#but now I can't go the entire week

[ohboywonder]

..

[onesnoopyaday]

I AM AT MY LIMIT

Snoopy #90

30/12/2024

description under the cut

[description: a cartoon-style drawing of Snoopy's head. Snoopy is a white dog with black ears. His eyes are shut and his mouth is a horizontal line. There are two large blue teardrops, one under each eye. The text "I am at my limit" is handwritten across the top of the image.]

[pettyprocrastination]

whoever this beloved anon was I am so touched by your kindness! You definitely didn’t have to do this but I am so happy you enjoy this idea and I will happily expand upon it for you!

this is just a collection of word vomit bullet points for the time being but I will happily answer any and all questions about this pair!!

warnings: violence, angst, child death (Sarah Miller), foul language, the same warnings that apply to tlou, reader is Sarah's mom and described as having similar features to her. 

So the general Idea is that you and Joel are happily married before the outbreak. 

You had been Sarah's mother, his high school sweetheart he got pregnant when neither of you were old enough to have any reaction to the pregnancy test other than a fucking panic attack in one another’s arms. but you made it work 

you both worked but made time for one another and your sweet girl, going to museums every other weekend and joel insisting on swooping you off for a date every now and then 

nothing special. He knows you’re more of a diner gal than anything too fancy that makes you both feel out of place. 

On his birthday in 2003, you had planned to tell him that you were pregnant again. But the memories of your own fears of motherhood from all those years ago begin to swirl through your head again and you get cold feel. deciding to tell him the morning after

it is his birthday afterall, you want to focus on him. 

but when you’re woken up in the middle of the night because tommy needs to get bailed out, Joel kisses you sweetly one last time before promising he’ll be back and you can’t shake the feeling that something bad is happening. 

its you that shakes sarah awake that night. shouting at her to put on her shoes when she’s still rubbing the sleep from her eyes because you’ve been listening to the radio for the past two hours, calling joel again and again and again praying for him to fucking pick up but to no avail. 

Sarah, bless your little girl’s bleeding heart is the one who insists you check on the adler’s against your better suspicions and when you find the eldest looming over her daughter, blood and sinew dripping from her mouth, you grab your daughter hand and burst into a full sprint until something slams into your back and sends you tumbling onto their front lawn

its how joel finds you, struggling to keep the once sweet old woman, whose now nothing more than dead eyes and gnashing teeth straining to snap at your pulse point as you push against her while sarah shrieks before your husband runs forward and cracks her skull with a wrench. 

there’s hardly a moment of pause, just enough for him to pull you up and into his arms before he’s ushering you both into the car with an urgency. 

when the truck crashes, you get separated from them. Perhaps at Tommy’s side when the flames rise and create a wall, separating you from your husband, or maybe pulled into the mob of chaos when trying to escape from those already infected-

all joel knows is that you promise you’ll find him: just get sarah to safety and you’ll meet him at the river

Poor thing is already so frightened, held in her father’s arms with tears streaming down her face insisting they can’t leave you they just can’t but her father kisses her forehead and reassures her its going to be okay 

“we just need to be brave, okay babygirl? Your mama’s real tough, she’s gonna be alright.” 

he isn’t sure if he’s saying it to his daughter or himself. 

but when he comes to the river you aren’t there. Only a soldier who points a gun at the scared little girl in his arms and then he loses everything

its when the light is gone from his daughter’s eyes that he realizes. His voice cracked and raw from sobbing that he looks around to see his brother with drawn in shoulders and tears in his eyes but his wife is nowhere to be found. 

Tommy says you got lost in the chaos. Everything was so loud, so sudden that he turned around and suddenly you weren’t there. 

Joel wants to go back but its Tommy that stops him, that dulls the red in his vision to a sad faded pink because his brother points at the orange horizon not too far from them, so much of the city is already in flames. 

“We’re gonna find her, but not there.” 

So Joel searches. for the first year spent in the world post-outbreak its all he did. 

He became a smuggler because of it. 

Information came at a price and he needed to be able to fucking pay it, whether it be in blood or ration cards. He was willing to do anything to find you or any thin thread that lead your way. 

But it’s Tommy that asks him to give up. Not in those words of course. 

The youngest Miller knows better than to say something so cruel that would make his brother, the only person he has in this world turn on him. 

But his voice is worried when he asks him one night in Boston when he hasn’t even had the chance to wash the blood from his knuckles 

“You think she would have wanted this for you?” 

the fight that followed his words was brutal. Vicious insults and scarred fists slamming against each brother until they're both too tired and bloody to continue. Each leaning against a wall for support and Tommy’s wavering voice breaking the silence. 

“I don’t know where she is, Joel. But I do know you're gonna get yourself killed if you keep lookin’ for her.” 

All he can do is nod. 

It’s a few days later when he meets Tess. Who has heard plenty of stories about the elder miller’s brutality and wants him to put that muscle to good use for some extra profit. 

It begins his new life. One that empty and cold but one he can live. 

Until of course, Ellie comes along. The sweet and incredibly opinionated girl that makes him become something akin to the man he thought died twenty years ago. 

its when he’s traveling with Ellie, that it happens. When a warm familiarity has settled between the two because so much blood and pain has been shared he can’t help but see her as something close, something bright even though all he can force himself to utter in her reference is “cargo” 

when theyre traveling through the woods as Ellie chatters away, probing his memory about a movie that may or may not have existed thirty years ago because her descriptions of the plot are incredibly odd he hears a voice shout for them to stop and finds himself staring at a man- no, a boy- pointing a gun at them. 

Ellie stills, but Joel can see enough to know that from the lanky figure and dimpled face that he’s young. Maybe twenty, twenty-two at the oldest, but his eyes dart from Joel to Ellie with a pinprick of fear that allows Joel the time to charge forward and slam him to the ground before wrestling the gun from his hands. 

He has enough to time to tuck it under the stranger’s chin before he hears the sound of the safety being turned off and finds himself looking up and seeing a gun just inches from his face. 

Joel’s head whips around when Ellie’s voice calls out his name in fear, he turns to see another stranger holding her a gun point, shoulders drawn back and a shadow cast over their face by the had obstructing their identity. 

“You hurt one of mine, I hurt one of yours. That a fair deal?” 

Its takes him a moment to recognize you. It’s been so long since he’s heard your voice, the sweet tease when you would poke at him each time he woke up late despite the fact that you reminded him to set his alarm the night before, the times you’d chide him with a harsh “Joel Miller!” whispered in public anytime he was able to grab you a bit too passionately to be appropriate in public but the laughter in your voice let him know you were never truly mad at him. You didn’t know how to be. 

But that sweetness is buried under a cold rasp that cuts through the air as you point a rifle at the scared little girl in front of you.

“You think I won’t?” You’re older now, skin covered in scars from a life he didn’t know you got the chance to live and your eyes are cold as they regard your husband. “Put the gun down and get the fuck off of him, I won’t repeat myself.” 

Joel mumbles your name in awe. The woman he loved, the woman he mourned the one he fought so hard to find stands before him like some sort of hallucination and suddenly the world feels like its spinning until you bark orders at him again. 

“You’ve got five seconds Joel, make a fucking choice before I make it for you.” 

He looks down and realizes the boy under him, the one with the bleeding nose and snarling face has your eyes and his dimples. 

“One.” 

The one above him has Sarah’s hair. Soft brown curls that shine under the sun. 

“Two”

Wait. No, they both do.

“Three.” 

Twins. Jesus fucking Christ you had twins. 

“Four.” 

Joel holds the rifle up above his head and the one boy standing snatches it from his grasp, tossing it to the ground and kicking it far from his reach. He slowly stands, allowing your son- dear god your son- to scramble to his feet. 

Your voice softens just for a moment. “You okay, Duke?” 

Blood stains the bottom half of his face from where Joel slammed his fist into the boy’s nose just moments before, but he nods nonetheless. 

Now, they both stand on one side of you and he can see the resemblance clear as day the same way he would whenever Sarah was by your side.

When you order him to hand over his bag, he does so without question before telling Ellie to do the same. 

She watches him with wide eyes, her hands still up in the air but gaping at her companion as if he had grown a second head. 

“Joel!” “Just do it, alright?”

He doesn’t miss the way you watch their interaction with narrowed eyes until she tosses her bag to you and you slowly lower your gun. 

“Now, you want to tell me what the fuck you think you’re doin’ at my home?” 

[a-loose-collection-of-ants]

Happy pride month, holy shit

[alongtidesoflight]

i swear my stepdad is so illogical AND stubborn it hurts

[eddis-not-eeddis]

I need some prayers. My health is really bad right now, and i might lose my job.

[ihamtmus]

.

[impulsivedecisionsat3am]

this could've been me missing school (but instead i feel like garbage over winter break)

[shrikeseams]

.

[eggmeralda]

do you ever feel casually suicidal? like you're not depressed or anything you're doing fine but also it feels like a convenient option

[iniziare]

Tag drop: Dorian Pavus

[bnnuy-wabbit]

this entire Music Taste debate thing re:rap is getting annoying really fast. Im not USian enough for this.

[france-the-third]

Guys if I disappear in like... May, this fucking thing will be why

That monstrosity is a list of all the tests I have to pass to get the baccalaureate, and I need that to ... basically to get pretty much any job I'd like to do

I had to create that thing myself, using multiple government website pages about the bac(calaureat, we're lazy) because comprehensible information is apparently not a thing

close-ups/explanations under the cut

blue= explanation of an abbreviation

green= explanation of an abbreviation but it's a list that you don't need to read to understand this

italics= word(s) in french

note: i haven't reread this super carefully, so if I say oral on its own, i do mean oral exam, in french we just say un oral so my brain may forget the word exam lol

BFI: Baccalauréat Français International, basically I have 8 hours of English a week instead of the normal 3 (although with LLCE and/or AMC you get 9 or 15 hours but i'll get to that in a minute) and I have a bilingual level of English [technically I already had that but most of my friends didn't]

Coef(ficient) [x]: ...ok so i have no idea how this works really but it's basically how much is this grade worth. If you get 19/20 coefficient 1 then you got 19/20. If you get it coef 2, I think that means you got 38/40 etc. So coef 20 is huge.

DBQ: Document Based Question

Durée: length of time, how long does this test take

ACL: Anglais C? Litérature, literature basically (shakespeare and gothic make sense, O'Brien is the name of my teacher and hopefully it's a common enough name that it doesn't matter that I just realized his name's still on here oops; he's my poetry and drama?? teacher but since we don't really know what to call his class, we just call it by his name. He teaches about poetry yes but also we're also studying Beckett's Happy Days which is a play, not poetry)

CDM: Connaissances du "Monde", lit. Knowledge of the (British) World, we have to do some research projects which we will present in an oral at the end of the year

There's about 50 kids in my school who will have to do all that this year, about 50 who will have to do that next year, etc.

There's about 1500 students in my school, there's 3 years so only about 500 students passing the bac at my school this year, and only 10% of us have to do this many exams.

The international section doesn't really exist in other schools however, so there's a really small percentage of french kids total who have to do all this.

All that stuff is admittedly my "fault" for choosing to do the international section.

Everything else is mandatory(-ish)

Tronc commun: Everyone has to do this

(notice how the coefficients are at like 8, not frickin 20)

Philosophy: we have to either write for 4 hours about a single sentence they'll give us as a subject (and it can be about practically anything) (that's a "dissertation", or 'dissert' because we have really long names for stuff but then we don't bother saying the full name) OR write a "explanation of the text" which i have no idea how that works bc my teacher's a bit incompetent

N/A: Not applicable, that's for the time the exam takes, we get tested in class so there's not really a set time for stuff

(I know that's ridiculously small sorry)

Ok so now we're getting to the fun little french thing that no one who's not french ever seems to know

In 11th grade (1ère) we have to choose 3 areas to specialize in out of the following (can vary slightly based on schools):

HGGSP: Histoire-géographie, géopolitique et sciences politiques, aka political science and social studies

HLP: Humanités, littérature et philosophie, aka humanities, literature and philosophy (oo it's almost the same words in both languages)

LLCE: Langues, littératures et cultures étrangères, aka English (lit. languages, literatures and foreign cultures but it's really just English class)

AMC: Anglais monde contemporain, aka English again (lit. English contemporary world and again it's just English class)

Mathématiques - transparent

Physique-chimie: Physics and chemistry. No those aren't the same, but yes I only figured that out bc someone explained that to me, bc those two are always taught in the same classroom and with the same teacher for some reason

SVT: Sciences de la vie et de la Terre, aka "Sciences of life and the earth" (you know, bc that's specific), aka Biology + Geology

SES: Sciences économiques et sociales, aka economics and social sciences

NSI: Numériques et sciences informatiques, aka computer science

Arts (arts plastiques, cinéma-audiovisuel, histoire des arts): The list I found with all the names of these spécialités (bc they're only ever referred to by their acronyms) has art be split up like that [technically there were more but i cut them lol] which is weird bc I've never seen art history be separated from actually-making-art (arts plastiques-- Why are they plastic I have no idea) and I didn't think cinema had art history

In 11th as I said you choose 3, and you have 4 hours of each per week.

In 12th grade (terminale), you drop one of the 3 subjects you chose so that you can concentrate more on the other two, with 6 hours of each per week.

The most common combination is math, physics, biology and then one of them gets dropped.

This is just a zoom on the two I kept, I had computer science as my third spé last year.

This combination is extremely uncommon, I only know 1 other person who did those 3 subjects lol.

SVT (biology/geology): Ecrit: I have to write stuff; I wrote either or but it turns out it's both, anyways I have to do a DBQ (see above) and answer a question based on knowledge. TP aka Travaux pratiques: uhhh idk how to explain this other than actually doing science instead of just talking about it.

Art: Ecrit: Analyse du corpus d'oeuvres: we have to analyze a collection of works of art based on a question we're given, and then we can do either a note d'intention pour un projet d'exposition, lit. a note of intentions for an exhibition project; basically we have to take one (or two) of the works of art we saw in the first part and say how we'd put it in a museum. or we do the analyse de corpus + a commentaire critique, where you have to answer a question, for example on a mock we had a question about whether or not AI counts as art; and we had a text and a new work of art An oral is the same word in both; a lot of subjects don't have orals (svt for example) and basically we have to talk about the project we worked on for the whole year. I think. Pratique: actually getting to work on creating something. I'm doing an animation, my friends are doing a frieze that's themed on marine life, something to do with leaves, a crochet project that's also marine life themed, something space themed?, and a mini forest in a suitcase. Some of our classmates are doing sculptures (there's a sculpture of a female bust with holes in it and handprints all over it), someone is - i think - making a musical instrument from scratch, someone else does a lot of paintings that are humongous with lots of bold colors... This is the best part about art as a subject because you get to choose what you do.

Next up, another thing that all french people know and no one outside of france knows; contrôle continu

That is basically classes where we don't have a big test at the end of the year, which is nice, but we still have tests and at the end of the year the average of all of the tests done in these subjects counts as a percentage of the grade you get for the bac.

Maths comp(lémentaires -- we love shortening words lol) aka complementary math?: you can choose to abandon math as a spécialité but still keep some math classes in 12th. There's also something called maths expertes, lit. expert math, which is the same thing but with harder classes; but given that i only know one person who does that, i completely forgot to include it here lol

Both math classes here are optional, everything else till LV3 is mandatory.

Coef 3 en 1ère, 3 en terminale: the averages of both 12th grade and 11th grade are counted

Histoire-géo(graphy): social studies (lit. history and geography)

Enseignement scientifique: so. this thing. Despite the fact that you can take biology and physics as spé, everyone has to do this "scientific education" where the kids who took biology are bored in biology classes, the kids who took physics are bored in physics classes, the kids who took both waste two hours per week listening to stuff they already know, and the people who took neither physics nor biology are also usually pretty bored because even if there's one or two students who are interested by science but were more tempted by other things, most of them didn't take science as spés because they don't like science.

It's a great system /s.

In fairness, we are doing more or less useful things; in biology we're talking about evolution and we mentioned how - especially in France - antibiotics are being used too much and so are becoming less effective. For the people who don't do science, I suppose that's important to know, for me at least the effect was ruined by the fact that I had done that in spés like a week earlier.

In physics, we've been working on energy consumption and kind of how it works, but there's too much math in physics for me to be super interested lol.

LV2 aka Langue vivante 2, aka "living language 2": As I'm writing this I just realized that I forgot to include the LV1 in this pdf lol.

In 7th grade (or 6th if you're an overambitious nerd like me), you have to choose a "second" language, that you'll keep till at least 12th grade, and then afterwards idk how it works. The first language is English by default, you *can* make english your 2nd language but that's complex and Idk enough about how that works. French is taught from 1rst to 11th but doesn't count as a living language for some reason.

Most schools offer Spanish and another language, my middle school had Spanish + German, a friend of mine does Chinese as a 2nd language and there's probably other options depending on the school. Oddly enough, despite the fact that Belgium is at the closest about 20 minutes away from my house by car and the Netherlands are at the closest 1h30 away, Dutch is not a commonly taught language I think. Spain is at the closest about 10 hours away by car, and yet it's far more taught.

(The reason I forgot the LV1 is that in the international section, we automatically get the highest grade possible, 20/20, bc they're grading us based on British standards so they're basically saying that we speak English)

EMC, Education Morale et Civique: I'm going to be honest and say that I have no idea what this class is for or how to translate it lol, desoite having had this since 6th grade. Literally the words mean civic and moral education and if that sounds like propaganda, well, it sort of is. We've had many classes on how to be a good citizen, and how democracy works I think, but we've also had classes on other completely unrelated stuff.

Most of the grades in EMC are group presentations, and so I could not tell you about a single thing I got graded on lol

Spé abandonnée en 1ère: lit. spé abandoned in 11th. Yes we use the word abandoned for this lol, other than that I think I covered it earlier

LV3: So following the logic from LV1/LV2, I think you can guess what this is. This is a third, optional language you can take, most people don't bother because we already have too many classes.

I however am not most people lol, but I'll be adding my friend as an example here because the language I chose could be confusing given what I said earlier about LV2s. Antony [not their real name] is in the international section so has English as the default LV1, they took German as an LV2 and they took Japanese as their LV3. Based off of this logic, I have the same thing except I have Spanish as my LV3 and not Japanese. (I'm not sure how clear this would be on it's own because as I said most schools offer Spanish as an LV2 and most people choose that as their LV2. Since I did German as my LV2, I only started taking Spanish classes in 10th grade)

My school, being an international school, offers an extremely large range of third language possibilities: As I've mentioned, there's Japanese and Spanish, but also Italian, Chinese, Portugese, Polish, maybe German, possibly Dutch and possibly/probably others but I don't know for sure. (I just checked and they don't actually offer German as a 3rd language, but they do offer Dutch, and that's it. "Only" 7 languages, I kinda thought there were more [i think most schools have like one or two. A quick google search for the other school I could have gone to tells me that that school offers Spanish and Arabic as 3rd languages and that's it])

Oh and there's often Latin or Ancient Greek offered at the same time as the LV3 I think, but as they're dead languages they don't count as langues vivantes lol

And we reach the end, with these two.

Français (1ère): As 12th graders, we've already done this part of the bac, last year. The French exam used to be the same year as all the rest but if you've read this far, I think you see the problem with that lol

The grade counts as a percentage of the total bac

And last and certainly worst; the Grand Oral: Lit. the big oral, we have absolutely no preparations for this at school and need to research stuff on our own, in our "free time", whatever that is /j. (... well actually /hj)

I've had 1 teacher talk to me about this, it was my biology teacher, and so depending on the teachers you have for spés, I wouldn't be surprised if some of my classmates hadn't been told the specifics of this sucker at all.

What we have to do is prepare not 1 but 2 possible questions, either 1 per spécialité or a mix between the two subjects (there may be other possibilities but as I said almost no one has told anything about this so this is based off of my recollections of what my biology teacher said and what i found on two government websites.). The reason you prepare two subjects is so that the examinators can choose which one they want you to talk about. Twice the work, twice the stress, for a 20 minute thing.

You have to present your topic for about 10-15 minutes iirc, and then answer some questions.

In biology, my teacher gave us a few vague topics we could use as starting points for our grand oraux (yes the plural of 'oral' is 'oraux', the french language is weird), and basically it's a whole ass reasearch project that we don't get any dedicated hours to in our schedule, that no one has told us about/reminded us of and we have to do that on top of everything else here.

In case my tone isn't clear, I find this ridiculously stupid. I don't like oral exams in the first place, but usually when we have to do some in subjects such as EMC, they don't give us any other work to do while we research our oral, at least in that subject. Another reason I really dislike this is because of CDM (see the first pic, about the international section exams).

CdM is 2 hours a week where we do some research for our research projects. Again, we have 2 hours every single week, with a teacher present, to do nothing but research (and send emails to potential research partners technically), for an exam at the end of the year. This is an international section thing, so the research is in English.

There was the option of adding 2 hours a week for a very small percentage of people to learn how to research in English, and despite the fact that most people would complain if they had more hours of school, the 2 hours a week of research are genuinely useful. I've gotten a lot done since September, and I'm pretty confident about the oral.

For the grand oral, I need to come up with 2 subjects by the end of vacation (we have a 2 week break starting today because it's France and also my class at least already has terrible mental health, if we had to keep this schedule up every single week till May we'd be reduced to like 5 students per class because everyone would be having breakdowns or burnout [Antony is technically not slowing their schedule down over this break (or really any of the other breaks we had), but they're insane /aff /hj. more on that in the tags lol]) not because the school finally realized they should probably remind us of this, but because my biology teacher's a very competant and organized woman who wants to know our subjects so she can help us. (I've had teachers I've liked more or where I've been more interested in their class, but man do I love her for this, other than 2 of my international teachers, she feels like the only competant adult in this school)

[girlitfeelsgood]

I am getting so fed up with myself I just can't get myself to do anything

[racke7]

My internet has been investigated by a professional.

There might be something weird with the big cables (to quote the guy: the "inner-pair" and "outer-pair" of the eight-cables are of different lengths, but by all accounts still work just fine), but my own equipment has at least passed (no extra-fine for crying wolf for me).

The weird stability-thing continues to be weird. And current test is for them to switch my internet-provider (internet-provider has a use-contract with the cable-operators, who are the ones investigating) over the weekend. See if the problem is on that end.

It's possible that this is the case (at which point I guess I'll try to switch permanently), or that it's that weird cable-length resulting in the problem (which is... a whole different can of worms).

[secondhandlovers]

Almost the whole country is being flooded and my federal state is affected the most