#and i don't....i can't conscion it

[liketwoswansinbalance]

What Rafal's Physical and Immaterial Coolness Could Represent

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As a forewarning, this post is more... observational and has less of a singular, hard-hitting point to it. (Also, see Conan Gray's "Fight or Flight" song for reference, as, most of this post occurred to me in relation to that very song, if you interpret parts of it as representing Rafal's internal monologue on the subject of Rhian's substitutes during Rise.)

Also, this is a long post, so it's going under a cut.

⸻

Why is Rafal's immediate response to personal hurt avoidance of all things? Isn't that kind of a heightened, overly instinctive, clearly "uncool" reaction to have?

And yet, strangely, we still classify it as in character for him. His leaving was, arguably, the most iconic and true-to-self thing he did across both prequels. So, I want to ask: why is that?

That he just up and left seems apathetic and could be construed as part of his cold, cool nature, of course, but still—when we look at what his reaction truly is: he chose flight.

(Flight as opposed to the alternative fight, freeze, or fawn responses.)

FLIGHT! Like, can you believe it? This man, who's so headstrong and willing to stare down anything, chose flight. Let that revelation sink in. (Maybe this is more obvious than I think, but I can't believe I hadn't thought of this weird discrepancy before. Flight!)

Anyway, to explain Rafal's reaction to (potentially) having been emotionally hurt by his argument and corresponding bet with Rhian at the start, I'm going to reference a theory from an old post, as it has suddenly become relevant once again.

In short, the idea is about how Rhian's expressions of authority are personal while Rafal's are nearly always impersonal. Rhian is a master of social dynamics, considering how deftly he lies in Fall to gain favor from others and influence their views of him. And, this makes sense because he once cared so much about how he was perceived, as we take into account his original self-consciousness and his high-minded, conscionable tendencies from Rise. He is the one who wields interpersonal power as Rafal, correspondingly, wields impersonal (often more tangible and brutish) power.

If anyone would like more elaboration, here's an excerpt from that old post:

The strange thing is, in Fall, Rafal admits to having conceded a lot of the time to Rhian in the past, in the face of smaller, pettier arguments, a trend which also represents his yielding to Rhian's (supposedly nonexistent) authority in the early days. That tendency seems self-contradictory of Rafal, but perhaps, even Rafal's authority is situational. He's capable of exercising it over everything and world, but not over his own brother. He can't rein Rhian, the inevitable force, the "fatal" (to invoke both death and "fate") tides of change, the Prime Mover, in. Meanwhile, Rhian is the inverse of that. Rhian cannot exercise authority over everything and the world, but he can do so over his own brother. Besides, Rafal, often by sorcery or by outright manhandling, manipulates and exerts his physicality over others and his environment while Rhian rarely does. And yet, Rafal (from what I remember) never so much as lays a hand on Rhian during Rise (in Fall, everything changes and escalates). I don't yet know why this is, but I think this observation is true most of the time. At least, I haven't thought of any exceptions yet. The working hypothesis I have is that Rhian (being the brother who chose to stay in the comfort and limited confines of the home, according to the Bettelheim text's ideas) only initially felt comfortable to do anything there. To act, and exercise his authority in an intimate, narrow, personal way. By contrast, Rafal (the more worldly, well-traveled, and inconstant brother) wants to gain independence from their stifling "home" life, under the Storian, and, as a result, upon his return, could've felt like a stranger in his own home and with Rhian (who's also changed in his brother's absence regardless). Thus, while Rafal can certainly exercise his authority impersonally, he doesn't feel at ease exercising authority over the familiar because it could be too close for comfort, too unsettling, unsettlingly different and the same, like he can't shed the disbelonging that drove him out of the fairy-tale construct of the "home" as a safe, childhood refuge in the first place—when Rhian first questioned his very core purpose and Evil's existence.

Thus, again, Rafal's ability to wield power is, without exception (I think), always impersonal.

The closest he comes to Rhian's brand of power, which involves acting on a smaller scale or more on an individual, one-to-one level and being intimate, are his interactions with Hook and Midas. And, despite those seductive instances, Rhian is still the master of all the smaller scale exploits, like with Hephaestus and the Pirate Captain rescuing him from the Doom Room where he'd been "abandoned," whenever these acts are in fact intentional.

Yes, Rafal possibly unwittingly, by being more open with his victims, has broader appeal, but that side of him isn't all pure strategy, done with intentionality. Part of it is just how he is. Rhian, unlike his brother, strikes at something inside people that doesn't just rely on scare tactics and classic, one-dimensional intimidation. In Fall, he gains a creepiness factor and the ability to lie convincingly, importantly, without blushing.

Also, I want to commentate a little on Rafal's novel instance of blushing during Fall, which was quite unlike his usual self.

First, here's some context about physical coolness, the socially-perceived "cool factor," and how blushing can only ever be sincere and is valuable because it is involuntary from Quiet by Susan Cain:

I suspect Fall aimed to establish Rafal as more "trustworthy," and as more subject to having humility thrust upon him, than he had been in Rise, when he had previously been insurmountable.

Yet then, after that "invulnerable," unaffected precedent he set about himself, he started blushing, signaling that he suddenly began to care, and that the opposite was true of Rhian as Rhian changed throughout Fall and became more immune to his old, constant feelings of shame that originally must've formed his moral compass.

Also, Rafal gets more points towards being an actual sociopath! He just partially lost his former, low-reactive temperament when he turned "Good."

One other thought of note:

Has anyone ever headcanoned Rafal as having an avoidant attachment style? To complement that, Rhian would probably have an anxious attachment style.

Essentially, the traits of these attachment styles are Rafal and Rhian personified.

Rafal:

Rhian:

[evesaintyves]

for @remadoramicrofics - it outgrew microfic status, almost 2000 words, but i'm submitting it anyway. combining October prompt guts and October 14th challenge triptych.

three acts of bravery, maybe. read it below or on AO3 🎖

Packing up sets the world back in order. He learned to do it before he learned to tie his own shoes. With his mother clucking get your things, Remus—hurry now and his father directing the flight of reference-books into a box, wand swaying, face of stone, it was clear that sentimentality was only a weight to be dragged. He learned very quickly to snip any string that might tug at him—he is nothing if not a quick learner—and, eventually, to evade those ties altogether: to harbor no love for the peaked attic bedroom with the view of the river, the back garden overrun with primrose and gnomes. Nor the blue-eyed neighbor girl who peeked through the fence-slats. 

It is a kind of art, to keep a life small enough to fit inside one suitcase, and it has saved him from more tight corners than any countercurse he might throw in a duel.

When Tonks put her hands to her belly, eyes all sparkling with some unrecognisable joy, and said now, don't freak out, I have to tell you something: it was a strangling feeling, like a dog snapping at the end of its lead. There had always been a way, until now, to walk off and start again. This miscalculation would be the end of that. Now he was chained to his regret, she was chained to him, and the thing inside her was chained to its brutal future.

He didn't freak out. He watched her lips move, her hands grab at him, and calmly, silently, he made the only conscionable decision.

Tonks made a mess of the house before she left; even the velveteen hippogriff she bought for the baby is lying on the floor, eyeless, disemboweled and spilling its batting-scrap guts. She screamed at him, she called him a bastard. And a liar. It doesn't matter, he's been called worse. He's been worse. It was satisfying, in the end, to see her finally understand: she took her hands off him like she'd touched something disgusting, her mouth quivered, she backed away as if in terror: how can you just stand there, she breathed, raspy from all her carrying-on, and look at me like a fucking stranger?

Easy, he might have said. I am a fucking stranger.

But he didn't say anything because he didn't have to. She was crying so hard when she apparated off to her mother's that he thought she might splinch herself—and a week ago, or maybe even this morning, that might have curdled his insides with terror and dread. 

But he has unhooked himself from his insides. That's an art, too, and he's well-practiced: it can be every bit as natural, he finds, to feel nothing as it is to feel something. Easier, even, once you've mastered it. 

He clicks shut the suitcase, knots the length of twine.

James, he says to himself, I'll find him. I'll give everything I have.

It isn't much. He's got hands that know how to kill and the will to do it. He's got a ruined body, still absurdly walking the earth while so many more deserving have returned to it. He's got the shame of all his generation's failures, the cans they've kicked down the road to their children. And he's got a monster inside: lusting, ravenous, insane, goading him to go after her, bury his face in her powder scent and beg, to confess that I want you, I want to live, I want to have what I want—

What higher calling, for someone like him, than to put all that between Harry and a curse?

 

Shh-shh-shh, Tonks whispers. She presses a kiss to the warm dry scalp, with its menthol smell of ointment, its tickling hairs. We're going to Nan's house.

Teddy, on a brief intermission from wailing, roots his red little nose and mouth against her shirt. He's always hungry, he's been on her sore tits all day—he was latched when the call came from Kingsley. It is never enough.

She can't just wait. She's not a keeper-of-the-home-fires. She's springloaded, a coil of taut potential straining for release—trained to fight three-on-one, to throw jets of wandless fire from her open hands, to keep her pulse rate seventy-steady all the while. They need her, they can't spare her, what is she doing here?

Waiting for death to come and find her, that's bloody what. They'll step over Remus's body ( he's a good fighter, not the best —these awful thoughts won't stop— he's distracted, scared, has too much to lose. His clicky old knees could betray him. He'll think of the baby, lose his focus, miss by a centimetre and that's the end. It could have already happened ), they'll swarm the castle like driver ants, and then they'll come for Teddy. She'll be in pieces before she lets them get to him, but once she's gone he'll be so helpless, swaddled in his bassinet. She won't have it. She won't sit and let it happen.

She stands there for a moment, in the dark house, with Teddy bundled to her chest. He's winding himself up for another cry, back spasming, a bubble of snot in his nose. It'd all be easier if she could just get him to sleep, but she's not good at that—it's hard not to let it feel like a failure. He's cried so much in this house she can hear it even when he's quiet, the sound has soaked into the walls. This, here, is the life these three have only just begun to make: the kitchen table permanently sticky with jam, the tousled bed: biscuit crumbs on her side, a stack of books on his. The baby's things everywhere, socks and sleepsuits, corduroy dragon, the cot overturned in her rush to get going. Blankets gushing out over the rug.

That's what she's got to go and fight for. This is only the start! They've got years, so many years, so much happiness and lost time to make up! So many knuckle-kisses, murmured sweetnesses under the duvet, Remus jiggling the baby through colic all night, giving her his worn-out smile from the doorway—God, fuck, she's never even told him about the time her dad took her to the zoo and she morphed herself a crest like the iguanas! The Obliviators had to come and zap everyone, Dad turned the colour of beetroot trying not to smile! He'll laugh himself sick!

She's got to go, so she can tell him. That and so many other things. He keeps appearing in her mind: sprawled across flagstone, hole burnt in his robes, face up and staring at the Great Hall's fake sky. Do you know what's up there, behind all the magic? he asked her once, years ago on a mission together, sitting hidden in the boughs of a tree. When she shook her head no, he said, Spiders. It's infested completely, there are a million. And cobwebs thick enough to swing on—don't ask me how I know. He waggled his eyebrows, charming in a way that was unlike him and perfectly fitting all the same. She was so taken by the thought of eight million eyes watching her little self perch on the stool at her sorting that she just grinned at him, gormless. He looked at her face like he was deciphering runes. And it's clear, now, that he was hers at that moment. Since that moment, he has been hers.

She won't let them have him. They've taken too much already: Dad, Mad-Eye, Sirius. The hope of every muggleborn kid who should have, this year, looked for the first time up into that indoor sky and felt the touch of wonder. She can't get it back, but she can make them pay for it. She's got enough revenge boiling down in her gut, it could power a thousand killing curses—she could explode with it, it could set her on fire—

C'mon, baby, she says. Teddy's shivering breath is so warm, so soft, on her chest. We've got to go.

 

When Nymphadora was a little girl, long before she got her wand, she used to break a stick off the sycamore tree and run about brandishing it, casting made-up hexes, making explosive sounds with her mouth. Halt! she'd shout at the imaginary enemy. Andromeda never knew where she'd gotten that. Ted's little black-and-white telly in his office, maybe. She'd jump off the garden wall, land on her face, pick herself up and announce, I'm okay! Even when she scraped up her elbows, even when she knocked out a tooth. She was always okay.

Andromeda has never asked—and who? Who would even tell her?—but she thinks that must have been how they found her. Faceplanted in the mud, wand out in front of her. Little warrior. When she handed the baby off that night she had that same look on her face: I'm okay, said through a mouth of blood.

Teddy is more of a dirt-digger, beetle-watcher, masher of rose hips into pretend potions. She has to stop him at the door and check his pockets lest he bring home a toad, a wriggling handful of earthworms. That's a bit of Ted coming through, she's pretty sure. This afternoon, she watched Teddy stop his potion-mashing, squint into the mess, and fish out a pill bug with his chubby little fingers. He held it up to show her: roly-poly, he said proudly. He's only just started pronouncing his Ls. He set the bug aside on the grass and recommenced his mashing.

Teddy's a lover, he doesn't like to kill things. That's the privilege of a peacetime child. For lunch he gets spaghetti hoops on toast, his grandfather's guilty favourite, and then a little kip upstairs. Andromeda cleans the mud off his dungarees, and off the carpet where he's tracked it in, and off the doorknob and the bathroom sink and his booster chair.

Nymphadora and Ted used to chuckle to each other at her arsenal of scrubbing charms, the shirts folded in squares. Like that sort of thing was her idea of fun. No. That was the daily fight against entropy. Her daughter, born under the standard of this potted aspidistra, raised in this tidy defiance of the mess outside, never understood. She went charging off with her wand out and left Andromeda to walk the floor all night for months with this little war on her shoulder, the baby that wouldn't stop screaming—and who could blame him? Andromeda understands that desperation, that longing for something impossible. The night they buried his parents, Teddy cried like he was begging God. 

Andromeda didn't. She doesn't beg.

I know what you think you're doing, Narcissa told her once, a week before she left with Ted forever. She'd cornered Andromeda in the upstairs hall, gripping her wrist and hissing so that Father in his study wouldn't hear. You think you're doing something brave. You're not, you're just running. Anyone can run.

Andromeda would never concede that she was right. She wasn't—not about Ted, not about leaving home. But still she thinks about it. There's an Order of Merlin upstairs, in the locked room that was Nymphadora's, gleaming in its velvet case. For her courage. Her sacrifice. There's no denying that she earned it. But days like this—when the house is silent and Andromeda is folding dungarees, rinsing tins of spaghetti hoops—she wants to take her long-gone daughter by the shoulders and say: my darling, you have no idea.

images by edward hopper: a room in brooklyn, sun in an empty room (detail), rooms by the sea (detail)

[rjalker]

also for the record for those who haven't watched the show I wanted to say:

this is the face of defeat lol.

[ID: A screenshot from the 1987 show Beauty and the Beast, from the second episode Terrible Savior, showing Catherine, a white women with blonde hair sitting in Jace's office, who speaks to her from offscreen, saying, "You remember his first rule?" Catherine has her head tilted slightly to the side, her lips pursed, her eyes slightly blank. End ID.]

She has lost this conversation and she knows it. She cannot keep pretending she has the moral highground when she took self-defence lessons from their mutual friend who explicitly told her that if someone tries to kill her (again) she has to fight back in the most vicious way possible because the person trying to murder her isn't going to have any qualms about 'fighting dirty' so she can't either.

She wants to pretend that fighting back in self defense isn't conscionable but they both know she doesn't actually hold that rule for herself so she's lost this conversation and they both know it.

Sorry. It's just very funny to me and important that people know what this expression is for.

his line at the end of "I don't have to tell you the difference, you already know or you wouldn't be here" is because they both know that if she really thought fighting back was just as bad as attacking someone in the first place, she'd literally be dead, and has absolutely no ground to stand on to argue that teaching people self-defence is just going to put them in more danger.

I don't have screenshots, but right before this scene she protests that Jace's people shouldn't be teaching little old ladies how to punch, because "they could get hurt resisting a robbery like that".

so Jace explains that that little old lady over there got her finger cut off because a robber wanted her ring and she couldn't get it off fast enough, so he cut it off for her.

[collymore]

The right to life isn't the sole preserve of British lowlifes, or their evident controlling Zionist scum!

By Stanley Collymore

The last time that I checked, and that was immediately actually prior to my very studiously creating, drafting, and as I then afterwards do start the concise formatting of each respective poem I've written, I established for myself as a consequence people were still legally entitled, and simply likewise fittingly allowed, to quite peacefully protest, in Britain! So why then are the demented right-wing, distinctly trying so ardently and distinctively irrefutably desperately, to actually silence very decent people whose own views and stated opinions, in a staunch and discernibly evident and literally, highly commendable solidarity unquestionably actually with the Palestinians, who plainly these noxious critics, can't stand and, as such, in their rather most authoritarian mind set, conjoined with a very evil, odiously bullying manner, are literally vociferously insisting that, the UK authorities forthwith, rescind all the lawfully constituted rules in situ, relating solely to public demonstrations, Instantaneously ban them; and, instead, a quite unquestionably coercive prohibition then firmly put on people that distinctively are legally and very openly too crucially doing nothing wrong!

And just because these aptly honourable protestors fully cognizant of the realistic and true history, that initially sparked and predictably very understandably keeps this conflict literally going as apart from the essentially brazenly sanitized as well as the irrefutably outright-lying type, which Zionists actually dearly love to proselytize and the brainwashed readily take in because they're so undeniably crucially effectively intellectually challenged; vile, noxious vermin!

Rather unmistakably in marked contrast from the numerous decent men and women knowing full well, what war crimes are, and how several odious, British Prime Ministers, quite barbarously, together with the UK's Establishment, actually intentionally and totally calculatedly evilly endorsed, honoured and vilely sickeningly eulogized and blatantly still do so, these sick, malevolently unrepentant, war criminals amidst the frequent passing of billions of both UK and US currency actually between these now unmistakably well-heeled, but characteristically still effectively, the simply rabidly, toxically verminous and odiously pernicious scum they've actually always have been but irrefutably additionally now living the life of Riley but who literally truly don't wish either to really know about or else emphatically and simply suitably, both conscionably and crucially, are quite indifferent to the obviously, very intentionally created and deadly awful state of affairs for every Palestinian!

And therefore, and quite aptly so, a genuinely and rather essentially, undeniably distinctly discernible, very obviously plausibly credible and undoubtedly too, quite natural litmus test for all present day and, significantly also, distinctively future generations of Palestinians as yet unborn that’ll distinctly - if something concrete and positive isn't done to accord each Palestinian not only justice but equally, what's similarly their own back - have no other option but to fight on, indefinitely; most aptly: from the River to the Sea!

(C) Stanley V. Collymore 7 November 2023.

Author's Remarks: The concluding line in this poem was included not only because it fits adequately into the symmetry of the rest of the poem and the general thoughts I undoubtedly want to naturally and obviously outline but likewise also, because when there are undeniably cretinously arrogant morons about who assume that they either can as well as rather asininely set out to coerce the British government and other UK authorities to act as dimwittedly as they are and usurp to themselves the role of “Thought Police” my own counter reaction to that as a mentally liberated person is to summarily let such idiots know what they can do with themselves while carrying on intelligently, and similarly responsibly, by doing what I always do and which is to categorically and significantly think for myself.

How “from the river to the sea” can be anti-Semitic beats me when those who’re said to be using it as their purported battle hymn, namely the Palestinians, are themselves unquestionably biologically SEMITES, and the interlopers, who took their land from them and that they’re allegedly using this slogan against, purportedly while claiming to be Semites, rather pertinently and most categorically, significantly aren’t any such thing; as they’re unquestionably white Caucasians undoubtedly from Europe; never mind that a few of them practise Judaism which, not dissimilar from Christianity and the Muslim faith, is a Semitic religion, simply because these faiths were created by people who were genuinely biologically SEMITES. And to use the asinine arguments you’re evidently and idiotically proselytizing makes no sense to anyone with a functioning brain and who can think for themselves. No wonder, with the lack of such people among your lot, you effectively, and quite essentially as well, distinctly do need a thought police. Charles Windsor is constitutionally, in a country that has no constitution, unlike the USA, Germany and other white ruled countries for example, effectively the Head of the Church of England – make of that what you will, regarding a serial adulterer; who either obviously has no clue about or any discernible regard for the Christian 7th Commandment, but all the same he’s the C of E’s head and supposedly a Christian. Quite essentially I’m also a member of the Anglican Church – High Church C of E  precisely, as we call it in Barbados, but it’s a properly ordained religious figure, an Archbishop, who heads the Church there and unlike England the Anglican Church in Barbados is completely separated from the state, which is not the case in the UK, as you essentially have Bishops sitting in the House of Lords and MPs and Prime Ministers like Boris Kemal-Johnson determining not only who these principal bishops should be but likewise also the top man as well, namely the Archbishop of Canterbury. But to return to Charles; he’s white and I’m Black and we’re both also British. Should I now therefore because I’m a devout member of the Anglican faith and a committed Christian as well, call myself a SEMITE, because the religion of which I’m a part and have been all my life was founded by Semites; or should Charles do the same?

Quite preposterous wouldn't you say if either of those two ridiculous propositions did actually occur? So why the hell then and obviously in the era of the DNA are we having fraudsters that are simply and very effectively playing the most catastrophic, of all the pogroms experienced by their white Caucasian people and within Europe at the hands of their own European kind - not Palestinians, not Barbadians - for every bloody financial windfall they can carry on incessantly getting, because of selective white guilt, but only to them, not anyone else who were similarly victims of that European holocaust: Evidently no gypsies whose death toll was far in excess of the 6 million stated "Jews"; quite distinctly no Rhineland Niggers, as those Black French men and women were called, and the list goes on – yet it was they, European Jews, but initially the Sephardic Jews, who initiated and profited immensely from the Transatlantic Slave Trade in my beloved ancestral homeland of Barbados; but we ourselves nor the rest of the world mustn’t remember, or dwell on that – the utter blatant hypocrisy; since no one else in the world but EUROPEANS were responsible for that continent’s holocaust, as the same odious mother fuckers see fit to forget the other holocausts likewise perpetrated across the globe by other European nations, notably Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Germany where in what’s now independent Namibia but then was a German colony of Southwest Africa, as all the enforced colonies were as obviously the indigenous people didn’t invite them in, but Namibia then as Southwest Africa systematically had over 80% of its indigenous population wilfully wiped out, with the Germans openly admitting that it was to be a precursor for what barbarically subsequently occurred in Europe. So drain Germany financially as much as you want to you acquisitive Zionists but cut all the lying and disingenuous crap about the Palestinians, as what you have is what you actually took from them. No different from Australia, New Zealand, Canada the USA and the Chagos Islands; with those in Australia asininely and essentially so contemptuously claiming that Australia was Terra nullius, empty of any living people, notwithstanding the fact that the Aborigines have been living there in their own homeland continuously for in excess of 66 thousand years. But you kiss-me-ass whites unquestionably, self-evidently have convenient memories!

And as far as slogans do go - does this one ring a bell with you fucking, idiotic hypocritical whites: “The only good Black person is a dead one.” You’re not going to own up to it, you never bloody well do to your acts of barbarity so why this? Should this also be a distinctive subject matter for the Thought Police? I don’t think so; and I don’t know of any other mentally liberated Black person that would want that to be the case. And as I’ve said several times previously, Zionists and Zionism have bugger all to do with Judaism or any other religion; since it’s distinctively a political creed, no different from Nazism; and all that its evilly vile and sick adherents are doing amounts to nothing more than a very calculated takeover of most, though not all, aspects of Judaism. And we know precisely why - loads of money; not only ongoingly received from Germany through the Weidergutmachen Compensation Scheme and which has run into literally billions, as well as what you get from the USA for not having nuclear weapons; which even the most obtuse prat in the world knows is a fucking lie, since Israel and its Zionist bastards has plenty of them but under US laws the United States of America cannot finance rogue nuclear states, those that don't sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and refuse to let the international nuclear watchdog inspect their facilities and officially confirm the authenticity of their situation. Israel has intentionally bailed on all of these same conditions others must comply with; as the USA accommodates and plays their same fucking daft game, pretending that they don't know whether this rogue state Israel has such weapons or not. Yet only this week a senior Israel cabinet minister was suspended for say Israel should nuke Gaza to the deafening applause of the surfeit of rightwingers and predictably the Daily Mail readers and commenters. And prompts the question: how can you nuke someone if you don't have nuclear weapons. Quite as daft as expecting or suggesting that a thoroughly confirmed azoospermiac becomes a biological father! LOL!  But there are many such fathers in Britain; used as always by the trollop and slapper Karens. Yet sensible folk are supposed to see and treat these Zionists as victims; and even more stomach churningly so as "Semitic" ones!

[thisiswhattheycallafinecareer]

Mad today because some of y'all fucking idiots are still gonna vote for Trump

[frogsandfries]

So I quit

In the most, my ankle got caught in a loop snare way possible. I guess my manager found the key in my locker before I had figured out how to say, I quit.

She called me from her personal phone which, at the very least is unorthodox. She kind of lectured me on it. I told her I had mentioned I was looking for more hours. I understand she doesn't have enough hours for her staff, but that's really..... not my problem. Get a staff of people who don't need full-time pay. My problem is washing my hands of Wisconsin and knowing I can confidently, stably, permanently leave. But also, I don't really want to spend the time playing the not-enough-hours game if I can line up better prospects. If I can line up better prospects, why would I let those chances slip by just because I have to put in my two weeks? Why would I effectively waste my money on formality?

Also, maybe it's dense of me, but I feel like her not picking up on me telling her I need better hours and assuming I would stick with a small change job if a better opportunity came along, that's kind of her issue not mine. Also, her not picking up that me needing more hours kind of is your polite warning. But again, maybe dense.

It isn't even just this one thing, it isn't even feeling like she was on my ass the whole time I was sick or me being slightly afraid to communicate. It's feeling like I'm putting in the maximum without appreciation or acknowledgement. Like, oh this is her base level, let's add more without more compensation. My explorations into economies on the west coast have taught me that I'm worth more than a pitiful seven or eight dollars an hour.

As much as I like working a retail job, as much as I like interacting with customers, I deserve to be paid a livable wage. I need a livable wage, I think now more than ever. Now more than ever, I'm edging closer to thirty and I can't keep living in people's spare bedrooms. That's not independent. So much of that relies heavily on someone else. Often what they keep in the fridge, certainly their rules about housekeeping, for better AND worse. Their choice in decor and smells. Not my say in anything. And then it depends on my social network. If people I can live with are somewhere I don't want to be, I get stuck where I don't want to be.

I also can't conscionably bring a child into my extremely unstable situation. Raise my child under someone else's roof with someone else's dietary habits and housekeeping habits. What if that person thinks they can backseat parent for me? What if I have strong opinions about that? What if I just want my kid to grow up with one bed and one kitchen and a view of the ocean? The ocean is like a fifty-seven hour bus ride from here.

I quit for me. I quit for my future. I quit because I was starting to resent being managed by a stressed out chihuahua. I quit because otherwise, I will procrastinate away August and find myself in October, still procrastinating. I quit because I need to get serious. And a manager with too many employees and not enough hours just isn't going to work for me. At least I didn't disappear for like three weeks still in possession of my store key.