narrow your eyes at her. You took a deep breath to calm yourself before releasing it.

"No. We're not cool at all." You say, taking the ear piece off and tossing it down before grabbing your bag and walking out.

-

You had finished the rest of your interviews in autopilot. Your energy was faked, you felt betrayed by Maya. This wasn't the actions of someone who cared about you, this was a calculated move that you were sure was brought on by her label and manager.

All the time spent hiding and keeping you a dirty secret just for her to out your relationship the moment you were finally getting attention on you for the right reasons was sickening. You'd never pressured her or argued when she chose to follow her label and manager's decision to keep your relationship quiet.

You were supportive and you put her career and goals first. Any other time this would have been what you wanted but right now you felt used and like a prop. You blocked her number and blocked her on all your social media's, not caring to hear what she had to say.

Over and over she'd shown time and time again you were not on the list of her priorities. You could argue away most of her bad habits and bad ways but this. There was no excusing this. You couldn't defend it because there was nothing that she could say that would make you feel even remotely ok about any of this.

Today was your photoshoot and you were numbing yourself to the hurt you felt. All the excitement dying down at things that should have been making you happy. You'd never dreamed of being in the position you were in and your joy was being stolen.

"What do you think about this, Jay?" Shuri asks as you, Riri and N'Jadaka are looking over the edits. The picture they all seemed to settle on was sexy yet cutesy. You had a huge bouquet in your arms, while posing in the gold sparkly dress Azura had helped you pick. Your tattoos were showcased in a very peekaboo way whilst the rest of your body was covered.

"It looks good." You agree, your tone giving off a 'whatever' kind of vibe.

"Alright, we'll use it as the cover to idg1f." N'Jadaka says. "It really matches the vibe of the song. Gotta give it to you Shuri, your vision is immaculate."

"It's all dependent on the artist." Shuri shrugged, looking at you with a small smile. You returned it though your smile didn't meet your eyes.

"You've been working your ass off ma." Riri agrees, looking from Shuri to you. "You've been locked in ever since the first day in the studio."

"I'm glad ya'll feel that way." You feel your cheeks warm, and you look down at your hands.

"I have a meeting but I just wanted to stop by and say that you're doing great, Jay." N'Jadaka adds, before reaching over to hug you. He dabs up Shuri and Riri before leaving.

"You hungry, Ma?" Riri inquires, she knew you weren't feeling like yourself. She and Shuri talked amongst themselves about taking you out to cheer you up.

"Afta mi belly naav nuh bottom." (After my belly has no bottom 'greedy') You laugh, before nodding.

"Alright, why don't you get changed and we'll take you out. You deserve to be celebrated. You've signed to our label, your about to release a single that millions are anticipating and you've been kept busy this whole week with promo shit." Shuri asserts, licking her lip. "Pick whatever outfit you want."

-

🎶 You must be stupid, don't even flirt with me, what you doing mi nuh interested, keep it pushing, come outta mi face and give me some space. You likkle bit too nuff yute don't chat to me, A wha so? Don't make your friend dem gas you, cause this is a brand new moto 🎶

Azuradidollie and 644,431 others liked.

Twinkle You must be stupid, don't even flirt with me, what you doing mi nuh interested, keep it pushing, come outta mi face and give me some space. You likkle bit too nuff yute don't chat to me. #Single #idg1f

Azuradidollie Yes babes, mek di waste gyal know wah gwaan #idg1f

513 comments, 23,491 likes.

ShuriUuu You free fi carry me out #idg1f

985 comments, 67,203 likes.

RiriWi Give me money and buy me stuff #idg1f

678 comments, 52,465 likes.

chrisbrownofficial she like eating pussy, I'm like me too 😉

User Ariana what are you doing here?

1,252 comments, 101,230 likes.

Mayabee Jay, don't play with me.

User Girl go sit down and nurse your heart burn

1,190 comments, 141,234 likes.

Kyliebabe Single but was just fucking on oh.... ok

Azuradidollie @Kyliebabe Ah yuh ah nyam har front?

User Why are you so pressed? your friend caused the drama babes.

791 comments, 62,123 likes.

Shuri and Riri took you shopping to celebrate your newest achievements, before finally taking you to dinner. You'd had the wig taken off your head, and was wearing your hair out in a wavy silk press. Makeup free and natural, save for lipgloss and your lash extensions.

You posted the video Riri recorded of you walking, and twirling and posing to the lyrics of your song that you knew would hit Maya deep in the gut. You put the lyrics in the caption before using the hashtag single to make a statement as you had no interest in her, her label or her manager using you.

You put your phone on DND, as you ate your sushi and pasta. Throughout the dinner, the conversation was light. You all exchanged information about yourselves, favorite colors, music, artists, hobbies, goals, etc.

You found out that Shuri could play several instruments, and write her own music. The latter wasn't a shock as she had tons of writing credits. She wrote songs on the daily just by living and watching, she was beyond talented.

Riri could play the electric guitar, and was amazing at putting together beats. She could hear music in her head as she went about her day, and was always recording a melody that she had stuck in her head. You could see similarities in yourself and the both of them.

"What made you want to co-head the label?" You ask Shuri. Her family's music business venture was years old but you saw a significant change once she and N'Jadaka stepped up to be the new faces of the label.

Riri and Shuri shared a look, before Shuri looked at you. Her jaw was clenched and her body was tense. You could tell there was something there.

"Riri and I are together but at one point we had a third." Shuri explains which is no surprise to you. You figured they were together, everyone speculated but they had never confirmed. "Destiny's an artist on the label, I was only into producing when we got together but when I seen just how shitty a lot of artist's deals were, including hers... I chose to do something about it, it was shortly after my father and brother died that I pushed for N'Jadaka to head the label while I worked beside him. We worked to give our artists better deals than they'd previously had, whilst working to ensure the company was still making money."

"I worked tirelessly to give Destiny everything she wanted, because I saw how stressed she was not having creative control and being forced into the bullshit the label pushed on her. My father and T'Challa agreed that our relationship should be kept quiet as Destiny was a sex symbol and was more profitable and marketable as a single straight woman." Shuri rolls her eyes.

"After the accident, I finally had the chance to change the direction of the company to what I'd had in mind. However, I soon realized Destiny was only using Riri and I. The moment she had a better contract, she left us to be the industry mattress." Shuri laughs to herself.

"Why aren't you and Riri public now?" You ask, curious. They no longer had a reason to keep their relationship silent.

"The gag is we are. We're private not secret. We post each other, we're out and about with each other. We've just never addressed anything because we feel no need to. Everyone knows what's up with us." Riri declares, looking at you with a small smirk.

"That makes sense. Social media can be just as destructive as it is beneficial. Especially to relationships." You agreed.

"I take it you and Maya are no longer friends? " Riri raises a brow as she looks you over.

"No, we are not." You shrug, rolling your eyes at the mention of the girl. Azura was right, and you saw that clear as day.

"So, you're a free agent." Shuri watches you through hooded eyes, as she sips on her bourbon.

"Why do you want to know?" You look at her with a wide smile on your face daring her to be bold.

"Just want confirmation that you're free before we have you coming all night. Not that you being in a relationship would have stopped the pursuit." Shuri's lips turn up as she watches your body flush at her words.

"Yuh think one dinna and ah likkle shopping can lock me dung?" (You think one dinner and a little shopping can lock me down?) You giggle as you sip on your lemon water.

"Definitely not." Riri denies, as she waves over the waiter to clear the table and bring the check.

"However we all know at some point you will be on your back with your legs spread open and your mouth wide as we work your fat pussy over." Shuri says and you clench as her words heat up your core. She used patois to say 'Fat pussy' and that had you feeling hot all over.

"Mmm mmm girl." You shake your head, giggling. "Yuh haffi work fi mi tight ole." (You have to work for my tight hole.)

"So, this is what working looks like. Now it's making sense why you were so pressed to work with Rina." You see Maya approaching behind the duo and your face drops as she opens her mouth.

"What are you even...." Your words fall off as you realize she still had your location on her iPad. You unlock your phone to remove her iPad and block it before locking your phone again. "What do you want?"

"Why the fuck are you out here acting like a whore when you have a whole girlfriend?" Maya exclaims.

"Whore? My girl outta di two ah wi? who ah whore? cuz mi know seh my pussy nuh haav more den 5 bodies pon ih." (My girl, out of the two of us, who's the whore? Cause I know that my pussy has no more than five bodies on it.) You match her tone.

"Mi neva yet disrespect yuh ar mek nubodi disrespect yuh yet, so don't ever innah yer life try diss me ar mi pussy." (I have never disrespected you or let anyone disrespect you so don't ever in your life diss me or my pussy.) You hiss.

"Why are you treating me like this?" Maya starts with her bag of crying and for once you feel nothing as the tears roll down her face. She can't cry and think she'll get her way.

"You called me a whore." You kiss your teeth. "That is not the words of someone who loves me or even cares about me. You'd think with all the slut shaming you and I have both endured, that word would have never left your mouth."

"I'm sorry." Maya cried. "I didn't mean to say that, I was just angry. I love you so much, Jay. I would never purposely hurt you, you know that."

"Disrespecting me and using me as a prop for your career wasn't you hurting me?" You scoffed.

"I didn't." Maya swears and you swallow as you see the look in her eyes. "I swear to you, I did not. My manager made the post on my page, I didn't know until after it happened. I would never use you in that way, you know I wouldn't."

"Maya, I love you." You see both Shuri and Riri share a look out of the corner of your eye but you keep your eyes trained on Maya. "I love you so much that I put you and your wants over my own. I let myself down to lift you up. If I'm being honest I overlooked the shitty things you'd do or say because I was that in love with you. But love should never feel like that, at least not the love I want. You're a good person, I genuinely believe that but you just aren't good enough for me. I deserve more, I deserve better. You've said sorry just about almost every day we've been together and yet you continue doing the same stuff you know hurt me. I'm putting myself first for once, and if that makes me a whore or selfish, or anything you want to call me that's fine because I've come to terms with the fact we aren't right for each other."

"Don't do this, Jay... I'll be better, I promise." Maya's face was pale as she cried. You felt embarrassed for her as everyone in the outside area was staring, cameras were flashing and you knew people were recording.

"I'll text you later." You sighed, before grabbing your purse and walking towards Maya. You wipe her tears and grab her hand, leading her away from the attention and cameras.

-

What do you guys think? Let me know below <3

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT ECOMMERCE NEWS (INCLUDING ETSY), LATE JUNE 2024

Welcome to my latest summary of Etsy and other ecommerce news, relevant for small and microbusinesses online!

Get these updates plus my website blog posts via email: http://bit.ly/CindyLouWho2Blog Get all of the most timely updates plus exclusive content by supporting my Patreon: patreon.com/CindyLouWho2

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

Etsy has yet again changed how processing times work for some countries, and this time, they’ve opted everyone into working on every national holiday. [post by me on LinkedIn, with screenshots] Many people are happy they can officially opt out of working on some days, but not so happy Etsy opted them in. The next day, Etsy clarified that this is currently only available for Canada and the US, and is only for national holidays, not regional or provincial ones. 

The old Etsy listing form disappeared as promised on June 25, and the new one is still a mess [post by me on LinkedIn]. Etsy claims to have fixed numerous issues with the new listing form, including manual translations, bulk editing, and sharing to Pattern. No word on the numerous pricing issues that have affected non-US sellers in particular through the domestic pricing tool, and that have apparently changed both variations and shipping prices for US sellers. The latest new listing form fix is the inability to save drafts, although it doesn’t seem to be working for everyone. 

USPS seems to have reused its tracking numbers early recently, with widespread reports of labels created June 18 and later showing as already being delivered in April or May. I’ve updated that linked Patreon post with info on how to get Etsy to correct their own records, so that seller protection and Star Seller status are not affected. 

ETSY NEWS 

Wondering if your images meet Etsy’s minimum size requirements? I did a video for you [on Patreon] so you can easily check for yourself. 

Etsy is still pushing shop loans through YouLend, “up to two times your monthly revenue.” Thanks to Michele from Artologica for the screenshot of the dashboard notification, and some of what you see once you click it:

and a link to the Etsy program at YouLend. Please read the terms carefully, as they get repaid through your future sales. It appears to be US-sellers only. 

There’s a new “Made for You” page with a lot of links to various features for buyers, but I don’t see it linked anywhere on the desktop version of the site. I also don’t really see the point, but maybe we’ll have to wait and see how they use it. 

Apologies for missing this one, but sellers in Turkey must now use “ShipEntegra” to mail orders, unless they already use another service. In effect, this means all new shops in Turkey are required to sign up and only ship orders through ShipEntegra, as of June 3. 

Apparently the “Buy More and Save” badge Etsy applied to some listings that already had multiple quantity discounts is just a test [item 2] per Etsy.

ECOMMERCE NEWS (minus social media)

General

Facebook appears to be removing links to EcommerceBytes on its platforms. 

Amazon

Amazon's "Subscribe & Save" feature will be available for products that are not Fulfilled By Amazon items, as of June 27. 

Amazon's Prime Day 2024 is July 16-17th. 

“Ad Relevance” is Amazon’s proposed solution to the end of ad cookies; it has AI at its core. 

North American Amazon orders will stop using plastic air pillows by the end of the year. 

Amazon is facing another lawsuit on copying successful sellers’ products and manipulating the Buy Box, this time in the UK. 

eBay

As of July 1, eBay will be charging most of its sellers more for Express Payouts: $2 each time instead of 1.5% of the total. 

eBay is now charging buyers of luxury wallets and handbags an optional $40 for authentication, for items between $200-$499.99. Items $500 and up are still authenticated for free. 

The eBay Summer 2024 Seller Update included new tools and renamed programs, but some of them had already been announced. 

If you are using the eBay seller app, watch for draft listings disappearing. 

Shopify

Businesses selling through Shopify can now apply to sell on Target Plus, a third-party marketplace that currently has around 1200 sellers. 

Shopify now has a chatbot for site owners, called Sidekick, but it is currently only available to English stores in North America. 

Walmart

Walmart+ Week started June 17th, almost a month before Amazon’s Prime Day. 

All Other Marketplaces

Just a few months after ending selling fees, Mercari is laying off a substantial portion of its US-based workers. It’s also still looking for new sellers, offering credits that can be spent on the site for opening a new shop and inviting friends. 

Payment Processing

Apple Pay Later is being phased out in favour of “Affirm”, a third-party Buy Now Pay Later app that will be available in more countries than Apple’s own product. 

Shipping

USPS hopes to change its non-standard package surcharges by region, charging more when the package travels further. 

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hi Steph!!! Hoping you can help me since @bluebellofbakerstreet is trying to kill us all softly ...

Are there any John in a kilt stories?

Preferably making Sherlock all hot and bothered?

Hey Lovely!

Ahh, I do have an old Community Recs list from 2019 here, but you're giving me a good reason to make a new list of my own; I have enough on my MFL list to make one of my own, after all.

Please, if you guys have any, add them below! <3 I’ve only added anything that a search of “kilt” gave me on my personal offline list :) I know there are a tonne that I may have not tagged, and I surely don’t have nearly all of them.

JOHNLOCK AND KILTS

See also: Alexx’s “Johnlock in a Kilt” List

All the Girls Love a Soldier by Book7BrokeMyBrain (E, 12,951 w., 1 Ch. || Military Kink, Frottage, Domesticity, Post S3, Pining Sherlock, Kilt John, Wedding, Dancing, Oral, Romance, ) – John is invited to a stag party and a wedding. The related accoutrement suit Sherlock to a T. 

MARKED FOR LATER (TO READ)

the dead-end case of the kilted kirkyard killer by darcylindbergh (E, 8,823 w., 1 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting || Scotland, First Kiss/Time, BAMF John, Frottage, Blow Jobs, Banter) – In which Sherlock follows the wrong man and gets more than he bargained for.

The Perfect Specimen Series by Cleo2010 (E, 27,825 w across 2 works || Kilts, Masturbation, Drunkenness, Oral / Anal Sex, Hand Jobs, Cock Worship, Manipulation, Toys, Rimming) – After seeing John undressed for the first time and making certain observations, Sherlock quickly becomes obsessed with a certain body part belonging to his flatmate. This is the story of how that first sighting came to be and the following attempts to learn more. An unashamed masturbation-fest, first person and very detailed. It's rated explicit for a good reason!

The Bachelors' Handfasting by Jberry (E, 30,624 w., 20 Ch. || Regency AU || Arranged Marriage, Virgin Sherlock, 1800′s Scotland, Bodice-Ripper, Romance, Kilts, No Period-Typical Homophobia, Smoll Sherlock, Suicide Discussion, Romance, Miscarriage, Depression) – After her son is caught in a compromising position, Victoria Holmes must make arrangements for a quick marriage between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Men in Kilts by okapi (M, 33,000 w., 23 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting, Meet-Cute, Hurt/Comfort, Kilts, Fluff, Slow Burn, Hand Jobs, Oral Sex) – Mrs. Hudson hires John, who works for the Men in Kilts housekeeping service.

The Straw Man Fallacy by Vulgarweed (E, 40,422 w., 8 Ch. || Wicker Man AU || Ritual Sex, Sacrifice, Mystery and Horror, Romance, Fuck or Die, Dubious Morality, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pagan Festivals, Public Sex, First Time, Case Fic, Virgin Sherlock, Scotland, Kilts) – Summerisle is not a welcoming place to visitors, but it shows its best face at May Day. For ulterior motives.

Philia and Eros by distantstarlight (E, 84,660 w., 20 Ch. || Historical AU || Friends to Lovers, Time Travel, Kilts, Possessive Behaviour, Love Confessions, Slow Burn, Implied Rape/Non-Con) – Love is timeless but time isn't necessarily linear. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes are about to embark on an unintended adventure that will take them far away from the comfortable confines of 221 B Baker Street. Part 1 of Strange Paths

October to Hogmanay by snorklepie (E, 127,318 w., 25 Ch. || Post HLV Fix-It, Awkward First Times, Hurt/Comfort, Sherlock is a Mess, Shameless Smut, Sherlock’s Past, Scotland, Poison, Holmes Family, Kilts, Dancing, Angst) – John stared at Sherlock’s profile against the cab window and exhaled slowly. After a long moment, he reached out and touched Sherlock’s long fingers where they were fiddling with the button on his coat. The tall man didn’t look around again, but his fingers slowly unfurled before curling deliberately around John’s hand. Part 2 of Scotland

Nine and a Half Weeks by CumberCurlyGirl and Kameo (E, 198,502+ w., 40/? Ch. || WiP || American AU || Different First Meeting, Daddy Kink, Bottomlock, Anal Plug, Riding Crops, Spanking, Light Bondage, Anal/Oral, Aftercare, Posh John, Virgin Sherlock, Homophobia, Sugar Daddy John, Rimming, Coming in Pants, Light Dom/Sub, Past Sherlock / Victor, Light BDSM, Public Sex, John in a Kilt, Vibrators, Happy Ending) – Sherlock Holmes is about to graduate from high school in midwestern America. Despite his intelligence, his prospects are bleak due to poverty, an indifferent, alcoholic father and poor choices. One day, at work, he sells a riding crop to a handsome blonde Brit and his life is changed. He doesn't know what hit him - until he does. This is a story of a journey to love and self-acceptance and explores many themes along the way: drug abuse, grief, coming out, age difference, consent. Lots of sex but so much more.

[ingek73]

Why are women so marginalised by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

Courtney Love

Barely 8% of its inductees are female. The canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gatekeeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostility

Fri 17 Mar 2023 08.00 GMT

Fourth time lucky? Kate Bush on stage in 1986.

I got into this business to write great songs and have fun. I was a quick learner. I read every music magazine I could get my hands on and at 12, after digesting many issues of Creem, I decided to base my personality on Lester Bangs, the rock critic raconteur; his abiding belief in the transformative power of a great rock song matched mine. (I also obsessed over his running arguments with Lou Reed – they confounded me, but I loved it.) Artists and their songs shaped my life, my beliefs, my self-conception as a musician – Patti Smith’s growling Pissing in the River, Heart’s Barracuda, the Runaways’ Dead End Justice, which I still know every word of. But what no magazine or album could teach me or prepare me for was how exceptional you have to be, as a woman and an artist, to keep your head above water in the music business.

The magnificent Chuck D rapped: “Elvis is a hero to most, but he doesn’t mean shit to me.” I concur. Big Mama Thornton first sang Hound Dog, written for her (and possibly with her) in 1952, which later put the King on the radio. Sister Rosetta Tharpe covered it, too, hers being the fiercest version. Her song Strange Things Happen Every Day was recorded in 1944. It was these songs, and her evangelical guitar playing, that changed music for ever and created what we now call rock’n’roll.

When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame started in 1983, you would have thought they might want to begin with Sister Rosetta, with those first chords that chimed the songbook we were now all singing from. The initial inductees were Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley; not a woman in sight. Sister Rosetta didn’t get in until the Rock Hall was publicly shamed into adding her in 2018. (She was on a US postal stamp two decades before the Rock Hall embraced her.) Big Mama Thornton, whose recording of Ball’n’Chain also shaped this new form of music? Still not in. Today, just 8.48% of the inductees are women.

Long overlooked … Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Photograph: Chris Ware/Getty Images

The nominations for this year’s class, announced last month, offered the annual reminder of just how extraordinary a woman must be to make it into the ol’ boys club. (Artists become eligible 25 years after releasing their first record.) More women were nominated in one year than at any time in its 40-year history. There were the iconoclasts: Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Missy Elliott; two women in era-defining bands: Meg White of the White Stripes and Gillian Gilbert of New Order; and a woman who subverted the boys club: Sheryl Crow.

Yet this year’s list featured several legendary women who have had to cool their jets waiting to be noticed. This was the fourth nomination for Bush, a visionary, the first female artist to hit No 1 in the UK chart with a song she wrote (1979’s Wuthering Heights), at 19. She became eligible in 2004. That year, Prince was inducted – deservedly, in his first year of eligibility – along with Jackson Browne, ZZ Top, Traffic, Bob Seger, the Dells and George Harrison. The Rock Hall’s co-founder and then-chairman Jann Wenner (also the co-founder of Rolling Stone) was inducted himself. But Bush didn’t make it on the ballot until 2018 – and still she is not in.

Never mind that she was the first woman in pop history to have written every track on a million-selling debut. A pioneer of synthesisers and music videos, she was discovered last year by a new generation of fans when Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) featured in the Netflix hit Stranger Things. She is still making albums. And yet there is no guarantee of her being a shoo-in this year. It took the Rock Hall 30-plus years to induct Nina Simone and Carole King. Linda Ronstadt released her debut in 1969 and became the first woman to headline stadiums, yet she was inducted alongside Nirvana in 2014. Most egregiously, Tina Turner was inducted as a solo artist three decades after making the grade alongside her abuser, Ike.

Why are women so marginalised by the Rock Hall? Of the 31 people on the nominating board, just nine are women. According to the music historian Evelyn McDonnell, the Rock Hall voters, among them musicians and industry elites, are 90% male.

The Rock Hall’s canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gatekeeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostility

You can write the Rock Hall off as a “boomer tomb” and argue that it is building a totem to its own irrelevance. Why should we care who is in and who is not? But as scornful as its inductions have been, the Rock Hall is a bulwark against erasure, which every female artist faces whether they long for the honour or want to spit on it. It is still game recognising game, history made and marked.

The Rock Hall is a king-making force in the global music industry. (In the US, it is broadcast on HBO.) Induction affects artists’ ticket prices, their performance guarantees, the quality of their reissue campaigns (if they get reissued at all). These opportunities are life-changing – the difference between touring secondary-market casinos opening for a second-rate comedian, or headlining respected festivals. The Rock Hall has covered itself in a sheen of gravitas and longevity that the Grammys do not have. Particularly for veteran female artists, induction confers a status that directly affects the living they are able to make. It is one of the only ways, and certainly the most visible, for these women to have their legacy and impact honoured with immediate material effect. “These ain’t songs, these is hymns,” to quote Jay-Z.

The bar is demonstrably lower for men to hop over (or slither under). The Rock Hall recognised Pearl Jam about four seconds after they became eligible – and yet Chaka Khan, eligible since 2003, languishes with seven nominations. All is not lost, though – the Rock Hall is doing a special programme for Women’s History Month on her stagewear ...

What makes Khan’s always-a-bridesmaid status especially tragic is that she was, is and always will be a primogenitor. A singular figure, she has been the Queen of Funk since she was barely out of her teens. As Rickie Lee Jones said: “There was Aretha and then there was Chaka. You heard them sing and knew no one has ever done that before.”

Unworthy … Chaka Khan on stage in Toronto in 2018. Photograph: Rich Fury/Getty Images for Netflix

Yet Khan changed music; when she was on stage in her feathered kit, taking Tell Me Something Good to all the places it goes, she opened up a libidinal new world. Sensuality, Blackness: she was so very free. It was godlike. And nothing was ever the same.

But for all her exceptional talent and accomplishments – and if there is one thing women in music must be, it is endlessly exceptional – Khan has not convinced the Rock Hall. Her credits, her Grammys, her longevity, her craft, her tenacity to survive being a young Black woman with a mind of her own in the 70s music business, the bridge to Close the Door – none of it merits canonisation. Or so sayeth the Rock Hall.

The Rock Hall’s canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gatekeeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostility. This year, one voter told Vulture magazine that they barely knew who Bush was – in a year she had a worldwide No 1 single 38 years after she first released it. Meg White’s potential induction as one half of the White Stripes (in their first year of eligibility) has sparked openly contemptuous discourse online; you sense that if voters could get Jack White in without her, they would do it today. And still: she would be only the third female drummer in there, following the Go-Go’s Gina Shock and Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground. Where is Sheila E – eligible since 2001?

It doesn’t look good for Black artists, either – the Beastie Boys were inducted in 2012 ahead of most of the Black hip-hop artists they learned to rhyme from. A Tribe Called Quest, eligible since 2010 and whose music forged a new frontier for hip-hop, were nominated last year and again this year, a roll of the dice against the white rockers they are forced to compete with on the ballots.

If so few women are being inducted into the Rock Hall, then the nominating committee is broken. If so few Black artists, so few women of colour, are being inducted, then the voting process needs to be overhauled. Music is a lifeforce that is constantly evolving – and they can’t keep up. Shame on HBO for propping up this farce.

If the Rock Hall is not willing to look at the ways it is replicating the violence of structural racism and sexism that artists face in the music industry, if it cannot properly honour what visionary women artists have created, innovated, revolutionised and contributed to popular music – well, then let it go to hell in a handbag.

• Courtney Love is a singer, musician and actor

[stressedlawsecretary]

Today's Focus

02.21.24 - It is both hump day and soup day lol. I am not remoting in today; I am in the office for a soup social. I'll remote in tomorrow and Friday but since it's both takeout day for dinner and my dad is headed to a funeral this just worked better for the schedule this week.

Work - There are a couple of efiles sitting here for me but other than that I have no real work to do. SJC is off doing training, so I won't be needed as frequently by her, and my other two lawyers are very independent; unless I have to mail something today I will probably not have any real work to do.

Background Noise - Okay well. I start today with 121 on the Watch Later, which is a video less than yesterday after adding my subs for the morning. I'm probably going to do less of the nonsense background noise videos today than normal though, due to my studying.

I did do like eight full videos yesterday, around doing 20-minute chunks out of a couple of very long videos (3+ hrs and 2+ hrs respectively.)

Study - Wednesday is visual study day and for once I'm not at home to cheat with the DVR lol. SO I have a playlist of true crime videos on YT, and almost the entire like 40 seasons of Frontline on the Internet Archive set up. The plan is: a short video from the Watch Later, 20 min of one of the long videos I'm working on, a short video from the true crime playlist, and 20 minutes of a Frontline episode - all rotated in a circular fashion. I'll probably read some random articles here and there, might read some from my deep dives, and I have a documentary entitled The Act of Killing on my list but that's a stretch goal for sure.

I did very well yesterday. I read: six climate articles, three police misconduct articles, five pages from the Glass Report, five 'good news' articles, four other articles, and I finished both The Negro Problem (an article from The Atlantic circa 1889) and When is a Book Not a Book? Oliver Twist in Context (a five-part article by the NYPL). I did get farther in Black Women and the Constitution but that is a long essay so at least I made headway.

Extras - Okay, I am screwed up on the chores so I don't actually have anything to do today on that front; I am going to shower tonight so I have plans to try and tackle cleaning the medicine cabinet and the radiator register in there first. Other than that, it's two more episodes of Dekaranger (If I time this right, I'll switch back to Kamen Rider Drive on the weekend and finish that series up) plus a couple more episodes of Batman, which has gotten much much sillier than I remember it omg.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Raising money for Locus Magazine

Update: The naming rights/Tuckerization from this fundraiser sold almost immediately after this post went live, so we’ve added another one.

Update 2: This one sold, too.

Since 1968, Locus magazine has been the paper of record for science fiction, fantasy and horror literature; it’s been through several iterations, but the current one — a crowd-supported nonprofit — is the best yet. They’re raising $75k on Indiegogo to fund the next year’s operations:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-magazine-science-fiction-fantasy-horror#/

I started writing a bimonthly column for

Locus

in 2006; I’ve written six columns per year for them ever since, without missing a single one, and every one of them is open access on the same day it comes out in print:

https://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html

After Locus founder Charles N Brown died in 2009 — in his sleep, on a plane, coming back from an sf con he’d covered for the magazine — his staff took over the magazine and its vast archive of science fiction ephemera and restructured it as a nonprofit. Brown’s collection went to Duke University:

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2019/01/11/locus-archives-documents-the-history-of-sci-fi/

The magazine pressed on, continuing as the best source of industry news, thoughtful reviews (including short fiction reviews, a rarity these days) and opinion, as well as its essential annual recommended reading list and its Locus Awards. I devour each issue.

Earlier this year, the editorial team wrote to me and asked me what I could donate to the fundraiser. My contribution is a “Tuckerization” — naming rights for a character — for an upcoming Marty Hench novel, one of the sequels to my forthcoming Red Team Blues (Tor Books, 2023).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Red Team Blues is my first noir novel, a detective story whose hero is Marty Hench, a Silicon Valley forensic accountant who’s spent 40 years unwinding every finance scam tech, and who, on the eve of his retirement, is roped into a bloody, deadly cryptocurrency heist.

This is one of my lockdown books (I have seven books forthcoming as of this writing), and it was a wild ride to write. I love noir fiction, but it has an odious side: the prototypical noir hero is a veteran (in early noir, he’ll be a WWI vet in the interwar years; in later noir, he’s a WWII vet in the 50s or 60s), who has come home to a changed and fallen world.

Everywhere these heroes look, the wrong people are participating in society as his equal: queers, women, people of color. The foundational vibe of noir — a simmering rage at the state of the world — is grounded in incredible, reactionary bigotry.

Marty Hench is also bitter about what his world has become, but the invaders he rails against are the crooked finance bros who parasite off of the genuine excitement and creativity of early techies who want to help everyone “seize the means of computation.” He is furious at them, and he expresses his fury by unwinding their baroque scams and busting them, but the supply of finance bros is limitless, and for every one he slays, five more pop up.

I finished Red Team Blues in about eight weeks and handed it to my usual first readers, from whom I got unusual responses. The day I finished it, I woke up at 2AM to find my wife sitting up with the bedside lamp on. I asked her what she was doing, and she looked up from the book and said “I had to find out how it ended.”

Then I emailed it to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The next day, he emailed me this:

That.

Was.

A! Fucking! Ride!

Whoa!

Then he bought it, and two more books in the series.

Now, attentive readers will have noted that Red Team Blues is Marty Hench’s last adventure. That means that the rest of the series will be an indeterminate number of prequels, explaining how the Marty Hench of RTB came into being. The next book in the series is The Bezzle, set in the mid-2000s, which sees Marty go up against a corrupt prison IT baron who waxes unimaginably wealthy by eliminating prison mail and visits and replacing them with high-priced, per-minute “visits” and emails on a “free” tablet; I finished the first draft of this one last week.

The book after that, Picks and Shovels, is Marty’s first adventure, telling the story of how his obsession with early computers led to him flunking out of MIT, then discovering the miracle of spreadsheets at a community college accounting program. Everyone else in his class wants to use spreadsheets to hide money, but Marty wants to use them to find it.

Marty follows his roommate out to Silicon Valley, where he lands his first job: helping track down an insider threat for an early PC company called The Three Wise Men, a predatory affinity scam run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi.  The action gets going when Marty figures out that the “insider threat” he’s been sent after are on the side of the angels: a rival tech company founded by three women who’ve left Three Wise Men to compete with it.

They’ve also left their faith: a queer orthodox woman who renounces due to her rabbi’s homophobia, a Mormon woman who leaves the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who throws in with radical Liberation Theology over the dirty wars in Central America. This one is about halfway done and will be finished by spring.

Each of these books is a period piece, steeped in a highly specific time and place: Silicon Valley in the grips of the crypto bubble; central California prison towns during the Trump years; San Francisco in the heroic era of the first PC bubble.

The Locus Tuckerization will let you name one of the characters in one of these sequels. It’s a chance some (minor) immortality, but more importantly, it’s a chance to sustain a magazine that has promoted and aided the careers of every working sf/f/h writer in the field, including and especially me.

It’s not just the Tuckerization, of course! There are lots of other wonderful premiums in the crowdfunder:

exclusive access to a deleted scene from Mary Robinette Kowal’s Spare Man, a signed manuscript for an as-yet unpublished novel, and/or a 30-minute Zoom with Mary Robinette;

many signed books from authors’ own collections;

a signed, handwritten apology from Kelly Robson because she’s “soooo sorry they totally wrecked you with their story”;

a private Zoom chat with legendary editor Ellen Datlow, or sf writers Stephanie Burgis or Justina Ireland;

a story critique from award-winning writers Kate Heartfield or Sam J. Miller;

a Tuckerization from Wole Talabi.

More awards are going up daily, and the campaign closes in 10 days. As of this writing, they’ve raised $54,539 of their $75,000 goal.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-magazine-science-fiction-fantasy-horror/

[Image ID: A reworked classic red-border Locus Magazine cover; the cover illustration has been replaced with the cover for Red Team Blues, a minimalist image of a man escaping through a keyhole by Will Stahle. The man's face has been replaced with a dotted-line bordered grey oval with a question mark in its center. The Locus issue number has been replaced with Locus's 'Indiegogo 2022' wordmark.]

[nuwildcat]

Hey lovely 💛💜 2, 3, 9, 10, 40?

HI EM!

Go to your AO3 “Works” page, to the sidebar with all the filters, and click the drop-down arrow for “Additional Tags.” What are your top 3-5 most used tags? Do you think they accurately represent your writing habits?

I AM CACKLING!!! Gosh I would not have done this otherwise but for reference: Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, and Praise Kink are my top three. Totally checks out, the only think missing there is cocktails and that's sadly not on the list. Clearly I have work to do

3. What are some tropes or details that you think are very characteristic of your fics?

Right so anyone who has had a conversation with me while I was brainstorming a fic will get this, but the importance of friendship in a fic. Romance is great and good, but it doesn't hold up in isolation. It needs other relationships built around it. That's what I try to do in my fics and what I intentionally write into my characterization of my main characters. How do they interact with the people that are most important in their lives, and how does that drive them?

Also honorable mention to cocktails cause it's threaded through almost all the fics that I just like cocktails and like to write about them

9. How do you find new fic to read?

Oh I am a full on tag gremlin and I will will just troll through the tags of whatever content has my attention at the moment. The KP discord server has saved me many hours with fic recs, and occasionally a friend will stop by and be like, I have this fic I think you might like. I take fic anyway I can get it.

10. How do you decide what to write?

I love how you think I have any say in what I write and it's not just the brain weasels going this looks shiny today! There is a note on my computer that is like 20 fic ideas deep about what I want to write, and occasionally I stumble across something in the wild that gets added there. Other times the gremlins I have made friends with bring me a shiny new thing to stare at longingly. It's basically just a game of what can keep my attention span for the longest time. Luckily I can make my brain focus some of the time, which is why I can get a whole fic out.

40. Do you tend to reread fics or are you a one-and-done kind of person?

For the most part I am a rereader. Sometimes there is a fic that just wraps up in such a lovely way that I want to preserve it in amber as that was the first and last time that I have read that. Most of the time I am a crow going back to my hoard of shiny things and looking at them again. If a fic is really thought provoking I love to give it another read through later to discover all the little bits that had me fascinated at the beginning!

[televinita]

2024 Bookish Goals & Resolutions

I want to add some later in terms of the actual content of books I want to read, but...this is what I have for now.

-Keep a running record of the books I buy (I did this last year and it didn't slow me in the slightest. but we're going to do it again anyway because if I don't, I think I might get even worse)

-Sell/donate at least 50 books. This is the year I've got to be brutal and let go of the books I bought "just to read" if I haven't read them within 2 years of purchase.

-Keep track of the books I DNF. Also the books I read but deem Too Short to count on my official reading list* (currently books under roughly 100 pages, considering font size/line spacing/illustration-to-text ratios, or less than 3.5 hours on audio, particularly if it's a children's book -- I add them to Goodreads, but don't keep a list tied to the year I read them.

*ALTERNATE GOAL: be brave and just add them all to the list regardless of length. or at least more of them.

-Go book-shopping in Wisconsin. I want to explore and that's the best way to convince me to push past the siren call of Stillwater, the river town that has everything/is basically my Disneyworld.

-Read at least 24 books I bought prior to 2024 and haven't read. I managed it this year! (This goal runs concurrently with the next one)

-Knock at least 40 books off my Goodreads TBR, whether by reading or deciding I'm not interested. If it's been on there more than 3 months, it counts. By my calculations, this year I took off 25 books that were added prior to 1/1/23, plus a few more by the length-of-time rule. I can do better!!

[planetary-gus]

Y'all I might have a fucking problem.

This is the blurb I just captioned a selfie with on my Instagram story at 3 in the fucking morning

"When you've been listening to your 'edgy misfit' playlist and reading for the last 6 hours but you finished all 3 books you planned to read tonight and now you have to just sit and wait another 2-3 hours for your girlfriend to wake up and respond to the nearly 30-40 messages you sent because you're running on caffeine and sugar and a gay panic and a gender crisis and just spammed her with your gay panic and everything going on in your books"

LIKE I HAVE A PROBLEM.

But also adding to the "List of things I've screamed in the last 6 hours"

But this time I was reading Rick Riordan books

"OH YEAH IT'S GREAT BEING A CELEBRITY AMONG SQUID!"

"OH MY GODS IT'S BABY NICO!"

My brother telling me to shut up and stop screaming around 10 PM

"I JUST WANT THE GAY ITALIAN YOU SHUT UP"

reads the line "I only passed out a few times"

"OH YEAH ONLY A FEW TIMES"

Proceeds to almost pass out when I stand up to go to the bathroom 10 minutes later because I have POTS

"CLAUDIA THE CLUMSY— HONEY NOOOO"

*kicking my feet and squealing anytime Frank does anything because he's precious*

Blaise blushes around Claudia and the sexual tension is obvious

*Happy biromantic squealing*

Realizing just how much I love my girlfriend around midnight and just texting her about 20 times describing various acts of affection

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH I LOVE HER SO MUUUUCCHHHHHHH"

*Gay screeching*

Sees an Egyptian goddess in the Kane Chronicles Survival Guide

"WHY IS SHE KINDA HOT THO" ・//////・

*Even more gay squealing when I texted my girlfriend again because I got some pictures where my freckles looked really nice*

(Anyone else do late night photoshoots?)

My brother's told me to "shut the fuck up" like 3 times tonight I'm an annoyance but I'm gay and autistic and I checked out 13 books from the library today and I'm in the middle of a gender crisis rn so

Also, for anyone curious I was reading

The Demigod Files

Camp Jupiter Classified

And The Kane Chronicles Survival Guide

Also I'm listening mostly to Non Binary coded playlists on YouTube if anyone wants the kind of music I'm listening to

(Also Crystal City Killers-National Anthem. Listen to it. You'll thank me. Also read the webtoon if ya haven't)

[jodilin65]

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1996 We screwed yesterday and I didn’t have to beg. I only asked once. Do I think he’d have initiated it if I didn’t? No. He prefers to wait until the weekends, but that’s OK.

I’m gonna be giving him his first sign language lesson tonight. I’m gonna teach the way teachers do and the way I’ve taught before. I’ll start with the alphabet, then I’ll do the chapters containing the most common and useful words.

I spoke to my mom yesterday, but not Dad. He was asleep. They both have colds.

Mom started to ask if I looked for something, but then she changed the subject and told me to never mind. I have no clue as to what that could’ve been all about. If she were talking about a package she’s sent, she wouldn’t keep it such a secret.

I’m tired today due to going to sleep late and getting up early. Usually, I wake up when I get going, but nowadays, if I’m tired to begin with, then that’s how I stay all day and night.

The cable company added about 40 new channels and I hope soon enough that we can get some kind of TV guide that lists all these new channels. There’s one channel I like so far cuz it has Twin Peaks. There’s also one with The Bionic Woman.

Tom and I got to the end of the Myst game yesterday. Boring! I also completed all 50 levels of Balistic yesterday, too.

I think I really remembered what Robin really said to me in the cabin before she took me to her cabin. First I thought she said she’d kiss or tickle me, but I think she took my hand and teasingly said to go to sleep and that she wouldn’t stop kissing me till I fell asleep or if I didn’t go to sleep she’d keep kissing me. Or was it tickling me? I don’t know.

Guess I’ll go read the last of my library books now. I just started it, but I know I’ll finish it by 3/16 when it’s due.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1996 Yesterday, sure enough, that teenager showed up to play ball. When I spoke to him, I told him I could deal with it twice a week for a half-hour and so far he’s kept his end of the deal.

I was a bit bummed out last night and today about Tom’s “good news” about this sick leave he discovered he has. How dare he keep playing with my head?! He said he has worried he couldn’t get time off for this new baby we’ll never have. What else has he been worrying about that he hasn’t told me pertaining to a kid? Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.

We’ve got lots of new channels today. More reason for Tom to be glued to the TV than doing whatever with me. I’ve already got to wait till Saturday to get laid. Maybe if I beg for it I’ll get it, but I’d really rather not beg.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1996 I’m watching Charlie’s Angels now.

It’s very cool and windy out now. I’m amazed it hasn’t knocked out the cable.

I mopped the kitchen floor and made Tom Hamburger Helper for his dinner when he comes home.

I quickly spoke to my mom. She and Dad have colds.

It rained last night, but I don’t know for how long. I awoke at 10:30, but only to pee and smoke a cigarette. It also rained a little while ago very briefly, but the good news about it is that it doesn’t look like the roof over the back room leaked.

I hope no one will play ball next door today like they didn’t yesterday. It was obviously due to the cool damp weather we’ve been having. I wish it were summer. It’s so quiet in the summer, but by then, someone will surely be next door.

I wish I could run into that kid so I could ask him what the hell he meant when he told me about the black lady and her 13-month-old son. Maybe such a lady did exist and just told him that for the hell of it. Or, maybe she really was gonna move in but changed her mind.

Yesterday I read 170 pages in my library book. Definitely the most I’ve ever read in one day.

Later…

Tom just got in early cuz he went to bed early. He says there’s a possibility of snow here tonight. There fucking better not be!

I was wrong last Saturday when I said there’d certainly be no sex cuz of our little squabble the night before. He initiated a good screw. Yesterday he went down on me and I sure hope I don’t have to wait till next Saturday for sex.

He got solutions to the game Myst from AOL yesterday, but most of it is impossible to understand.

As I said, the weekend was fun, happy and productive. There was only one dumb thing he did.

He called me to the kitchen table saying he had good news to tell me. Then he picked up an employee handbook from work and showed me how he had accumulated sick days he didn’t even know he had. He said his point was that he could use those days after the baby was born and that he had been worried that he wouldn’t have time. Oh, brother! Time for what? To talk about it? To tease and pretend it’ll happen?

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1996 How many kids will I have to chase away from next door’s basketball hoop today? Yesterday, shortly after 6:00, I was about to go chase them off, but they left as quickly as they had come, luckily. I wish I knew someone who’d destroy that fucking thing! It’s too fucking close to this house! They may as well be bouncing the damn ball off the walls of the house here.

I got a message from Tammy yesterday who said that if I just ease up and let things happen naturally, all will work out. Including having a baby.

It’s almost like she and Tom spoke about this. Her choice of words is just like Tom’s when she said to “let things happen naturally.” And also, how does she know I have a hard time easing up? What makes her so confident as to what the problem is? How and why is she so confident that in time it’ll work out and that he’s telling the truth? She says exactly what Tom and Kim said about it.

We stopped over at his parent’s yesterday and Mary and Dave were there, too.

Time to go start this week’s round of letters to my parents, Kim and Bob.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1996 Tom wouldn’t have offered to screw me yesterday on his own, but he agreed to when I asked him. I then changed my mind, though, and had him eat me out cuz I had wanted to go to bed.

After eating me out, though, we got into another one of our losing, depressing, angering, frustrating, and confusing conversations. If I’ve said this before, I’ve never said it now with such intense certainty. I could never have a child with this guy, even if it were possible. He’s just too contradicting, too full of shit and that kid would really kill our marriage.

When I told him yesterday that I feel controlled and that everything has to be his way, he turned that all on me. I told him that I feel that he won’t give going to a doctor earlier a chance to see if it’d help my emotional state and that all he cares about are his feelings. To hell with if I have to spend another year or longer depressed. Then he said something about the fact that he may never be whole again and may go over the edge and never be able to have a family if we went earlier. Now how can anyone tell me he wants a kid and isn’t trying to punish me? His not cumming or going to a doctor isn’t just due to his fears of having a kid and due to loving to tease me about it. It’s to punish me.

Then he comes out and says his problem could be cuz the moon is round after I asked him if he thought the reasons for his not cumming could be what I think they are. This isn’t what he’s always told me. He’s firmly sworn it wasn’t cuz of what I said it was.

Then he said another cold statement to cover the truth. He said he’s worried about having a kid with me for doubting him so much that I’d want to see a doctor earlier. What a mean spiteful thing to say cuz he feels being pushed into being the father he doesn’t want to be that he lies about and says he does want to be.

What am I supposed to think after two and a half years? What woman wouldn’t doubt him if she were in my shoes?

Then he said that if I could go 6 months on a day schedule, cuz it’s something I say I can’t do, so that should motivate me, and we’ll see a doctor in September.

What about motivating himself? Also, how sweet of him to say we’ll go if I do something we know I can’t do cuz that’s how much he doesn’t want to go.

Nonetheless, I’ve come to fully realize that this man wouldn’t be any better of a father than I’d be as a mother. I told him the appointment is off and that he either must sacrifice an orgasm with his wife forever, or rubber it up if he wants to cum. I’m telling you, though, where I used to be getting fed up by the month, I’m getting fed up by the day!

Know what his bullshit answer to losing the bet will be? Cuz we fought so much. Or something else going on in life or something I did.

I swear I’m getting ready to have Andy see if he can find a fairly decent enough-looking woman for me on the side, although, I know that’s impossible. And I’m really, really ready for us to have our own rooms again.

Tom also had said something about fear of going to the doctor cuz he fears how my emotional state would be due to something about my calling him a liar or finding out something was wrong.

See? He does know why he is the way he is, and he obviously fears I’d kick his ass. Yeah, I probably would punch him out first and ask questions later if he admitted to bullshitting me all along, but who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t then want to know how and why he could do such a thing?

I’ll just live the rest of my life wanting a kid cuz I have no choice, but I won’t live the rest of my life playing games with him.

He also tells me he can’t talk to me about his problems which is pure BS and simply a way of lashing out at me for knowing and saying that he’s full of shit.

Tammy said to keep the communication going and this is what we’ve agreed to do from the get-go, yet as he admits, this only frustrates him. Then to punish me further, he won’t cum and blames it on me for bringing it up. I’m sorry I can’t hold in or mask my emotions, but who else am I supposed to talk to? The only things I can bring up regularly are things he wants. If he wanted a kid, then I could bring it up with no problems all I wanted.

He tells me he feels pressured. Why else would he feel pressured if he really wanted a kid? The reason why he feels pressured is cuz he does not want to be a father.

As far as I know, no one’s returned next door since they left yesterday at 11 AM. Tom said that was probably a city worker who took her kid to work with her. He says it’s become a big thing for people to take their kids to work if they can’t find or afford some other place for them. He says there are always kids where he works. There’s another reason why he doesn’t want a kid, I’ll bet. He deals with them enough already at work.

Then why would the kid say someone was moving in? Was it just in the hopes that I’d say, “Well, OK then. If the new neighbor said you could use the basketball hoop, then use it.”

Did the woman and her kid get delayed till tomorrow then? Or did someone drive her here? Does she not have a car but is really in there and this is why it just looks empty?

Whenever Tom gets up, he’s gonna go get some groceries.

At some point, we’ll be going to the library, then possibly over to his parents’ today or tomorrow.

There’ll certainly be no sex today to punish me for last night, but that’s just fine with me.

God, though! If I weren’t going through this shit with him, I wouldn’t have so much to write and would probably be 20-30 journals behind. Then again, I don’t think so cuz then there’d just be some other shit. Some other shit would be going on for me to deal with. I kind of wish there was something else for a change instead of wanting this kid I’ll never be allowed to have.

Later…

So far today, there’s been no one next door, so who knows what the scoop is?

We went to the library and he got 2 electronic books while I got 3 mystery/haunting-type books. So far there’s one I just can’t get into.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1996 Before I get into my terrible news, let me just say that Tammy’s opinion hasn’t convinced me that Tom isn’t deliberately holding back. He still hasn’t touched me cuz I’m not safe, even though I am. I knew he wouldn’t touch me all week as I said before. See? I know him. So, if I wasn’t wrong about things like this, why should I be wrong about the kid thing?

Tom asked me earlier if I was gonna be up when he got home. A typical question when he’s suggesting sex for later. He’s teasing me, though. I know him better. He’s done that before, but especially when I’m mid-cycle and I know he knows I’m mid-cycle.

OK, here’s my horrible news. I’ll give you a hint - screaming, barking, basketball games and wild company. Yup, the house next door has been sold.

A basketball game started yesterday afternoon, so I went out to chase the guy away. It was a teenager and I’m not sure if it was the same one as before. I told him that that house wasn’t vacant with the hopes that he’d tell his pals and stay the fuck away. Then he said he knew the house wasn’t vacant and that last night he met the black lady and her 13-month-old son that was to be moving in today and she said he could play there.

Shit! However, there’s no for-sale sign. I wondered if it was now a HUD house since a HUD truck has been there. Tom said that due to the city owning the house for a while, they’d want someone in there who could pay full price and that they can’t sell it without a for-sale sign. Then what the hell was this kid talking about and how did he come to meet this supposed woman? He must live nearby or was playing when she came by, but Tom never mentioned seeing or hearing anything.

My feeling is that somehow, with or without a for-sale sign, someone’s moving in today. I better get my “quiet down” letter written. No, this time I’m going over there as soon as things get chaotic.

This really, really sucks, though, and I know she’ll have a dog cuz God wouldn’t allow otherwise. They’re gonna have their fucking living room window open so I can hear the kid screaming up a storm while in the music room and the backyard. People are gonna come over to see the house and a single person, if she really is gonna be the only adult there, is gonna have tons of company. Mothers today are so wild and I can see blasting rap music and lots of ball games since blacks love basketball. She’ll probably have brothers and nephews over playing basketball.

The good thing about a 13-month-old is that it’s not gonna be in school and taking home its buddies, but that won’t eliminate all the goddamn screaming.

Wait till she tries to sleep at night and gets barked awake by those two dogs right by her bedroom window. Not that it’ll matter with her kid and her own dog, I’d think.

I’d love to say she’ll hardly ever have company and will be working all day and have the kid in daycare and will have no dog, but dream on!! God could and would never bless me with that and with barely knowing that they exist.

Now it’s time for Robin’s true test. Remember how I said she said I had nothing to worry about? Well, we’ll see now if she’s full of shit or if it’s some other entity that’s posing as her, cuz I still can’t deny or say that Robin was just my imagination, even though I wish I could.

If just one adult is moving in there paying full price, they better have a damn good job to be able to support herself, her kid and her house. That house was going for $600 and something a month if it hasn’t gone down.

This really sucks and I’d better enjoy my last few hours of peace. With that house having been empty since last September, boy am I in for some very serious and heavy-duty compensation! Big time!

My pigeons will probably only hang out on our electrical wires and not theirs. They’re probably gonna be scared off for a while from sitting on wires above their house or even coming into our yard due to the dog that’s about to be over there.

This really sucks! This really fucking sucks shit big time!

Later…

They’re here. I heard them pull in in two big city trucks. I really think it’s a welfare mom, cuz they help them move. I am sooooooo fucking pissed!

I heard the kid and I thought I heard their dog, but not too much yet cuz it’s probably held up in one of those trucks. I wonder why two trucks, though? Isn’t one enough? Amazingly, though, they’re coming in very quietly compared to the way the M’s blew on in here. In time, things will likely change. At least I should be able to sleep and hopefully there’ll be no trailer filled with people living in their front yard by our bedroom.

I wonder where her car is. Out on the street out of view? I wonder why the dog’s not out back yet, too? If this lady doesn’t have a dog, God forbid, then she’ll be running out to get one since she probably came from an apartment.

I feel like I’m in an apartment all over again!

Later…

I heard Mommy yell out something to some black guy. She sounds mean, too.

I wonder why HUD would let her have a 3-bedroom house with only one kid. She’s probably pregnant.

A good 95% or more of this whole moving-in process, though, they’ve been unusually quiet.

If it’s OK with Tom, I may move this little table out of the music room and back in the bedroom where the vanity is and put the vanity in here.

I heard her again. She kind of sounds like Tracy K.

Anyway, I’m sure Tom wouldn’t mind me swapping the table and vanity since he can sleep through anything.

I saw a white van and I guess it’s hers. Why does God always sic vans on me, too. They’re so loud and obnoxious, but maybe she won’t sit there with the engine idling for an hour every week, either. It looks like a piece of shit like the red one the M’s had. Something I can see a welfare mom drive.

I have nothing against blacks, but I sure hope she’s not in a gang of some kind. Do I have anything against welfare moms? Yes and no. I understand that some of us can’t help being poor, but it’s those that don’t help themselves when and if they can that I dislike. I also dislike those very much who have kids when they shouldn’t.

Later…

Well, the city trucks and white van have left and right now it appears no one’s been there for about an hour and a half. That’s odd. I mean, where did they go? I hope this is a sign that they’ll hardly ever be home, but I know I’m dreaming. I can’t believe there’s no dog over there yet. They could all be over where they’re moving from and picking up another load.

I can almost guarantee what Tom will do when he gets home. If he does not do anything physical or sexual to me at all, he may do something else that wouldn’t surprise me. Something he’s done and would do at any time, but especially with me being mid-cycle. He’ll start feeling me out and rubbing himself against me as if he’s about to initiate sex. Then he’ll say, “How about some fun tomorrow? Or, “I can’t wait till tomorrow when I’m more awake so we can have fun.”

Last time I got my period was between 2-4 AM and he knows that by late this afternoon or early this evening, I’ll be just over 24 hours over mid-cycle.

Well, I’ve done enough writing for now, so I’ll either write later or tomorrow.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1996 He fixed the capping macro so that I can now cap after question marks and exclamation marks, besides just periods. Now, all I have to cap are I’s, names and first letters of words beginning paragraphs and that’s fine with me.

As you can see, though, I began typing with all small letters after having typed with all caps in journal 107 and guess what it did? It left the first letters of words beginning sentences capped, but it made all small letters for the rest of all those first words. Oh well. It’s only part of 1 journal and my typed journals really serve me no purpose other than as backups and for searching for stuff. I can’t run a search mode through a written copy of a journal when looking for certain subjects. I will no longer type any more journals or letters in all caps.

I love it, though, and wish I had this capping thing a long time ago. I wonder if this is part of Tom’s New Year’s resolution. To do the things he promised me long ago. He promised to fix this thing so long ago that I forgot all about it and just totally gave up on it. Will he ever fulfill his promise of a kid, though? No! Of course not!

Tom is full of it, though, when he says we could find a way to afford a kid since you have several months to prepare for it. No way! I may not be a money expert, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that we could never afford a kid. Probably not for quite some time, either.

I still can’t believe that I haven’t heard those dogs. They should’ve gotten their letter from the humane society today, too. I had a bad thought, though. If they got rid of those dogs, they may move their kids and the ones they do daycare for out back. No thanks. Still, I think most kids out here live in their front yards.

As we all know, I’ve mentioned having one weird issue after another to deal with. Or some issue that bugs me for the longest time, anyway. It was wanting the woman I could never have and now it’s wanting the kid I can never have. I asked myself, if God broke down or made a mistake and let me get pregnant, what would be the new issue replacing this one, besides any others I’ve already still got to deal with? What would he then go and do to me or Tom or the kid? I can’t really think of anything he could do and maybe God can’t either, so maybe this is why this shit has been so never-ending. God probably feels he can’t end it by having Tom tell me the truth cuz there’s nothing to replace it with. God’s always gotta do something and he’s gotta have me stuck in some major issue that I just can’t seem to deal with or fix.

Got a letter from Kim today and two from Bob.

Later…

I just got done watching some TV and in a little while, I’m gonna do Tom a favor he asked of me. He wants some ideas for his Crazy 8’s computer game as far as a heading goes. I’m going to draw cards and write the letters of the game on each card. I’ll do different colors for the cards and letters. There’ll be 6 cards. One for each of the letters in the word Crazy, then the one for the 8’s.

Meanwhile, I’ll return to write more later.

Later…

In 20 minutes, I’ll go get Tom up if he isn’t up already.

I’m taking a break from ballistics right now at level 18. Hope I beat level 39.

In my caps test paper, I did go ahead with my little suggestion for his poor little problem. Sure, I know it’s useless, but if he can give bogus suggestions, it’s only fair that I can, too. A while back we were discussing how therapists condition their patients. They could condition Tom to cum like he conditioned himself to beat the alarm. He said, though, that he doesn’t want to do anything that will take the fun out of sex. Of course, the real reason is simple. He doesn’t want a kid. I said, though, that maybe he’ll have to do something that’s a bitch to get what he says he wants, and then turn it into fun. He adapts better than anyone else I ever knew in my life.

Yesterday I came across something in my library book. A guy was with a hooker and it said he held back for hours to achieve a bigger climax. I asked Tom what he thought of it. Grinning and chuckling, he said that that’s just how they talk in books.

Right!

The dogs have barked this morning, that’s for sure. They just don’t give a damn about those dogs or anyone else around them.

Later…

I absolutely don’t believe it, but then again I do, even though it doesn’t bother me. I’ve never before heard the kids two houses down where those dogs are, but I could today and it sort of reminded me of when the M’s were next door. At least it’s not ear-piercing loud. If it were or if it got more common, then I’d be pissed, but I’m sure I’ve got nothing to worry about. How can they be outside, though, with the dogs? Well, these yards are of a good size so they’re probably tied up in a corner of the yard away from the kids. No, they’re not outside. Otherwise, it’d be louder. They’ve got their windows open. It’s a bit damp out, but still a good day to have windows open. Especially if you’ve got a lot of little kids around you.

What I was pissed about earlier is over the same old shit. This guy has made no effort to try to have a kid or to try to up the amount of sex we have.

Afterward, we took a shower together and when I asked him why he loved me he said, “Love can’t be explained. Love just is.” So, that’s what inspired me to write the song I just wrote.

He also told me how to recap my all-capped parts of this journal that had some small letters. Oh, how I wish I had this thing a long time ago. I love it! He says he can find a way to cap I’s and the beginnings of paragraphs too.

After Tom left, I was still upset and I finally broke down and just had to talk to someone else about this sexual shit with Tom. I called Tammy and I said, “This is so embarrassing and I’m afraid you might laugh,” but I told her anyway. She shocked the shit out of me. I thought she was gonna confirm my fears and say that the guy really doesn’t want a kid, but she said there’s nothing to laugh at, I’m not alone and she’s had the same problem. She firmly believes that Tom’s telling the truth and that in time, it will work out. She also said that yes, it could be physical, even though Tom and I know that’s not it cuz he’s cum before. She said a man can still be able to get hard, but still be impotent and not able to get off.

Really? I didn’t know that.

She’s had problems where she couldn’t cum, so since she gave me her advice and opinion of my case, I gave her advice. I suggested she do what we do and have Bill lie on his side and have her on her back facing him with her legs over his side so that she can stimulate herself. If Tom just screwed me without my stimulating myself, there’d be no way I could get off. Probably not even if I was horny as all hell.

I got up to level 40 of Balistic, so I hope I get higher the next time. In a way, I’m glad I haven’t hit level 50 yet as it gives me something to look forward to little by little. I’ll still always enjoy and love the game though. It’s definitely my favorite computer game. There are other games I haven’t played in a while or even checked out yet, so I think I’ll do that sometime soon.

Later…

My pigeons are out there cooing away. It’s a bit breezy out, but not too bad. It’s not as warm as it was there for a while.

No mail for me today. I’m sure I’ll get those books I ordered, but will I get that CD? I doubt it.

What did Evie mean when she said she liked writing letters and was gonna surprise me with a letter? Will she ever surprise me with a letter someday? I hope so. That’d be nice.

No, I won’t dare tell Tom about my conversation with Tammy. I’m sure he’d rather me talk to her than to some stranger of a nurse, but he’d still be pretty upset over it.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1996 Soon I want to see if I can beat my 39-level record by playing that ballistics game.

At the moment I don’t really have anything important to do, so I left Andy a message to call me if he wants to chat. Maybe he can come over one of these nights after work to get his birthday toaster present.

I don’t know if I mentioned yet that Tom printed out two pictures of Gloria that he found on AOL as a little Valentine’s present for me.

Tom returns to work today at 4:30. Now watch. I know him. He won’t touch me throughout the whole week after having a vacation and especially not on the 23rd when I’m mid-cycle. I told you he’d never change and has one excuse after another. All he did was look me straight in the eye and say “yes” when I asked for a kid. One big fat complete lie. He lies about it as if he were lying about a pencil he stole. Like it’s no big deal. Just another casual white lie.

I last left off about the junior high schools I attended, so I’ll take it from there. I only attended Longmeadow high school throughout parts of my freshman year.

You see, my mother began her threats of sending me to funny farms a couple of years before she finally did it. She claims that she and Dad were frightened, helpless and powerless to change the situation. I can see how they feel that way, but I’ve always found it to be a petty excuse. I know I was responsible for my own actions, but at the same time, if they hadn’t always been so negative and so preoccupied with their TV or other stuff, maybe I wouldn’t have cut my arm and tried to kill myself or been such a rebellious troublemaker.

During the beginning of my freshman year, I was tutored by a woman at the Willie Ross School for the Deaf. She was a cool lady.

Then, I went to the high school where I did the rest of my freshman year.

On July 27th of 1981 when I was 15, they sent me to the Brattleboro Retreat in Vermont. They admit now that this was a bad move, but they haven’t ever admitted other bad moves such as Valleyhead and a certain foster home I was in and the state funny farm in Northampton. I was in Vermont till December 17th or 19th, so about 5 months. It was pure hell, but little did I know that Valleyhead and Northampton would be much worse. This was just the beginning of my 3-year voyage between 5 miserable places. At least in Vermont, you had your own room and there were more privileges and the restrictions weren’t as harsh. The food was better there, too, and you could have money enough to support your cigarette habit if you had one. For the most part, though, this place, as well as Valleyhead, treated the kids there as if they were criminals. Like with Valleyhead, there weren’t enough supportive people who wanted to truly help you and boost your self-esteem, etc.

The nicer staff weren’t the ones with the power. Those with the power often brushed us off as if we deserved whatever we got in life and made us feel worse in general and worse about ourselves. There were several staff members on power-play, and it didn’t take much, if they didn’t like you, for them to make your life miserable and to put you on restriction for the dumbest things.

After Vermont, I returned home and right away, my parents just had to get rid of me again and suggested a private school in Northampton. I refused. I begged to stay home. I felt like any other kid would feel - rejected, unwanted and uncared for. My parents, especially my mother, couldn’t be bothered with my hyper personality, my energy, my talkativeness, my need for conversation and communication, or my dreams. Most everything I did was silly or not good enough. Most everything was my fault.

I was only home a few months after Vermont and soon attended an alternative high school in Springfield. This school was pretty cool. They weren’t so hard on you and there were only a few teachers and students.

In April of 1982, I became a ward of the state. I was taken first to a crisis center where I stayed for 3-4 days. Then I was placed in a place called LaRagione’s for about two months. This was a rooming house for adults with emotional problems and there were about 7 3-story houses where everyone lived. They came to the main house for meals which was also where I lived. This was in Springfield.

My foster parents were Anna and Harry B and they were pretty cool. They had a house in West Springfield and they wanted to remain my foster parents till I was 18, but the state got in the way of that.

The same woman, who tutored me at the Willie Ross, tutored me while I was there.

Around June of that year, I was in the state hospital for a week or two. It’s a wonder I came out of that place alive. I know that they’ve changed a lot of laws since then, thank God. There were 4 people in a cubicle and there was absolutely no privacy at all. Not while you shit, not while you showered, not while you slept, etc.

From there I went to a foster home that was a nightmare. It was in Springfield too, two blocks from Anna and Harry’s. I lived on the first floor with a woman named Dorothy H and her vicious friend Valerie. I was alone there, till another 16-year-old girl named Shelly came there. She was a toughie and she protected me from Valerie and Dotty’s cruel ways and their teasing me. Shelly could take Dotty, but not Valerie. At first Shelly was intimidating to me, but we became friendly. Every morning she’d hide me out upstairs, out of the way of Dotty and Valerie’s wrath.

This is where I was in the worst of my anorexia. I couldn’t eat if I wanted to cuz of all I’d gone through, but I also wasn’t fed too much as it was. I was lucky if I could find a loaf of bread in the kitchen of that house. I was 85 pounds and my periods stopped till I was almost 19. Due to this, plus serious tranquilizers I was on, I ended up at 148 pounds when I was 18 and it took me till I was 19 to start my descent to 100 pounds which took a year.

Later…

I just talked to Andy and Quinn and then I went to finish some soup I made yesterday. Quinn said that my telling him I weighed 96 pounds made him hungry.

I felt kind of warm and when I took my temperature it said I was 99. I had somewhat of a feeling that I may be ovulating and, of course, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Meaning, I can’t go to my husband and tell him of this possibility and have him eagerly fuck me and cum.

He told me earlier that he doesn’t know that he’s positive his “problem” is subconscious but says it may be. He says he doesn’t know what the problem is or else he’d fix it. He also said, though, that the day will never come when he tells me he never really did want a kid. If he doesn’t know whether his problem is subconscious or not and if he doesn’t know what the problem is, then how can he be so sure that what I’m telling him his problem is, is the case? I’m sure he knows damn well what his 3 fears are. He doesn’t want a kid. He doesn’t think I’ll be a good mother and he loves to tease me about issues of sex and a kid.

He doesn’t want me to talk about it, yet he says he and I can bring up suggestions that may help him. Why should I bother? I know better. The only thing of it right now that really pisses me off is how he lied and said he’s gonna win the bet during a moment where I was upset just to cheer me up, even though he denies this. How can he lie to me about a kid as if it was a little white lie that could never hurt me? How can he go about it in such a swift, casual, and easy way?

I just wish to hell I knew when this was gonna end and how. Is it gonna be by him playing this game forever and forever refusing to cum as has been the case? Or is it gonna be by him telling me what’s really on his mind? I don’t see how there could be any other way for this to play out. It’s either lie forever or tell the truth.

I’m terrified every month at the thought of PMS when my feelings are intensified. I can talk to him about anything but this. If I do, he either gets upset or lies and says we’ll have a kid to cheer me up at the moment.

Earlier he also said, “I don’t want you to work just for the sake of working. I want you to work if you want to. I want you to be happy and do what you want to do.”

Well, I can’t do what I want to cuz he won’t allow it. Therefore, I’ll take second best, cuz if I don’t, I’ll just be sitting around forever, and we could use the extra money, and second best is better than third best or lower.

He also told me of an idea he had earlier tonight. He wants to teach me graphics 3 times a week and he wants me to teach him signing 3 times a week. I’ve always wanted him to learn sign language and I think he’s serious this time. Especially since it’s stuff he wants and it sure beats having a kid, as far as he’s concerned. Hell, I think he’d rather me get in trouble all over again than be pregnant.

Amazingly enough, I haven’t heard the dogs bark last night or tonight, but they sure barked up a storm yesterday morning. I’m doing one more thing, that I know is worthless, but that’s OK. I sent a letter to them from the Arizona Humane Society’s complaint dept.

I also sent Anna & Harry a letter just to let them know how my life is and that I’m sorry for the calls I made to them in the late 80s. I told them I still love them and think of them and am grateful for how well they treated me when I was 16 and living with them.

Later…

I absolutely cannot believe that I haven’t heard those dogs bark at all since I’ve been up, but that’s fine with me.

I’m getting bored more and more and I need a new project on top of my hobbies. I need to be working. If only we had a color scanner for my drawings and a laser jet printer for typing.

Andy’s gonna be moving into the house alone for the first 3-6 months. Then Michelle will move in when she gets more money.

I don’t know why Tom wants me to do this. He said he wants it just because and that he’s got no reason in particular. He asked if one of these days I’d write about one day in our lives, then about one week in our lives, minus any feelings or attitude. How totally boring.

Now my temperature’s 98.1. So, who knows if I really was ovulating or if I ever do?

Guess I’m gonna go and wind down now.

Later…

There’s some kind of city work truck next door. The same kind that’s been there before. I guess anytime now they’ll put a for-sale sign back out for all the large families with dogs to see.

Once again, I’m gonna go wind down with some coffee. I’ll also go set the VCR for Law & Order tonight to get that out of the way.

I just hope that whatever they’re doing next door doesn’t get noisy so I can sleep. I’m pretty sure it’ll be quiet, though, cuz they have been in the past.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1996 Another time period of Tom saying or heavily suggesting he’s gonna cum will be over in a day. I knew better, though. I haven’t been upset lately or feeling like a freak during sex, but I’m not PMSing either. Then, everything bothers me. I wish I could always be within a week after my period, cuz then knowing my husband won’t allow me a child is much easier to deal with. Next, he’ll say once again that he’s gonna win the bet and will cum by April 1st, then it’ll be by June, and on and on and on.

So far, my breaking my promises to him and giving him his own medicine of false hopes and not always the nicest things, is working well. I’m down to 96 lbs. Now I just have to get a job. He said we’d discuss that after his vacation, but there’s nothing to discuss. I already told him he could control me from having a child, but he sure as hell can’t control me from other things. I’m gonna show him what it’s really like to have things go the way you wish they wouldn’t and to expect things he won’t be getting.

Remember when I said he said something about just going with the flow if he tries new stuff in bed? What a laugh I had to myself a couple of days ago. While we were screwing with him on his side and me on my back, he put his hand on the top of his dick. I thought something was wrong and he said he was OK. Then, afterward, he reminded me of the new stuff and that he didn’t want me to be curious or ask questions about it, but to just go with the flow. What the hell kind of a new thing do you call that? What kind of a joke and game is he playing with me now? And why do I have to just go with the flow? Why do his reasons behind these strange “new tricks” have to be such a secret? Is he trying to convince me that he isn’t afraid to have a child and that he doesn’t fear I’ll be a bad mother and that he isn’t playing head games with me about it? Well, he hasn’t succeeded and no “trick” will succeed without the white stuff. I mean really, how ridiculous can he be?

Anyway, the only people that are gonna know about my letter to Robert Stack at Unsolved Mysteries will be Tom, Andy, Kim, Bob and Alex. Andy said I forgot to thank Robert Stack for narrating my life. Ha, ha!

My favorite computer game I’ve mentioned before is Balistic. In the past, I’d never beaten level 13, but tonight I got up to 39 levels. There are 50 in all.

Later…

I’m kind of bored right now, but that’s life.

I forgot to mention earlier that Tom doubts Unsolved Mysteries will air my case just like I doubt it. He said you never know, but it isn’t really entertaining enough. True. Especially when you compare it to someone being pulled from a burning car.

He also told me that yes, he does believe I’m psychic which surprised me a bit. I had thought he was rather skeptical.

Well, I’m gonna stay up long enough to take care of the load of laundry I’m doing, then I’ll be hitting the sack.

Thankfully enough, there were no basketball players throughout the weekend, but the dogs bark no less than usual. Mostly at night, though. Primetime for them to go off seems to be at 11:30 PM and 2:30 AM.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1996 I have the movie recording right now, so now I’ll write. Last night I finally decided to send a letter about my search for Robin to Unsolved Mysteries. Tom gladly helped me and gave me feedback as far as the letter goes that I wrote. I’ll enclose a copy of it here, but first, let me tell you what finally prompted me to do this. There was a case of a middle-aged lady who was in a car accident. Two men pulled her out of her burning car, but they took off before she could get their names and thank them. After 15 years, she finally asked Unsolved Mysteries for their help. If they can find two people from many years ago with no names to go on, I think they can find one person. At least I hope they can and that they will, but I doubt if they’ll bother with my case. I just don’t see any reason why they’d bother and it doesn’t seem meant to be and although they do a variety of different subjects and related subjects to mine, I think the little girl who gets stolen from her backyard is more important for them to air. If they aired it, though, it’d be just my luck that she wouldn’t be watching if she’s alive and also just my luck if someone that knew anything wouldn’t bother to call in any info if they were watching.

I called 800 info for their number and when I called Robert Stack came on with an initial greeting. Then some other guy came on giving the two choices. You hit #1 for new story ideas and #2 for info relating to a case. They said all story ideas must be typed and they must include your full name, number and address. They said it’d take about 12 weeks for them to get to it. I guess, from the way it sounded, they’ll send a letter, either way, saying they’re interested or to fuck off. So, mid-May should be when I’ll get my fuck off notice. It’s still a pretty fun joke of a game to play and it’s something someone can’t say I didn’t try. Not even I can say I didn’t try to put any effort into it after all Tom and I tried to no avail on our own.

Here’s a copy of that letter.

Dear Unsolved Mysteries,

First I would like to say that I have enjoyed your show for many years. The variety of the stories you cover is great.

My name is Jodi Lin. I’m writing to you with the hopes that you can help me find someone who made a difference, for the better, in my life. Unfortunately, I do not know this person’s name. She was a camp counselor at a camp I attended when I was 9 years old in 1974. The camp’s name was Camp Naomi in Raymond, Maine, but has been known as Camp Nashoba North since 1988.

I came from a troubled home and was a very troubled child. This is why I only attended this camp for about 2 weeks that summer, then I had to leave. While I was there, however, I met a camp counselor whose first name may have been Robin. She was very kind to me and very understanding of my situation. She really made me feel wanted and cared for and she really listened to things I had to say. I’ve tried for a long time to find this woman, but I haven’t been able to. The reason why I’d like to find her is that I just want to say “thank you.” I’m 30 years old now, but I never forgot her friendliness and kindness.

All I know about this woman is that she may have been a supervisor or a specialist of some kind. She had her own cabin and I stayed there with her and her medium-sized brown dog on my last night there. She was about 5’ 5” with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes and slender. At the time, she probably was between 17-21 years old.

When my father came to pick me up from this camp to bring me home to Massachusetts where I grew up, we were crying as we said goodbye to each other, and she gave me a Polaroid picture of her dog.

This is all I really remember about her, but if there’s anything at all you could do to help me find her and put us in contact, this would be appreciated from the bottom of my heart.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1996 I’ve got 20 minutes to write and no, I haven’t forgotten about going through my life in more detail. I’ll get on with it soon enough.

I just thought I’d go through what we did yesterday. I got up around 11 AM, and then we left at 1:45 to go to play miniature golf. For the first time in my life, I was ahead of him, and then he kicked my ass in the end and won. It was fun, though.

Then we went to eat at Dairy Queen and then headed for Walmart. There, we got Andy’s toaster for his birthday present which I wrapped in paper with all kinds of funny lines and sayings on it. I also got birdseed and a birthday card for Andy.

Andy and Michelle are going to be moving into that house on March 1st.

Then we went to Staples where Tom got his mom a new mouse and paint to cover up the stuff he put on the roof to prevent leaks (we hope!). I got envelopes and 6 new pens. So far 3 of them seem to skip. There’s pink, purple, green, blue, red and black. Instead of highlighting each date, I’ll just do a different color every new day for a while.

Tom took his parents to the racetrack today, but I haven’t done too much today yet.

It’s been beautiful out, in the 80s and it made me feel really good to hear Tammy, Larry, Sandy and Jenny tell me how cold it was there with 5’ of snow and it was still coming down.

I’m pissed off cuz about a week ago, someone changed the security light next door, so now that thing blares on for ½ hour at a time while I’m trying to listen to music in the peaceful darkness.

No basketball players in the last couple of days, but I expect I’ll have to chase a few away here and there and hope that they, as well as their friends, get the message - fuck off!

Leave it to me for it to be just my luck to be next to the only house on the street with a goddamn basketball hoop.

I heard on the news that any high school kid who doesn’t pay child support can’t have extra activities in school. God, it’s getting so common! I think I’ve heard that 8 or 9 out of 10 women have their kids between the ages of 15 - 22. Shit!

Well, it’s TV time, but afterward, I’ve really got some far-out news to tell.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1996 Well, Andy’s birthday card is gonna be late getting to him. I totally forgot all about it cuz I’ve been busier. I left him a message asking him if I’m still sending it to the same place. He mentioned having filled out an application for a complex, only to end up getting fucked over by them. He said they couldn’t get the people out of what was to be their new apartment, then offered him another one, but they hated it. He mentioned already filling out a change of address card at the time, too.

Today he left a message saying they’ll be renting a house for $350 a month which is excellent. You could never find a deal like that back East. He says it’s a 700-square-foot, 1-bedroom. It’s a duplex, which I didn’t know they had here, with carports in the middle of them and there’s a single woman living next to them. I’m happy for them and I hope this works out.

Tomorrow we’ll be buying his birthday present. A toaster. We’ll also be stopping by other stores, going food shopping, and playing miniature golf.

I noticed on my list of notes that I mentioned getting two letters from Kim yesterday, but I don’t think there’s anything too important about those letters to mention.

Yesterday and today there were some hang-up calls, so who knows if it was Jenny or maybe even Nervous. I’m right by the phone now, so let me see if Nervous’s phone is hooked up again.

Nope. It now says it’s not in service. I don’t think Nervous would even bother at this time and I’m pretty sure Fran lost our number and doesn’t remember my married name, either.

Yesterday I organized my drawings, getting them prepared to try to sell. I’ve got 3 groups. Group 1 is people, group 2 is animals, and group 3 is flowers. I wrote a list of their file names in journal 54.

I may have accidentally said our bet was up on March 1st, but it’s really up on April 1st, even though I’m 200% sure I’ll win. Actually, I’m 1000% sure.

Yesterday Tom asked me to make some beads to hang on the light fixture of the second ceiling fan in the back room that we never use cuz of how the roof above it leaks. I did and asked if I could have a kid for it. He said yes.

Yeah, right!

Today was a good day, but before I get into it, let me tell you what happened yesterday morning at 10:00. Some high school kid started playing basketball next door and of course Tom was here. Finally, after an hour of it, I said fuck it cuz I live here too and politely told the kid my grandmother was sick and asked him to leave. He was cool about it and left. Tom didn’t seem the least bit upset by this and I couldn’t have really cared if he had been.

Then, today at 6:00 a younger kid was playing, and I asked the same thing and he was very nice about it too and took off.

How the fuck do they know it’s vacant next door? There’s no for-sale sign. Is this gonna be God’s latest thing? He just has to do something, huh? Well, it’s better than that house being sold, cuz then it’ll be an everyday thing, not to mention their barking dogs.

Anyway, we went to the IMAX Theater in Scottsdale (Snottsdale) and we saw a half-hour documentary on storm chasers. It was pretty cool, but they’re full of it when they say the screen’s over 6 stories tall. If that were so, each floor would have to be my height and maybe even a bit shorter. It’s not 120 feet wide, either, but about 75. It’s about 75 feet tall, too. Still, it was neat to see.

Then we went to the mall for a bite to eat, came home, and then went back out to the library where I got two books to read.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1996 Another day of the same old boring shit sexually. Earlier he told me there was plenty of time for him to win the bet. Now, what did that statement mean? I know better and that he has no intentions of winning and if he did, he'd cum by my hand only once to get me off the cigarettes for a day and so he could trash the back room.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1996 I feel so bad for those dogs two yards down. They whine every time it rains out and the owners really just don’t give a shit at all. Maybe I’ll call the Humane Society on behalf of them as I originally considered. How do they stand it? I mean, I know they’ve got kids and therefore it just blends in all together, but how do they sleep?

I hope Tom gets home soon from his errands cuz I only have half a cigarette left.

I did another load of laundry and had the clothes out for a few hours and right after I took them down it began to drizzle, so that was perfect timing.

I just did Larry and others an envelope I think they’re really gonna like. I did 3 plants sitting in pots on the front. On the back, I drew a silver rod and drew 5 hanging plants.

Speaking of envelopes, Tom said Nickolena sent Mom a Valentine and decorated the envelope. Tom says he’s sure the idea came from me, or else they’d have just done something on a separate piece of paper. Yesterday I did a Valentine’s banner for Tom with words and drawings on old adding machine paper.

A miracle happened yesterday. Tom finished the back room and I can now vacuum 99% of it. I just hope it’ll stay this way, but after 2½ years, I’m grateful.

I wonder how many more years it’ll take him to cum, although I know better than that. He’s still teasing as far as sex goes. He said he was gonna wake me up since I took care of myself yesterday cuz I couldn’t get him to. This is one area where I’m glad he’s full of it cuz I don’t like being woken up. It’s the lying I’m sick of. He said he wants to win the bet so he went all out to clean the back room so he doesn’t have to have that on his mind. Now, if you’ve got to have a room cleaned in order to cum, you’ve got a problem. Well, he may not have the room on his mind, but he’ll have the fear of a kid on his mind.

I haven’t heard any kids, so that’s good, cuz if you’re like most people, you don’t want to deal with it unless you know you’ve got to deal with your own kids.

Got a package from my parents. They sent a new cow wind socket. Cool. This one’s a bit longer and a bit different looking. They also sent a small wind socket and a bracket to put up a mini flag. They sent the following for mini flags. A Halloween flag, hearts, a pineapple and one with a slice of watermelon and a drink next to it. The last one is the one we put up. For big flags, they sent a pineapple, a cactus and coyote, and a fish. I put the cactus one up over the microwave and the fish are up in the back room.

They also sent a shade screen for the car.

I don’t know why they bother with sending so many pineapple ones. I hate those. They’re so boring. It’s amazing how little these people know their own daughter. Back on Oswego Street, they sent me these disgusting lemon, lime, and orange sugar-coated candies. Don’t they know I hate citrus flavors?

Any flags I don’t put up, I keep in the hall closet, cuz you never know what we or someone we know may do with them in the future.

When Tom was last over at his parent’s house, they sent back some cake for me, a swing, and a monkey bar. They’ve been put up out back, too, so the backyard is pretty much decorated really well and has all kinds of stuff out there.

Tom says he wants me to trim his hair again soon. Oh, God! Does he really think I can learn to do it right? Well, he says so. I trimmed my pussy hair and did it in a much better way. I shaved it, but as I got closer to my clit, I trimmed it. That way there’s less stubble and won’t scrape up more hair molecules.

This Wednesday we’re going to the IMAX Theater. A coworker of his won tickets and he gave them to Tom. The screen there is supposed to be 60 feet tall and 120 feet wide. That ought to be interesting.

Kim called last night. Now that she’s got over female problems (hopefully), she now has intestinal problems. Hopefully, she’ll be OK.

I left Tammy a message and hope to hear from her soon.

Other than that, there’s not much else going on. Tom wants me to draw the cactus/coyote flag. I’ll do it on another CD label of his and I’ll also be doing it on my parent’s envelope for their next letter.

Later…

Well, Tom just told me that at 8:00 when his show’s over, he wants me to “spoil” him. Yeah, I’ll spoil him with a wicked hard-on. It’ll be good timing, too, seeing that he’ll be up for over 12 hours. I wonder if he’ll try these new things he mentioned or if he’s just talking.

Later…

The good news is that I did a really good drawing.

The bad news is the same old shit and I’m finding myself thinking of leaving here and there. It’s just that I love this guy so much otherwise that I can’t imagine leaving. I’m just so sick of his lies pertaining to sex. It’s all bullshit. The waking me up, the new stuff, the bet, the kid, etc. He said he knew I didn’t believe him, but to just wait a week to see who’s right cuz he doesn’t want to blow his chances during the relaxing vacation he wants. He doesn’t want me to be quiet about it to up his chances of cumming. He wants me to be quiet cuz he just doesn’t want to hear it or deal with it. I can’t make him deal with it, either, cuz all he does is get upset and blame me and turn an attack on me. There’s no way I can demand we get help now cuz there’s no way he’ll budge, and he’ll just cry no opportunity.

Well, like that woman said, there’ll be no kid as long as I’m willing to set aside my wants in order to make him happy. The only way I can make him happy is for him to never cum, for us to never have a kid and for me to allow him to tease me with these issues.

I miss mutual sex and if it was up to me, I’d only have him go down on me since screwing is only for me. Screwing is something I enjoy, but it also makes me feel like a freak and I’ll sure as hell never get pregnant by it.

I could demand only oral sex, but then he’ll insist he doesn’t like the idea cuz then he can’t play with my head. I swear that sometimes I feel all he wants me here for is to clean the house, draw him pictures and be something to tease and bullshit! I’m so sick of people controlling me all my fucking life. I can’t stay at home, I can’t wear the clothes I want, I can’t be a singer and I’m certainly not allowed to have a child. Am I ever gonna be able to do something that I really want without someone or God trying to stop me? My own fucking husband insisted he’d cum long ago. That was a lie. He promised us a child. That was a lie. He’ll never allow me to have a child, no matter what. What did I do to him to piss him off this much to sacrifice an orgasm so as to never allow me a child? What did I do?!?!

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1996 My non-horny husband just laughed when I said I was horny and is glued to that damn TV. He’s waiting till the end of his day, as usual, so holding back is no problem.

Yesterday we screwed at the end of our day and after I came, he continued on for a short time. He said it felt really, really good going slow. Then why did he stop? Did it feel so good that he feared he would cum? Obviously. Then yesterday he goes and says he wants to win the bet. Then an hour later he said he didn’t know cuz he’d be afraid I’d whine and say how he was holding back and how he came at a safe time. He also said he was gonna try new stuff with me over the next few days, but I thought he didn’t like to plan.

I never heard of anyone who likes to tease someone sexually so much. I know guys teasing women about having kids is common. I’m sure of that as much as I’m sure of the statement that nurse made on how I’ll never have a child if I remain with him. That’s OK, though, at this point, believe me.

I’m just so sick of the TV, the computer and other stuff having to come before me unless I’m sick or in some kind of crisis.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1996 It’s too soon to really tell yet, but I’m pretty sure that as I figured, they’ve done nothing at all about their dogs two houses down.

I’m not in a good mood now, but it’s mainly cuz I’m tired. For the second night in a row, Tom woke me up. First it was his snoring and last night it was cuz he was talking in his sleep.

Now here’s my latest new experience and here’s what I’ve decided to do about it. When I got woke up at 2 AM, I noticed a small spot when I went to check for my period. Then I got curious and decided to see what would happen if I prayed to God. I said the same thing I’ve been saying. That I knew motherhood wasn’t right for me, that I wouldn’t run away from that fact or try to fight it, and begged for my period. Then I was suddenly engulfed in a feeling of such a warm love and I could feel that God was so very proud of me and there it was!

No, they don’t give a shit about the letter I sent. I can hear them barking like hell right now.

Anyway, this experience has reinforced the fact that I must follow my head and not my heart and do the right thing, no matter how many days I spend wishing I could have a kid. Now I’m determined like never before, even though I know I’ve got nothing to worry about and that God and Tom would never ever allow me to have a child.

I’m starting to wish more that we could just go back to having our own rooms. If you’re not attracted to someone enough to cum and if you’re that afraid of having a kid, you won’t cum whether or not you’re together, a room away from the person you’re with, or a whole house away. He’s just so full of shit when he said that having us sleep in the same room would make him cum and that wearing regular clothes would make being nude more special. It’s all bullshit and I’m sick of his lies and his head games. How dare he tell me he’s gonna win our bet just to cheer me up. He just doesn’t understand me and thinks this is such a joke and that he can hurt me like this. At least if we go back to our own rooms I can always sleep.

Well, guess what? Now it’s time for me to let him down with lies. The difference is that I know when he’s lying, but since I’m now just beginning to join in on his games and lies, he’s gonna be getting psyched up for nothing just like he had me do in the beginning.

He’s not attracted to me (he says he is and tries to pretend he is) and he has this thing where he thinks I’m too thin. Well, he better get his eyes checked cuz I have plenty of a belly and my thighs are quite meaty. I’d have to lose a good 15 pounds or so before I started really looking too thin. Anyway, I said I’d get up to 105 pounds which he likes me the best at, but I’m really gonna lose about 10 pounds. Lately, I’m between 98-100 pounds, but I’m gonna get between 90-95 and give him a taste of his own medicine. I know, though, that even though he likes how I looked better at 105 that he’s full of shit and would never cum no matter what I weighed.

No problem, though. Cuz I’m gonna make sure that from now on that I help God and Tom make sure Tom never ever cums. A kid isn’t for me, whether or not I want one. There’s no way I could handle it. I know God and Tom don’t need my help, but like I said, I’m not fighting or running away from what’s right and what’s got to be anymore. It’s my turn to join in on the games, the lies and the making sure he always holds back. I’m also gonna make it a point to walk around here stark naked more and more.

Lastly, in April of ‘97, there’ll be no appointment cuz I refuse to go to a joke of an appointment. He also doesn’t realize that he’s dropping more and more subtle hints as to the truth. We were talking about pregnancy and periods earlier and he was telling me that you feel different in the beginning. I then said I was curious to look it up and see what’s so different that you’re supposed to feel. He said maybe I shouldn’t do that cuz then I imagine things. Well, I wouldn’t for starters and also, if he’s gonna “make things happen” and if he wants a kid, then why would I have to imagine and why does he have to worry about my imagining things? Well, unfortunately, the lying asshole is on vacation after today and I wish I could say we’ll have a fun relaxing time but I know better. I’ve got to make sure that I stick to the things I said I’m gonna do. No more being the nice and honest one here. I’m gonna be just like him. I’ve also got to make sure I talk about it as little as I can cuz he just can’t handle it cuz baby talk just really turns him off.

Later…

The last few subjects I could think of that I have written down in my notes are friends, enemies and those I couldn’t be with that I wanted to be with. They’re all rather connected, so I guess I’ll begin going through my life little by little from as young as I can remember and from whatever events I can remember. There’s a lot that I can remember, but there’s also a lot that I can’t remember. No one can remember everything, though.

Well, let’s just start with the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be born in the first place. That’s why my mother took DES, since back then they didn’t know the problems it causes. A part of me believes that because I wasn’t supposed to be born and my mother fighting to have me is the reason why I’ve gone through so much misery. Another part of me believes that being blessed in so many ways is also why I’ve been cursed in so many ways.

The dogs still bark on and off as usual. Not only do they probably not care if they get shot, but they’re probably figuring, well, we can’t or won’t debark them and we sure as hell would never allow them in the house, so fuck it.

My puzzle book finally came. I was wondering if they either forgot me or were trying to rip me off.

Anyway, I lived at home until I was 15. It was a nightmare. The only things I didn’t go through were sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol or poverty. I went through 80% emotional abuse and 20% physical abuse.

My parents’ full names are Dureen June O and Arthur Irving O. My siblings are Larry Ross O and Tammy Sue G. My maternal grandparents are Shirley & Jack G and my paternal grandparents are Bella & Joseph O. After Joe died, Bella remarried a guy named Herman G. My ex-aunt is June W. Mary & Ronnie G, as well as Ruth & Marty O, are my two sets of aunts and uncles. Ronnie’s my ma’s brother and Marty’s my dad’s brother. Both are aggressive assholes, according to most people’s standards which includes my own. Ronnie’s kids are Lori & Lisa and Marty’s are Polly & Philip.

My mother was very negative and didn’t want any of us kids to be “better” than her. That’d take the attention away from her and make her jealous. She’d cut me down about anything and everything. Her parents lived next door to us in the first house we were in and my mother was just like her mother. Typical case of like mother like daughter, and this is why I know I shouldn’t have a kid. My parents weren’t stupid, though, and they also did do me some good. They’ve taught me valuable things whether they were big or small. They kept me well-fed and clothed. Going to them with a problem, was almost always a whole different story. She seemed to get off by my being upset and by her cutting me down. When I was sick, though, she took really good care of me.

My brother didn’t live at home too long during my childhood since we were 12 years apart, but I liked it when he was there cuz we got along the best.

My sister was a nightmare. She was and still is in most ways, a carbon copy of our mother. Bitchy, too serious and negative. She used to cut me down to nothing too, and boss me around like there was no tomorrow since she was 8 years older.

Later…

Why is God so mean to me and why does He hate me so? It’s a hell of a coincidence that the more I try to ignore the subject and turn away from it I see and hear more about it on TV, the radio, or wherever. He made up his mind to make sure that I don’t have a kid, and I’m trying to do the right thing and get over not having a kid, yet he rubs them in my face. Today would be the perfect day for them to be out playing near the house after school. Something tells me that they’ve just got to be sent here today.

I had to wait a long time to accept that I’m not having a kid, but how long will I have to wait for my replacement? I just hope I even have a destiny. There’s got to be something else out there for me. I just hope that just cuz he won’t let me sing or be a mother doesn’t mean that he won’t let me do something else. I just wish I knew what else I could do and when?

If I had a choice to either have a kid or be repulsed by the idea all the time, I’d want to be repulsed by the idea all the time, but since I am only sometimes, I better quit dreaming and just hope and pray that there’s something else that I’m meant for and that it gets here fast enough.

I was thinking earlier of how I need a new bathing suit and right away I said to myself that I’d get a blue 1 piece. Am I ever gonna quit thinking of him and do for me? Nothing I say, do, or wear will change things.

Anyway, back to my life back in the first house where we lived till I was 12.

I didn’t do too well in school, other than science, gym, music, art, typing and lunch. I was a troublemaker till 6th grade. I’d just walk up to a kid for no reason at all and kick or punch them. I was holding in all that anger that I had for my mother, but I certainly couldn’t take my anger out on her.

I did grades 1-5 in an elementary school named Blueberry Hill. I stood back once in second grade.

For some reason when I was in first grade, there were these two girls I just had to be friends with. Christine T and Cindy F. Chris and I ended up being friends, but Cindy never liked me.

There were two teachers I had crushes on, too. I can see why I had a crush on third-grade teacher Linda M as most people liked her, but why I had a crush on fifth-grade teacher Joan B beats me. What did I see in her? Everyone hated her, too. She was easily the worst-liked teacher there.

During third and fourth grade I was in the resource room, OKA: the retard room, the dummy room, or the troublemaker room. You were put there if you were either slow or a troublemaker. I was in there cuz I was a troublemaker, even though I was pretty stupid till I was in my early 20s. I was about 7 years behind my age in looks and brains. I was always jealous of someone else due to them either being smarter, having longer hair, being skinnier or cuz they had nicer parents.

Stephanie Watnick is another girl that stands out in my memory. She was in the fifth grade with me. She was friends with me, but she was also one of those I beat up on whenever angry.

Other than these 5 people, the only other one worth mentioning was Rose M. She was my fifth-grade teacher and she was friendly with my parents. She even spent a day or two with us during the summer at the beach.

I did 6th grade and 3 days of 7th grade at Glenbrook middle school, then transferred when we moved to the other side of Longmeadow. There are about 4 elementary schools in Longmeadow, 2 middle schools, and 1 high school.

Glenbrook sucked. You had no lockers. Just cubby holes so anyone could rip your lunch money off. There’s nothing about that school or the teachers there that stands out in my mind at all.

William’s middle school was way better. You had lockers there and I liked the teachers and some of the students there better.

Later…

I’m surprised they haven’t begun to play basketball next door. God’s probably holding them off till Tom gets home. That way I can’t go out there and say, “I appreciate your right to play, but could you please take it somewhere else? My grandmother’s real sick and she needs to sleep.”

Back to who stands out in my mind at William’s. There are two teachers. Mrs. Bogert was pretty cool. I didn’t have a crush on her, but I liked her personality. Mrs. Tricinella was one I had a crush on and again, I don’t know why. I don’t know what I saw in her and no one liked her either.

For students, there was Brenda P. She was a friend of mine, but she ended up not liking me. There was Laura C who never liked me. She had long pretty hair, but she wasn’t there for 8th grade, the last grade of middle school. I think she moved out of state.

Then there was Jessie S, Big Bird’s adopted daughter. We had met before when I was about 10 and she was about 8 at the Jewish Community Center. She was another longtime good friend of mine besides Jenny and Andy. I hope she’s doing well today. At least our friendship didn’t end on a bad note. We simply lost touch with each other. I suppose I could track her down through her mother, but there’s really not much to say to her. I could update her on my life, but that’d take forever and I’m sure she’s busy doing whatever it is she’s doing nowadays.

Later…

Thank you, God and Tom! Winning the bet is going to be no problem and Tom has made it clear, although subtly, that I will get my period next month and I strongly vibe it, too. When I was asking him about Ibuprofen being addicting or playing with my period, he said not to worry and that it’s non-addicting and that it won’t mess with my period for next month. I’ve been needing it for my tooth as well as for cramps.

Having a kid has not only become scarier but it’s gotten to be quite a turn-off in my mind in light of all that’s gone on. First I lived in the depression of knowing I couldn’t have a child and now I live in the fear of getting pregnant. Not literally, of course, cuz I know God and Tom are taking care of making sure I don’t. It’s just that even though they’ve got that covered, I still have to do the work at making sure it doesn’t happen. Even if Tom really did want a kid, we have to wait till my teeth are done being worked on whenever that’ll be and we have to wait till his father dies and that’ll probably be during the middle of the summer, I guess.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1996 I finally got my period and I now realize more than ever how much God will love me for doing “right.” Every day I’ve been praying for my period and letting God know how much I know what a wrong thing a baby would be for me. I prayed to never have a baby and for Tom to lose the bet, even though I know I’ve got nothing to worry about.

Tom’s up now, so I’ll write later.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1996 Another day of waking up at 98 pounds, and no period. I’ve got slight cramping and I know it’s coming and that I can’t be pregnant. I hope I get it soon, though, cuz this could mean something could be wrong and that’d be all I’d need.

Tom just got up and I’ve got nothing else to say at the moment, so I’ll return later.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1996 Hey cool! I’m 98 pounds on the day I’m due for my period. I wish my period would hurry up and start, though, as I am soooooo bloated.

I can’t get on AOL till 7 AM ET cuz they’re updating their system.

I watched a movie, listened to music and showered, but now I’m not sure what I’ll do. Maybe type up some drafts pertaining to my life. Maybe do some artwork.

Later…

I left Andy a message to tell Michelle she can forget about calling Tom, but thanks anyway. I told them that if either of us wished to bring up the subject of adoption, we would. In truth, though, I don’t need to know what I already know.

I can’t watch Little House on the Prairie cuz the cable’s out.

Got another message from Tammy. She wanted to know about a way to contact any other people she knew. I also told her to look in AOL’s member directory and how Tom and I once looked to see how many people with my maiden and married name there were.

She also said she did pick out other names, but they were taken. Mystery was taken. That is why I’m Mysterylin.

There was a quick hello from Becky too, and she says she’ll be writing to me soon.

I hope Tammy gets a new printer too, soon.

I sent Kim a letter. She once asked me if I wanted any stationary, saying she had lots of it. I told her to go ahead and send some if she still wants to and if it’s not a hassle. As long as it’s not shaped funny, I can reset the margins to fit it.

Later…

I’ve finally had it with those two dogs two yards down and have sent them a letter. Now hopefully I’ll only have one more letter to send and that’ll be to the people who move in next door about their kids and dogs. I just hope these people don’t come to the door asking if I knew who sent it, even though I’ll say no.

I feel so bad for these dogs, too. It’s so cruel that they have to be outside 24/7.

Anyway, I wrote that I was sorry to have to write this, but I’m just a concerned neighbor with a wacky brother who’s threatened to shoot the dogs due to their barking and as sick as it is, he’s unstable enough to do it, so please try to lessen their barking. It’d be helpful and appreciated. I’d like to give my name and number but don’t want to cuz I don’t want my brother to know I wrote this.

I’m almost 100% sure, though, it’ll do no good. Anyone who doesn’t give a shit about their dogs won’t give a shit about their neighbors. In fact, they’ll probably say to themselves - fine. Shoot the dogs. We don’t give a damn. I mean, they obviously don’t give a damn to be leaving them outside like this. Then again, next door stunned me by quieting their kids down, so we’ll see. And also, their dog was out 24/7 too.

I listened to music earlier, but I haven’t done any singing yet.

Robin was here earlier for the first time in quite a while. I sensed her while I was laying down and I was like - go away! But she then proceeded on to say she was sorry for causing electrical problems, but that she still loves me and loves to see me. She promises that things will work out and that I’ll never have to be as miserable as I was back East. Well, if she’s really for real, I hope she’s right about my never having to be as miserable as I was back East!

It’s gonna be 83º here today and 86º or 88º tomorrow. Wow! We may have to get the EC ready soon. When I go out to smoke in the middle of the night, though, it’s still pretty darn chilly.

It’s amazing that this journal only took 13 days. I still have to finish typing 105 as well as the last 8 pages in here.

Yesterday I did a lot. I busted my ass with housecleaning and other stuff, so I might be kind of lazy today. Maybe I’ll try calling Kim. She mentioned bleeding from her ass (maybe hemorrhoids), but hopefully it’s no big deal and hopefully, she isn’t in the hospital.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1996 No more being able to rank on Tammy for having a piece of shit for a computer. She got a brand new one that’s faster than ours for $1,600. She’s got CD-ROM, Windows 95, big speakers and all kinds of things. I told her that since I can’t rank on her for having a piece of shit for a computer I’ll have to double the amount of ranking I do on her cold and snowy winters and her humid summers.

Just called AOL and got two messages from Alex and one from Tammy. All she said was that she made it online and would talk to us soon. What a boring, non-original screen name she’s using.

I sent her a reply letting her know I am very happy for her and now she can enjoy all the things we do. I won’t be sending her regular mail anymore. Just to my folks, Bob, Kim, and Larry.

I don’t usually print out Alex’s messages since they’re usually short with nothing really new.

Got a letter from Kim today with letters she got from Bob. She also sent copies of her AT&T bill and her Excel bill, but I’m shitty with math, so I’m gonna let Tom check it out. She also sent a $5 bill saying some places charge $5 to switch over, some charge $3 and some charge nothing, but to keep it anyway.

Yesterday my combination of PMS and being tired didn’t have me in the best of moods. I could tell Tom was bored by my rambling on and on and he even said so, but also that it was OK to get it out of my system. Just when I had been doing so good at keeping my mouth shut!

Then he came out and told me the biggest lie to cheer me up, even though he denied it was to cheer me up. He told me that he was gonna win the bet. What a liar and how it’s all the more obvious that he loves playing with my head about this!

Yesterday I really got on my ass about smoking indoors and am now smoking outside. I hate it and it’s a pain, but it’s already begun to cut me down as far as how much I smoke is concerned.

Later…

Now I’ll get into describing places I’ve lived, but first, I got 3 free pairs of pantyhose in the mail today and a form for the Literary Book Club so I can get 6 free books in a bogus name.

After I was born in Springfield, we lived in a house there till very shortly after I was born. I was only a few weeks old, I think, when we moved into a 4-bedroom house in Longmeadow. The house, which was next door to my mother’s parents had a huge backyard. Many acres both out in the open as well as set in the woods where I had my swing set and Larry and Tammy had their private fort. The house was built right before I was born and was pretty modern and still is compared to the second house. It was on Berkeley Drive and the cellar was just about finished. It was carpeted with heated floors and even a toilet, sink and shower stall. The stairs that went down into the cellar were in the middle. To the right was one big room with a few built-in shelves. On the other side was my little playroom, the bathroom in the middle and the laundry room behind that.

The first floor circled the staircase. If you were standing in front of the stairs, the front door would be behind you. To your left would be the dining room, through there in the back would be the kitchen, and through the kitchen would be a small hallway. To the left was a bathroom with a sink and toilet and to the right was a walk-in pantry and the stairs to the cellar. Past this was a long living room that made up one whole side of the house.

Upstairs were 4 bedrooms with just a small hallway in the center and a full bath.

The attic in this house wasn’t one you could walk up into. You had to go through a hole in the ceiling and stand on beams.

There was a double-car garage at the left of the house.

Berkeley Drive was a quiet dead-end road with a circle at the end of it. There were only 7 houses on that road.

When I was 12, we moved to Birchwood Ave., also in Longmeadow. This was on the corner of a busier street with many more houses on it. This house was also a 4-bedroom and it was bigger and older, built in the late 1800s, but I liked it much better. It was kept in excellent condition and my mother had the rooms with different kinds of wallpapers and carpets as she loved to do, so most of the interior was pretty modern looking. Its front and back yards were very small, but this was to free my dad from having to do so much yard work as his heart was never the greatest. Even I’d mow the lawn from time to time. My dad used a sit-down mower at the other house.

Its cellar wasn’t as finished or as nice as the other one, but it was my private resort that I loved. My stereo and guinea pigs lived down there and that’s where I’d do my homework, too, at my desk which had drawers and a bookcase. Again, the stairs were in the middle of the cellar, and towards the right was one big side (my side) with lots of big built-in cabinets. The left side was where the washer and dryer were and there was also a small room with an old freezer in it as well as another small room with no floor in it. I used to wonder if I’d find any secret passageways.

The first floor was kind of like a U. If you enter through the back door which is in the kitchen, as with the other house, you enter a huge kitchen. This was one of my favorite kitchens and I think my mom agreed. Off of the kitchen was a bathroom with a sink and toilet and in front of that, also off the kitchen was a closet area within a small area. There was where the steps leading to the cellar were.

Through the kitchen was a dining room and through that was a good size foyer where the front door was as well as the stairs going up to the bedrooms.

Through the foyer was a huge living room that ran the length of the house. Off of the living room was a solarium.

The upstairs hallway was kind of in the shape of a staple. Once you hit the top of the stairs, there’s a bedroom on the left. If you go right, there’s a full bathroom and to the right of that is another bedroom with a porch off of that. In the middle of the hallway was a big linen closet. To the right of that were the stairs to the attic. It was a full walk-in attic that I’m sure we would’ve used as a playroom if we kids had been younger. To the right of the attic stairs was the master bedroom, then to the right of the master bedroom was the last bedroom. That was mine in the beginning and if you stood right outside the door and looked towards your left, the stairs went right down under you. Off of my room was a small cedar closet. Its door was a few inches shorter than I am.

The master bedroom was always my parent’s room. The first bedroom was my father’s mother’s, then Lisa’s bedroom (Tammy’s first kid when she was a baby). The second bedroom went from being a den to Tammy’s room, then back to a den. My room became Tammy’s room cuz after I graduated I lived in the cellar.

Although I had my share of horrible times in this house, it also gives me a warm feeling to remember it and I did have some good times there. I fell in love with this house the second I saw it.

From when I was about 5 till my late teens, my family and I always spent the summer at our beach cottage in CT. I had more shitty times there and wished we could stay home a lot. When we first got this 4-bedroom cottage, it was a dump. My folks fixed it up really nice and later knocked out some walls making it a 2-bedroom cottage. It was small and on one floor. The walk to the beach from there took only about 90 seconds.

I first went out on my own the day before I turned 20 in 1985, so it’s been just over 10 years now. I first moved to Locust Street in Springfield on the first floor into a 1-bedroom apartment. This 4-story building was built in the 50s and the apartment was nothing too bad and nothing too impressive. It was about 600 square feet and I had a roommate there for a month or two. Her name was Michelle L and she was a 17-year-old runaway that I worked at the Harley Hotel with. She said her father molested her. She turned out to be a major backstabber who took no appreciation for my rescuing her from her home situation. This was at the time I wouldn’t see my brother for 8 years as she, as well as Jenny, came between me and my brother. My brother fell in love with her and they had an affair. Michelle and Larry were becoming more of a nuisance by the minute and in order to get rid of Michelle, I knew I had to get rid of both of them. So, I kicked her out and she went to live with Larry and his family, but I don’t know for how long.

I was only in this apartment for about 5 or 6 months. I think it was the following May that I moved due to someone knocking on my window at night. If I’d had the guts I have today, I would’ve waited outside the window at night to take care of the problem. I think I did once, but no one showed up. This left me to believe it was my brother or someone he knew. I still don’t know up to this day. In the end, whoever it was did me a favor, cuz I moved around the corner in the same building on Woodside Terrace into a much bigger and nicer 1-bedroom apt. This one was about 900 square feet. It was on the fourth floor and I lived there till July 1987. I had a black girl named Barbara T live with me there for a couple of weeks who ripped me off and was a lazy bitch. She rang up $143 of long-distance phone calls while she was there, but luckily my good acting with the phone company got it wiped out. There really wasn’t any way I could’ve afforded to pay that, either. I can’t remember where I met Barbara which is weird since I have a great memory, but I think I met her along Locust St.

Then I moved to Oswego St. onto a second floor in a 1-bedroom apartment that was more modern. I even had a garbage disposal there. This apartment was about 600 square feet. My roommate at this place was Crystal C. Another lazy bitch who ripped off a few pieces of clothing from me. She was a real wimp who was under the bad influence of her no-good boyfriend. We met at Dunkin Donuts and ended up chatting when the discussion of roommates came up. After a month or so, she left out of fear of me. I don’t know why she was afraid of me when all I wanted was for her to do her share of chores.

I left there on March 17th of 1989 to move back to the same fourth-floor apartment on Woodside Terrace.

After Crystal, I wanted no more roommates, but I ended up taking in my best friend Andy who I reunited with in April of 1988 cuz he got evicted from his own apt. It was terrible, as all we did was fight and he wasn’t there more than a month or so either. We’re just too much alike to live together, but Andy’s also changed dramatically for the better since then. I think we both have.

I moved out of Springfield to South Deerfield, MA, 40 minutes away from Springfield, on April 1, 1991. This was the most beautiful 1400 square foot (the size of this house), 1-bedroom apartment I ever had, but I was terribly isolated there. This apartment had everything from a Jacuzzi in its bathtub to a dishwasher, washer and dryer in the bathroom, a garbage disposal and a trash compactor. A ceiling fan, a microwave, a burglar alarm and 3 big skylights. There was only one other apartment in this 3-story office building where friends of mine lived. We lived on the top floor.

I moved to Norwich, CT February 8, 1992, to the biggest dump I ever lived in. The Norwich Housing Authority. I lived in a rundown, filthy old 1-bedroom apartment that was about 500 square feet. It was to be a 102-day nightmare and the noise there was horrible and this place literally ran me down physically and mentally till I came to Phoenix on June 9, 1992.

The apartments in Phoenix were very modern and beautiful with dishwashers and some had a washer and dryer in the apartments, but their walls are still too thin. Just about all apartment complexes have pools and even Jacuzzis.

I spent my first 5 days here with Andy who had been here 16 months before I got to his 400-square-foot studio apartment. I ended up getting the same studio two buildings away from him on the first floor. Then, I moved right behind him into his building in an identical studio. The walls were also too thin there and I hated my neighbors. This was in the Vista Ventana apartment complex.

Then I moved about 40 minutes away to the Crystal Creek complex in April of 1993 into my first 2-bedroom apartment on the second floor that was about 1000 square feet. My husband lived next to me and that’s how we met, but I hated the people below me.

Then I moved to an identical apartment in the back of the complex to avoid the pool noise till I moved here in September 1993. This has been the longest I’ve ever lived in one place since being on my own. Then again, I spent a total of 3 years at the Woodside Terrace apartment counting both times I lived there.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1996 I’m bored now, but earlier I typed a couple of letters and played Balistic. I need a new project. Something new and exciting that’ll take me a while to do.

Tammy left a message saying she was just calling to say hi. She would never call to just say hi, so she probably has some computer questions.

I’m getting nervous about Tom’s upcoming vacation. I’m afraid all we’ll do is fight no matter how hard we try not to.

When I look at this man there’s so much love I feel, but there’s also so much anger. I just try to remind myself that I’m sure he tried to find a way to tell me the truth, but he just doesn’t have the heart to break my heart and no one should be forced into being a father or a mother if it’s not what they want. I must continue to accept that just cuz I can’t have the things I want, doesn’t mean there’s not something else out there just as fulfilling.

We had sex yesterday which was a bore. I didn’t cum cuz I had taken care of myself earlier due to thinking he wouldn’t bring it up.

He says his favorite time for sex is in the mornings, but his actions show me he likes it at the end of his day. It’s safer that way. That way he’s more tired so he can hold back.

I know now that Tom and God are only trying to protect me. I’ve been praying steadily the prayer I wrote a few pages back. This way I can feel close to him and that he loves me cuz I’m praying for what’s correct for me.

There are two things out of the many things that Tom’s been all talk and no action that I’m truly grateful for and that’s that he doesn’t wake me up when I’m asleep for sex as he said he would. He’ll also never read my stories which saves me lots of embarrassment. I told Tom that if I die to give my original journals to Andy. Andy will read them, but Tom wouldn’t, so I guess it’d be best for those books to go to someone who’ll read them and get a big kick out of them. The only other person in this world who might want to read these would be Tammy, but I don’t think she’d have the time.

I’m gonna go leave Andy a message unless he answers.

Later…

I can’t believe it took me 30 years to learn that the word instrament is spelled instrument when it applies to a musical instrument!

Andy’s been on the phone for quite a while, but I left him a message. He’s probably talking to Quinn.

Karson hasn’t called which is fine with me. I admire her respect whereas Fran would keep calling people who didn’t want to hear from him, no matter what. I’m still amazed he doesn’t call periodically. He must’ve lost my number and forgotten my married name.

I guess now’s as good a time as any to write more about my life. I’ve thought of such subjects to get into such as places I’ve lived in, health situations and accidents I’ve been in, goals that are both current and past, friends and enemies I’ve had and people I couldn’t be with that I once wanted very much to be with.

There’s not much to say in the way of goals since these have pretty much been a joke for me. I’ve always wanted to be a singer. I didn’t start wanting to be a mom till I was about 24 and then after I left the NHA when I was 26 it went away till I met Tom. I should visit a place like the NHA daily cuz this not only may bring back bad memories, but it’ll surely help me get over never having a kid much easier.

Up till I was about 10, I used to also want to be an actress, but I haven’t wanted to be since then, even though, if a legit deal came my way, I wouldn’t necessarily turn it down.

I had thought about working with the deaf since I’m fluent in sign language, but there’s so much more needed for that than just knowing how to sign. There are extra credentials required like experience working with all different kinds of people, other degrees, etc. Nowadays, I’d just prefer to have a deaf friend to sign with for the fun of it as signing is fun.

Other than wanting to be a singer and a mom which cannot be, I just have to have confidence that I’ll find something just as fulfilling and productive. Like I said, I may wonder why God hates me at times, but I know deep down he’s just looking out for my best interest and loves me enough to protect me. Therefore, I have faith in him that he won’t just let me wander around aimlessly forever. He’ll make sure I cross paths with something. Meanwhile, I know that as long as I keep praying for him to continue protecting me from pregnancy and stuff like that, that I know would hurt me, and that I’d be lousy at, and to help me find something correct for me, I’ll be on his good side for sure.

Let’s move on to the health and accident department. Well, I’ve been lucky for the most part, but I’ve been through enough hell as well. Besides typical colds and flues, I’ve had to deal with asthma and allergies for the most part. I outgrew my asthma till a few years after I began smoking and I began smoking when I was 13. From about September 1990 to early 1993 was when I went through hell with my asthma, having attacks that nearly killed me. It was a constant living nightmare that I never thought I’d be free of. It had me in such a grip that this alone made me wish I was dead plenty of times.

When I was about 9, I had double viral pneumonia and was hospitalized for two weeks in New London, CT with it since it happened while we were at our summer home at the beach in Old Lyme, CT.

When I was around that same age, I was spending a few weeks at Jenny C’s house in Huntington, MA where I went over the handlebars of my bike and wound up with 60 stitches in 4 layers in my chin.

I also banged my pinky finger and my knee doing gymnastics. I got my pinky sprained on the vault and sideswiped my knee on the beam.

I was born with no outer ear on my left side and no canal or hearing. All I had was a tiny portion of the lobe. It took 15 operations in the 70s in Boston to build the outer ear out of plastic surgery. The first 8 operations were in-patient, and the rest were out-patient. Back then they had no CAT scans and was told I’d never hear out of that ear.

Then, in 1994 it took two operations to build an ear canal and in the second operation, the frame was taken off cuz it was causing major sensitivity. Both operations were out-patient. It’s amazing how it took 15 operations where I had to stay a few days to build the frame and it took only one to remove it in 10 minutes when I was home that same day. That ear doesn’t hear half as well as the other, but some hearing is better than none and music sounds pretty neat with headphones on.

The rest of my medical ordeals were self-inflicted. I began cutting my forearm as a sick way to release my pressures which became rather addicting at around age 8. That escalated over time but stopped when I was 17 after I jumped out of a window and broke my upper right arm. That was the most painful thing I ever experienced, aside from wild cramps due to the DES, and that deterred me from suicide attempts, even though I’ve thought about it many times.

I also began starvation diets when I was around 10 and that nearly killed me twice. It began when I was at the beach and didn’t eat or drink for 3 days. When I awoke on the third day, I couldn’t raise my head off of the pillow. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the kitchen was 3 feet away from where I’d slept, I’d have died as my mother couldn’t care less. Her attitude was, “You did it to yourself; you correct it.” It took me nearly 8 hours to muster up the strength and determination to grab a devil dog, then 10 minutes to open and eat it, then another hour or two to get up and shower.

This really messed up my stomach and I’d have diarrhea without even knowing it. It was so gross and embarrassing, but I’d be right smack in the middle of the beach when all of a sudden this brown stuff would be running down my legs. I don’t know who I was madder at. Me for doing this or at my mother for not helping me. Would she have left me to die if I could never have gotten to the cupboard for that Devil Dog? I’ll always wonder about this and it’s a scary question.

I’d have times when I’d not eat here and there, but I always made sure I had plenty of liquids. When I was 16, I became seriously anorexic. A lot of it wasn’t just that I wouldn’t eat cuz I thought I was fat, but I was going through such a hellish ordeal that I just couldn’t eat and the second foster mother I was with wouldn’t feed me that much at all.

When I was around 14, two years before what I just wrote about happened, I overdosed on pain and sleeping pills. Luckily, though, I never needed my stomach pumped.

Before I get into more detail about my life, I think I’ll describe all the places I’ve lived in and that’s omitting any foster homes or funny farms I’ve been in for now.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1996 Tom went to bed a couple of hours ago, and he says he’s gonna get up in about 6 hours. This way he can reset his schedule and he’s already all caught up on his sleep. I wish I could do that!

I called Sandy and Jenny a few hours ago as I figured they’d more than likely be home then, rather than tomorrow morning.

I am amazed at how much Sandy loves to get my drawings. She says she and Jen really look forward to them and run to check out each other’s drawings. Cool.

Sandy and I also teased each other about the weather. It hit a high of 13º there today and they just got 6” of snow dumped on them to add to what’s already there.

Sandy also says they all laugh about the pie incident now and then.

Michelle hasn’t called Tom, so I wonder if Andy talked her out of it. If so, it’s no big deal and I told her she didn’t have to do it and that it was no biggie.

Now I’m gonna start this week’s letters. All the laundry is done, so it’s nice having that out of the way.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1996 Last night I cried for 6 hours and was so depressed. I was trying to do anything and everything I can to shake it. I still haven’t talked to Tom about it and I won’t ever.

There’s something I’ve always realized that I realize now more so than ever before. There are two things, actually. The first thing is that I’ve come to see more and more that even if I could have the things I want, I could never handle them. I’m just not cut out for them. I can’t sing well enough and I could never be a good mother or handle that either. Also, I realize more than ever that I’ve got to start accepting what can and can’t be and stop trying to fight these fights I could never win. I’ve got to let go and just take what I can get in life and take what’s meant to be. I’m wasting my life and driving myself crazy by trying to get things that aren’t destined. I see more than ever now that it’s not that I’m a quitter or am giving up in any way, it’s that it’s hopeless. I simply am powerless to obtain the things I want in life. I really lectured myself earlier about this telling myself, “Come on now, you know that just cuz you got here and you got Tom that you still can’t have first best. You know you can’t have anything you really want that really matters to you. First best isn’t meant for you, so just accept that and move on.”

Move on to what, though? That’s the scary part. Accepting that I can’t be a singer or a mother is frustrating and depressing, but not knowing what’s meant for me for real is scary. God obviously doesn’t want me working regular jobs any more than he wants me singing or being a mom, otherwise he’d have me able to do that and keep a schedule. He didn’t make me that way or able to be a singer and a mom, so what does that leave? What’s he got planned for me? Does he even have anything planned? Do I even have a destiny? Is this really it as far as my life goes? Will I just continue to do journals, sing for fun, watch TV, do puzzles and clean the house? Is that it? Is that it aside from whatever else Tom and I do together? Is this all I’m good for and deserve?

I miss those days when I first got here when I was so happy constantly, despite my problems with neighbors and money. It’s not that I wish for that life back, but I wish I wasn’t hit as hard by things both physically and mentally. It seems that most others who find they can’t have something they really want can get over it much quicker than I do. They seem to accept it quicker and easier and they also always seem to find something fast enough to replace whatever it was that they first wanted and accept it without being so depressed about it. Maybe these people aren’t as happy as they’d like to be, but they don’t seem so miserable over not being able to get what they consider first best cuz most of us don’t get first best cuz life doesn’t work that way. I guess the only thing about it with me is that wanting to be a singer is much more of a long shot, than wanting a child. Most people can’t sing at all and don’t become singers, but most people also can have a child.

Andy was reminding me again earlier that his sister Linda and her husband tried for 8 years before they could have a kid and she experienced all the same emotions as I am. Yeah, well there’s a big difference between someone who can’t get pregnant due to a physical problem than there is with someone who can’t get pregnant due to her husband making sure she doesn’t cuz of his own individual fears as well as his fears of how much she’d suck as a mom and couldn’t handle it. Well, he’s right and I realize more and more that Tom is afraid cuz of how I’d be as a mom. He hasn’t got any faith in me than I’ve got in myself and I don’t know if all the talk he used to say about believing I’d be a good mom was always just talk or if he’s come to see and believe that through time.

There are still only two things Tom can do. The only question is when? When will he come out and tell me that he not only doesn’t want to deal with a kid but that he doesn’t have faith in me as a mom? If not that, then he’s gonna have to make sure he finds a way to beat the appointment in ‘97 and make sure it doesn’t work for him.

Yes, this type of misery is better than the old types of misery which I know sounds funny. At least I’m not in the NHA or broke or alone. Yeah, I know, though. The person I’m with is fucking me out of a dream. Believe me, I’ve asked myself how I could love him for doing this to me and why I don’t just leave, but I love him. Just like I used to ask myself how I could love my mother after all she did to me, but I guess I love her too. I also know that if it weren’t for my mother I wouldn’t be here and if it weren’t for Tom, I wouldn’t be hearing out of two ears and I wouldn’t have a lot of other things.

I wasn’t kidding when I said I wouldn’t talk to Tom about this anymore. It will never change anything and he just doesn’t get it. He’s not the one who wants a kid and to be a singer and he doesn’t want to change anything to make it so we have a kid. Nothing will change the 3 things that are keeping him from cumming. 1. His not wanting a kid to deal with. 2. His fears of my being a bad mother. 3. His enjoyment of teasing me with this subject.

Nothing will change God’s mind either and I want so much more than ever to work on not trying to solve problems that can’t be solved year after year. I have to treat unsolvable problems like hopelessly broken TVs. If it can’t be fixed, you dump it. Well, it’s my life and Tom can control my body from getting pregnant, but he can’t control me from refusing to play this game and deal with hopeless problems year after year.

For the first time in eons, I prayed to God and here’s basically what I said: I still may never know if you’re a hoax, a myth or evil and you know the reasons why I’ve been afraid to pray to you. I’ve also been confused for the longest time as to what I should pray to you for. Nonetheless, I see it’s obvious you won’t budge on the issue of a child and I know you’ll never allow me to have a child or allow Tom to allow himself to have an orgasm. I’ve come to realize that it’s not that you won’t allow me a child to punish me, but that you’re just trying to protect me. I promise not to fight you on things you won’t allow anymore if you’re really trying to protect me and all I ask is two things. Please continue to protect me from pregnancy as I see that I could never handle it or handle a child. Also, it’s very important that you help me find a supplement in life. Something I’d be satisfied with doing that’ll occupy more of my time and help me to accept not ever having a child. I’m tired of being upset over things I can’t have, so please help me to make it easier to accept the things that I can’t have and to find other things in life.

I decided it was my turn to play another game with Tom. Well, you remember our bet about 5 months ago I knew I’d win and I did win? We bet that if he came within 30 days that I’d have to go a day without smoking and that if he didn’t cum, he owed me nothing. Due to his loving to lie about it, he said he was sure he’d win the bet and that there was no doubt in his mind about it, but we both knew he wanted to lose. He didn’t seem the least bit upset about losing, either, cuz that’s how much he wanted to. I made a new bet with him. I said he could have till March 1st to cum with no excuses such as bad days where he’d need more time. If he didn’t cum, nothing would change. If he did, he doesn’t have to clean the back room (which he tried putting a guilt trip on me about earlier cuz he said he’d clean it nearly 2½ years ago) and also, I’d go a day without smoking. I told him, though, that I don’t make bets I can’t keep. He asked me, “If I clean the back room before March 1st, then win the bet, do I get to trash the back room?” I told him OK. Why does he love things so trashed and unorganized? He says he doesn’t, but his actions say differently, just like with the kid, or else he’d have cleaned it long ago. I can’t believe how stupid he thinks I am. Anyway, we both know he wants to lose this bet and that he will, so I’m far from worried about having to go a day with no cigarettes. And again, if he did cum, it’d be once and during a time when I couldn’t get pregnant and so he could get out of doing the back room and so he could see me suffer for a day without smoking.

Only two things will happen. He’ll either admit the truth about the kid or beat that 1997 appointment.

Tom’s also sick again, by the way. NOW does he believe me when I say it’s gonna be one thing after another and that he’s not the only one trying to hold us back?

The roof in the back room is leaking much more and he’s got to figure out what to do about that this weekend. I also wonder how much longer the TV will last.

I thought the hair growing out by my ear where it had been shaved looked stupid, so I trimmed the other side to make it even. It looks better this way.

Later…

Did I mention something funny I did with Sandy’s birthday letter? On Jenny’s, I drew a flamingo and on Sandy’s, I drew 3 palm trees and wrote: If you stare at these trees, will people think you’re weird? This is what she said was the case when she stared at all the palm trees in Florida.

I forgot to mention how I got the nickname Mystery. It was my stage name as a dancer. A friend’s friend had a baby named Mystery, so that’s how I got the idea.

I spoke to Andy and Michelle about Michelle calling Tom from Big Brothers & Sisters and asking what I already wrote about. Yes, she is an excellent actress and yes, she will do it. When I first told Andy about what I wanted Michelle to do to Tom and why, he was nervous at first that if Tom gave me an answer I didn’t want to hear, it’d ruin our marriage. Now, why would he think that? I explained to him, of course, that it was just my way of assuring myself whether or not I should mention adoption. Of course, the truth is to see if he says he doesn’t want a kid.

How will I react if he tells Michelle he doesn’t want a kid? Not surprised, but pissed. Also, as hard as it’ll be, I’ll have to keep my mouth shut about it, cuz then I wouldn’t be able to do something like this again if I needed or wanted to. Besides, it won’t change anything. It’ll just reaffirm what I already figured, and he’ll be all upset if I were to confront him. Not due to being tricked nearly as much as being “caught” with confessing. I think his answer might be “maybe” rather than “yes” or “no,” cuz he’ll probably not want to bother discussing it and he may not wish to answer yes or no without knowing what the point is. Of course, there’ll be no point as she’ll be hanging up in mid-sentence after his answer.

After the job is done Andy will tell me over the phone what his answer was. Not on the machine, naturally, so there’ll be no way Tom will know about this unless he reads my journals or bugs the phone and I highly doubt that.

Later…

Tom worked 4 hours, then stopped by his parents’ and now he’s working on the back room. I appreciate how aggressively he’s been working the back room, but I almost feel like he’s punishing me for it. It’s like he’s saying, “OK, if you’re gonna get on my case with the back room, I’ll do it, but I won’t be giving you sex.”

No problem getting him to go down on me, but we haven’t screwed for a good 8 days or so. It’s amazing how long he can go with no sex and how low his appetite is, but I’m sure that in the shower and when he goes to the bathroom, he gets it out of his system.

He said he saw a city van go in to clean next door when he got home yesterday. I guess the city does own the house and that they’re gonna try to sell it again. Soon the 2-4 or more kids will be there as well as the 1-2 dogs.

Can you believe I’m 98 pounds 2 days before my period? Lucky me.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1996 Now as far as that love life that’s a joke – well – like I said before, there really wasn’t any till I met Tom. I didn’t understand my being a lesbian and that it’s a genetic thing you’re born with until I was in my early 20s. I just thought it was a phase I’d grow out of, but I was always attracted to women since I was little. They were always better looking to me, but certainly not every woman. I’m pretty picky. I always used to wish I was one of those where looks didn’t matter to me, cuz then I wouldn’t have spent so much time alone, even though that’s much safer.

Once when I was about 13, I let a boy go down on me, but I never came. Then when I was 20 and in my first apt., I let another guy go down on me and I came. I think his name was Richard. The roommate I’d had at that time liked him, but we both saw soon enough what a lying immature jerk he was.

Then I met Ron M when I was 21 and we even told my parents we were engaged. I just didn’t know how to say no to second best yet and thought I couldn’t do any better or ever get a woman. He was the first guy who could get inside me, even though it took a few months of trying and even though he was small. Ron and I were history 6 months after we met.

Then I met Al L when I was 22. This whiny little geek was the type to hate everyone and find problems with everyone. He couldn’t get it in there and he had premature ejaculation, anyhow. After two months, I was sick of him cutting me down, so he was out of the picture.

One night, also when I was 22, I guy named Mike came over and he ate me out as I jerked him off by hand. I never saw him again after this night.

Then after I moved for the 4th time when I was 24, I had oral sex with two different neighbors, Mark and Jai. The reason why it was only once is cuz that was all Mark wanted and Jai felt bad for cheating on his girlfriend.

Lastly, I had a one-nighter with Bruce, a guitarist I’d met. This was the second guy I ever had inside me, who was also conceited and negative toward me. Then there’d be no more guys till I met Tom in 1993.

It was right after my 24th birthday when I learned that I could get a woman, but not Miss Right. Miss Right was always straight, gay and taken or gay and not interested. There would be 6 women. Diana for one night, Lisa for one night, Kacey for a month, Brenda for 7 months, Ann Marie for two nights and Julia for one night. Julia was the only one I was with out here in Arizona.

I met Diana, Kacey and Lisa at a gay bar that Andy and I, who are also gay, would go to in Springfield here and there.

Diana was Puerto Rican, 5’ 4” with shoulder-length dark hair, dark eyes, and was chunky at about 140 pounds. I forgot what she did for work.

Lisa was an EMT and I remember wishing here and there that we could have more than one night. She seemed really cool and just an easygoing person in general. She was 5’ 4”, skinny with shoulder-length reddish-brown hair and brown eyes.

Kacey felt for me what I felt for Brenda. I really wanted Kacey in the beginning, but she just couldn’t get into me. Brenda wanted me really badly, but she became too persistent and had so many problems.

Kacey lived in a duplex and was the only one I’d ever had for a lover or a friend at this time that had a decent job and income. She was a chemical operator and made just over $15 an hour. She was 5’ 4” with light brown hair to her waist and she had hazel eyes. She weighed about 110.

Brenda was my neighbor and this is how we met. She was 5’ 6”, very thin, with medium-length brown hair and brown eyes. She was part Cherokee and she had distinct features and she looked Cherokee. She drove a taxi.

Brenda was a good person who wasn’t stupid, but she was a wimp. She just didn’t know how to stand up to those who pushed her around and she began doing crack. She was also smothering me.

I met Julia at the first club I danced at. She came in as a customer with a male friend of hers and she told me she was curious. A few months later, we got together. She was Mexican, 5’ 2” with hair down to the middle of her ass that was dark and so was her eyes. She was of average weight. I think she worked in an office.

Then I met Tom who was also my neighbor in April of 1993. I moved into his house the following September and we were married on June 15, 1994.

Later…

I guess Tom isn’t sick again. He just had a sore throat due to some allergy and just needs to catch up on his sleep as I did.

I asked Tom his opinion of Jenny. He thinks she tried calling when she got my letter, couldn’t reach me, then had second thoughts about it and figured it wasn’t meant to be.

Maybe, but I think she never intended to call. Lucky for me, though, in a sense. I just don’t want no shit.

Later…

I just did the same Snoopy drawing I did in the back cover of my paper journal. He asked me to do it so he could carve it.

Luckily, I’ll be asleep during most of tomorrow cuz I have a feeling the neighborhood kids just might enjoy the basketball hoop next door, even though I haven’t heard anything in days.

Tom’s working half a day tomorrow, then he’s gonna stop by his parent’s house. I wonder how his parents are enjoying their new neighbors.

Sunday and Monday are Sandy and Jennifer’s birthdays, so I’ll call them Sunday. I made cards/letters with drawings and I hope they arrive on time.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1996 I drew a woman on her toes in ballet slippers up to below her knees in the kitchen. I got the idea from journal 41. I don’t know if I like it. I guess it’s OK, but it seems that one foot is bigger than the other, as usual. It’s hard to get two eyes just right, two eyebrows and two feet proportioned.

I’ve been thinking of an idea that I’m finally going to put into action. I’d need Andy’s roommate Michelle to do this, though, cuz Tom doesn’t know her voice and I don’t know anyone else who could do this for me. I just hope she’s as good of an actress as I hear and won’t fuck up. I was thinking of having her call and say she was from Big Brothers & Sisters and ask if he has any kids, then if he’s planning on having any and see what he says. Right after his answer, I’d want her to start to say something like, “The reason why I’m calling is-” then put her finger on the receiver as if the line got cut off by mistake. Then, she can report to me or have Andy report to me whether or not he said no to the question of if he’s planning on having any kids.

My own best friend, however, doesn’t know the truth about Tom as Kim does cuz she’s a nurse. I’m just too damn embarrassed. He thinks it’s just the DES that’s the problem, so I’ll say that the reason why I want her to do this is cuz I’m thinking about asking him about adoption, but that sometimes people may answer a stranger differently than someone they know.

He was in a good mood, as I said earlier and he said he felt relaxed and calm. Just what he needs to feel to cum, so he says. Is this why he only wanted to go down on me earlier? It’s ironic - and maybe funny - but true that there’s one day out of every month that I cannot count on us having sex and doing other stuff. That’d be the 14th day after my period started, of course.

He’ll be on vacation from the 10th-19th of this month and I jokingly said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we made a family during your vacation?”

He said, “That wouldn’t be funny. I’d be happy.”

Yeah, right. Sure he would. Well, his vacation’s out of the question anyway as I won’t be mid-cycle till a day or two after his vacation.

When I thought back on the message that he wrote for me in the angel journal, I’d always thought there was something phony or just plain old not right with it and it was last night that the answer hit me. I guess it was the way he worded it “if you’re not a mother” and not “if we’re not parents.”

We were talking about what sex therapists do and he was telling me that they condition people like he’s conditioned himself to wake up before his alarm goes off. I then asked him how come he couldn’t condition himself to cum and he said cuz it’s harder. Oh. Then that’s not gonna help us in ‘97 for sure. What the doctors will have to do would be strictly physical (plant his sperm in me), unless he then comes out and admits to not wanting a child.

Speaking of kids, well, I do hate to listen to them, just like other people’s music, dogs and whatever noise they can give off. Once or twice in the last 5 days or so, they’ve been fucking using the basketball hoop next door. I fucking swear, if there was a way I could tear that thing down I would! Don’t fucking tell me this is gonna be a new thing with them that’s going to occur more often. And the bulk of the time the kids have made noise has ironically been mostly when Tom’s here. As if God’s really trying to tease and rub in the fact that he won’t allow me one.

I just wish I knew why God hates me so much. Take Karson, for example. You mean to tell me that God loves her so much more than me that he goes and blesses her with a child and feels that she deserves it more than I do? Does he really think I’m that undeserving and such a bad person? Obviously so. I just hope to hell Kim can get pregnant when she marries Doug. That’d really restore some of my faith in God.

Anyway, I’ve decided to write according to subjects for the most part. I told you about myself, Tom and where we live and now it’s time for me to tell you why I hated New England so much. It’s too damn cold, old, ugly and expensive. That pretty much sums it up, not to mention the many bad memories I have from back there. I always felt “out of place” since I was little and that I didn’t belong there, and I really believe that I was born in the wrong state. I always knew I was meant to live out west. I just thought back then that it’d be California. I can’t wait to visit California, though.

So, where have I traveled to? Well, I’ve been to all the New England states as well as New York, and other states below Connecticut. My parents and I drove to Texas when I was about 11 to see my sister Tammy who lived there when she was married to her first husband.

My sister Tammy who’s 38 now lives in Salem, Connecticut. My brother Larry who’s 42 lives in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts and my folks like in Palm City, Florida. I’ve been there 3 times. I don’t remember the first time, though, since I was just a baby.

Anyway, Arizona’s the furthest from MA I’ve ever been.

Rather than get into my family and places I’ve been too much now, let me continue on with the jobs I’ve had. I don’t want to jump around too much and get sidetracked too much.

After I both quit and was fired from the Harley Hotel, my parents got me on SSI and SS checks in 1986. It wasn’t much and sometimes they had to help supplement me. I only worked a couple more jobs that barely lasted a month cuz I hated it so much and found it getting harder and harder to keep a schedule.

I tried waitressing in Springfield, then I worked in the laundry dept. of a nursing home in Springfield, then down at the end of my street in Springfield in a small convenience store, then waitressing at Denny’s in Chicopee with my best friend Andy during 3rd shift.

I quit all of these jobs, but I quit the one down at the end of my street out of fear as the neighborhood was getting deadlier by the minute.

I tried housekeeping on my own and babysitting back east here and there and even when I first came out here, but that was a drag, too.

Then I met someone after I’d been here a few months in 1992 who told me she was an exotic dancer and she didn’t feel threatened or scared by her work and that I should think about doing that myself. I did think about it for a few more months and after I’d been here for 6 months, I finally got up the nerve to audition at a nearby topless joint. I auditioned with two songs and even other dancers gave me tips. I got $18 just for those two songs and was hired that night.

The good news was that my money problems were over, but I was making far less than I’d hoped to. I thought I’d have hundreds of dollars left over to just blow off in the mall and even help my sister out back east, but this wouldn’t be the case.

For 8 months I worked at 4 different clubs. I didn’t work too much through February of 1993 cuz of a cold followed by the flu. First I worked at Sha Na Na’s, then moved and worked at the Mile High club which was the deadest. So, I left there and went to work at the Candy Store, but they changed their story as to what hours I could work, so I left and went into private-room dancing at a place called Favors. I made $275 the first night, got my picture in a magazine that these places advertise in, but then left cuz I made no money for 3-4 nights in a row. The last place I danced at was the Ex-Caliber club and that was OK, but by then I had settled in here with Tom and just decided to take care of the house so we could have more time with each other as he worked days and I’d have had to work nights.

[cascallisto]

[1.2.24]

Hello, hello! I’ve decided to start consistently journaling as one of my New Year's resolutions, so that I can keep track of my progress this year and many to follow. My list of resolutions this year include:

Journaling

Focusing on and dedicating at least 24 hours to one project each month

Reading at least one book each month

Drawing for 30 minutes each day or at least 24 hours each month in total

I think these are all fairly achievable goals that I can contribute to throughout the year without getting too burned out. It would take about a minimum of 2 hours out of my day, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, and I’d have the weekends to catch up if one day is more of a struggle than another. 

In starting this journal, you may notice that I started on the 2nd and not the 1st of January, and that is because I allowed myself a day to rot in bed before truly starting my year. I don’t know why, but large markers in the year are very intimidating for me. Starting anything new is always intimidating, especially if I’m tracking my own success. Because of this, I always allow myself to rot the day before. This means I start a day later than the rest of the world, which takes the pressure off starting the year. I’m already “behind”, so there’s no one to compare myself to, and it’s no longer a race. 

On January 1st, I was in bed all day, and I didn’t track the times for when I accomplished any tasks. I don’t think I got out of bed until almost 3pm. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t productive, though. It just means I was lounging in bed. I did work on the setting and characters for a new, solo D&D campaign I want to run that I’m quite excited for. I was getting the urge to write an epic high fantasy, but I’ve also been playing Baldur’s Gate 3. That might be the reason that all my inspiration for the story was leaning heavily into D&D. This will be a homebrew story that I write, so it won’t take place in the D&D world, but I will take the characters’ races and classes straight from the D&D manual. I’m not sure if it’s considered D&D fanfiction because I don’t own the rights to any of those things, but if it is considered fanfiction, so be it. I don’t care what it’s called because I’m having fun with it. 

As for January 2nd, I woke up with a strange bruise on my thigh that I assume was from laying on the same side of the bed the previous day without moving. I showered at 9:40 and finished around 10:10 before completing my skincare routine and such from 10:20-10:45. Then I had breakfast, which consisted of egg salad on a bagel. Throughout my morning I was listening to episodes 2-3 of the Critical Role podcast on Spotify.

My sister and I had talked previously about reading more books this year, so we decided to read together. I was reading A Court of Thorns and Roses last year and have decided to continue reading it this year as my first book of 2024. I read from 12:30-1:19 before I decided to work on editing chapter 1 of Project Demon. While editing, I realized that I’d been calling chapter 0, chapter 1 and chapter 1, chapter 2 when talking about this project online. That’s a bit embarrassing, but from this point forward I’ll be referring to the first chapter of the book as chapter 0 and the second chapter as chapter 1. 

Anyway, I edited chapter 1 from 1:30-5:32. I wanted to spend about an hour on this project so that I could either continue reading or work on some art, but Pro Writing Aid added a new critique feature that was stroking my ego. I also wanted to reread the chapter to get back in the mindset of writing the story since I didn’t write all December, but it was mainly the compliments that kept me going. 

Then, from 6:00-8:45, my sister and I had dinner together. My mother made me an onion, garlic, cinnamon, clove, and lemon tea because I’ve had a terrible cough for about five weeks now and it shows no signs of disappearing. It’s a “medicinal” tea so I’m sure it’s alright for me to call it absolutely disgusting because it isn’t a show of my mother’s ability to make tea. It’s just gross for medical reasons. I also had leftover fried rice with seaweed and kimchi, which was delicious.

Of course, from 9:00-9:33, my family gathered in the living room to watch episode 4 of the new Percy Jackson series. I have always been a mythology geek, and I was a huge fan of the series in middle school. It’s one of the only book series my brother could stand as a child since he wasn’t much of a reader, and my sister and mother have never read the books. All I’ll say is, I’m praying on my knees for Nico’s introduction since they deleted him from the movies. It’s what will make or break the series for me since I stopped watching the first movie when it hit me that he wasn’t in it. If he doesn’t make an appearance, the internet will have to convince me through TikTok edits that it’s worth my time. 

After the eventful episode, I showered from 10:00-10:55 and worked on my night skincare routine from 11:00-11:36. I decided that the New Year is a better time than any to start wearing my retainer again as I prepared myself for bed. I was in bed by 11:40, but I couldn’t sleep because the joints in my legs were aching. I had no explanation as to why, so I took melatonin at 12:15 and was asleep by 1:00.

[priscila-runs]

Week 5 of 20 complete! Here’s my diary of what I tracked, thought, and learned during my fifth week of training:

Did the math last week on food and realized that I must fuel more 🍕! If, per my various online sources, a runner should eat 20-24 calories per pound of body weight for every 1-2 hours of training, then I need to be eating around 2200-2500 calories a day. Since I’m eating about 1200 a day right now, my belly will be glad to know lots more company will be joining her in the coming months. Pasta, black beans, brown rice, sweet potatoes, lentils, bananas and yogurt are currently on the VIP list. Dreading the poop schedule adjustments but let’s cross that bridge when we get there, shall we? Daily log:

Monday: took the day off per my new schedule. Been reading Freud lately which gives me lots to think about while running. What a fascinating and (perhaps unfairly) misunderstood guy. Salmon, asparagus, brown rice for dinner!

Tuesday: FIRED UP. Banana beforehand. Five miles to start off the week. Yogurt after a solid 8:20s pace.

Wednesday: Felt a little more tired and groggy in the morning but managed four miles at 8:teens pace. I’m snacking a lot since it’s an easy and quick way to fill the fuel tank or whatever. Dinner was lots of pasta, broccoli, bell peppers, chicken. Yogurt and granola for dessert.

Thursday: Exhausted and woke up late (5:25AM) and antagonistic so I’ll apologize later, feeling bad about it now. Anyway, doing my hair takes a while and this morning it led to me getting caught up in conversation. My boyfriend told me that Freud says women are culturally stunted. I find that very interesting and even intuitive so I don’t disagree, but is it possible that men are stunted in culture, caught up in it and its materiality and that while women are dialectically attached to society, women experience and therefore feel beyond culture? Idk. I wrote about the conservative nature of women in domestic roles and the relationship of this dynamic to Texas society. Maybe Freud and I could have written something together in another life. Anyway, these conversations w/bae in the morning completely make my day 🥰 Went out the door by 6:30AM and came back by 7:30AM. It was a 2x2 mile tempo 🥵

Friday: Lunchtime run of three miles at 8:20 pace. It was a good run and I was able to sustain pace! Tonight my friend Sarah and I are going out to dinner and then a DJ dance party afterwards.

Saturday: wow came home at 2AM after one cocktail, three Modelos, and lots of dancing. I paid for it today with a three miles at ten minute pace 💀💀💀 but I had a complete blast last night so it was worth it 🪩 Did ten minutes of HIT and added stability stretches to do at the end of every run, but first I’m going to pilot them tonight before bed. Long run tomorrow. For the rest of today I’m going to hydrate constantly, eat a lot (healthy), and then to head to bed very early tonight. I know these efforts today will pay off tomorrow.

Sunday: 13 miles today! It felt fantastic. Woke up around 6AM and had a bagel w peanut butter and drank a glass of water and coffee. By 8AM I headed out with sunscreen lathered and my UCan gels strapped. At mile 7 I had to stop by a convenience store for a water bottle—investing in something collapsible will be crucial otherwise I’ll be lugging around a weight once I’m done hydrating. Next time I’ll take my gel at 40-45min instead of 1hour. By some accounts it’s important to gel before actually needing it. I’m out of packets so I’m debating trying a new kind or going with the same brand as they seem to be working fine. Form and cadence are essential!!!!! Improving these and also focusing on them during my runs has made the most difference for my speed and endurance. Since I need strong abs, arms, and legs for good form and cadence, strength training will be a big priority for me entering week 6.

Practicing mindfulness.

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As a runner, I am at all times on the lookout for new methods to enhance my leg power. Sculpting robust legs will help runners get sooner and keep away from operating accidents. one Examine (opens in new tab)A research revealed within the Journal of Power and Conditioning Analysis discovered that 40 weeks of power coaching helped distance runners enhance their VO2 max (the quantity of oxygen your physique makes use of throughout train) and run extra effectively. As a health editor, I really like nothing greater than diving right into a exercise problem, and subsequent on my listing was the lateral step. A variation of the normal step-up, which works your quads, glutes, calves and hamstrings (right here The right way to do a weighted step-upand tryout variations), lateral step-ups additionally work your hip flexor muscle mass.One other nice advantage of the lateral step-up is that it is a unilateral train, which means you are engaged on strengthening one leg at a time. This implies you will shortly be capable of spot any imbalances within the physique - we regularly have one leg that is stronger than the opposite, and strides can really feel simpler on one aspect. However what if I added 50 weighted lateral step-ups to my routine for one week? Is that this one train each runner ought to have in his or her repertoire? Learn on to know extra. The right way to do a lateral step-up To do lateral step-ups, begin by standing subsequent to a field, bench, or step. In the event you're new to this transfer, keep away from utilizing a field too excessive at first - it must be decrease than your knee peak to begin.Standing subsequent to the step, place one foot on it, the opposite on the ground. Utilizing step foot, push via your toes, have interaction your glutes and core, and carry your toes off the ground so your toes are stage. Slowly return to the beginning place, touchdown softly on the ground on the balls of your toes. Repeat all of your repetitions on one aspect earlier than switching legs. (Picture credit score: Shutterstock)As with all workouts, should you're a whole newbie, otherwise you're returning to train after an damage, it is a good suggestion to speak with a private coach earlier than including reps or weight to this train. Strolling with poor kind can put you liable to damage. It is also price noting that it is undoubtedly not advisable to do a decrease physique exercise each single day - I did it for the problem, but it surely's not a standard a part of my exercise routine. I did lateral step-ups daily for per week — here is what occurred So what if I do 50 lateral step-ups a day for per week? I grabbed a step and a set of dumbbells (see Greatest adjustable dumbbells Right here to work from home), and obtained the job. Here is what I discovered: One leg was undoubtedly stronger than the opposite As talked about within the introduction, one of many advantages of lateral step-ups is that you're working one leg at a time, serving to to focus on physique imbalances and stop overtraining the dominant aspect of your physique.I do know from expertise that my proper leg is stronger than my left — I am right-handed and sometimes lead with my proper leg when operating, and the identical applies right here. I discovered that I used to be extra balanced on my proper aspect, and the workouts appeared tougher to carry out once I was main with my left foot. I had a private coach examine my kind, and he stated that it was completely regular for one leg to be a bit of weaker than the opposite, that I used to be doing the fitting factor by specializing in unilateral workouts to strengthen my left leg. By the top of the week, I undoubtedly felt extra assured on my left aspect.He additionally notes that this train is one which's straightforward to get unsuitable—it is tempting to push off from the toes on the ground, however that may put stress on the ankles. Motion should come from the toes on the bench. I felt my core

work I typically fell right into a little bit of a rhythm with these exercise challenges however discovered that I actually needed to deal with the transfer and transfer slowly and with management. The touchdown is simply as necessary because the ascent, and I discover if I do not have interaction my core, I fall again to the ground, particularly if I take advantage of dumbbells. This may put strain on the toes, ankles, knees and decrease again, so have to be prevented. I used to be fascinated with this train After getting a private coach to observe my kind, he additionally famous that I typically used momentum to propel myself ahead as I lifted my legs. He made me take into consideration staying grounded in steps and solely transferring upwards. Leaning ahead makes strolling simpler, because it takes the load off your quads. Nonetheless, leaning ahead isn't good on your decrease again, so think about maintaining your torso straight throughout this train. Normally these week-long challenges comply with an identical sample — I get actually bored by the third day, and must provide you with new methods to combine up the train to maintain it fascinating. This was not the case right here. Certain, it wasn't probably the most thrilling finisher to my exercise or run, however I needed to focus and I labored to extend my dumbbell weight a bit every time. After all, seven days is not lengthy sufficient to construct muscle, however I discovered that by the top of the week, I felt extra assured in my left aspect. I will undoubtedly be placing these in my leg day classes once I gear up for the London Marathon this spring, I am glad I haven't got to do one other 50 tomorrow morning.Searching for extra leg day inspiration? Learn what occurred when our health writers 60 leg extensions per day for per weekPlus this 7-Transfer Kettlebell Leg Exercise which strengthens your decrease physique. Extra from Tom's Information Immediately's greatest dumbbell offers