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the-fourth-knower · 3 years ago

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Diary of a Lost Doe, Part 2

Part 2 is here! Read part 1 here! Left y'all off on a cliff hanger for part 1, so hopefully this part will be worth the wait.

Part 1 is a bit longer, but the first half's length is mostly spacing. This one has more paragraph format and ideally oomph to it.

Note: All Wheatfields belong to @aquillis-main, Eggman belongs to SEGA, and so on.

Diary 2 Entry 56

Fuck my life.

Angelica was gone for most of yesterday, I had to go into the Eggman zone to look for her. When i finally fukin find her she had a fucking mouse with her. Red furred, tan-muzzle/ears. Also tan tuft or fur patch. And I guess a tan tail. Clothes smell a bit like weed.

Angie insists that’s it's Trevor. This time there’s no dissuading her. It might actually be the Wheatfield kid.

She says the kid- is he a kid, he’s not that much younger than me? Fuck it, the guy ran into robots and got screwed. Angie saved him but the dude was beaten up bad or something and has barely woken up since

Angie definitely used her power on him. Even though I told her not to use it except for emergencies, multiple fuckin times

Shit i almost went through the page.

Angie’s been taking care of the guy all night and today. If I can’t get her to lay down she’ll do it all night tonight too.

Why the hell does she need to have a bleedin heart

Also, not sure but I could’ve sworn I saw Guardian guiding me to Angelica...mabye it really is a Guardian Angel for us. maybe

I think we may need to move out of here, things are too hot for my liking. I gotta figure out where we could go.

A stock of our current supplies

217 dollars and change

Quareter of a pallet of bottled water

Eight cans of food

Two bedrolls

Spade/trowel

Water can (could leave it)

Two backpacks

Duffel bag

Three first aid kits, one partly used

Three journal diaries

Half a case of pens

Three small bags of seeds

Quiver with arrows (Angie’s)

Pa’s gift to Angie (Shortbow)

Steel glove (Mine)

Pistol (Mum’s, technically Angie’s now - no bullets)

Haven’t made anything in the past few days. No one wants to hire anyone right now. And I guess I don’t look like bodyguard material. Can’t get a job with that, if I wanted to.

Man I wish Angie thought to grab some of the robo parts, we could have sold them.

Got to get Angie to sleep.

Diary 2 Entry 57, apparently.

Been a while. Finally have time to write again. Shit’s been crazy. We’re in an actual house now, or something.

Where to start.

Well first off. The Wheatfield kid finally woke up and stayed up. Freaked out at first before Angie calmed him down. Didn’t know she had it in her - usually she’s the one freaking out over things. But if she can calm down the kid then that’s a thing I don’t have to worry bout.

Turns out the kid has something the robot army dude - Eggman or Robotnik or whatever - wanted, that’s why he got thrashed in the first place. He also seemed embarassed bout his state, that or that we gave him some of our clothes. And by that I mean Angie did.

I’d been preparing to leave when some of the robots showed up. They wanted to grab the Wheatfield, and he looked like he pissed his pants.

Then Angelica got in the way.

Next thing I know there’s vines bursting out of the ground, just like what must have happened when Angie fought the thugs when we first met Guardian. They popped the robots like balloons, and animals jumped out of them. Why the fuck are there animals in there? Who uses animals in their robots???

I broke a few of them too, the ones that Angie didn’t get. Even the mouse got one that was gonna blindside Angie. So he is good for something.

Just one problem; during the fight our house shack got trashed. Or right when it started.

Well after that we obviously couldn’t stay in our place. So Angie had to say goodbye to another garden - she watered them all before setting the water can down. Or did whatever she does.

I think I’m gonna miss that dumb shack.

Wheatfield wanted to go home. So we went with him after getting everything salvageable. Angie grabbed the water can and used it to store stuff - was pretty sure at first she’d leave it, but I forgot she’s quick to adapt.

I wanna think I helped in that.

Dodged more robots to get to the house. Got attacked by one that seemed to be hunting us. That was after we went into sewers to escape them. Or we just got unlucky. So I decided to get to the bottom of why they wanted the Wheatfield kid anyways.

Turns out it was a fucking letter. A letter. All of this mess over a fucking letter.

I wanted to just throw it away there and then. The kid wouldn’t give it to me at first, so I had to get in his face. He gave it to me then. I was gonna drop

Then Angie butted in and told me to give it back. Which. honestly shocked me I think. she didn’t like me ‘bullying Trevor’ like I did.

Didn’t even touch the guy! And I wouldn’t have done it if he just gave it to me right away. I didn’t “bully” him.

whatever. She pointed out that we couldn’t get rid of the letter and get away with it; the letter wasn’t what the animal-bots wanted but the carrier.

Which gave me the idea to change how he looked. I think they thought I was gonna get rid of the kid at first - like I'd do that, sure I get mad easy but I don't just ditch people! Not sure if he liked what I did instead, but coating the guy with mud helped. I think. At least he wasn’t a red mouse sticking out in the crowd anymore.

Things went smoother after that. We managed to avoid the robots for the most part. Had to break a few of them. Saw a green orb a few times that led the robots away - came across some smashed up robots with flowers around. Guardian Angel and all, I guess.

Finally got to where the Wheatfields were living now. Near a park. Dunno why I didn’t think bout that. Then again I didn’t know it existed until the Wheatfield kid led me there.

Took Angie aside while the kid ran off ahead; made sure that she would let me handle all the talking. I wasn’t gonna let someone know bout what happened unless I trusted them, not even mum’s and pa’s old friends. She was still mad at me I think, but she agreed. Not that she’d been talking much to me all day, she was too busy making sure the mouse was okay - I guess it made sense. He was her best friend. Is her best friend? I dunno.

If I was rude then I wish I could have captured a pic of their faces when they figured out we were there. The pa of the family, Jackson, looked like his eyes would bulge out - the mum, Emma, looked only slightly more dignified.

After fussing over their kid, they fussed over us. Asked a bunch of questions. “Where’s your parents, are you okay, were you hurt, why are your clothes filthy, when did you last bathe, why are you both so thin”

I like to think that I did a good job keeping the two of us fed and clean. As best as I could anyways without running water and unreliable income - they may have meant me more than Angie. I made sure she was fed as best I could.

I planned to tell them that we would be fine on our own, that they didn’t need to worry bout us.

Then they offered us baths. And Angie just perked up at it.

I couldn’t disappoint her by telling everyone we’d leave. So I said yes, we’d accept.

And now we’re living in their house.

Fuck me, if it doesn’t feel nice. Angie’s even willing to sit next to me again, but she’s been playing with the Wheatfield kids - there’s a second one, younger brother. Solydaster I think. Kinda cute but also a bit of a pest.

Fuck, this is the longest entry I’ve written. Gotta chill now. We’ve all just laid low. The animal bots left. Guess they had something better to do. Or just got bored watching.

Still dunno bout living with them...but Angie’s happy.

If Angie’s happy I should be happy too. So I’ll try.

I can manage it. I gotta manage it. For her.

So why don’t I feel happy

#Knower writes #Sonic #Sonic the Hedgehog #Sonic Fic #Sonic OC #Annabelle Flaches #Angelica Flaches #Trevor Wheatfield #Solidaster Wheatfield #Emma Wheatfield #Jackson Wheatfield

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thatgoblin · 4 years ago

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Small Town Affairs

Summary: Hazel is an Omega in the small town of Tin Springs, Midwest America. She's trying to live her life after breaking up with the local sheriff, John Walker, and his mate, Brock Rumlow. New people aren't something that happens often, but when a new pack comes to town her whole life goes from a small mess to a complete disaster in the best way.

Warnings: Domestic Violence, Assault, Sexual abuse, Himbo Bucky, Misogyny, will update as story goes.

Chapter 1

It wasn’t often that people moved to Tin Springs, population 803. We barely had enough people to need a high school and a junior high school let alone more than a general store and gas station. There wasn’t even a Walmart for nearly 20 miles. You had to make a special trip to the larger town of Conway that had fast food restaurants and strip malls while the closest we had was a Dollar General and a ‘home style’ restaurant that was closed after 9. We did have a few bars and a strip joint, but those were just outside of town. Far enough that most people didn’t count them as being a part of town. It was very much a dying breed of Mayberry towns that used to thrive till people moved for better jobs and schools or to just get out of that small town headspace.

So when what looked like a whole fleet of moving trucks drove down the main road, everyone was talking. Turns out there was some guy with the last name Rogers that owned land that belonged to his pack that he was moving his new pack onto. The family had basically moved away or died off by the time I was 18. Most of the townspeople thought the houses on the land would stay empty till someone bought the land up for farming or to build new houses on. No one ever did and the moving trucks were telling us why it wouldn’t happen. Everyone and their dog would be gossiping and talking about who the new people were, where they came from, why they came back now, but I just ignored the whispers and gossip as I checked out folks at the general store.

“Hazel, would you be a dear and stock the shelves before you leave tonight?” The store owner, Peggy Carter, asked from her office. It sat just to the side of the register, making it easy to keep an eye on things. Her prim English accent was very much out of place in the small midwest town, but it wasn’t as crisp as it used to be when she first moved to Tin Springs.

“Sure. I’ve got my keys so I’ll lock up for you too,” I said, glancing back at her before the bell above the door rang. “Howdy,” I greeted the customers before going back to tidying my area. They were just a couple of women that were grabbing last minute items for dinner, which was the usual crowd so close to our closing time. I knew their faces, but couldn’t recall their names. I’d seen them around town, but I didn’t exactly interact with people outside of my job.

“Did you see the paper today? John Walker’s up for re-election again,” one woman said as they meandered towards the dairy section. While they sort of tried to stay quiet, the store was empty at that time of day and with it being so small that the voices carried easily.

“I saw that. He’s got my vote for sure,” the other woman said. “You know, he’s been such a good sheriff and I don’t think anyone’s running against him. It should be an easy win for him.”

“Hopefully. Things are just fine as they are now, why change them?” The first woman said. “Though, it is a bit odd that he’s with another Alpha and not an Omega.”

“I know, but Brock’s a good man. Both of them are. It’s just too bad things didn’t work out with them and that Omega girl.”

I should be used to it by now, hearing people talking about me and my exs. When you date the county sheriff and the only garage owner in town, things aren’t exactly secret. Even if they didn’t know your name or face, they knew your business.

“You know, John always said she was a good gal, but just had some problems. His mother and I play bridge at the church on Wednesday evenings and she told me that he was heartbroken over their split up. Him and Brock adored her, said they wanted to have kids too. I do hope she’s getting herself straightened out,” the second woman said.

I could handle the whispers and looks I’d get from the older Omegas in town, but this was a new low. They weren’t even trying to keep it quiet anymore.

“Just so ya’ll know, we’re closing soon, so if you’ve got some trash talking to do, do it outside where I don’t have to listen to it,” I called, earning small gasps from the women. They hurried to the front to check out, keeping their eyes down as I glared at them. If they were dumb enough to talk about me in front of me, I was not going to go easy on them. They didn’t say another word as they left, leaving me behind to glare at their backs.

“You should learn to ignore them. People will always talk,” Peggy said from the office.

“The least they could do was be discreet about it,” I mumbled. “Besides, it’s already been over a year and you’d think people would let it go and move on.”

“Well, with the new people moving in, you might get your wish,” she said. I could only hope.

The rest of the evening went by pleasantly fast. Peggy left me in charge to stock the shelves after closing. We closed usually at about 8:00 PM, no one showed up after 7:45 PM on a regular day. So to hear the door jostle as someone tried to open at 8:10 PM was odd. Frowning, I put down the pasta to look over the aisle to see a man trying to peer in. He had dirty blond hair styled back into a faux hawk of sorts, and dressed in ripped skinny jeans and a tight black tee. There were a few cuts on his face, a bandaid over his nose, and what looked like hearing aids hooks around his ears, the man stood out like a sore thumb compared to the locals. Seeing me, he put on a big smile and waved.

My first instinct was to ignore him, but since he didn’t look familiar I figured he was one of the new people in town. They wouldn’t know the hours of any of the stores in town. I decided to at least let him know the store was closed. If anything happened I had a bat under my register and pepper spray on my keys in my pocket. Going to the front, I unlocked the door before opening it.

“Hey, sorry, we’re closed,” I said as the muggy summer air came rushing in. “We close at 8.”

“Damn it,” the man hissed as he pulled out a cell phone. “Is there any other place to get groceries around here? My pack and I just moved to town and we don’t have any groceries. We’ve been working all day to get stuff into the house and didn’t realize the time.”

“Oh, uh not really, sorry,” I said. “Dollar General closes at the same time and you’d have to go to the next town over for Walmart and that’s 20 miles away.”

“What time do you guys open in the morning?” He asked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“We open at 6:00 AM.” The way he looked when I told him was like witnessing a puppy being kicked. I could smell him, he was just an Omega. What harm could it do to let him in this once? Peggy had let a few people in here and there after hours, so what was one more? “Okay, so you can’t tell anyone or you’ll get me in trouble, but I can go ahead and let you in to shop. I’m just restocking shelves, so go ahead and get what you need.” Stepping aside, I let him in before locking the door behind him to keep anyone else out.

“Thank you so, so much. You’re a lifesaver, really,” he said as he grabbed a cart and proceeded to grab things off the shelf. I didn’t mind staying late, rent was going up and it was getting harder to pay, so a bit of extra time wouldn’t hurt. “I’m Clint by the way.”

“Hazel,” I replied as I went back to the shelves. Letting him fill his cart, I finished up my work before meeting him at the register. It was a lot of food, but then again how many moving trucks had showed up? “I really hope this isn’t just for you.”

“Naw, there’s 8 people in my pack. I’m hoping this will be good enough for at least dinner and breakfast, but there’s a few of us who can eat out a whole house,” Clint said with a chuckle as I scanned the items.

“Wow, that’s a lot. We don’t really have any packs at all around here. Maybe a handful, but it’s just three people at most,” I said.

“Oh yeah? We just moved here from New York. One of our Beta’s, Steve, used to live here. You might know him,” Clint said.

“Last name Rogers?” I asked, getting a nod. “Not personally. I know of the family and the land, but that’s about it,” I said with a shrug. “Alright, and total for today is $234.89.”

“Yup, sounds about right,” Clint said with a chuckle as he swiped a credit card. What did they do in New York that allowed them to buy that many groceries? Not to mention that was just for one night, I couldn’t imagine a full week’s worth. Maybe they should go to Walmart for groceries next time. “So is there anything fun to do around here?” He asked as I handed him the longest receipt I’d printed before.

“Eh. Depends on what you want to do. We have a restaurant that closes at 9:00 PM, a few bars around here, and a strip joint, but other than that there’s not much to be done unless you’re a fan of high school sports,” I said with a shrug.

“I’m going to have to give Steve a slap upside the head for bringing us to the most boring place in the world,” he sighed before looking at me wide eyed. “I mean, it’s just that it’s kinda slow compared to New York.”

“Don’t worry. I think it’s boring too, but like most of the folks that live here, it’s cheaper to stay than to move if you don’t have another job or family else where,” I said. “Sometimes the rodeo comes to the next town over and a lot of people go there.”

“Yeah, when he said this was a completely different place, I didn’t think he understood how all of us would find it so different,” Clint said as he started to load up the grocery cart.

“Here, let me help you take those out to your car. I’ll get the cart from you and you can head out,” I said, grabbing the keys to unlock the front door to let us out then relocked it.

“Thanks. You know, I guess small towns do have a lot of nice people willing to help out,” Clint said as he led the way to a black sports car.

“Sheesh, fancy,” I snorted as he popped the trunk.

“Yeah, it was a pain to drive it down the dirt driveway I have with my mate. I don’t want to part with her, but I also don’t want to ruin the undercarriage,” he said with a wince.

“That’s a bummer. There’s a car lot in town here, but I don’t know if they’d have anything your style,” I said, handing him a paper bag full of cereal.

“Howard, my mate, would shit his pants if I tried to go there,” Clint said with a chuckle. “He’s too posh to even think of buying anything pre-used. I’m pretty sure he’d have a heart attack.”

“Sounds like he’ll get comfortable real quick,” I said with a snort.

As we were finishing up putting the groceries in the car, there was a short honk and siren bwep before a sheriff’s car pulled into the spot next to Clint’s.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Clint frowned, unsure of what was happening, but I knew.

“Howdy friend!” A familiar voice called as a blond man with bright blue eyes and an irritating smile stepped from the patrol car. Dressed in his brown and khaki uniform, Sheriff John Walker approached us. “You must be part of the pack that just moved to town.”

“Uh, yeah. Just got in today,” Clint said, shifting his body again. “I’m Clint.”

“Pleased to meet you, I’m Sheriff Walker. Figured that since I saw you in town, I’d catch you real quick for an introduction,” the man said, holding out his hand for Clint to shake. Raising a brow, Clint shook the officer’s hand.

“Nice to meet you. You’ll probably be seeing the rest of my pack throughout the week,” Clint said before closing the trunk of his car.

“You’re on the Rogers property, yeah?” John asked, resting his hands on his hips.

“That’s the one,” Clint said with a nod.

“I think I went to school with one of the Rogers’ pack. Steve, I believe his name was. He was a grade above me. His family stayed in town a while before leaving. Didn’t think we’d see anyone come back to live on the property,” John said. I wanted to get away from this conversation as fast as possible. John hadn’t even addressed me, let alone acknowledge my existence. The last thing I wanted was for him to start shit with me in front of someone.

“Probably, I mean, he’ll be in town tomorrow to get all the paperwork fixed up with his mate,” Clint said. “But I should be going. We’ve been driving all day and everyone’s tired and hungry.”

“Alright, I’ll let you go,” John said with a nod, backing up to let Clint move. I kept quiet, trying to not look John in the eye as I moved the cart back to the sidewalk. “Have a nice evening, now,” he said, typing his broad brimmed hat to Clint.

“Thanks. See you around, Hazel,” Clint said to me with a tight smile and wave. I gave a short wave back before booking it back to the store.

Don’t follow me, don’t follow me, don’t follow me.

“Hazel, wait up,” John called as he jogged to catch up with me. I wanted to scream as I stopped at the front door to unlock it. “So, you’re talking to the new people now, huh?” He said as Clint pulled out and drove away.

“John, go away. It’s none of your business and this is not part of the agreement,” I hissed, getting the door open. Shoving the cart in front of me, I tried to shut the door in his face, but he’d stuck his boot in the way.

“Look, I’m just trying to keep an eye out for you, okay? Don’t get cozy with the new people. They might be interesting, but you never know what people are really like,” he said, pushing his way into the store.

“Ironic coming from you,” I snapped, glaring at him as I moved to the register. “I’m trying to close, leave.”

“Remember what I said,” John sighed. “Don’t trust those new people.”

“I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you and we both know it’s not far,” I snarled. “Now go away or I’ll short Brock this week.”

“Fine,” he said. “But just remember, I was the one that always looked after you. Even after everyone started those rumors about you, I stuck by you.”

“A lot of good it did me. Now go.”

John looked like he might say something else, but stopped himself. Instead, he shook his head before leaving the store. Quickly, I locked the door after him. Standing there, my hands shook as tears pricked my eyes. The asshole could always get under my skin. Just a damn look and I’d be nearly in tears. As much as I wanted to believe I was stronger now and could handle myself, that small interaction showed me that he still had a grip on my life.

Finished for the night, I headed home. There were no more encounters with anyone else thankfully, allowing me to relax for the night with a beer on my porch. My house wasn’t much, a one story two bedroom house that had a less than stellar paint job, but it was home. It was old, from the 20’s, but it was sturdy. I wasn’t there much but to eat, sleep, and shower anyways.

Sitting on the porch, one beer turned into two which turned into three. It was the fourth one that I finally felt like I could stop shaking completely. The last time I had seen John and talked to him was nearly a month ago. We’d been separated for almost a year and he was being his usual passive aggressive self just to push my boundaries. He’d come into the store and made a show of talking to me like I was a kid, letting everyone see he was the calm, collected Alpha that was trying to reach out with an olive branch to fix things between the unstable Omega who just needed some gentle handling to become a decent person.

I had nearly come unglued on him, but managed to keep my voice low and my eyes down. Peggy found me right after, sobbing out behind the store. No one, not even Peggy, knew what really happened between all three of us, but I wasn’t about to tell them and neither were John and Brock. We’d come to an agreement that they would leave me alone and not talk to me unless absolutely necessary and I’d stay quiet. As well as paying them off. It was nearly half of both my paychecks, but it was worth it if it meant they didn’t come into the store when I was there or tried to talk to me at all.

But John was starting to toe the line and push back. Brock kept his part of the deal, I was pretty sure he never really cared for me, but John was always obsessive. The deal was going to have to be revisited if John didn’t back off.

Done for the night, I tossed the bottles before heading to bed.

The last few days of the work week were about the same. Go to work, come home, go to work, come home. I saw Clint now and then who came in to grab a few things here and there, but that was it. He was nice and despite John wanting to tell me who I could and couldn’t see, it felt better to know that there was someone in town who didn’t know things about me without my permission.

While we weren’t best friends, we did send memes to each other when I was on break and he wasn’t busy. At one point he messaged me a picture of his shed full of cobwebs and wasp nests and asked if it was appropriate to burn it to the ground. I told him to be careful because there could be copperheads underneath or groundhogs. That led into me explaining what those were and learning that the man had lived 37 years thinking a groundhog was something made up by a city for a holiday and it was really just a beaver they were using.

It seemed that I would be teaching him, and probably his pack vicariously, what to look out for in their new homes. I still hadn’t met the rest of the pack, though I had seen one or two here and there around town.

Soon Friday rolled around. I woke up at about 4:30 AM. Friday would be busier than usual as it was a payday. I showered then dressed, sliding on jeans and a long sleeved shirt, I then made a pot of coffee before doing my makeup. Just enough to hide the bags under my eyes and a few marks on my neck that were visible above my shirt collar.

It was my regular dress for my job at the store, Peggy didn’t care too much so long as it wasn’t offensive. Which meant anything but plain clothing and no writing. After coffee, I fixed my hair so it didn’t frizz then grabbed my thermos of coffee. I locked up then headed to work.

The sun was peeking above the trees and clouds as I pulled into work around 5:15 AM. Peggy was already there when I walked in the back.

“Did you have any problems closing the other night? I forgot to ask,” She said as I stepped into the office to get my cash drawer for the day.

“It was fine. Had one of the new people stop in, Clint. The blond that comes by for snacks. He’d made it in just after we closed, but I went ahead and let him shop since they didn’t have anything at their houses,” I said, taking the drawer from the open safe.

“Houses? You mean they’re not all in one?” She asked, looking up from her book keeping.

“There’s not a big enough house for more than four people on their property. There’s like ten of them,” I said with a snort.

“Well I’m sure we’ll meet all of them at some point. We’re the only grocery store in town,” she said.

“Unless they need to buy in bulk. Clint nearly bought everything in the store,” I said, counting my drawer at the register.

“We can only hope. Next time you see them, let them know if they need more than a few things to get us a list and we’ll get them large amounts. We used to do that a lot when there were bigger packs in my hometown,” Peggy said. The woman was nearly 60 and had lived in England up until about 30 years ago, getting the general store from her uncle who had passed away. I was used to hearing the facts of ‘We used to do this in my hometown’ a lot.

“Will do.”

Finished with setting up, I unlocked the front door and turned on the rest of the lights at 6:00 AM. The usual rush of moms right after school starts as well as early rising elderly came in, making for the usual busy rush that Peggy would step in and help with at the second register. By the time 10:00 AM rolled around, things were tapering off. We’d have a lunch rush for those grabbing a quick something, then back to a nice slowness.

“I’m gonna take my break after this last person checks out,” I said to Peggy who nodded. I was starting to get hungry and I saw a bearclaw in the donut rack that had my name on it. A few cups of coffee could only hold me over for so long before I needed actual food.

Before I could clock out for a break though, two people walked into the otherwise empty store. They were part of the new pack, just the scent alone said that, and they were Alphas. Great.

“I got this if you want,” Peggy said softly as she caught the scent too. Peggy was a sweet Beta and she acted as a stand-in grandma for me, but I couldn’t just run at every Alpha that came in.

“I’m good,” I said, giving her a small wave and smile. It wasn’t long before the Alphas came to the register. One was taller, probably over 6’, with steely blue eyes and dark, earthy brown hair with a scruff on his face. He smelt of fresh rain and peaches with that Alpha musk. Dressed in an almost too tight tee with an extra sleeve and glove covering his left arm and hand, he looked out of place in the button up work shirts and plaid that was usually worn by the adult men around town.

The other was shorter, more tailored. His light brown hair had a bit of copper to it as it was swept back from his face as that held a neatly trimmed beard. His dark eyes stayed on the phone in his hand. He too was in a tee and jeans that were fitted tighter, making them look. . . Well almost foreign. A whiff of cedar and maybe smoke or tobacco swirled into the first Alpha’s scent. Both of them mingling and making something settle deep inside my belly.

Fuck.

“Is that all for you two?” I asked, holding back with every fiber of my being any scent or sign of them making me feel like a simple, needy Omega.

“That’ll be it,” the first Alpha said. It was standard groceries of meat, cheese, dried goods, condiments, basically anything to stock up a house after moving.

“Is your pack settling in okay? Clint comes by now and then,” I said, trying to make small talk. Usually I didn’t, but something about those two had me anxious. Not a bad anxious, but. . . I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Oh, uh yeah. We’re getting there,” he said with a nod. “It’s different than what we’re used to.”

“What are ya’ll used to?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

“A lot more people and a lot less trees,” the second Alpha spoke up, his voice lilting into an accent I couldn’t place. “But it is lovely here. I quite like how peaceful it is without masses of people a hair’s breadth away.”

“Glad you like it,” I said, giving him a soft smile. “So are all of you from New York too?”

“A few of us, but not all,” the first Alpha said as he pulled out his wallet.

“Well, hopefully it doesn’t take you long to settle in. Today’s total is $87.56,” I said, tapping a few buttons on my keypad.

“Tell me, is there a nursery around? For plants that is,” the second Alpha asked, leaning onto the counter when I started to help pack up the groceries into the cart. “I am wanting to start a flower garden, but would like to see where the supplies are first.”

“A plant nursery? Um, there is one just west of the town. Just take the main road and it’s about ten minutes from town. It’s run by the Mennonites and they have a bunch of different plants to pick from. They’ve even got starter trees for fruits and some bushes for blackberries and the like,” I said.

“Thank you. I appreciate the information,” he said with a soft smile and a nod. I couldn’t help but smile back at him.

“You’re welcome, if any of your pack needs anything just ask around. We’re all pretty friendly here,” I said as I finished putting the bags in the cart.

“I will keep that in mind,” he said, moving over to the cart to hold out his hand to me. “I am Helmut. It’s nice to meet you.”

“I’m Hazel. It’s nice to meet you both,” I said, taking his hand. It was warm and soft, different than the work roughened hands I was used to. Helmut rolled his eyes at the other, elbowing him.

“Hey,” he grumbled, shooting him a glare. “Oh, uh, I’m Bucky.” A quick wave and awkward smile was all I was given as he quickly moved to push the cart away.

“He’s house broken, I swear,” Helmut said with a wink. I couldn’t help the honest to God giggle that came out of me. “Have a good day, Hazel,” Helmut said, smiling as he shook his head at Bucky.

“You too,” I called after as they left. It didn’t even occur to me that I was staring after them till Peggy came up next to me.

“You could always ask for a photograph. It would last longer,” she said with hum.

“Oh shush,” I said, waving her off. “They were just, ya know, nice. Most Alphas around here are curt and so loud and demanding. It’s a nice change to see is all.”

“Uh huh. Even if you weren’t letting them get a scent of you, you were definitely giving them eyes. I’ve never seen you do that for anyone. Not even when you were with ‘Those-Who-Shan’t-Be-Named.’ I think it’s cute and wonderful that you had that reaction,” Peggy said as she went to the other register so I could take a break. “Besides, when’s the last time you actually touched someone on purpose?”

“It’s nothing, I’m just being nice to new people is all,” I said, locking my register computer after clocking out for a break. Quickly, I grabbed the bearclaw before leaving the dollar and change for Peggy. “It was just a handshake. Besides, you always tell me to work on my customer service skills,” I said as I walked to the back door.

“I didn’t mean it like that!” She called after me.

#john walker/oc #brock rumlow/oc #john walker/brock rumlow/oc #bucky barnes #john walker #brock rumlow #bucky barnes/helmut zemo #bucky barnes/oc #helmut zemo/oc #zemo/oc #bucky/zemo #bucky barnes/helmut zemo/oc #bucky/zemo/oc #a/b/o #marvel #fanfiction

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halo-jpeg · 4 years ago

Text

Bearable | A Reddie Fanfiction

Read it from the beginning

Chapter 2

Richie's phone buzzed. Instantaneously, his phone was out of his pocket and into his hand, and he opted to check the message rather than watch the sidewalk ahead of him. A grin split his face and he caught the inside of his cheek between his teeth, biting down on that instead of letting out an excited little squeal. The text was from an unknown number and read,

Hi, it's Bill from the coffee shop. Can I get the party information?

With another three guests set to come, Richie was all the more anticipated. That brought the list of guests up to an even 40. With flying thumbs, Richie tapped back his answer consisting of his address and the time the party was starting before saving the number into his phone underneath the name 'Stuttering Bill'. The phone was slid back into the pocket of his jeans. A stiff breeze whisked past him, and he almost felt cold enough to shiver, pulling the edges of his arcade-floor print button-up closer together in an attempt to shield himself. The sky overhead was a pale grey, promising rain soon to come and snow, too, in no time at all. It was nearly November, and while the snow usually fell heaviest from December to January it was no rare occurrence for it to make an early appearance just for a week or two. Again, Richie's phone buzzed.

Thanks. Any snacks we should bring?

For a moment, Richie pondered. He had a perfect reply locked and loaded but didn't know if it was too soon for this kind of joke. What he wanted to say was 'only yourself, hot stuff' and maybe he'd throw in a 'and the short one too' but he quickly decided he didn't want these three random people to hate his guts too quickly on the off chance that they weren't okay with guy-on-guy flirtation like that. Instead of one of the many cruddy pickup lines he has ready to go he says,

No pressure, unless you want something for yourself.

As Richie puts his phone away yet again he found himself right where he wanted to be, the lovely little family-run grocery store known as 'Hanlon Grocer'. The people inside actually tolerated him and took the time out of their days to run 50 bags of Doritos through the checkout, when a few other places he'd been to for party snack stocking had actually turned him away- it also helped that the owners son was one of his best pals. He stepped through the door, running a quick hand through his slightly wind-swept hair. Almost immediately he was greeted by the young lady currently working the register, the younger cousin of Mike Hanlon herself, Jennifer Hanlon.

"Morning, Richie," She greeted with a casual wave, attention temporarily stolen from the book she had open in front of her, "Mike tells me you're having a party tonight. I'm guessing that's why you're here?"

"You're a cunning one, Jenny!" Richie leaned against the counter, his radiant smile making him look something close to insane, "I have about an entire aisle of soda to buy from you!" Jenny smiled back at him, plucking her bookmark from the counter and slipping it into place. She closed the book, sliding it aside, and Richie caught sight of the cover- The Prestige, by Christopher Priest. It was a new one that Mike had been reading a few weeks back.

"Well, Mike's somewhere here. If you flash him that million-dollar smile maybe you can get him to help you carry some things." Richie clapped his hands together, and took a step back.

"Thanks a billion, Jen- I'll see you shortly, I'm sure. Get those scanning hands ready, I'll have quite the haul," Richie took a few more steps backwards, still talking to Jenny as he made his way further into the store, "I really hope you don't mind me always making such a big fuss!"

"Pshh," Jenny waves a hand, "You're our top customer, Rich, I could never mind!" And, with that, Richie spun on his heel, leaving Jenny to return to her fine literature so he could go pack his arms full of snacks, too many to carry for one man alone. Lucky for him, just as he was about to disappear into an aisle in search of his friend, Mike stepped out into view from nearer the produce section, catching Richie's eye.

"Sure an begorahh, me ole' laddie Mr. O'Hanlon, sor!" Richie danced along the linoleum tiles, trying both to stomp and float at the same time, graceful and intimidating as his Irish Cop, "Doh ye mind lendin' me a hand 'er two?" At once Mike set aside the crate of cans he'd been carrying, meaning to restock some shelves- in Mike's mind, that could wait.

"Morning, Richie," He greeted as he stepped away from the crate, instead beckoning with his head for Richie to follow him towards the primary snacks isle, "Putting off shopping til last minute again? Do I have to tell you it might be a little more wise to get this done a week or so in advance in case you forget anything?" Mike glances over at Richie, his eyes alight with a teasing mischief as they turn left into isle 6.

"No, my good sir, you do not." Richie clasps his hands together as he speaks, leaning over just slightly to rake his gaze across the bottom shelf. One bag after the other, he scanned in search of just what he wanted and- aha, there it was, the barbecue chips, and, more precisely, the Lays barbecue chips.

"I called in for an extra order of those just for you," Mike gave Richie's shoulder a gentle push, which Richie returned with one of his own.

"Oh, you!" He was now the Southern Belle, a hand spread on his chest as he batted his eyelashes, "You really shouldn't have, Sir Michael, you are just too kind!" With that, the charade was abandoned and Richie dropped to his knees, none-too-graciously jamming his absurdly long arms onto either side of the rows of barbecue chips. As if they were his bride, he scooped them up, holding them with as much care as he would if this metaphor were true.

"Do you... want a basket?" Mike was snickering to himself, one hand lifted to hover over his toothy grin, the other planted on his hip. "Let me get you a basket." Richie was left alone for a second as Mike hurried away. Right, a basket- that... that could have been smart, Richie thinks to himself, but he isn't always too smart. Case in point, instead of recognizing that his arms were way too full and he couldn't carry anything else, he got distracted by the rows of chocolate bars and hobbled his way over there. A box of Atomic Fireballs sat in the midst of the candy, basically begging him to buy them. Against his better judgement, he tried to free up one hand enough to snag the candy.

-----

Eddie's gaze darted back and forth between two different cereal boxes- the classic Corn Flakes or the new Special K. One had less sugar, the other less calories, and he would be getting about the same amount of cereal for the same price but- All of a sudden, Eddie's careful thinking is interrupted by a crash, and he leaps nearly three feet in the air at the sound of it, letting out a horribly embarrassing sound like a quite shriek. Both cereal boxes went to the ground and he suddenly didn't care about them any more. A sound like that couldn't possibly mean anything good, could it? Someone might have been hurt and he has the equipment with him right now to help them on some minimal scale. Eddie hurried forwards, exiting his aisle and heading straight for the source of the noise in aisle six. As he sped around the corner, he came skidding to a halt for just a moment before pushing forwards once more and stopping at the side of someone covered in a mixture of chip bags, candies, and metal.

"Shit, are you okay? Anything hurt? Here, let me help-" A little metal rack in the center of the aisle had been pulled over onto the poor guy trapped underneath, one rung jabbed against his ribs in a manner that couldn't possibly be comfortable. Eddie fastened his hands around the rack as best he could, pulling it off and away as quickly as possible. As soon as it was pushed aside his full attention went back to whoever had been trapped underneath, and a gust of familiarity punched him right in the stomach. The only one Eddie had ever seen wearing those wretched thick-framed glasses had been the coffee guy from the night before. Eddie brushed away the pang of annoyance in his gut and helped brush bags of barbecue chips aside to pull the barista into a sitting position.

"Ah, thanks," The guy said with a chuckle, pushing his glasses up and reaching for one of the bags of chips. He frowned as he picked it up, suspecting it for damage and most likely discovering that at least half of it's contents were crushed, "My bad for the trouble, my long-ass limbs sometimes get the-" He paused, finally looking up at Eddie, and then his own eyes lit with recognition and he was grinning like a maniac. "Hey, I know you! New guy! Eds!" Eddie fought the urge to roll his eyes at the nickname, brushing right past him.

"Are you okay? Hurt at all? Do I need to call a doctor? When did you last get a tetanus shot? Are you bleeding anywhere?" Eddie was already moving to unzip his trusty fanny pack, knowing he had butterfly tape, disinfectant, bandages and all things alike just inside. "How are you feeling? Dizzy at all? You might have hit your head or something and-"

"Hey, calm down there buddy, you'll give yourself an aneurysm if you don't stop and take a breath!" The barista was chuckling again, hands held out in front of him in some attempt to calm Eddie's already-racing thoughts. Worst case scenarios sprung up left and right, the current most prominent possibility being that this goof could get some sort of instantaneous infection that would transform him into a zombie, "I'm just fine, actually. I've taken quite a few tumbles in my day and this is nothin'. If anything, I'd be more concerned for the chips!" He went to climb to his feet, and Eddie was almost reluctant to allow that. Maybe he'd throw out his back or tear a muscle or fall again- he shoved the thoughts away and instead just stood as well. "Thanks, Eds," The guy said with a big glowing grin and a shrug of his shoulders, one hand rising to scratch at the back of his neck, "If I'd known you were here to save the day I'd have fallen sooner! My knight in shining armor!"

"Don't-" Eddie began, biting his tongue and then finally snapping out, "Don't call me Eds! And for the love of God, don't go getting yourself hurt just for the hell of it. That's stupid. You could have broken something!" Crossing his arms over his chest, Eddie huffed out a breath, shaking his head out of disapproval. Eddie's damsel in distress opened his mouth to speak when a new voice sliced in and someone Eddie hadn't seen before hurried around the corner with concern etched into his every feature and a shopping basket slung over one arm.

"Richie, what- What happened? You okay?" He approached quickly, glancing briefly at Eddie before his full attention went to Mr. Damsel- or, otherwise, Richie. Richie shot two thumbs ups.

"I'm great, Mikey, my good pal Eddie came to help me up."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Mikey set down his basket and turned to Eddie instead, extending a hand and a friendly smile, "I'm Mike. I didn't mean to intrude if you two were talking, but Rich tends to get himself hurt more than the average human male. It's second nature now to fret over him." Richie let out a scoff, adopting a dramatic frown and upturning his nose.

"It's really hard to control my noodle arms, thank you very much! And, come on, did you really expect me not to go for the Fireballs? The heart wants what it wants, doesn't it?" Eddie let Mike's hand go and, feeling a little bit awkward now to be talking to these near-strangers, said,

"Well, it's nice to meet you. I, uh... I guess I'll be seeing you again later tonight at the party," Eddie tried to smile, "Don't go knocking over any more display shelves." Eddie was just about to turn and hurry away, just about to get out of the social interaction when none other than Bill appeared down the hall, a grocery basket hanging off his arm, obviously curious and with Stan at his side. Bill spotted Richie, Richie spotted Bill, and then the latter was approaching with his Big Bill smile.

"Oh, hey!" He greeted, nodding cheerfully in Mike's direction as well, "It's you again! I juh-just wanted to thank you fuh-for the invitation to your party." The best thing Eddie thinks Bill has ever done is draw the attention away from him. He has a tendency to do that- most eyes shift right for him when he enters the room, as if everyone sense that he is the leader. That's alright, in Eddie's opinion, because he could never be a leader and is much more content to be a follower hiding in the shadows. Now, both Richie, Mike and Bill are locked in conversation, much more friendly and natural than the one Eddie had been caught in moments earlier. Stan takes a few subtle steps towards his much shorter friend, leaning over a little to hiss out a whisper,

"They'll be talking for hours, I can already tell." Eddie found himself smiling and nodding right along. Stan was absolutely correct. The chemistry that was already brewing was that foretelling of three great friends. "Interested in coming with me to look at the bakery? I can smell it from here and I want to see what they have." Eddie only smiles wider. He nods his head without seconds thought, only trying for a second or two to catch Bill's gaze before just giving up and following Stan out of the hallway and towards the back of the building. Matching him step for step, the two picked up a much more comfortable, much more pleasant conversation that Eddie actually enjoyed having. "The curly haired one sure talks a lot. What are the chances that we're seeing him again today? How many grocery stores are there in Portland?"

"Apparently just the one. Some higher power must hate me to make me run into him again." Eddie rolled his eyes dramatically, and Stan let out a snicker, gently bumping his elbow into Eddie's and quirking a brow. In return, Eddie's own brows bent down into a questioning furrow. "What? Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face or something?" One hand lifted to wipe at his cheek but it came back clean. Stan just shook his head, a small smile ghosting his lips as they arrived at the bakery. "Oh sweet, sesame bagels!" His attention redirected, Eddie dismissed the odd look and moved to stand right in front of the glass, hovering over it and scanning it's contents but never putting his hands on it. That was icky, in his opinion- Stan was at his side moments later, scanning over the iced sweets just next to the bagels that had caught Eddie's eye.

"What do you want to bet Bill won't want us wasting our money on any of this?" Stan said with a grin, gaze still glued to a tantalizing slice of carrot cake.

"My soul. How much extra cash do we have to waste?" No one needed to speak another word. The two made a silent agreement- buy whatever the hell you want and defend your purchase with your life. Neither Stan nor Eddie would let Bill scold them for this. They deserved some sort of 'welcome to Portland' treat. In the end, they were both walking away with quite the haul- Eddie had secured a bag of six of those sesame bagels, and Stan had bought the carrot cake along with a loaf of banana bread. Just as Stan passed over the cash needed to pay for the treats, Bill stepped into view, hurrying in their direction with his grocery basket filled with whatever other food the three needed to last them a week.

"Wuh-what did you two get your hands on?" Bill doesn't waste a minute to start interrogating, though the smile on his face betrays his attempts at scolding the two. He doesn't even make them explain themselves, jumping to the next topic right after and beckoning with his head for the two to follow him towards the checkouts, "We should cuh-come here from now on. I like supporting luh-luh-local businesses. It's good for the economy or something, and Mike is n-nice." Eddie almost let out a groan- that was the last thing he wanted, because then he risked running into Richie again. It seemed he and Mike, one of the grocers, were good friends. Why else would he be worried for Richie's well being? Still, Eddie bit his tongue, instead answering with something less rude and more civil.

"We could, or we could go to a bigger store. They'd have more options- we'd probably get better deals, too." Clutching his bag of sesame bagels and hoping Bill would take the bait, he continued in his attempts to convince him, "Here, they've only got so many different things. If we went to the Superstore a ways away we could pick out healthier foods and stuff and probably save a ton of money."

"Eh," Stan answered rather than Bill, holding a hand out in the redheads direction to silently offer a turn carrying the basket, "I like it here. It's quiet, and it's all family run. There'll be less processed items available. You hate processed foods, Eddie, you should love it here- it's all organic." For some odd reason Eddie felt like Stan was maybe... plotting something? The curly-haired boy seemed awfully suspicious. Usually, he just went along with whatever else was decided, and rarely bothered to help in decision making. He never minded what Bill or Eddie chose because, as far as he was concerned, they were both logical and made great decisions. Alarm bells rang in Eddie's head and curiosity began to bubble within him. What was Stanley getting at?

"Luh-let's see how everything plays out. Maybe w-we'll end up going somewhere else next w-week, buh-but we don't ne-need to decide r-ruh-right now." The three arrived at the till.

"Good morning," The lady behind it looked about their age, with bright eyes and glowing sepia skin, her hair frizzy and light, like a cloud around her head. Her name tag read 'Jennifer'. "Chilly day today, isn't it?" Jennifer got right to work, not even glancing down at her hands as she scanned one item and then the next in rapid succession with memorized ease. Bill and her picked up a natural conversation, his great people skills showing through now more than ever. Bill brought up Mike, and the three found out that he was Jennifer's cousin- they also discovered that hers and Mike's grandparents owned the store and kept it running smoothly. Before they knew it, everything was bagged and ready to go. Stan, Bill and Eddie distributed the bags between them, said their goodbyes to the kind girl behind the counter, and made for the doors. The chill that had been in the air when Eddie had first arrived had eased, just a little. The sun peaked out timidly from behind thickening swaths of darkened clouds, and the taste of rain hung heavy on the breeze.

"We should get a cab. I swear to God, if it starts raining and I catch a cold I'm blaming it on you guys." Eddie grimaced as he looked up towards the sky, and the three set off back in the direction of home.

"What are we doing for the rest of the day?" Stan asked, staring up and around at all of the buildings lining the street, taking in every little detail Portland had to offer. Bill was doing just the same as he answered,

"I have nuh-nothing planned. I might take a n-nap or suh-humthing like that before the party." Eddie let out something akin to a scoff, though it sounded more surprised than hostile or anything negative like that.

"Don't you still have unpacking to do? You can't seriously be finished, can you?" Bill shrugged his shoulders, shuffling his grocery bags from one hand to the other. Eddie took that as a sign that Bill was, in fact, done with his unpacking. How, Eddie had no idea- shit, he's hardly finished half of his, and Stan couldn't possibly be done either with how much of a perfectionist he was. As if to prove Eddie wrong, Stan spoke next.

"I finished earlier this morning. You aren't done? How much do you have?" Eddie had brought his biggest suitcase from back home. After all, he had basically taken everything he owned with him; his entire closet, his whole medicine cabinet, more miscellaneous things like some toxin-free cleaning supplies- getting everything into a convenient spot (and needing to clean those convenient spots first) took time and effort and Eddie tended to get distracted. It made sense that he wasn't done yet, but he hadn't expected the other two to have finished so quickly. "That's alright, it's fine," Stan continued, cutting into Eddie's thoughts, "I can help you if you want me to?" Eddie was quick to deny that offer.

"Thanks, but I'm more than capable of putting my own shit away. You guys can do whatever- don't worry about me." Sooner or later, the three arrived back at home, and Bill offered to unload to groceries which left Eddie to get right to work. When they arrived back up in their apartment, Eddie dropped his grocery bags in the new, untouched kitchen and dismissed himself to head for his room. Straight down the hall from the kitchen sat Eddie's door, and behind that, his bedroom, perfectly neat and tidy. As he stepped inside, he took in the sight of it all again with a burst of pride- this was his room, and he finally had the privacy he had always craved. To the direct left of the door sat a small set of drawers with a sizable mirror mounted just above it. Facing those drawers was the king-sized bed fitted with sleek grey sheets and a whole seven pillows of different sizes. Underneath the bed was a rug, the floor a pale hardwood- two bedside tables sat on either side of the bed and a door to the closet was to his right. Finally, the piece de resistance were the large double-doors that led to his own private balcony- since Bill's room had an ensuite and Stan had a walk-in closet, he had scored the balcony and he was more than excited.

At last, Eddie stepped into his room, pushing the door near-shut behind him. The white, cold light filtering in through the glass panes of the balcony doors washed everything around him in a pale luminescence. Any minute now, he was certain, rain would start to fall, and he was glad to have made it home before getting caught in it. Eddie made for his suitcase, which was set at the foot of his bed. It was huge, silver, heavy-duty and still half-full despite a whole hour of unpacking. Pushing it onto it's side, Eddie pulled on the zipper and flipped open the top, not wasting a minute as he began to pick out the pharmaceuticals tucked within. Despite escaping his mother, he hadn't escaped old habits- paranoia still gnawed at his insides whenever he thought of sickness, his own weakened immune system- he pushed the thoughts away and began to arrange his assortment of emergency medications on top of the drawers. As he did so, he stared at his reflection in the mirror- the fear of sickness was, at once, forgotten. Instead, he found himself soaking in the feeling of his newfound independence. Eddie had finally left the nest for good.

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coeurdastronaute · 6 years ago

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Either/Or: Christmas Day 2 (Found)

I don't know if it will be spoilery since the story hasn't advanced that far but Kara experiencing her first Christmas on earth with lena in the au where she lands on earth as an adult.

It wasn’t until there were lights on trees and wreaths on street lights that the month was noted. By then, of course, there were santas on street corners with their bells, a light snow that was a dusting of a promise of more to come, and the music piped over store speakers were songs of a distinctively merry variety.

And all of it nearly went unnoticed, though not intentionally this time, by a CEO who found herself juggling an illicit alien-aiding crime while simultaneously lying to her brother. There weren’t enough hours in the day to fit in an entire Earth-shaped education while running a multi-billion dollar corporation and getting weird butterflies in her gut when an alien smiled at her in that stupid little way that made Lena’s thighs--

None of that mattered. Instead, she finished sending off a work email as she made her way down the sidewalk, listening to Kara describe her day of earthly adventures, unaware of everything.

“Lena?” Kara asked as she zipped up her jacket a little tighter against the chill in the air. “What’s Christmas? What are the holidays?”

“Oh damn,” the CEO sighed. “Is it that time of year already?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Sure enough, when Lena looked up from her phone, she suddenly saw aforementioned signs of the impending celebrations and festivities. Her eyes narrowed in on a window display with a large tree and a mannequin family putting a tree on the top, all joyful because of their new, expensive pyjamas.

“Throughout the vast religions of Earth, there are certain special holidays. One of the most prevalent is Christmas and during this season there are a few holidays, so it’s kind of rolled into one.”

“But what do you do?”

“Oh, well,” Lena furrowed and tried to think about how she normally spent the holidays in a gin-soaked puddle of self-doubt and loathing on a foreign beach, avoiding her family. “Families get together and spend time doing certain things.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Like decorating a tree, which is, ironically, a pagan tradition, and then going to church, eating a big meal, putting out cookies for Santa, opening presents, things like that.”

“Wow, those all sound spectacular!”

“They could be, I guess.”

“You don’t do some of those?”

Almost worried about it, Kara paused and waited for Lena to look at her. When she did, she furrowed a little more as Lena debated it. From what she could see, the world became a little more magical with all of the lights and decorations and happy songs that everyone seemed to agree on. Lena seemed to be the only one that didn’t care about all of it.

“I don’t celebrate,” she simply shrugged, indifferent to the whole thing.

“Why not?”

“You usually have to have a family to do all of that stuff.”

“And you don’t.”

“Exactly.”

They resumed their walk, though at a slightly distracted speed. Kara dug her hands deep into the pocket of her jacket while Lena adjusted her purse and crossed her arms, completely enamoured with avoiding thinking about her family and the lack of joy she felt toward the time of year.

All of the storefronts were glowing and showed familiar scenes of holiday events-- trees in need of decoration, parties at offices, family dinners, snowball fights, and the such. Each one was a diorama of absence for the CEO.

“Could we do Christmas this year?” Kara finally asked as they stood on a corner and waited for the light to change and allow them to pass.

Ears hidden beneath an adorable toque that Lena picked out herself, and definitely for the reason of keeping Kara warm and not because she was becoming her own personal dress up doll in all the clothes she fantasized about taking off, Kara burrowed into the scarf to protect her ears and exposed skin.

The lights from the street, from the traffic light, from the stores, all of it concentrated on Kara’s face, and she practically glowed with excitement despite the layer of begging that made Lena absolutely angry at herself for being so damn gay.

“You want to celebrate the holidays with me?”

“Well, yeah. You’re one of my favorite people on the planet. I want to do it all with you.”

She melted. Lena Luthor melted like a chocolate bar on an August day left in the back of an all-black interior car in a parking lot with no shade.

“I want to come back to your statement about being ‘one of’ the favorite people. Considering you don’t know anyone else,” Lena began quickly. “But I do think it is possible. If you’re really serious about it.”

“It’d be a nice, healthy item to check off of my bucket list.”

“That’s true.”

“If you are uncomfortable, I understand, but we can do whatever you want.”

“No, no,” Lena shook her head. “You’re right. This will be good. We’ll do all of the things one sees on a Hallmark movie.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Right. I suspect we should start there then.”

Without even realizing it, Kara unleashed an absolute powerhouse in the Christmas celebration department. She didn’t know that simply asking for Lena to show her a few things, she was actually setting forth a perfectionist who was so absolutely desperate for a holiday, that she would take one and never let go.

“I’m very happy you’ve agreed,” Kara beamed as she put her arm over Lena’s shoulder, hugging her to her side in her joy.

“Me too,” Lena mumbled, turning her head slightly to smell the intently Kara smell that existed despite the layers.

Every day for a week, the evening after work and dinner, Christmas movies were absorbed and regarded with intense study. Kara liked the lights and the singing, and naturally came with a lot of questions about many tangential earthly affairs. And Lena answered them as best she could, though she did distract herself taking notes until she compiled a perfect list of things to do for the season.

And now her apartment was a collection of boxes and decorations that were in need of putting things up.

“We didn’t have to get the biggest tree in the lot,” Lena sighed as she took a step back and looked up at the giant evergreen.

“Oh, but look at it. It’s so beautiful.”

The alien floated near the top of the tree, adjusting a pristine, glowing star. Without her abilities, it would have been impossible. That, and the fact that Kara seemed to have a sort of natural predilection toward the holiday spirit that Lena never really experienced. Maybe it was all of the movies, but she honestly believed that it was her natural state.

A carefully crafted playlist hummed throughout the place as the last of the large selection of assorted ornaments were added. Lights were hung from the doorways, and wreaths made it to the doors while a few outdoor decorations were set up on the balcony. Stockings remained hung on the fireplace, while the cat made himself fit in a discarded box.

“Do you think we got too much stuff?” Lena worried.

“No way. I think it looks fantastic in here. But I’m not really an expert.”

“I think you’re pretty close to an expert.”

“I have a list.”

“A list?”

Satisfied with her work, Kara floated down to the floor and tugged a piece of paper out of her pocket. There was something absolutely adorable about the giant Christmas sweater the alien decided to wear. Lena was finding that shopping for her was much easier than shopping for herself. She was certainly more eager than she imagined.

“The tree and the lights, and then cocoa and dinner and presents.”

“Wow! You do have a list. Very similar to my list.”

“I’m liking these holidays. A celebration of kindness and joy and giving. This is so great. I’m glad we’re doing all of this.”

“Me too.”

It took them a while to clean up the rest of the empty boxes that came from the things they all bought. But they managed, and they turned off all of the lights except for the decorations. The place glowed in a different way than ever before. It twinkled and glittered and smelled like the best parts of a forest. While the fire roared in the fireplace, Kara laid down beneath the tree and stared up at all of the lights.

Lena laid beside her on the tree skirt they agonized over for much too long at the store.

“I’m going shopping tomorrow, to find you some presents,” Kara decided, turning her head to look at the CEO daydreaming, her face multi-colors.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. I need to give you something nice. Full discretion though, I will be using the card you gave me for emergencies.”

Lena chuckled to herself and sighed as she closed her eyes. It was perfect. She was living a perfect moment, and she wasn’t sure what came next.

“You really don’t have to get me anything. I have everything I could ever want.”

“There are going to be lots of presents under this tree. Lots of them.”

“Okay. Then I’ll get you a few.”

“Just a few?”

“Wouldn’t want to spoil you.”

Kara laughed, melodically and light. It was unencumbered by pain, despite being composed completely of it. Lena admired that about her probably most of all.

“You’re already spoiling me, Lena.”

“Good.”

There were presents, now. The tree brimmed with boxes and bags and different shapes, all wrapped in festive paper spilling beneath it.

The entire apartment remained full of good cheer and mirth. The pair found themselves working through Christmas movies almost every night, often with Lena not that interested as she finished up work, but inevitably failing to keep disinterested, and gradually snuggling beside Kara about halfway through.

There’d been other things as well. They got dressed up and went to the ballet to see the Nutcracker performed. They donned gay apparel and went to a party at Lena’s office. They went ice skating in the park. They drank cocoa like it would never exist after Christmas was finished. They baked Christmas cookies. They built a snowman. They donated to every street corner they could. It was a joyous kind of exhausting.

“I’m so excited,” Kara bounced in her chair as she surveyed the living room and the presents.

“You have x-ray vision and you haven’t looked at the presents?” Lena teased as she licked some batter from her finger and handed over the spatula.

“That wouldn’t be in the Christmas spirit, and I quite like the Christmas spirit.”

“Spirit or not,” the CEO huffed as she lifted the bowl and poured it into the tray. “I’m not baking anymore sweets. You have the metabolism of a greyhound, but I do not.”

“But you bake so well.”

“And I have a sweet tooth, which is not helped by you.”

“If we’re going to have a dinner tomorrow, we have to have something festive for dessert. It’s in all of the movies, Lena.”

“I’ve created a monster.”

Kara didn’t notice, or at least pretended not to as she happily licked the spatula and Lena wiped flour on her forehead again. Kara liked that part. She loved how carefree and un-put-together the normally immaculate woman could look when she stopped caring.

“I was doing research and I discovered a tradition,” Kara smiled.

“Another one? It’s Christmas Eve. I’m sure we’ve done them all by now.”

“In a country made of ice, they give books to each other and spend the evening reading to pass the time. It’s the first gift of the season.”

“And you got me a book?”

“I did,” Kara nodded. “Did you get me one?”

“I did.”

“Great minds are identical.”

“Yes,” Lena smiled as she slipped the cake into the oven and started washing. “But I’m too tired to read.”

“Can we still open a present?”

“Ah, so that was the root of it.” Kara just smiled and nodded, clearly found out and not at all deterred by it. “Go get mine and I’ll get yours.”

The dishes were shoved in the dishwasher, the ham was thawing for the following day, and Kara sprinted at superspeed until she was sitting on the couch with a gift in her lap, impatiently waiting. It happened in under a second, and yet she was too eager to realize that Lena was mortal and did not possess any powers at all.

“Are we going to have to do this every year?” Lena asked before she caught herself thinking about the future.

“Definitely,” Kara agreed with no hesitation.

Lena smiled to herself and accepted the gift and handed over her own. They opened them and smiled at each other, though neither recognized the book the other had picked.

“I’m excited to read this. Thank you,” Lena offered sweetly.

“I thought this was a movie?” Kara furrowed as she scanned her title.

“It was a book first.”

Gently, reverently even, Kara trailed her fingertips along the title of A Christmas Carol, and she looked back at Lena and nodded, as if it were the most important thing she’d ever done. It was this solemnity that made Lena happiest.

“I’m going to read it all tonight. Thank you for this tradition.”

“Thanks for all of the traditions,” Lena shrugged. “Why don’t you read some of it out loud. That’ll be a fresh spin on it.”

“Since you’re too tired to read,” she nodded, quickly opening the book.

Somewhere between the tenth page and the end, Lena drifted off to sleep with her cheek on Kara’s arm and her body pressed up against her’s. It was a compromising position, and she didn’t even notice. But Kara finished and felt Lena and didn’t want to move. Instead, she looked at the cute, exhausted girl and smiled as she pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around them both.

The fire died down and the cat stretched before readjusting, but Kara settled deeper into the couch until Lena grabbed her ribs and held onto her at a terrible angle. She didn’t move though. Just let her.

She wasn’t in her bed. Lena knew that before she opened her eyes, but still, she dug her nose into her pillow and growled a slight complaint about waking at all. The only difference this time, was that her pillow growled back and complained about her movements by adjusting beneath her.

Lena’s eyes shot open as she felt an arm squeeze tighter around her shoulders.

Half laying atop and half smothering the alien beneath her, Lena realized she fell asleep on Kara and then used her like a teddy bear. In what looked like an uncomfortable position, Kara swallowed her fate, her head tilted off to the side as she sat sideways.

“Merry Christmas,” Kara grumbled, not interested in getting up.

Only when she saw that she was staring at someone who was wake did Lena swallow and sit up, pushing away from Kara’s warm and safe arms. She wiped the drool from her chin and cleared her throat as she blinked and got her bearings.

“I’m sorry,” Lena started. “I fell asleep. You could have woken me up--”

“I fell asleep too,” Kara tried against a giant yawn. “And you were very tired.”

With a small smile, Lena cleared her throat and adjusted herself as best as possible. She pushed the blanket away and realized she really must have been tired, to pull it down onto herself and to burrow into Kara with no memory of it at all.

“Because it’s Christmas morning, does that mean we can open presents?”

Oblivious to the horror and embarrassment the CEO was facing, the alien smiled happily, eager to start her day. She had avoided thinking about it at all, and Lena envied it.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she teased.

“But presents.”

“I’ve given you so many presents.”

“But these are wrapped and they’re a surprise. You’ve given me boring things. Like clothes.”

“And what if those are clothes?” Lena teased as she re-tied her ponytail.

“At least I get to unwrap them.”

Her excitement was infectious and even though Lena was still groggy and still mortally embarrassed, she sighed and smiled and nodded. Even though she still needed coffee, even though her neck was tight and sore, even though everything wasn’t perfect and she didn’t know how to holiday, she followed Kara to the tree where they sat, cross legged and ready.

The gifts themselves were vast in their categories. Lena received lovely smelling perfume, much different than the one she owned, but somehow better. She got vinyl records and a new coffee mug and a very expensive watch that she instantly loved. There were weird odds and ends, but Lena was surprised by how thoughtful each gift was, and she could imagine Kara agonizing in the store about what things earthlings might need.

The gifts that Lena picked for Kara weren’t much more cohesive, but she wanted to give her anything that would make her feel more at home. There was a telescope and nice notebooks, video games, a camera, another sweater, and of course chocolate.

Somehow surrounded by a mountain of discarded wrapping paper, each sat with their gifts circling them and lingering in their laps. Still wearing the new toque that Lena got her, Kara smiled at the moment.

“This was, by far, the best first Christmas in the history of Christmases,” Kara ventured.

“I’m glad.”

“What about for you? How was it?”

“It was exceptionally perfect,” Lena promised.

“Do you think we can do it again next year?”

“For however long you’d like.”

Kara smiled to herself and nodded.

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hollerpresents · 5 years ago

Text

Lottery

Lottery by Matt MacNeil

We hit traffic some minutes away from the pizza place and were stopped at a red light. A firetruck came barrelling down the road and Nicole told George to pull over. “I know,” he said, and angled the car into the curb. The firetruck flew by and went yeeeeowww. I thought, The Doppler Effect, to myself but I didn’t say it out loud.

“I wonder if they ever just put the siren on to get through traffic or something,” I said. “I know for a fact that they do,” George said, getting the car back on the road. “My uncle Charlie was a firefighter, or I mean he is a firefighter, and he told me that he does it.” Reilly shook his head. “Maybe your uncle Charlie is a piece of shit.”

George swung his head around and looked back at him. “Don’t you dare talk about my uncle Charlie like that you fucking bitch,” he said and smiled. He turned back and looked at the road, but he continued to watch us through the rear-view mirror.

“Anyone says shit about my uncle Charlie and I’ll kick the fucking shit out of you,” he said and started laughing, and Nicole turned up the radio. “One time he had to rescue a cat from a tree, just like in cartoons or whatever,” George continued, glancing at us through the mirror. “He was up in a cherry picker and when he went to grab the cat, the cat sprung away and fell and splattered on the ground.” “No way,” I said.

“No I’m serious, the whole family was there watching and everything. Like, little kids,” he said, smiling again, through the rear view mirror.

“That didn’t actually happen did it?” Reilly said. “George. You’re joking.”

George shrugged his shoulders. “That didn’t fucking happen,” Reilly said.

When we pulled up, Reilly took out a piece of paper from his bag and said, “Oh I can check my lottery ticket,” and waved it at me.

I had never bought a lottery ticket in my life, never had the balls, frankly.

I was too embarrassed to buy lottery tickets because I thought only poor people bought lottery tickets, and even though I was poor, I didn’t like to flaunt my poorness around like most poor people did.

“Wow,” I said at the lottery ticket. “I didn’t know you bought lottery tickets.”

“I don’t,” he said, and put it in his pocket. “My parents put one in my stocking every year. My sister got one too.”

Of course. That explained it.

“Didn’t your mom win the lottery?” Nicole said to him passively, which sounded like she was trying to insult him, but she was being serious.

“Yeah, she won a million dollars,” Reilly said, all nonchalantly.

And it was true, he wasn’t lying about it.

His mom had actually won a million dollars in the lottery sometime last year.

“Whoa, what the fuck,” I said, trying to keep my cool.

I found myself laughing at his jokes more.

Reilly and I went into the corner store while George and Nicole went into the pizza house. He went to the cashier to check his lottery ticket while I chose what kind of chips to buy for the group.

It was a toss up between corn and potato.

When I got to the register I asked him if his ticket had won the big jackpot, and he said that the numbers hadn’t been drawn yet.

“Nain terty, nain terty,” the cashier said, frantically pointing at the clock.

“Ah, there’s still time!” I said mischievously, and I started rubbing my hands together like a rat, and the cashier smiled at me.

I walked out of the store a new man. In one hand was the lottery ticket and in the other were the chips I had picked, good ones too, the best ones they had. Your favourite kind!

Let’s just say I felt like I had already won the million.

On the drive home, George was singing a song and just ripping shit down the road where the speed limit was like 40. “Slow down for Christ’s sake,” Reilly said. “We’re gonna hit a deer and we’re all going to die.”

Nicole was telling me some bullshit about how you’re more likely to be struck by lightning five times in a row than win the lottery.

But I wasn’t listening.

I was thinking about all of the things I would do with the money.

I was thinking about quitting work, about going into the break-room when my boss and co-workers were there and telling them all to suck it and just walking out in slow motion.

I thought about giving Grandma maybe a thousand.

I thought about giving it to my parents and saying you don’t have to worry anymore, your son has taken care of it, your son has saved your lives, and he didn’t have to, but he chose to do it, because he is good.

Later that night back at George’s house, his younger brother and his friends came over and all of us got high and sat around his dad’s giant table and played poker.

I thought about that painting (or was it a photograph?) of the dogs playing poker. Which dog would I be? I would not be the cheating one, the one secretly giving the other one a card from between his toes.

I would have that dog put to sleep in real life.

One of George’s brother’s friends was so high, he kept saying the dumbest stuff, like, “We are all here right now,” and no one would say anything, which made me feel embarrassed for him, so I would usually say something like, “Yeah man, haha.”

“We’re all here right now, right now!” he said and burst out laughing.

“Yeah,” I said. Everyone else was just looking at their cards or phones.

“We are SO here. We are all extremely here right now, do you know what I mean?”

And I laughed and said, “Yeah man I think so.”

And he said, “Yeahhh, we are some fuckin’ here-ass dudes,” and everyone was getting so tired of his shit. Then another friend of George’s brother said, “What if one time you get so high that you just never go back to normal?” and the super high guy started to lose it. He really started to lose his grip.

He started breathing like a bird and we all had to lie to him and tell him everything was okay.

I was losing bad at poker, but my luck was about to change, I hoped.

I suddenly remembered the lottery ticket. “Wait is it 9:30 yet?” I asked, and someone was like, “It’s 2:45.”

I took the crumpled ticket from my coat pocket and went to the lottery website to check the numbers.

Not a single match, it seemed.

Not one!

In that moment I felt like a crashing airplane, and I hope that I never have to feel that feeling as long as I live.

I drank twelve beers to celebrate the loss.

I walked home from George’s place in the freezing cold, and on my walk I saw this old lady riding a bicycle loaded up with so many bags. She was pedalling the old thing so slowly, her head wrapped in a blanket to keep it from freezing to ice.

It was very late and she was the only person around, and I watched her struggling on the bicycle, so slow, going a snail’s pace against the unforgiving wind. This merciless season.

It seemed clear to me at that moment that if I did not intervene, nature would take its course and turn this lady into a solid block of ice, like a big cube of ice just there, frozen on the road.

I even pictured it in my mind and the image made me shudder.

I wanted to help this lady, give her a boost, since her old bicycle was crawling like a little baby. I thought about speed-walking up beside her and grabbing onto her and saying, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” and both of us going faster, faster, picking up speed, me on foot and her on the bicycle, and she would be smiling and nodding and saying “Thank you, thank you,” and I would say, “It’s okay, just hold on tight!” and we would go faster and eventually we’d be zooming down the empty streets together like a rocket. Both of us blazing down the lonely streets together, no one to stop us, faster than the speed of light, hotter than hell.

In my drunken haste, I silently lunged at her and she looked at me quickly and I grabbed onto her and for some reason I yelled, “Oh you’re so cold,” and she let out a scream and we both toppled over onto the ice and she was screaming and screaming and I freaked out and got up and just took off down the street and I had tears in my eyes.

So I kept running, running, blazing down the road alone, gathering speed, like a rocket, and the lady, well, that lady turned to ice.

Fin

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

Text

FIVE QUESTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE DESIGN AND BAD ECONOMY

But working on this is not a win, in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts. And they have leverage in that their decisions set the whole company moving in one direction or another. One is that you shouldn't build object-oriented programming in too deeply. What good will more code do you when you're out of business. The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average for the population as a whole must be giving people something they want, the more different it gets. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac.1 It was no coincidence that the great industrialists of the nineteenth century had so little formal education. Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in one family's bank account, or the market wasn't ready yet, b the founders solved the wrong problem. Programming languages are how people talk to computers.

With server-based apps get released as a series of small changes. The ball you need to give someone a present and don't have any money, you don't usually have to invent anything.2 Life in a zoo is easier, but it could not have grown so big so fast. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because she's shy that she hates bragging. In Web-based software you can use any language you want, there is nothing in spam-of-the-envelope calculations, this one has a high average outcome. A company big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company the people in the mailroom or the personnel department work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. I think you should make users the test, just as we can become smarter, just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game. Her immense data set and x-ray vision for character.3 And historically the number of new startups being founded in 2003.

For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. A big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the algorithm described in A Plan for Spam I hadn't had any, and I completely agree with him. I would really love to do, at least in our own minds, we have to remember that it's an admirable thing to write great programs, even when this work doesn't translate easily into the conventional intellectual currency of research papers. It could only spread to places that already had a vigorous middle class. A big company is like high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.4 Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be one. In practice, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually have to move from filtering based on single words to an approach like this. But it could be that a lot of new startups being founded in 2003. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

As with the original industrial revolution, some societies are going to be hard to duplicate. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs are constituent characters. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs are constituent characters, and everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. Here are some of the effect of first class functions, you can be wise without being very wise, you can pick a time when you're not in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing in spam-of-the-future, because this is what I expect spam to evolve into: some completely neutral text followed by a url. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company, then a lot of maximally interesting tokens, meaning those with probabilities far from. It will always suck to work for some existing company. Ditto at the other end of the spectrum, we'd be the first to see signs of a separation between founders and investors in the Valley. In the earliest stages of a startup, of course.

Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two. Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people do it? Maybe it's because you haven't made what they want.5 75%. 88, just under the threshold of. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. Except instead of being at the mercy of investors. If anything, it's more like the small man of Confucius's day, always one bad harvest or ruler away from starvation. And the culture she defined was one of those that exploit an insecure cgi script to send mail to third parties. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the things they're doing is breaking up and misspelling words to prevent filters from recognizing them. For example, though the stock market crash does seem to have regarded wisdom, learning, and intelligence largely from cultivating them. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we're less likely to die from infections.

With server-based. That last sentence is the fatal one.6 If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work. If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are thereby fairly close to measuring the contributions of individual employees. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.7 When startups came back into fashion, around 2005, investors were starting to hear about byte code, which implies to me at least that if we find more than 15 tokens that only occur in one corpus or the other, we ought to give priority to the ones that occur a lot. Two of the four spams I missed got through because they happened to use words that occur often in my legitimate email. Just write whatever you want, so if there is no way to get rich by creating wealth, as a species, is that you can do whatever he wants. When there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems.

These techniques are mostly orthogonal to Bill's; an optimal solution might incorporate both. Salesmen work alone.8 Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention.9 But working on this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to bear. And in this economy I bet they got a good deal on it.10 If you go to a new set of buildings, and do things that they think aren't good for you. Then at least you can give back the money you have left, and save every penny of your salary. So let me tell you a little about Jessica.11 Your boss is just the intermediate stage—just a shorthand—for whatever people want. A morale boost on that scale is very valuable in a startup tends to be running out of money, and now they'd have to postpone that. Usually a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work a lot harder, and get paid for it.

Notes

That was a kid who had died decades ago. If an investor I don't like content is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their utility function for money. In desperation people reach for the fences in our case, 20th century was also the golden age of economic inequality was really only useful for one another indirectly through the window for years while they may introduce startups they like to cluster together as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Seattle, consider moving.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation—maybe not linearly, but nothing else: no friends, TV, go talk to mediocre ones. If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than later ones, and in a startup, but I took so long. And while we might think it was the least VC-like. SpamCop—A Spam Classification Organization Program.

But people like numbers. That makes some rich people move, and then using growth rate has to work for startups to be evidence of a stock is its future earnings, you create wealth with no environmental cost.

For example, the angel round just happened, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are trying to decide whether to go all the red counties. It's a lot heavier. I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even if we wanted to than because they actually do, but when people make investment decisions well when they talk about distribution of income, which merchants used to be able to claim retroactively I said yes.

I had a killed portraiture as a constituency. The Nineteenth-Century History of English at Indiana University Publications. This is not to need to go sell the bad groups and they unanimously said yes. Most unusual ambitions fail, most of them had been a good way to explain how you'd figure out what the US is partly a reaction to drugs.

Which is probably 99% cooperation. I said yes. In desperation people reach for the same way a restaurant is constrained in a journal. An accountant might say that YC's most successful ones.

Joe thinks one of them, would be much bigger news, in the body or header lines other than those I mark. For example, the same investor to invest at any valuation the founders don't have to talk about aspects of the next stage tend to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write has a word meaning how one feels when things are going well, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. Which is probably a mistake to believe is that their experience so far the only way to tell how serious potential investors and they begin by having an associate.

Globally the trend has been rewritten to suit present fashions.

See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

Bill Yerazunis. This was made a million dollars out of a social network for x. If you wanted to invest at any valuation the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, and it has about the smaller investments you raise them.

The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of three stakes.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #zoo #NBA #solution #goalkeeper #Your #person #vision #remove #number

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davidjjohnston3 · 3 years ago

Text

I am mad at my biological father... People in Milwaukee have strong spirits but they don't test or discern from whence these spirits come (Satan); they have a kind of 'anti-a'ga'pe' that wants to send people to Hell. I finally got fed up and started cursing or at least confuting in my head and heart, wishing there would be terrorized for messing with me / my soul. I want them to be chastened. In what universe is it OK to antagonize someone's soul rather than build them up / edify? It's Babylon America: commerce is king, pornography is the supreme teacher(?), media is religion, movie-theaters are temples. All this time my 'father-in-law' was trying to teach me the American way of lying to the civil authority and medical professionals... A while back I took stock of 'our' old family home and realized in some ways my biological parents are not that bad. I told my biological father as much and he got even more mad / contemptuous of me. Do I not assess the man properly? Reddit got mad at me for saying 'social form' and some Christian on Twitter tried to 'nope(?!..=|)' me for saying I prayed Sec. Pompeo will be President. 'No room in the Kingdom for phony Christians.' What's phony about defending the faith worldwide? Paul Washer of HeartCry Ministries extols the authority of the African father and the son kneeling before him but Caucasian American dad-son relationships are not that way in my experience. Once I bowed to my dad but it didn't mean much. Once he bowed to me after my (near)-suicide-attempt in Korea and that did mean.. Anti-racism seemed like an important concept to me but then I thought there are so many people who just wanna get stuff and if I met Ibrim X. Kendi in real life he's probably be cordial enough but not hesitate to unlease looters and rioters against me for his vision of the greater good not to say communist-disintegrationist-chaoticist utopia. Everyone in Milwaukee seemed to be mad at me a while back since the story of me in Korea at the high school was not 100% storybook. 'Oh David James Johnston he fell in love with his 16-17-year-old student, but realized they are being left behind or the Korean War is really terrible and they're all in danger up there then some things happened with the faculty and he tried to kill himself.' That is not totally inaccurate but I wasn't 100% the depressive melancholy young prince over the last 9 years. I had some ambitions and I studied a lot and I also had bad habits like smoking. I got a short-sleeved white polo shirt at the department store and lost a bit more weight. I am around 5'11 165 I would guess. I really have to make sense of my cardiac condition although hopefully it was acute / idiopathic from the Pfizer vaccine. What scares me is that I had a foreaugury or prophecy(?) of it in 2016 when I felt something like a powdery liquid running down behind my breastbone at the same time as when I was walking around Lake Park in terror of Koreans from the past coming to kill me, angel soldiers, 'the stars throwing down their tears,' the tiger of wrath, and also, feeling like God was feeding me something without having to eat. I still haven't read all of Blake's 'America: A Prophecy.'

* The psychiatrist whom I respect offered or 'ordered' me Prozac last week and it made me think. I feel almost like the Boomers saw Millennial children as having no souls. My parents wanted to send me to Hell. My mother always used to speak about 'Rosemary's Baby' and when I was young I ran around with a red cape in a strawberry patch. My mother told me this when I was in the mental hospital in 2013, afraid of the color red and not wanting to tear my chicken sandwich since I thought that it was metonymic(?) for tearing the Scripture rather than swallowing / appreciating it whole. 'We Boomers worked hard, stopped the ['totally causeless not trying to help anyone'] Vietnam War, Civil Rights, moreover weathered the traumas of JFK, MLK, RFK assassinations; ergo we earned the right to treat our daughters as sex-slaves and fire out our sons in order the better to take advantage of our neighbors' daughters whilst also amusing ourselves by medicating and psychologizing our kids rather than loving them and tending / nurturing / ministering to their souls.' I didn't take the Prozac but I did think of (Ms. / Artist / [Singer]) Kim Taeyeon - 'Love in Color' is my favorite song of hers which makes me think about abortion-culture in a way and how 'too many choices' can destroy or over-modulate the distance or scuff and wear down the love in a relationship - and bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed with bipolar in 2012 and suffered manic symptoms for most of my childhood. I felt in the hospital that one possible 'aetiology' or origin / backstory of bipolar is knowing that people out there want to kill you; or even, damn your soul to perdition / Hell / everlasting eternal conscious torment for displeasing them or going against their norms / expectations. My diagnosis was later jacked up to schizoaffective / bipolar schizoaffective, then nearly 'crossed the ionosphere' into schizophrenia, and is now back to schizoaffective thanks to the wonderful, integrity- and probity-filled psychiatrist, who was also the only person telling the truth and not being a corporatist tank-driving-vehicular-manslaughterer at my commitment hearing where Father in Law lied to a district judge and the justice system treated me like a second-class system. The ONLY person whose yes was yes and no was no. I still think sometimes about 'the condition of fiction.' I wish I could develop my more scholarly ideals sometimes rather than writing in this 'free' style as I don't really like freedom I like formality and rules. I miss []. I used to see so many colors and I saw this person in my mind's eye / Spirit when I met her online; but yesterday I felt like I just saw 'dark red.'

My brother is really rich (from Data Science)... I need to mend fences with him... I feel as if over the years I might've had mixed motives in 'taking him under my wing.' We had a bad relationship when I was young and I even stole money from him a couple of times. I also tried to catch him looking at pornography online rather than rebuke or chastise or plead with him not to, for courting death and failure. I just wanted to embarrass / shame him. I helped him get a job shortly after the Great Recession and I guess some part of me falsely believed he owed me a favor for that. I sent him many books over the years. After my initial diagnosis of a possibly disabling mental disorder my mother told me he had said that I could live with him if I needed help but that no longer seems a possibility - in fact he said, 'I never said that.' I was worried since I'm weak. Hopefully God willing I can get back to where I was a couple of months ago and actually execute sth like the description of the educational administrative job that I was offered. I came to a point in my life lately where I no longer know whether something is destiny. When I took the HS job in Korea - maybe the biggest decision of my life - I was confident. But in the last couple of months has been a tempest or fog of war or I simply made so many decisions I don't recognize myself completely. I want to work on 'Leaving Babylon' or 'Leaving Milwaukee' or 'Leaving America.' There are or seem to be good Christians in Milwaukee but why live in Babylon - commercial empire worshipping all kinds of false prophetesses, porneia, objects, death, child-rape, abortion, post-partum abortion, automobiles, meals, brands, money / Mammon and other 'stuff' Pastor Timothy Keller calls 'Counterfeit Gods' (to say too little since they're actually often demons from Hell)... I'm not sure how to write it without penning distracting trash that would give wannabe writers bad habits and make naive readers think they know more than they do. My net worth is about 2,000 dollars but I want to give it away just because I'm mad. I thought about selling my Lenovo X-1 laptop since it's Chinese Communist poison / curse, I know it's hacked by Huawei or whoever through a nano(?)chip, Father in Law tracks with AI... I heard the new Samsung smaller notebooks have around a 17-hour battery-life.

Milwaukee's Child Protective Services appear to be some kind of CCP-derived 'metaphor-joke.' Amber Alert a child has been kidnapped in either a silver Kia or a Chevy Impala. You can mount a plate-reading AI-camera on a 50-dollar drone easily...

I'm applying to a job in Korea. I have no idea if I'll get in. It is in my favorite neighborhood, and I liked the video of their staff. This would be a 'redemption-arc' for me. 'I am so exciting.' I don't know if it can be. I listened to a few minutes of 'Inferno' by C. Cho. Masterpiece. Did I ever pay dues like a BigLaw junior associate? Was I ever fast-tracked? Career-decisions are difficult. I have literal rejection-demons, I think, or uncertainty-demons. Maybe it is Belial himself: sensuality plus intellectual abnegation. Like I want to pretend the Spirit isn't there. Other people also suffer disappointment-demons, I feel. Loss-demons. Understanding others can be challenging, and the fun of it, moreover, is overrated for some people. IDK if I can ever. And too, some people, once you understand them - when they realize you understand them - become shameless. They get more seared-conscience than ever, like the only reason they were ever acting good was to save / maintain face. 'Buyaolian.' In past I tried to be all things to all men but lately I ended up trying to be 'Chinese mistress' to someone in a bad way. I had already tried 'Japanese daughter, daughter-in-a-box.' I don't know why I don't try 'son' except it makes him fake more than usual, that I know of. I felt praised like a daughter when I got praised; although maybe it is just me. 'Hello Kitty is a girl,' Said the Sanrio person. I looked at our family cat Ariel the other day and thought, 'my adult daughter Yves from LOONA.' He used to look like a manly lion, like Jesus even, the Lion of Judah. Cats are feminine. I would get a cat but I just want to teach and write. This cat seems at peace; he no longer overeats nor conversely is hyperthyroidal and thin / 'dried out.' I miss the cat Pukah from down the way, who was fat and 'crepitant' in her voice-sound. I took care of her for pay and bought some Audiobooks with the 'loot' or 'lucre.'

I honestly have a theory about Koreanness I don't like to share called 'Han Death Runes' that says some people see Koreans - women and girls - and just want to rape and beat and kill them. They just do. Japanese soldiers / officers / the entire government did. Doubtless Chinese did before that. Korean men did too. Caucasian men do now. Other people look at babies and want to kill them - not a joke, empirical Science has recorded it; Saint Augustine some 1600 years ago developed the category of Original Sin.

For a time I was convinced that ShowerThoughts on Tumblr was the Korean girl whom I attempted to save from attempted sex-trafficking by implying she should work hard in tenth grade and learn about [AI, IT]...

I am interested in helping orphans and other young people; today in lieu of the Lead Teacher offer I missed out on I applied to some Assistant jobs at Christian private and charter schools and was impressed with the humaneness of the management-questions on the online hiring-assessment. Nonetheless, ‘Blessed Are the Peacemakers,’ and the world will need I think / believe for somebody to prove that it is possible to take care of young people who don’t have good parents such as through a better orphanage-system someday. At least, this is kind of what I dream and daydream about. I think Saint Paul would talk more about older women helping younger women to be good mothers, however, or ‘teaching’ them, whatever that means.

The pro-life cause as this political cartoon long ago pointed out is supposed to be in favor of life far beyond the emergence in to this world as a defenseless eight-pound baby.

I feel lately as if I ‘waged a war for peace’ and ended up as the only casualty. I don’t mean to aggrandize myself. I strengthened my enemies and all I got out of it was a clarified love. I hope / wish that this constitutes suffering and not just punishment before Moses for being a bad teacher with abominable taste in student clientele, and also forget to send off graduates with a graceful hail and blessing, maybe a final exhortation and prayer, and let them be they.

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breakingmllc · 4 years ago

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Nope Still Not Having Kid My Dachshund Is Allergic S T Shirt

Happy 84th birthday to my main idol my grandma mj my grandma is the strongest person I know I saw her be the provider of her family and run her own clothing store my whole life she s battled cancer and beat it twice and she always gives me the realest best advice she s probably the only person on this planet that I still remember their home number by heart lol my grandma has a Hot I don’t have kids my cat is allergic shirt sweater finsta so everyone leave nice comments wishing her a happy birthday. Gj guys but be careful vitality just gave insight about how to shutdown your top and mid lane although they didn’t execute it properly their strategy is just too good to counter your playstyle and other teams will take advantage from it. So this is going to be a bit long but bear with me I had what I believe to be a pointless and incredibly frustrating experience with the assistant manager jamie at your auburn hills great lakes crossing location today I have been coming here for three years I frequent your orlando san marcos and new jersey locations as well at least once a year when we stop we usually spend 5 to 10 thousand dollars on your products the system is simple I go in park in a corner and bring bins to my corner sort them bag them move them to the front register and repeat today I brought a personal duffel bag as it holds about 8 to 12 of your bags worth of stuff I get told that i’m not allowed to use it because it’s policy not a big deal at all I say okay i’ll do that for the rest rather than rebag all of this i’ll just go up in line and pay for it and it can sit behind the counter seems pretty reasonable to me nope I got obstructed suggested that I might be stealing something and not allowed to pass stating if I don’t want to follow the system I can leave he then takes my entire duffel dumps it onto the floor and then rebags it into victoria secret bags then moves it to the front counter so it can be rang in I thought this was a little odd but hey he was doing all the work rebagging it so whatever i’m like dude i’m going to be spending about 8k today all I want to do is come in spend some money get out without any drama what’s the problem whoevers in charge should be thrilled with a sale like this we’re spending 8k keep in mind that I told him that I would do what he wanted and it wasnt’ a big deal and the response was to the effect of stop being lippy and just listen I told him what do you want from me I just agreed with you and said I would use your bags i’m not being lippy at all I know this because I said okay dude not a problem i’ll use your bags his response was maybe if you get to buy it i’m like what are you suggesting that an 8 000 order is something you guys don’t want he’s like yeah if you buy it i’m like dude we are spending 8k today why would I bag up a bunch of stuff and spend 2 3 hours picking our your fabulous product to not buy it anyway so I had 4 credit cards one card had 2 000 one had 3500 one had 2000 and one had 1000 because I am buying for multiple people I had 4 different cards all in my name I wanted one receipt for each card not a big deal to me right wrong again he cited some policy and said if the order is more than 750 items that they aren’t allowed to ring in under 750 items on any one receipt id like to point out that that amount is higher than your employees said they could take as a cash payment I asked him to please show me that I would understand better if I could just read it he was willing to do so he brought out the policy book and to my surprise what it actually said was words to the afffect of cash payments cannot be split up or over 750 items I forget the second half my immediate reply was so what’s the big deal im using credit not cash he snatched the policy book away from me at that point and said you know what you can just listen to me or I don’t have to let you buy anything it’s up to my discretion I then called your orlando outlet and your new jersey outlet and talked to the store managers and cited your policy I was given I asked them to confirm if that was accurate and both said if it was a policy it was news to them I then asked if they would let me buy my order using 4 cards and 4 receipts the woman at orlando said oh my gosh yes we do that every single day I asked if I went to her store if I would have any trouble with this in the future and was told no then she said you can always come down here if you’re in the area and i’ll be happy to take your order after that phone call I tried again here’s the video of that attempt I said listen I have 4 credit cards your register girl said you told her she can’t ring up an order under 750 items that’s 3500 if it’s 5 items not all of my cards have that much I have done multiple receipts every time I came here heck I can even supply them to show it he tells me that because I am order so many items that I can’t have less tan 750 items per receipt so I point around to everyone else and ask what about everyone else you aren’t forcing them to spend a minimum of 750 items what about the final charge i’ll have 750 items for two tickets but the leftover isn’t going to be 750 items you’re not going to let me buy them he shrugged his shoulders to say no at this point I haven’t yelled ive been a bit snarky and sarcastic because I know he’s just giving me a hard time two people ring in our order almost every time I am up there and we were there 3 times in the last 6 months spent a bunch each time so at 730 8pm or so we are done shopping assuming that two people could ring us up ended up being a fantasy he forced one employee only to ring us up later on he comes up when its now close to 9pm and says hey you mind if we ring you up on both registers I chuckle and say no I don’t but you do you don’t want to be breaking that 750 rule do you he glared at me and then sent the employee away and walked off after blinking a few times I laugh because after telling me over and over he couldn’t do it he just got caught trying to do what should have been done to begin with a short while later after 9 I find out that everyone is standing uip front except for the one girl and another associate because none of the rest of them are allowed to help her ring us up the only two people left in the store with about 700 more items to be rang in if that’s not enough since it was a holidy all of these employees are apparently being paid overtime to stand around and wait at a bit after 10 all but two girls leave and one girl is waiting to count cash while the other girl sits and keeps ringing stuff in we apologize profusely we expected two employees to ring us up like always and timed our visit to be out around 9 if this had happened instead of having one literally stand there and watch her for 1 hour and 47 minutes after close we would have all been out on time and no overtime or extra hours spent so finally at 10 47 pm our orders are done we thank the lovely girl lauren and jasmine who got stuck staying 2 hours past close because a manager made up some random policy and had to double down when I pointed out he really needed to follow that 750 rule when he was going to toss another girl on the register if this is policy fine it doesn’t seem to be no manager at your other outlets knew what he was talking about the orlando one insisted that the only restrictions are on cash payments and verified I was paying cash or credit it’s a pretty humiliating experience to get hassled trying to buy panties and bras by someone who’s on some type of power trip the only thing I said sideways to him was that I flat out didn’t believe his policy and that credit absolutely is not the same as cash I didnt call him any names scream at him or did anything to disrupt the store beyond what you see in the videos if this is not policy i’d like an apology from that manager in person or over the phone admitting he was mistaken I would hope that the next time I go there I am not hassled but if not I guess there’s always orlando or new jersey who seem to be quite friendly I also want to give recognition to jasmine and lauren lauren is the poor soul who got stuck ringing everything in alone because of the manager’s silly rule and not allowing anyone to help because it would be in violation of the 750 item rule jasmine was the cash counter who had to wait until we were out of the store to count cash even more interesting is that I had a former employee with me helping me buy and she said she never heard of this policy either but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t added since she left she was just as confused because the manager spent over 30 minutes trying to explain and defend this when that time certainly would have been more efficiently spent doing productive things instead of hassling someone who literally sits in a corner and speaks to no one while sorting through your products one bin at a time id love a call back about this or to find out what exactly is going on ive never been hassled like this before and it was a little frustrating and very trying to keep my cool joe rossetti alexandria gunn

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moleasia4-blog · 5 years ago

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Three “Real Food” Staples That Aren’t What You Think

This is a guest post from Vani Hari (a.k.a. The Food Babe) and New York Times Best Selling author. She has a new book coming out this week called Feeding You Lies!

I’ve made it my mission to tell people the truth about their food, where it comes from, and how to live healthfully in our processed-food world. My latest book, Feeding You Lies, just hit stores yesterday and exposes the many lies that you’ll find about our food on product packages, advertising, and in the media.

My journey to a real food lifestyle didn’t happen overnight. Just like most people living in this processed-food world, I was easily fooled by deceptive marketing and packaging. I knew nothing about real food or chemically processed ingredients, but I knew I needed to make a change.

First, I started with the obvious stuff. I stopped eating frozen Lean Cuisines and stocking up on “zero calorie” drinks… and I started buying more fresh ingredients so that I could cook at home and stocked my pantry with staples such as spices, cooking oils, and beans.

However, the more I investigated my food and what I was putting in my body, I began to realize that my grocery shopping still needed a makeover! A lot of those “real food” ingredients I was buying weren’t as healthy as I thought and were quietly sabotaging my health.

And let’s face it, with all the millions of dollars that companies spend to persuade us into buying their products, it can be hard to cut through the B.S. and know if you are making the right choices.

Let’s take “real cheese” for example…

With the claim “Off the Block” blazoned on the front of the bag, Sargento is insinuating this cheese is like the kind you’d shred “off the block” of cheese at home. However, flipping it over to read the ingredients list, you’ll find it contains powdered cellulose, an additive made from wood and used as a coating on most pre-shredded cheese to keep it from sticking together. Tests done by Bloomberg News found up to 8.8% of cellulose in some brands of shredded parmesan cheese. Eating cellulose is linked to weight gain, inflammation, and digestive problems. Ever since learning about this additive, I started shredding my own cheese!

Plus, dairy products without the USDA certified organic seal usually come from cows raised on grains and GMO feed, which is not healthy for them and produces less nutritious milk. It may also contain residue of artificial growth hormones, antibiotics, and synthetic pesticides. Any of these things can be in cheese labeled “Natural” and “Real”… so don’t fall for these claims on the package.

A Better Choice: Instead, it’s best to choose organic, raw, 100% grass-fed cheese and shred it yourself. Raw cheese contains enzymes that make it easier to digest and is more nutritious. Goat milk cheese is also an excellent option that can be easier to digest.

Another food to watch out for is cooking oil…

I used to think I was doing the right thing when I cooked with canola oil. It’s “heart-healthy” right? I mean, it says so right on the bottle! What they don’t tell you though is that most vegetable oils such as canola, soybean, and corn oil go through an INSANE amount of processing with chemical solvents, steamers, neutralizers, de-waxers, bleach, and deodorizers before they end up in the bottle. They are so heavily processed and should not be part of a “real food” lifestyle. Avoiding these oils just for that reason alone is a good idea. However, it gets worse. The “solvent” most often used to extract the oil is the neurotoxin hexane–it’s literally bathed in it.

These mass-produced vegetable oils are also too high in omega-6 fatty acids, which fuel chronic inflammation in the body, leading to disease. Thankfully, there are much healthier choices.

A Better Choice: Unrefined coconut oil is one of my favorites to cook with today. It is made up of medium-chain triglycerides (MCT), which have been shown to reduce cholesterol and obesity. Other unrefined cooking oils, such as Cold Pressed Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Avocado Oil, Hemp Oil, and Ghee all make excellent choices. Choose organic oils because that’s where GMO ingredients and hexane extraction are prohibited.

Growing up we always had this in the fridge…

Land O’ Lakes was a staple in my household. We used the whipped butter like it was nobody’s business—my mom would use it on her infamous parathas (Indian stuffed flatbread), in countless desserts, and to make homemade ghee. Once I found out what was happening at Land O’Lakes, my Mom and I had a little chat. I explained to her that Land O’Lakes is not organic and raises their cows with growth hormones linked to cancer, antibiotics, and harmful pesticide-ridden GMO feed. I told my Mom she had to stop buying Land O’Lakes if we’re going to change this world. Knowing all these facts, my Mom asked, “What butter can I buy?” Well, thankfully there are many brands out there that are light years ahead of Land O’Lakes.

A Better Choice: Today, I choose organic pastured butter. Butter from grass-fed cows has higher amounts of beneficial CLA and healthy omega 3 fatty acids. Also, grass-fed cows produce butter with up to 50 percent more vitamin A and E, and 400 percent more beta carotene (which gives the grass-fed butter a deeper yellow color). You’ll also be avoiding butter laced with residues from antibiotics or hormones as these aren’t used on organic farms.

What you can do

You don’t need to make a full-time career out of investigating food like I have to make better choices at the grocery store. You just need to ask and answer three simple questions about food. In my new book, Feeding You Lies, I walk you through these three simple questions that will dramatically improve your food decisions:

What are the ingredients?

Are these ingredients nutritious?

Where do these ingredients come from?

I believe that if you can select food based on your answers to these three questions, you’ll put yourself—and your loved ones—on the path to a healthy lifestyle right away. Plus, you’ll be fighting back against those guilty parties who are trying to contaminate our foods in the name of profits.

Feeding You Lies is a new kind of diet and health book. It’s a revealing investigation into the food industry’s playbook. You’ll become your own health investigator after reading this book, and stop falling victim to the food industry’s lies that have kept us from feeling our best.

I give you action steps that protect you from cheap, processed, unhealthy foods and the health problems and suffering they cause. My 48-Hour Toxin Takedown at the end of the book will help you rid your pantry of foods that are weighing you down. You’ll end your sugar and processed food addictions, lose pound after pound, never “diet” again, and rejuvenate your energy levels, mental fitness, and overall well-being.

Feeding You Lies is now available in bookstores everywhere. Pick up your copy here.

Named as one of the “Most Influential People on the Internet” by Time magazine, Vani Hari is a food activist, New York Times best-selling author of The Food Babe Way, and co-founder of Truvani. For most of her life, Vani ate whatever she wanted—candy, soda, fast food, processed food—until her typical American diet landed her where that diet typically does, in a hospital. Despite her successful career in corporate consulting, Hari decided that health had to become a priority. Her newfound goal drove her to investigate what is really in our food, how it is grown, and what chemicals are used in its production. The more she learned, the more she changed and the better she felt.

Encouraged by her friends and family, Hari started a blog called foodbabe.com and has led campaigns against food giants like Kraft, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Subway, and General Mills that have attracted more than 500,000 signatures and led to the removal of several controversial ingredients used by these companies. Hari’s drive to change the food system inspired the creation of her new company, called Truvani, where she produces real food without added chemicals, products without toxins, and labels without lies. Hari has been profiled in The New York Times and USA Today and has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, The Dr. Oz Show, The Doctors, and NPR. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Finley, and daughter, Harley.

Posts may contain affiliate links. If you purchase a product through an affiliate link, your cost will be the same but 100 Days of Real Food will automatically receive a small commission. Your support is greatly appreciated and helps us spread our message!

Source: https://www.100daysofrealfood.com/food-babe-feeding-you-lies-book/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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pendragonfics · 8 years ago

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Retail Christmas Hell

Paring: Heimdall/Reader

Tags: female reader, but with gender neutral pronouns, supermarket AU, Christmas shopping, Christmas Eve, swearing, fluff.

Summary: Reader works at the local grocery store. Her manager, Thor Odinson, hires a handful of security guards to make sure his workers are safe in the silly season chaos.

Word Count: 1,803

Posting Date: 2016-12-16

Current Date: 2017-05-31

Christmastime was a month of furious soccer mothers, kids stealing candies, vengeful elderly people who were known usually to be sweet and comely, and generally, lines that went out the door as far as the eye could see. To be honest, it never phased you, seeing as the more people who came through your register, kept you busy and on your feet, the faster time went and the closer it was until knock off.

Odinson's Food Market was known for its fresh produce and friendly smiles, but when you had to put up with screaming babies and the bossing around of customers who wanted bags packed a certain way, the last thing you were thinking of, to be frank, was smiling at the assholes who left their food shopping to the last minute and were in a rush like there was no tomorrow.

You weren't sure how the store was handling it; Tony who stacked the shelves said they were too busy to breathe as the people would practically wipe the canned food and things into their carts as soon as he stacked it. Your manager, Thor was always on his feet trying to sort out altercations and mixups with prices and hormonal adults arguing over the last watermelon on sale. Even Clint, who ran the little deli in the side of the store said he was in over his head with orders for hams and turkeys and such.

In short, Christmastime was retail hell.

But, it was money, and you needed just that to get out of the hell at home to rent an apartment as far away as you could from your terrible family as you could, and maybe, just maybe go to higher education so those who came after you in your bloodline weren't doomed to repeat history. This dream was that which kept your fake smile on, hands without cramps, and tolerance to the shoddy customers higher than that of a saint.

So far, the end of November and the better half of December had been a madhouse, with everyone coming in and grabbing their long life items, stocking up on decorations and fairy lights for their trees, on their holiday foods. Now, nearing the day itself, it seemed to be busier twofold than you'd ever seen it in your time here at Odinson's Food Market. Lines were larger. Ambience louder. The faraway echo of a howling child nearing in the pram, pushed by the nuclear family about to go nuclear if they did't buy the right sort of Parmesan.

It was a Tuesday when Thor Odinson decided, that he would use his father's funds to do something more than advertise for the little store with. It was a Tuesday when he hired five security guards from the privately owned company called ASGARSHIELD. As someone who only went to school because your parents were sick of having kids around their feet at home, you weren't really from a background where you'd seen many security guards. Maybe the ones in the bank who scowled over their shades indoors to make sure you didn't make a heist while they were on guard, or even the policemen, sure, but never these people.

Nat, Phil, Heimdall, Sam and Maria started that day, standing at the entrance to the store to ward off evil with their professional glares, to break up quarrels before they began. Nat and Maria never talked, always staying in their spot, watching out with near superhuman vision. Phil was all business until he made friends with one of the other cashiers, Steve, yammering on about their mutual love for an old time-y comic character when (if) it got slow enough to talk. Sam stuck around inside, stalking the known shoplifters like a falcon, picking them up on stuffing lollies down their pants in the act. And Heimdall, the quiet, intrusive Heimdall, would watch the entrance at the end of your register.

It took another Tuesday and a half for Heimdall to break his calm, collected shell; you noticed this well with your cashier eyes. When your friends had asked what 'cashier eyes' were, they'd laughed; that you had super-vision or something while on duty, noticing things about people or situations as to avoid major fallout and such. But with this very real, very handy super power of yours, you saw Heimdall watching you, as he always did for the last month, except, he was smiling. Just a little; not enough to show his teeth, but enough to know he had the muscles in his body to do so.

"You alright, sir?" you ask him, leaning over the register booth to see him better. With five minutes without a customer, you were free to relieve yourself of the stresses of standing up for nine hours a day and those customers that backchat. "Look a little off in your head there."

Heimdall nodded. "Just been watching you, that's all." He frowns, gesturing to the family who had gone on their way. "How can you stand it, talking to people all day?"

You crack a smile at that, "Well, how can you stand it, standing there, watching people all day?" you ask back, staring into his dark eyes. "I've been doing this job for years now, it just sort of grows on you, and, well, after the first dozen angry customers, you try to make sure that the next person whose mood is down can be perked up a little bit." You glance to your side, and noticing a customer pushing their trolley into your bay, you give him a nod, and start the never-ending job once again.

It was the Tuesday before Christmas, which, coincidentally, was the day before. It was the day from hell, and apart from your hair looking like literal crap, so was your mood, even though it was the same fake smile for every person who wanted things bagged a certain way. Maybe it was because the air conditioner slash heat was working overtime too and broke, or the fact that even Steve, the angel from above was having trouble with these literal demons buying four hundred dollars of empty carbs in their carts, but before you knew it, the icing on the cake was being laid out.

He had bars in his brows and lips, and looked like he came from good breeding for every part of his DNA except for the manners that were as black as his soul and clothing. There was nothing nice about this guy; perhaps the only nice thing would be that he couldn't stay there bossing you around, calling you names.

"I need those bottles double bagged, I've got a way to walk, you bitch," he hissed, barely glancing up from his Blackberry. Who even had a Blackberry, this was the modern ages, not 2006. "Fuck - not like that -," he tossed his phone into a pocket in his heavy greatcoat, and leaned over like the register bay was nothing between the pair of you. For a moment, your heart stopped, thinking he was going to throttle you, because well, he looked like he was high on something, and not just his ego. At once, he began to rip the bags from the rack, throwing them haphazardly into others.

You glanced to Heimdall, but it seemed like he got the message before you sent it. At once, the man was upon the guy, pushing him back into his side of the register, where all the other customers were supposed to stand, and stay.

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave," Heimdall intoned, voice monotonous like he was a secret service agent.

At once, the punk guy stretched to full height, and cocked his head like he was ready to fight anyone and anything that stood in his way. "I'm just leaving. I need my stuff for Christmas, and I'll be off." He gritted.

You stood there, stock still, heart racing like a little mouse caught in the crossfire of a cat and dog. Heimdall noticed you, or maybe he just knew everything that happened inside the places he was protecting, and crossed his arms. "I will not hesitate to remind you, sir, this establishment does not serve those who treat those working are slaves." His voice was not small, but booming, loud enough to be heard over the hubbub of the store. "You can take your business elsewhere."

The guy make a noise, somewhere between a grunt and a hiss, and marched off, mumbling something about 'the wrath of the Von Doom family' and something very rude, and unable to be mentioned again in polite conversation.

The rest of the line of people who had witnessed the outburst had been humbled by the rudeness the guy displayed, and the dominance that the tall security guard had shown. Not another person was ill-spoken to you that night, but you guessed it had something to do with the fact that Heimdall had stationed himself beside the register like he was a secret service man protecting a president's child or something.

By the time the shift ended - your coworkers loved to let you go first, they knew you had a lot on your plate - you couldn't help but not leave until you had some answers. Heimdall was just collecting his backpack, shades atop his forehead even though it was ten o'clock at night. "I - I want to say thanks for what you did, early," you managed to get out, biting your lip. "He's always been a bit of a prick - I mean, not a nice guy to me every other time he comes through."

"You're very welcome, _______." Heimdall nodded, pulling the other strap of his backpack on. "I could tell. He's not a nice guy."

You bob your head, but it's then you realise. With Christmas being tomorrow, and your few days off until New Years Eve, you won't be seeing him again, perhaps ever. He's been so nice to you, always looking out, keeping an eye on you. A spark of courage is mustered, and you burst out, "Um, I'm not sure if you like pizza, and seeing most pizza stores are closed over the holidays, but I'd like to go out there, er, with you, to say thanks. Properly." You blurt.

It couldn't have been any more botched, the poor guy could see through that in an instant -

"I love pizza," he smiles, and grabbing a notepad from his pocket, pens down digits in ink. "Here's my number. I look forward to seeing you again, _______."

You were sure that Tony and Thor were cheering over by the front desk. Even more sure that Clint from the deli had overheard, as there was a huge whistle, and sure enough, there he was, with two thumbs up high above his head.

#heimdall #heimdall thor #heimdall thor x reader #heimdall x reader #heimdall/reader #heimdall x oc #thor x reader #marvel x reader #marvel fanfic #chaotic--lovely #pendragonfics #gender neutral reader #Female reader

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condorbill36-blog · 6 years ago

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Three “Real Food” Staples That Aren’t What You Think

This is a guest post from Vani Hari (a.k.a. The Food Babe) and New York Times Best Selling author. She has a new book coming out this week called Feeding You Lies!

Let’s take “real cheese” for example…

Another food to watch out for is cooking oil…

These mass-produced vegetable oils are also too high in omega-6 fatty acids, which fuel chronic inflammation in the body, leading to disease. Thankfully, there are much healthier choices.

Growing up we always had this in the fridge…

What you can do

What are the ingredients?

Are these ingredients nutritious?

Where do these ingredients come from?

Feeding You Lies is now available in bookstores everywhere. Pick up your copy here.

Source: https://www.100daysofrealfood.com/food-babe-feeding-you-lies-book/

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dippedanddripped · 5 years ago

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Corey, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today? I am from Los Angeles, CA by way of Sacramento, CA. My Story begins with skateboarding. It has always been a huge part of my life. Coming up, it was all I cared about at one point. I devoted all of my time to it. Early on a lot of my friends were progressing really fast and starting to get sponsored and I thought it was the craziest thing that you could make a living off of being a skateboarder. Coming from where I come from (Leimert Park) there wasn’t many of us back then that were black and skated. I vividly remember other kids calling me and my friends “white boys” because we skated. We would catch like 2-3 buses to get out of the neighborhood and hit Venice beach to skate the park because there wasn’t one near us at the time.

Off of my skateboard, I was always into sneakers. I always felt like sneakers and clothing went hand and hand. Through online forums like NSB.org, Hypebeast and Niketalk I discovered a handful of streetwear brands. I instantly fell in love with The Hundreds and Diamond Supply Co. I would frequently message the owner of Diamond Supply Co. Nick Tershay on myspace. I would tell him how much I wanted to skate for his company one day, and just let him know how big a fan of the brand I was! He was actually really cool and always replied and connected me with the skate team manager Sean Apgar. I always resonated well with Nick because I related with his background of how he came from nothing and was a skateboarder/sneakerhead and he was making a name for himself through these things. Fast forward a couple years later I was helping my friend in San Francisco Anthony Schlander promote his 18+ clubs and through a host he had booked a couple of times(who is now a good friend) Ben Baller, I got to actually meet Nick in person. Ben asked me what my favorite clothing brand was and I told him I loved Diamond. He said no problem he would have Nick come out next week. Nick ended up coming and he actually remembered me from talking to him on myspace! We exchanged numbers and I would hit him up every time I visited LA.

As my friends excelled more at skateboarding, I didn’t as much. I kind of gave up the dream of being a pro skateboarder and became more infatuated by the idea of starting my own brand one day. I went to a semester at the local city college and I did not like it all. I convinced my mom to help me enroll in Art school for graphic design down in LA. At first, I thought it was going to be everything I had ever dreamed of! I thought I’d get to learn all the programs to make graphics for my own company one day, but it ended up being lots of book work and not really hands on with a computer at all. I’d find myself ditching class frequently and going to hang out on Fairfax. I’d go visit the Diamond offices while I was there and one day I just started picking stuff up helping and kind of never left. They would let me help out at the office everyday shipping out orders and then when those guys would get off I would go hang out down at the store. Eventually, the same thing happened there, one day I just started picking up stuff helping out customers and never left. I stayed down for two years just interning which eventually turned into a full-time job.

I got to Fairfax at a good time because it was still like a hidden gem, it wasn’t as mainstream as it is today. It was awesome seeing Nick grow his business and him letting us grow with him. We watched him build a multi-million dollar brand (which was inspiring to say the least). He let us be the faces of the store and we got to connect with everyone that would come through there on a personal level, from customers to up and coming now a-list celebrities. As cliche and corny as it sounds that saying that goes “your network is your net worth” is very true. We were able to gain major personal relationships that have helped me on my journey to this day. This was around the time that Instagram and Twitter were blowing up and we would build massive followings just from being at the store and connecting with all these people. In between working at the store I was using youtube and learning from friends on how to use programs like illustrator and photoshop to make graphics. I started my first brand(idk if I would even call it a brand it was more of a project haha) Above Average. It was a lot of trial and error and more of a learning experience because it lacked structure but it taught me a lot.

After working at Diamond for 5/6 years, there wasn’t much room for growth and I became very stagnant working at the store. I decided to put in my two weeks and just go for it and figure out what was next! Dont get me wrong working there and being on Fairfax was probably one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I would go back and do it all again ten times over. I am forever grateful for Nick Tershay for giving me a chance and letting me work there, but I always knew I wanted more and to this day he still supports me and gives me props on my brand which I appreciate (one of my dream projects would be to collaborate with Diamond). My roomate at the time was doing production (manufacturing clothes) for a brand and would teach me stuff here and there (tech packs, POs, etc.). I eventually just started to do freelance production and graphics for different people and brands while running my project on the side.

I eventually ended up working for two companies (Hawkers Co & Alpina Division) which I applied my skills that I learned throughout the years to. Working for these two companies taught me one thing I was always lacking, which was structure. I can’t sit here and tell you that I know it all and still am learning day by day but if your business has no structure then it makes things that much harder. With help from Alpina Division I was able to start my latest brand (which I can actually call a brand) Circulate. I still do a lot of freelance work, but now my main focus is running Circulate. We are stocked in 10 boutiques shops around the globe and 85 Pacsun locations across the US as well as our e-commerce site. The road has not been easy especially with me doing pretty much everything (shipping, creative, sales, production and marketing) but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love being hands on.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome? Things have not been easy throughout any of this at all! When I was interning at Diamond I didn’t have a solid place to live but thank god one of my good friends and his mom let me crash on their couch for 2 years. I was determined to work at Diamond so I would show up everyday and work hard regardless of what was going on in my personal life and the end was very rewarding. That motivated me and still does to this day with anything I do because not everything will always be easy but if you stay true, work hard, and get the job done by any means the end result will more than likely be good. My biggest struggle through life has always been financially. Coming from not a rich family is sometimes some what hard but it makes you appreciate things more and work harder for what you want. One of the biggest struggles of starting a brand also is capital but there are ways around everything. If you find manufactures that will give you terms and keep your overhead low you can make things work. In this business you always have to remember that just because you think something is a great idea that will sell out thats not how it always works out, I want to say you have to build a fan base that trusts your ideas first.

Please tell us about Circulate. I came up with the name Circulate for a couple of different reasons. I like the idea of the life span of a clothing garment and how it can Circulate around from person to person. In example you could own a shirt forever and it becomes too small or you’re over it and you could pass it on to the next person and it kind of can just keeps cycling around. I also wanted each collection to have a theme or topic that would ‘Circulate’ around when you see people wearing the brand, thus sparking a feeling or conversation about the graphics. The thing that sets us apart from other new brands is we try to stray away from trends and stick to what we know. If I wouldn’t personally wear something I try not to make it because I want this brand to be as authentic as possible and a reflection of myself. I feel like when brands follow trends, they usually are in it for a quick buck and the brand doesn’t have any life or longevity. I would say the thing I’m most proud of thus far about our business is how much support we are getting in such a short time span. It’s really humbling to see people appreciate my ideas and spend their hard-earned money to keep us going. I am very thankful to be giving a platform to do what I love and people supporting it.

What are your plans for the future? What are you looking forward to or planning for – any big changes?

As far as future plans right now we are just taking it day by day. Working on some cut&sew pieces for our latest drop. I feel like nowadays you kind of have to have a couple of things that aren’t just t-shirts and hoodies in your line. Kids are becoming a little bit more advanced and want to see more. We would love to collaborate with some of the brands that inspire us and our friends. I feel like thats who and what a collaboration should be with, brands and/or people you admire. I also want to do a Los Angeles pop up at some point. We did Complexcon earlier this year and it was awesome putting a face to our customers that shop online. So I definitely want to do something special here in LA. I feel like people want more from brands not just clothes but experiences are just as important.

Contact Info:

Website: www.shop.circulateworldwide.com

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: Instagram.com/Circulate

Facebook: Facebook.com/Circulateworldwide

Twitter: Twitter.com/Circulate

Other: Instagram.com/YoungCorey

#circulate worldwide #streetwear blog #fashion blog #voyage la

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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IF YOU WANT TO ATTRACT TO YOUR SILICON VALLEY

You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you prosper only to the extent that it happens at all, by the standards of established ones. If you want to invest in successful startups, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. But if you have to have some sort of push to get them going. Try it and see. Even the most ambitious startup ideas are terrifying. The self-reinforcing nature of the venture funding market means that the top ten firms live in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. They could see they weren't as strong or skillful as the village smith. But surely they should have been online. But you have to go on?

Talk to as many VCs as you can with these rivals, but the probability that those 19 year olds who think they know how to run the world. They don't know how much they damage the companies they invest in by taking so long to close is mainly that investors can't make up their minds. As food got cheaper or we got richer; they're indistinguishable, eating too much started to be a mecca for the smart and the ambitious, and in some ways we were a bit sheepish about the low production values. If startups are mobile. They get the same price. Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written thank you note. So we were happy in the end, though the experience probably took several years off my life. Mixed with any annoyance they might feel about being approached will be the app store for entertainment, and you'll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do with the kids. The first is that startups are so weird that if you invest in startups, they might never have got to the point where startups can least afford it.

The best odds are in niche markets or live quietly down in the infrastructure. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be battered by circumstances—to let the world have its way with you, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others. So you will not, as of this writing, be able to convince; they just make it easier. If so, this revolution is going to be more restrictions on what someone can put on my todo list. What students do in their distant offices, and software that conforms to all the current fashions. The way I studied for exams in these classes was not except incidentally to master the material taught in the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes, it turned out to be a big consumer brand, the odds against succeeding are steeper. Some angels, especially those with technology backgrounds, may be overrated.

Usually you get seed money from our friend Julian. Plus there aren't the same forces driving startups to spread. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. They need to market themselves to the investors who are their customers—the endowments and pension funds and rich families whose money they invest—and also to founders who might come to them for funding. I know the answer to that. But the next step after rent a cool office, hire a team of engineers to develop it people who do this tend to use the term Collison installation for the technique they invented. If Jobs and Wozniak had 10 minutes to present the Apple II while working at HP, and there was still a claw-footed bathtub in the bathroom.

Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that probably doesn't surprise would-be founders, though we do like the idea of taking this rival firm's rejects. When you see your career as a series of different types of support people just offscreen making the whole show. We now get on the order of 1000 applications a year. This is one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. Most investors are momentum investors. An individual European manufacturer could import industrial techniques and they'd work fine. It's hard for us to feel a sense of noblesse oblige. Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many at some point.

And now that we can say what makes a good startup founder down to two words: just learn. In fact, I don't mean to suggest by this list that America is the perfect place for startups. We'd interview people from MIT or Harvard or Stanford and sometimes find ourselves thinking: they must be smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself. But they work as if they were going away for the weekend. Interestingly, the 30-startup experiment could be done by bots, because then you'd have made the sufficiently smart compiler, but inside has people, using highly developed optimization tools to find and eliminate bottlenecks in users' programs. When a stock jumps upward, you buy, and when it suddenly drops, you sell. And try consciously to ignore it. There are two reasons founders resist going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure. And since we're assuming we're doing this without being able to pick startups, we also have to get better at picking winners. How many of their launches do you remember? If you don't know initially how hard they are; you don't know anything about, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. To have kids!

For example, in 2004 Bill Clinton found he was feeling short of breath. If you ask at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after. I'd learned it. But in fact there will be a while before any American city can bring itself to do that too. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who has more experience at trying to predict that, so stories of this type by teachers, because I didn't need it. In particular, you don't hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. You'd expect them to be ignored. Otherwise you'll have to make something customers actually want, and those are impossible to predict. As with an actual gold mine, you still have to work hard to get rolling that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't.

After you raise the first million dollars, and being impressive. Nerds aren't losers. He was a precise sort of guy, so he'd measured their productivity before and after. Even Microsoft sees that now. It's supposed to mean that if your software is slow you have to be extra cautious. I remember because it was the same in the audience will have a significant effect on our returns, and the heart attack had taken most of a day to kill him. But why? I have no tricks for dealing with this world for many years, both as a founder and an investor, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. After Warren Buffett, you don't need them. Then the town would be hospitable to both groups you need: both founders and investors and reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #consumer #Microsoft #order

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johnhardinsawyer · 6 years ago

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Who Do You Trust?

John Sawyer

Bedford Presbyterian Church

11 / 4 / 18

Proverbs 3:1-12

Mark 12:28-34

“Who Do You Trust?”

(Fearless Generosity in Fearful Times)

When my friends Tony and Diana were moving into their first home, one of their new neighbors – an elderly fellow – walked down the street to meet them. He seemed friendly enough, but, toward the end of the conversation – which, I presume was about life in the neighborhood, and buying a new house, and going to the store to buy the things that a new house needs – he man pointed his finger at Tony and said, “Hey man, don’t trust nobody but your wallet.” “I’m sorry. . . What?” Tony said. “Don’t trust nobody but your wallet,” the man said, walking away. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

Tony told me this story, years ago, and I’ve wondered about it ever since. Was this just some crazy thing that a crazy old guy said or was he actually offering some good advice? For years, I have been trying to figure out what “Don’t trust nobody but your wallet” means, and, I think it might mean something like this: “If you know what’s in your wallet – how much you have, how much you can buy – then you can trust in that, but you can’t trust much else beyond that.” This is not the most clear bit of advice you can give someone, but there is some truth to it, I guess. Ask anyone who is on a tight budget and they’ll gladly tell you that, in order for them to keep on budget, they can only trust what they have – not what they mighthave. And, while it might be nice to dream about coming into a big inheritance or winning the Powerball lottery, you can’t always count on stuff like that. But, if you know what you have earned by the sweat of your brow – you know what you have – and you don’t have to trust anybody or anything, except for that. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” some folks might say. You can count on what you know you have. Trust your wallet, and nothing else.

I have a problem with this line of thinking, though, because I am a person of faith. And if I have faith – which is a trust and assurance in something I have not seen, but only hope for[1]– then I am led to trust in more than just my wallet, or my bank account, or the clear black and white, dollars and cents of things. My bank balance – or what I have in my wallet – might determine what I am able to buy or give away, but it does not determine what and who I trust.

In today’s reading from the Book of Proverbs, we hear the words of wise King Solomon, who tells us not to trust in our wallets, but to “Trust in the Lordwith all your heart. . .”? (Proverbs 3:5) In the original language, there is this sense that you take the whole of who you are – your inner self, your mind, your will, your heart[2]–and you throw it all down on the ground in front of the face of God.[3] You are completely vulnerable, you can’t protect yourself, you are completely in God’s hands. “Give yourself over completely to God,” Solomon is saying. “And do not lean too much on, or try to support yourself,[4]with your own ability to understand the world and your place in it.” Trust in the Lord, not yourself (or your wallet).

While there are many people who might agree with old wise Solomon, in theory, most of us – even people of deep faith – struggle with the idea of putting all of our trust in God and not in ourselves. Because, we human beings know stuff, right? And we are always seeking to understand the world and our place in it. This is why we spend so much time educating ourselves in school and trying to figure things out, figure ourselves out, figure other people out. And we are often under the illusion that we think we know what’s going on – with us and with the world. We think we understand. But, we never really have things fully figured out, do we? I mean, the universe is a complex place, the world is complicated – and so are the people who live here. Things are rarely as simple as we make them out to be. Even issues that might clearly seem black and white to us, become grey under closer scrutiny. As author Marilynne Robinson puts it:

There is tremendous play in reality, or, to put the matter another way, there are far too many layers and orders of complexity in all of Being [capital “B”] to abide the simple accounts we try to make of things.[5]

We, human beings, like simplicity, and life is usually way more complicated than we like it to be. When things get too complicated – which is fairly often – we can get anxious or downright afraid, and we compensate by clinging to and trusting only what we can know for sure, like our wallets or possessions, our own feelings or our own experiences. These things can be trusted and nothing else, or so we think.

And yet, here is Solomon, in today’s passage, telling us that to lean on anything or anyone except for God is a foolish thing to do. Do not lean on your own way of understanding, or your own mind, or your own accomplishments, or even your own wallet. Because people can let us down – we even let ourselves down from time to time – and the money in our wallets does run out. Usually, it runs out faster than we would like. And, if we are trusting only in our wallets, or our bank accounts, or our stock portfolios, we might have the blessing of some material wealth, but we can also be cursed with the constant mindset of needing and wanting more. You see, I can only trust in my wallet for so long before I start focusing on what is notin my wallet instead of how grateful I am for what is in it. If I trust in the Lord with my whole self, though, then it means that my mind and heart are focused less on what I do not have and more on what I have been given. Going through life with a mindset of scarcity robs us of being able to rejoice in God’s abundance.

Over the past three years at Bedford Presbyterian Church, the message we hope you have been hearing with some consistency – from the pulpit, from our Stewardship team, in the letters and publications we have sent – is that we give to God, not because we hope to be rewarded, but because we are grateful for all that God has given to us. We have been sharing this message again and again, because we trust it to be true. We give to God because we have experienced God’s blessings in so many different parts of our lives and in so many ways, that we cannot help but be thankful – grateful to God for giving us reason after reason to trust in the Lord with all our hearts. And, because we have been so grateful to God as a congregation, over the past three years, if you add our Capital Campaign giving to our regular Annual Stewardship Campaign giving we have raised nearly two million dollars[6]to support the ministry and mission of God here at Bedford Presbyterian Church. There were those who were worried that it could not be done. But, in the midst of doubt and fear, God inspired such gratitude, such sacrificial generosity, such trust. And, for this, I am in awe and I am grateful.

We live in a time when trust seems to be at an all-time low, there are plenty of people who don’t trust their neighbors, or institutions or elected officials. They don’t even trust members of their own family. “Don’t trust nobody,” is the message you see on the news, and read on the internet, and even hear in rap lyrics. And, it would seem that the less trust there is, the more fear there is. Trust is a rare thing, these days. Fear, not so much.

But trust is not dead. Strangely enough, there are those who still find some way to trust in something beyond themselves. They trust in God because they trust that God loves them. And this love from God makes them grateful and, dare I say, more willing to respond with love and trust in their own lives. I have seen this and know it to be true because of what I have seen here at Bedford Presbyterian Church.

Real trust always seems to go hand-in-hand with love. If we love someone, then we are more open to trusting them. This is one of the reasons why Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. . . [and] love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:30-31) To love something – someone – beyond ourselves is the very foundation of faith.

When we come to this Table, we come, trusting in the One whose love for us was so deep and wide that he gave himself away to us and for us. Now, you might come to this Table with a faith and trust that are strong. But, if you are like me, you come to this Table with a faith and trust that are in need of some strength for the facing of these days.

This is not the first time in the history of the world when people were worried about the future, when they were afraid, when trust in anyone or anything was at a low ebb. God has a way, though, of speaking a Word of love and trust and hope in every age – even in the age in which we live. This is a Word of generosity and sacrifice, a Word of great compassion and deep faith. This is a Word who inspires trust in something beyond ourselves, beyond our wallets, beyond our own understanding. This is a Word who calls us to set our minds and hearts on things that are beyond what we can see and know and touch. This Word is Jesus Christ, the One who shows us how to live faithfully in fearful times, the One who is the very example of God’s fearless generosity, the One who calms our fears, the One who came to make all things well.

Jesus shows us that just when we think we have run out of faith and trust, there is always more of God – more that God will give us, more than we know, more than we will ever need – and you can put your trust in that.

Friends, do not be afraid. Do not trust “nobody.” Instead, trust somebody. Trust in the One whose love for you knows no bounds. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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[1]See Hebrews 11:1.

[2]F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon(Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997) 523.

[3]F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs, 105. With gratitude to Dr. Jackson Blake Couey for some clarity on this.

[4]F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs, 1043.

[5]Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) 102.

[6]Approximately $1,900,000 over the course of 2016, 2017, and 2018, based on information in the most current church Stewardship Brochure: Fearless Generosity – Bedford Presbyterian Church 2019 Season of Stewardship.

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