#i know it's a separate membership because it's a game for small kids because it's htt/yd

[ashburntcat]

things im Big Mad about: why can't there just be a universal currency. money conversion is bullshit and i Hate it why isn't everything just the same goddamn amount literally Everything would be so much easier

[samingtonwilson]

Apartment 8C - Chapter 1

Telling the Kids About Your Separation

SERIES MASTERLIST

Summary: college au. you and bucky are the closest of friends, the most functional of roommates, and… exes. but just because it didn’t work out romantically doesn’t mean he has to move out! it’s not like he’s so deeply in love that he can barely breathe. totally not in love. at all. not even a little. maybe. 

Pairing: bucky x reader

Warnings: language

A/N: SHE’S BACK, LADIES. the only tag list i’m using is the permanent one, nothing specifically for this series sorry!

“You guys said it wouldn’t last…” 

Natasha looks between the two of you. Steve’s beer is at his lips but he doesn’t take a sip. Wanda’s fingers pause in the bowl of popcorn she’s placed in her lap. Only Sam has a visibly emotional reaction. 

He’s on the verge of bursting— maybe in frustration as the two of you are blocking the television, maybe in laughter. 

It doesn’t help that you’ve hidden your hands behind your back. Nor does it help that you and Bucky are both grinning like giddy idiots while you stare at your friends who now sit with pin-straight postures on the sectional in your living room.

“And you were right!” you shout once several awkward beats have passed. 

There is a loud POP! when you bring your hands forward to twist the bottom of a party popper, iridescent confetti falling over the coffee table and tangling itself in Natasha’s hair, and a triple air horn sound effect cuts through the silence when Bucky opens the app on his phone. 

The two of you are laughing and high-fiving one another, but the four before you continue staring. 

That is, until longsuffering Sam— fingers pressed into his temples— speaks. “You called us over here to tell us you broke up?” 

Bucky shrugs and takes the empty party popper from you. He turns it over and shakes it, disappointed when more confetti doesn’t fall out. After all, he’d purchased the ones from Target just for the extra confetti. “We have consciously uncoupled.”

“That term refers to divorce,” Wanda says as she picks the confetti out of the popcorn and lets it fall to the floor. When she looks up, her expression is equal parts exasperation and amusement. “And, as far as I know, you two were never married.” 

Natasha, fingers combing through her hair, frowns. “I actually forgot you were even dating.”

“Yeah, so did she,” Bucky says as he jabs his elbow into your ribs with a snort. “We didn’t want you guys finding out from somewhere else.” 

“Like where?” Sam asks. He scoots over to let you sit beside him, eyes narrowed at Bucky who falls into his usual spot— the worn barcalounger you’d begged him not to bring when he moved in. “You think they’d send out a campus-wide alert that you two broke up? Or that E! News would be reporting it after they talk about whichever Kardashian is having another baby?” 

That steals Wanda’s attention from the popcorn bowl. “Speaking of, how is one of them always pregnant?” 

There’s a fair amount of indistinct chatter to answer Wanda’s question, but it is all loudly interrupted with a simple: “Does this mean Bucky is moving out?” 

It seems that everyone turns to look at Steve simultaneously. Squeaks of leather as you all shift around, the click of a bowl being placed on the wooden table. 

He understands the question in all of your gazes, and shrugs with a sigh of defeat. “They’re probably just genetically very fertile— Kris has had, like, eighteen children herself. Now, does Bucky have to find a place?” 

Then all eyes slide to you. Your eyebrows furrow and your nose wrinkles. The absolute picture of disbelief. It has Bucky fighting a smile. “Why would he need to do that?” 

“Living with an ex is hard,” Sam replies. He sets his hand on yours and gives your fingers a light squeeze. It’s meant to be comforting, but it isn’t necessary. “It’d make sense if you couldn’t—”

“Bucky moved in a while before we started dating,” you tell them, each word said in an imploring tone. “He still has his bedroom, I still have mine. Besides, we didn’t break-up because we can’t stand being around each other.” 

“Then why did you break-up?” 

The inquiry is directed at Bucky, who everyone shifts to face. The piercing attention draws a light blush over the bridge of his nose and at the highpoints of his cheeks. You hold back a soft laugh. “We’re just better as friends. The romantic compatibility wasn’t there.” 

“Romantic compatibility, conscious uncoupling,” Natasha repeats with a surprised laugh. “Does this man have a Goop membership, or something?” 

Despite your own laughter, you nod at Bucky. “He’s right, though. It just— Something was missing.” 

As inarticulate as it is, it’s the truth. There was nothing wrong with your relationship, at least at first glance. You kissed each other hello— when you remembered— and you kissed each other goodbye— when you remembered. 

But you often forgot— you usually forgot. Which might be explanation enough as to why the two of you didn’t last. 

— 

“Was the sex bad?” 

You nearly choke on the sip of wine you’d taken. Glancing at the boys in the living room to confirm they were blissfully unaware of Wanda in the kitchen, you set your glass onto the counter and narrow your eyes at her. “You should increase your volume the next time you ask something like that.” 

“It couldn’t have been too bad,” Natasha says from the barstool beside Wanda’s, still frowning. She’d managed to remove every piece of confetti from her hair and it now sits in a small pile next to her glass. “You two weren’t exactly virgins when you met.” 

Your answering smile is sarcastic. “Hilarious. The sex wasn’t bad. He’s— He’s good at it.” 

“Yeah, that was convincing,” Natasha snorts into her glass as she takes a sip. “For his sake, I hope none of us let it slip that Barnes’ dick is trash.” 

“It isn’t trash! Okay.” You wiggle a finger at Wanda. “You. Imagine having sex with Steve.”

Her nose immediately wrinkles, her scowl instantaneous. “Understood. But then why date in the first place?” 

“Remember the night my ‘friends’ from high school were in the city?” 

The smile Natasha wore due to your finger quotes gives way to a deep grimace. “The night that girl with the bad bleach job pranced around here showing her ring off? I wish I could forget.” 

You nod. “All night, she kept telling me someone might be out there for me. That I probably won’t be too late, that some people end up alone and it’s okay. Like I’m tofu and she’s apple pie.” 

“You lost me with that one.”

“Like I’m an acquired taste and she’s universally appealing.” 

You smile when they laugh to themselves, but shake your head seconds later. “I don’t care if I end up alone. I’ll be fine either way. It’s just the insinuation that I’ll fail if I try to find someone. Like it’s prom all over again.” 

“D’you punch her teeth in? Can I punch her teeth in?”

You roll your eyes at Natasha. “I drank my weight in whatever bullshit wine she’s stupid enough to pay for, texted Bucky to pick me up, and fucked him on the couch to make myself feel better.” 

Her features twist in disgust. “The couch we all sit on?”

— 

While Sam yells at the television as if the New York Giants can hear his admonishments and advice, Steve sits back against the sofa cushions. His sigh is heavy and pointed, meant to draw attention, but it fails. 

So he places his feet on the coffee table. He crosses his legs at the ankle. And he glares. 

An unsuccessful moment later, he speaks. “I’m not gonna let you crash on my couch.” 

Unable to stop himself, Bucky smiles but otherwise focuses on the game. “That’s a fun psychic premonition. Do you read palms, too?” 

Steve attempts to look more threatening and narrows his eyes to slits. The blue is icy, menacing. 

However the elephant cushion he’s clutching to his chest? Not helping his cause. “So she dumped you because you’re a pain in the ass? Is that it?”

“She dumped me because I’m too good in bed and it was starting to become too much for her.” 

Sam pauses the game just to join Steve in looking at Bucky skeptically. 

He just rolls his eyes. “No one dumped anyone. We both decided we’re better as friends.” 

“S’usually a lie when people say that,” Steve remarks. He sticks his tongue out when Bucky narrows his eyes in offense. 

“It isn’t this time.” 

Sam, wearing a sly smile as he turns his attention back to the game, asks the next question: “Were there tears?” 

“She was stone cold.” Grinning as he holds his bottle of beer to his lips, he adds jokingly, “I cried like a baby, though.” 

Sam hums. “Not surprised. You fuckin’ sobbed at Inside Out.”

“Oh, so you didn’t cry when Bing Bong said ‘Take her to the moon for me’?” Bucky cocks an eyebrow. “What, are you a fuckin’ monster, Wilson?” 

The grinding of Steve’s teeth is almost audible, his irritation painfully evident when he tosses the cushion aside. 

Yet he still straightens it to make sure the elephant is sitting up straight, trunk pointed to the ceiling. 

“I’m being serious, Buck. Living with an ex... It’s touchy and awkward. How are you gonna feel when she’s got some guy over?” 

“The same way she’ll feel when I’ve got some girl over,” the answer is said with ease. “Hell, I’ll give her a condom if she needs one.” 

“And your feelings just turned themselves off?” 

His shrug is a bit reluctant, the smile he offers Steve hesitant. “Hers did.”

—

Hours pass before it’s just you and Bucky in the apartment. 

Natasha and Wanda leave first to get enough sleep before their eight-AM class, and Steve only manages to coax Sam off the couch once he has watched the game highlights and coverage twice over. You think you might scream if you ever hear the SportsCenter theme again.

Leaning against the door after it shuts behind Steve and Sam, you offer Bucky a sleepy smile as he rummages through the refrigerator. Judging by his sour expression, there’s nothing good to eat. “That was easier than I thought.” 

“Yeah, I’m real glad I read that ‘Telling the Children about the Divorce’ article for it.” He slams the fridge shut. There is desperation in his voice when he asks, “Are you hungry, too?” 

Dish rag tossed in his direction, you flip the faucet on to wet each glass. “When am I not hungry, Bucky?” 

“Are you more willing to pay for pizza or Thai?” 

“S’too late for Thai.” You set a washed glass atop the counter and get started on soaping up the next one. “We’ll get Thai when it’s your turn to pay.”

Three glasses sit on the counter before Bucky sets his phone down and begins drying them. He peers over at you with attempted tact.

But, to his dismay, you smile and meet his blue eyes with a playful glare. “What?” 

“Steve’s dead-set on me moving out.” 

Your frown is immediate. You stop scrubbing the popcorn bowl for a moment. “Do you want to move out?” 

His reply is instant. He stops drying a glass for a moment. “No. Do you want me to move out?” 

“No.” You resume scrubbing. “I can’t live here with anyone else.” 

Chewing on the inside of his cheek to avoid a grin, Bucky nods. He decides to change the subject and bumps his hip against yours. “Sam thought we were gonna tell everyone we got engaged.”

Startled laughter and you hand Bucky the washed bowl, switching the tap off and leaning your hip against the counter’s edge. “After, like, four months of dating? No wonder he looked so terrified.” 

“Should’ve played it off that way just to see what they’d say,” he muses as you help him put the dishes away. “Tasha would’ve hosted an intervention for you.” 

You hum in agreement. “Steve would’ve definitely called your mother.” 

“Would Wanda faint or is that too dramatic?” 

“She was ready to faint when I told her we had sex on the couch.” 

Eyebrows raised, he watches as you walk to the living room and fall into that exact couch with exaggerated relief. “You told her that?” 

Another hum. “Nat almost threw up.” 

“At the thought of us having sex in our own home?” he snorts, adding in a deadpan tone, “Oh, the horror.” 

Bucky collapses onto the couch beside you and smiles when you drop your head onto his shoulder. He toys with the stray pieces of confetti littered over the cushions. “Went all the way to Target for the more expensive poppers and they had even less confetti than the Party City ones.”

“Just because something costs more doesn’t mean it’s better.” 

He gasps playfully. “We have a genius in our midst. Someone please embroider everything she says onto pillows.” 

“Yeah and I’ll use those pillows to smother you in your sleep.” You lift your head and set your chin on his shoulder instead. You try to glare, but his smile is contagious. “I know where you live, Barnes.” 

“You won’t for long if Steve has it his way.” 

“If the world operated according to Steve’s wishes, we’d all be required, by law, to eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast and wear shirts two sizes too small.” 

--

CHAPTER 2: FINDING YOUR INDEPENDENCE 

[jujymikey]

Gifts

Ever since Bruce came back from being lost in the time stream, he hasn’t been able to get close to his third son. He’s been able to connect with his other kids, even more so then before he got lost in the stream, but for some reason he and Tim haven’t been able to. Before he got lost, Bruce and Tim were the closest he has ever been with any of his sons. They talked all the time and they even hung out when they weren’t working on a case.

So when Christmas time starts approaching, Bruce is surprised when he has no idea what to get Tim. He’s only shared one Christmas with Tim back when Tim was Robin and his parents were away on some trip. He got Tim a camera that Tim used all the time, but Bruce doesn’t think he can give Tim the same gift twice. So Bruce decides to ask for some help.

“What’s up B?” Dick asks as he walks into Bruce’s study.

“Thank you for coming. I need your help with something about Tim.” Bruce gestures to the chair in front of his desk, “Please take a seat.”

“What’s wrong? Is Timmy ok?” Dick asks, worry spreads over his face.

“He’s fine. I just need help figuring out what to get him for Christmas.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I can help with that.” Dick frowns, “I haven’t gotten him anything yet...”

“You are the closet in the family to Tim, surly you have some sort of idea of what he’d like.”

“We aren’t close anymore... not since...” Dick trails off. There’s so much that they’ve all left out about what happened while he was gone.

“Since what?”

“Since I gave Robin to Damian. He didn’t take it well... he hasn’t really talked to me about anything besides cases.” Dick shakes his head, then immediately perks up, “We should work together to figure out what to get Tim!”

“Do you still have contact with the members of the teen titans? They know Tim pretty well.”

“Yeah, I’ll text Gar about it.” Dick pulls out his phone and stands up, “I do have to go now, but I’ll let you know what I find out.”

This time of year, stores send out magazines with gift suggestions. Usually the only one that cares about these magazines are Dick, but this year Bruce is the one reading through them. There’s a week until Christmas and Bruce hasn’t gotten any gifts for his kids yet. That’s why he’s sitting kitchen isle surrounded by magazines.

“Looks nice.” Cass sneaks up on him and looks at the magazine of men shoes.

“You want some men’s dress shoes?” Bruce smiles at her.

“They’re shiny.” Cass smiles and sits down in the chair next to him, “Whatcha doing?”

“Looking for Christmas gifts.” Bruce says flipping through the page, “I have an idea for most of you guys, but I’m having a hard time figuring out a gift for Tim.”

“I got Timmy a gift.” Cass flips through the magazines then points to a basketball, “I got basketball, because Tim is my basketball.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I’m glad you found a good gift.” Bruce flips to the page of men’s graphic t-shirts, “Do you think Tim would like one of these? He likes anime, this shirt has an anime girl and says ‘oppai’.”

“Tim wears suits and sweaters.”

“He used to wear t-shirts.” Bruce frowns, when he was Robin, Tim would wear all kinds of cartoon t-shirts. It’s been only a year since then, has Tim really changed that much?

On the 23rd the Christmas tree is surrounded by presents wrapped in colorful paper. Four of those gifts are from Bruce, but he still can’t figure out what to get for his fifth kid. The problem is that a Bruce doesn’t know what Tim is into anymore. Does he still like video games? Or comics? Or action movies?

Damian is the easiest one to buy for, Bruce got him some fancy paints. Dick is also really easy, Bruce just ordered the lucky charms but only marshmallows. Cass is a little more difficult, but it only requires a bit of thinking. He gets her an elementary school level English learning book. Jason is very difficult, he likes book, but Bruce isn’t sure which books he has and which he’d want. So Bruce got him a new armor set that Lucious created that has a built in chest taser. It seemed like something Jason would enjoy.

Bruce has spent two hours at the mall looking for the perfect gift for Tim. After looking through each store twice, Bruce finally gives up and calls Dick, “Did you talk to your titan friend about Tim?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t that helpful though. Gar just said that Tim likes to boss people around and paperwork.” Dick says over the phone, he can hear the others talking in the background, “I ended up getting him a new clipboard.”

“I don’t want to get him office supplies. I don’t want him to think of our relationship as only work.” Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose, he can’t spend two more hours walking cluelessly through the mall.

“Why don’t you try asking Jason? They’ve gotten pretty close since Jason stopped trying to kill Tim.” Dick suggests.

“At this point I’ll try anything, put him on the phone.”

“Old man, what do you want?” Jason huffs over the phone.

“Do you know what Tim likes?” Bruce asks bluntly.

“What? Is this a joke?”

“No, Dick says you and Tim have gotten close and I don’t know what to get him for Christmas.” Bruce explains quickly, he doesn’t want to tell Jason about this, but he hopes that Jason will be mature about this.

“Pffffttt, really B? You can’t figure out what to get your perfect little solider?” Jason laughs, “I almost killed Tim twice and I know more about him than you, thats so sad.”

“Jay, I don’t have time for this. I really need your help.”

“It’s really nice to hear you this desperate. This is so great.” Jason sighs contently, “Alright, I’ll help you.”

“Thank you.” Bruce breathes out in relief.

“I got Tim an action figure of some game of thrones character. Just get him something nerdy and he’ll like it.”

“Tim doesn’t have any action figures in his room.” Bruce frowns, Tim’s room has nothing but the essentials in it. The walls are completely blank, no posters or anything like that. If there wasn’t a bunch of case files spread across the room, it wouldn’t look like anyone even lived in there.

“Yeah, but he’s a nerd. He has to love action figures.”

“I don’t think that’s true.” Bruce shakes his head, “Does Tim even watch game of thrones?”

“Of course he does! Everyone watches game of thrones!” He can practically hear Jason rolling his eyes, “You’re a hopeless case.”

Then Jason hangs up the phone, leaving Bruce to wander the mall for another three hours.

Bruce is starting to panic, it Christmas Eve and he still doesn’t have a gift for Tim. He’s resorted to snooping through Tim’s stuff. Tim is away on having a Christmas party with the teen titans, so he doesn’t have to worry about Tim catching him.

Most of the room is completely impersonal, so Bruce starts really digging through all of Tim’s stuff. His closet, drawers, Tim’s laptop. He can’t find anything even a little personal, if she didn’t know that Tim lived in here he’d never have known that was Tim’s room.

After searching through all of Tim’s stuff, Bruce sits down on Tim’s bed and tries to figure out what to do now.

“Father, what are you doing in Drake’s room?” Damian stands in the doorway of Tim’s room, he’s holding Alfred the cat.

“I’m trying to figure out what to get Tim for Christmas, it’s harder than I thought.” Bruce sighs.

“Come on, Father. Even I’ve gotten Drake a gift.” Damian says, setting the cat down on the floor and she runs underneath Tim’s bed.

“The gift better not be a knife to the stomach, because I will not allow any stabbing on Christmas.”

“Please, I wouldn’t ruin a perfectly good knife with Drake’s blood.” Damian rolls his eyes, “I got him a membership at the Metropolis museum so that he’ll be at home less.”

“That’s actually a nice gift.” Bruce sighs, his two sons that have tried to kill Tim are getting Tim a better gift than he is.

“You’re a detective father, it’s not that hard to figure out Drake.” Damian pats Bruce’s head, “Drake is a very simple man.”

“I’m sure I’ll figure something out in the next few hours.”

Christmas Day comes way sooner that Bruce expects. It’s 5 am and Bruce is just now getting home from the store, finally finding a gift for Tim. He didn’t have time to wrap it, so he bought a gift bag to put it in. Placing the bag under the tree, Bruce sinks down into the couch.

“Long night, sir?” Alfred asks handing Bruce a cup of coffee.

“Thanks Alfred.” Bruce down half of the cup in one go, “I’ve been out all night.”

“With a lady friend I presume.” Alfred sits down on the couch with a cup of tea in his hand.

“Actually, I was out shopping for a gift for Tim.”

“Waiting to the very last minute I see.” Alfred shakes his head in disappointment, “I ordered master Timothy’s gift months ago. A tea of the month set. I’ll get that boy to like tea eventually.”

“I just don’t know like I used to.” Bruce sighs into his cup, “I guess I’ve just realized that we aren’t close anymore.”

“Master Timothy has been distant from the family for awhile now.” Alfred stares down into his tea, “I’m afraid the boy doesn’t feel like he’s wanted here.”

“I didn’t realize it was that bad. I thought it was just me that’s fallen out of touch with Tim.”

“The only reason Timothy moved back into the manor was because you’ve come back.” Alfred says and gives Bruce a small smile, “He really cares about you.”

“I care about him too, I just can’t figure out how to show him how much I care about him.” Bruce drinks the rest of his coffee, “I couldn’t even figure what to get him, I just got him something random and I don’t even know if he’ll like it or not.”

“I’m sure he’ll love whatever you got him. It’s the thought that counts. You just need to tell him that you love him.” Alfred pats his shoulder and stands up, “I will go make breakfast now and I’ll get you another cup of coffee.”

Christmas breakfast goes way better than most meals in this family goes. No one fights and no one gets stabbed. Then it’s time for presents.

Dick is like a little kid, dressed in his Superman pjs separating his gifts from the others. Jason is sitting on the couch eating cookies. Cass is next to Jason sharing the cookies. Damian is sitting on the floor with Titus and Alfred the cat. Tim is sitting on the couch drinking his third cup of coffee. Bruce stand behind the couch nervously waiting for his kids to open the presents.

“You don’t need to be so nervous.” Alfred smiles and gently pats Bruce’s back.

“I’m not nervous.” Bruce grumbles into his sixth cup of coffee.

Dick, Damian, Jason and Cass all open their gifts and love each one of them, even the ones that Bruce got for them. The only presents left are Tim’s. They look over at Tim and find him on his phone.

“Timmy! The only gifts left are yours.” Dick says in a sing song voice.

“Oh, were we taking turns?” Tim looks up from his phone.

“Here my gift.” Cass hands him her gift.

“Thanks, Cass.” Tim smiles and opens the poorly wrapped gift, “Oh wow a basketball. I love it.”

“You basketball.” Cass bops Tim’s nose.

“Here’s my gift replacement.” Jason throws his gift at Tim.

Tim opens the gift and tilts his head, “Who’s this?”

“It’s John Snow from Game of Thrones!”

“I don’t watch game of thrones, I don’t really have time for tv.” Tim sets the gift down, “But thank you.”

“You suck.” Jason throws a cookie at Tim.

“Now my gift!” Dick hands Tim his gift.

“Oh wow... a clipboard... I love it.” Tim smiles at Dick and Dick lights up. Bruce knows Tim enough that it’s a fake smile, but Dick doesn’t seem to notice.

“I guess it’s mine turn.” Damian huffs and hands Tim a card.

“Wow this is a really nice gift.” Tim says after opening the card, “You’re not going to stab me as payment for this gift right?”

“Keep it up and I might.” Damian growls.

“Here’s my gift, Timothy.” Alfred hands him his gift.

“Tea.” Tim smiles soft at the box, “I love it.”

“Here’s a gift from me.” Bruce grumbles and hands Tim the bag.

Tim opens the bag and pulls out the anime t-shirt that says ‘oppai’ on it. Tim burst out laughing, “You don’t know what that means do you?”

“....it has an anime character on it... and you like anime...” Bruce says dumbly.

“I do, thank you.” Tim smiles at him.

After presents are done, everyone spreads out and goes on their own, giving Bruce time to talk to Tim alone. He finds Tim curled up in a chair in the library watches videos on his phone.

“Tim, can I talk to you?” Bruce asks sitting in a chair near Tim.

“Yeah, what’s up?” Tim asks setting down his phone. It’s weird his other kids call him B and Damian calls him Father, but Tim does his best not to address him.

“I want to spend more time with you.”

“...is this a joke?” Tim asks with confused look on his face.

“A joke?” Bruce frowns.

“Or is something wrong?” Tim sits ups, “Or is this about a case?”

“This isn’t about a case or anything like that. I want to spend more time with you not doing work or cases or anything like that.” Bruce hates that he has to explain this. If he asked Dick or Damian to hang out, neither would ask if it was a joke, “Ever since I came back from the time stream, you and I haven’t had any personal time together. I’ve missed a whole year of your life and I want catch up on what I’ve missed.”

“Oh....” Tim blinks at him, then blinks a couple more times trying to stop the tears from forming in his eyes, “I-if you want...?”

“Of course I want to.” Bruce smiles, “You’re my son and I love spending time with you.”

Instead of replying, Tim pounces on him. Bruce holds Tim close to him, it’s been so long since he’s held Tim. He feels smaller than the last time he’s held Tim, which concerns Bruce, but he decides to bring that up later.

“So do you actually like the shirt?”

Tim wipes his tears off his cheeks and lays his head on Bruce’s shoulder, “Bruce, ‘Oppai’ means boobs.”

Bruce stares in shock as Tim just laughs at him.

[salted-cushions]

All the reasons I gave you, the things I wanted and didn’t want - they were real, but they paled next to you. Like candles lit under the midday sun. And I, weak and stupid, watched the sun set on my life for the last time instead of snuffing even one of my candles out. Now they’ve all burned out, and so I’m sitting in the dark with nothing but my regrets to keep me company.

Long-ass emo post that takes a long time to get the the point, be warned.

I have taken up running in the past few weeks. I am not a strong runner, but my aerobic capacity is slowly improving and I’m starting to enjoy it... slightly.

I ran a community 5K this morning, and the emailed me my results about an hour later. I ran it in 33:15, which was much better than last time but still slow as fuck in the grand scheme of things - the fastest guy there posted a time of 17:30ish, which I know because he lapped me about 10 meters before the finish line.

So I was pretty confused when they told me I ran the fastest time in my age category. Like wtf? So I opened the results page and sorted it by age category - and it turns out that out of 182 runners, eight of them were between the ages of 20 and 29.

Where the fuck do I find people my age to make friends with? Most of the people in my course don’t speak english well enough to really get to know them, and besides they tend to form their own little cliques based on nationality - the chinese students have their own little groups, as do the indians and sri lankans. The singaporean and hong kong group is a bit more welcoming (and they tend to speak better english too), but like... I can get along with them well enough, but not well enough to be part of the in crowd, y’know? And it feels kinda weird to be the only white guy hanging out with an entirely asian crew. Plus their main social activities seem to be hot pot and boba tea, neither of which I’m that in to.

I’d really hoped that I’d be able to make some friends doing this running group thing, but I guess only the young and old do it. Ever since I’ve moved back to the suburbs I just never see anyone between highschool age and middle age. And the people who are kinda around my age are like... young families who’re starting out with homeownership and having kids, just at a different stage of life than I am. I guess all the young people are living near unis or towards the city.

A few years ago, I wanted friends who went out and got drunk, had house parties, did drugs and had lots of casual sex. And I had that, for a little while, working at a bar near the city - we’d pull 12 hour shifts, sit in the bar after close and drink our paychecks, hit the clubs and dance for hours, hook up with strangers, crash somewhere for a couple hours sleep and do it all again tomorrow. But it’s not as fulfilling as I thought it would be, I think I only wanted it because I thought I missed out in my teens and early 20s. (Hospitality bosses want their employees to do this, by the way - they’ve created this culture where you basically get abused by them and the customers all day, then spend all your money drinking at your workplace to get the bad feelings out, and then by the time the next shift rolls around you’re so tired and hungover all you want is to get through your shift and get drunk again. It’s disgusting, and I hope I never work at a bar again).

So what sort of friends do I want now? I don’t really know. I want to be able to talk about things that are on my mind, share my accomplishments and have them celebrated, get support when I need it and give it when they do. I want to host dinner parties and cocktail nights, and go to my friends’ dinner parties and cocktail nights. I want to go to nice restaurants and classy bars for celebrations, and maybe hit a club and dance until I can’t stand once or twice a year - but not on a school night, that’s not very smart.

I guess part of my problem is I want to do everything and be accepted everywhere (thanks, ADHD). Not that many people want to go and see the ballet or a musical, and also get high and talk about life, and also exercise every day and be fit and healthy, and also get shitfaced and dance until the sun comes up. People I meet seem to have space in their lives for work or school, family, a couple good friends, and exactly one ‘other’. My ‘other’ is a list a mile long, and everything has to be done at 110% otherwise I’m not interested in the slightest. I miss dancing - but there’s no point taking it up again until I can commit $5k/year and 15+ hours/week to competition training, plus probably another $5k/year on costuming, shoes and travel. I miss world of warcraft - but there’s no point playing unless I’m gonna do 10-15 hours of keystones on top of raiding three nights every week. I miss league of legends - but there’s no point playing unless I’m gonna play four hours a night to keep my skills sharp, oh and also that game makes me so fucking angry that I’ve broken more than one keyboard playing it. I miss martial arts - I kinda wanna do jujitsu, but it’s so expensive and you gotta buy all the gear straight away, and I know that if I get into it I’ll start wanting to train every day and spend all my time and money on it. Plus I don’t always get along with the kind of people who do it - the typical BJJ guy is either an older dude who realised he was getting fat and had a midlife crises, or a younger guy with a shaved head and intense eyes with dark circles whose bought into the culture with a cult-like intensity and has the vibe of being on the precipice of getting an SS tattoo. I miss magic the gathering, but collecting cards for a competitive decks is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process with significant setbacks every couple months when a new set comes out, plus MTG people tend to be have this unique combination of zero social skills, zero personal hygiene, and intense arrogance that makes them eminently unlikeable.

I like lifting, but I don’t really like gym culture - if it’s powerlifting, it’s all bearded bikie sorta guys listening to heavy metal. If it’s weightlifting, it’s very insular and cliquey (although the scene in my city is very small, so that might be a poor judgement). If it’s ‘bodybuilding’ - not people who compete, but guys who want big pecs and arms, and girls who want a skinny waist and a fat ass - it’s all ‘yeah brah’ meathead vibes and shallow instagramming. Besides, I spent all this money on my home gym stuff, so I can’t really justify paying for a gym membership just for socialising.

I like running, or I’m liking it so far. I don’t know about the people, they seem a bit too... normal for me. Everyone’s chatting about their spouses and kids and dogs, except the little group of competitive runners who seem to be more interested in training than chatting (funny that). Maybe that’s how I find myself and make some friends - keep moving towards having a house and a spouse and kids and a dog. That’s scary though. Is that what I want?

This has been on my mind a lot recently, to be honest. In a year I’ll be finished with my degree (theoretically) and hopefully find a professional, salaried job. What then? Except for the year I decided I would drop out of school and have a career in hospitality (bad idea), that’s been the point where my idea of the future stops for quite a while now. I know I want to buy a house or an apartment at some point, and since I found out that my sister and I are inheriting an interstate property homeownership is actually starting to sound realistic. I know, in broad strokes, the field I want to work in. But... do I want to live in the city and live the urbanite single life? Do I want to have a family and live further out where there’s space and more greenery? If my research project goes well, maybe I could try and get hired on as a research assistant, or if I find something worthwhile I could put together a PhD proposal (lol good luck with my amazing 1.1 GPA). I could work for the local government, or the state government, or the federal government, or a design firm, or a construction firm, or a consulting firm... the options are so many and I don’t even know how to begin evaluating them.

Of course it’s all a bit of a pointless exercise right now, because I’ll honestly take whatever job I can get when I graduate. There’s a lot of jobs for civil grads, but with my awful grades, dodgy resume and just being older than the rest of my cohort, I won’t have the luxury of being choosy. Public, private, non-profit, research, city-based, rural or even interstate - I’ll be submitting as many applications as I can and taking whatever I can get. And that will cut down my options for stuff like where I like and what kind of lifestyle I want to lead, like I can’t be seeing musicals every weekend and frequenting trendy cocktail lounges if I’m living and working off in Traralgon or whatever, and I can’t be living on a ten-acre rural plot with some sheep and a couple of border collies if I need to drive into the city for work every day.

I’m not ready to turn 30. I’m getting my shit together, but it’s so fucking slow and frustrating. At the start of the year I tore up my life and started from scratch - like I have every few years since I turned 16 - but I think and hope that this will be the last time, now that I’m aware of my patterns, medicated, and trying to plan for my future. But making those plans means... I need to figure out who I am and who I want to be. I need to separate what’s a part of me from what’s manifestations of ADHD. I need to figure out what I genuinely like, and what I think I like because it’s novel, or stimulating, or because I saw people doing it and instinctively wanted to mirror them. I need to dig through the ideal version of myself, the person that I want to be, and figure out what pieces are good and what aren’t. A couple years ago, I had this idea that the ideal me would say ‘I’m gonna do what I want, and the people who don’t like that can piss off.’ Well, I woke up one day recently and realised that I had no friends because that attitude had systematically pushed everybody that I cared for out of my life, so that’s one idea that I’m working on getting rid of.

There is one part of that which is very difficult for me to approach, though... and that’s my ex. She told me that she thought I looked hot with a beard, and so that became part of my ideal version of myself. I normally wear stubble these days - but with the nice clean line shaved into my cheek, just like she liked. I tell myself this is the way I think it looks best. But maybe I only do it because my ideal me is built for her. Before I met her, I already wanted to be fit, healthy and strong - dance training, lifting, sometimes running (but never sticking to it). But fitness was a big part of her life, and while we were together I absorbed some of that from her. It would be stupid to drop it from my life altogether, but I can’t help but wonder how much of why and how I do these things is constructed around her.

I never met anyone who understood me like she did. I’ve never liked sharing hobbies with girlfriends - inevitably they don’t quite get it, just as I don’t quite get theirs. Like, girls who wanted to play video games with me didn’t understand my drive to improve and be competitive - how when I play a game I’m constantly striving, in every moment, to be that little bit quicker, more accurate, more efficient, to make the right calls, to pick the right strategies. To them, a game is just a game to play for fun - and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not how I enjoy video games and I’m going to be intensely frustrated for every single second of you clumsily trying to participate in something I’ve spent thousands of hours getting better at. I can’t even play Mario Party without becoming a ruthless monster, please let’s put on a movie or something before my head implodes.

She got it, though. Not with video games - she didn’t give two shits about them - but about fitness. She wasn’t like those people who come to the gym to half-heartedly do a set on every machine and then go home to eat ice cream, or the people who just do an hour of incline walking while watching tv and playing on their phones. She did research, and made intelligent plans, and took it seriously. She’d grit her teeth and push through the shittiest days, where lesser women (and men) would have cut their workout short and gone home. She badly needed to succeed, so badly that every little failure cut her to the quick. Healthy? Fuck no. But just like me. More than me, better than me. We understood each other. And let me tell you, you’ve never known love until you’ve watched your girlfriend grind her way out of a PR squat that by all rights she should have failed - and then seen the elation on her face once she’s racked the bar and realised what she just achieved.

Jesus, I’m close to tears now. I just wanted to bitch about not having any friends and I’ve once again segued into pining over her. God I’m so lonely. Why am I like this?

Reading over that last paragraph... it does sound like I have genuine feelings for her, and not just an obsessive need to recapture the one that got away. So that’s... good, I think. It doesn’t change anything really... it doesn’t uncover a new course of action to take, or instruct on how to manage my feelings better. But I don’t want to be that creepy, obsessive ex. I’ve felt like that a lot over the past couple years, but only internally... I’ve tried to leave her alone and done pretty well, I think. Like yeah, I think about her way too much and stalk her socials pretty regularly, but if she doesn’t see any of that then... it won’t make her uncomfortable. That’s the theory. And I’m getting better with the stalking... I just open her instagram and say to myself ��see? still blocked and set to private. you didn’t miss anything.’ and then I can close it and go about my day. Not great, but... better than the alternatives for now.

This is where it all comes together. I want to text her, have another shot, lay everything out and say ‘I want now what you wanted from me two years ago.’ And I think that’s an actual desire, even a plan, not just me desperately trying to grab on to the last few shreds of dopamine I could get from her. But... I’m not ready, and it’s not the right time. I need to keep getting my shit together, so I can face her and be proud of myself. I don’t want to be embarrassed by living in an ancient, dirty and broken-down house - but I’m working on that. I don’t want to be embarrassed by my inability to stick to an exercise routine for more than a few months - but I’m working on that. I want be confident when I say I’ll finish my degree this year. I want to be confident when I say that next year I’ll have a job and be looking at buying a house. I want to be confident when I say that I’m quitting smoking - or, better yet, proudly say that it’s been so many weeks since my last cigarette.

I hurt her, in the past. And I regret it, and I’m ashamed - because as I’ve learned more about myself, the reasons are becoming clear. She wasn’t happy, and she would break up with me. I would say, ‘well of course I don’t want that, but you need to do what’s right for you.’ And then I would go cold for a couple of days until she inevitably came crawling back - until the last time, when she didn’t. I shouldn’t have let it go on. And why did I let it? Because I’m weak and selfish. Because I ignore issues that I don’t want to deal with, and happily go on with my life as if they don’t exist. Because I’m desperate for approval and validation, and couldn’t do the right thing by her because it would have meant losing a huge source of that. Because I think I can get away with anything, and I care more about whether there will be immediate consequences for me, rather than if something is right or wrong or affects someone else.

I took so much from her. Her friendship with our other roommate - destroyed, and at the time I said ‘that’s between the two of them,’ but I was the one who came into their lives like a hurricane. Her house - she was the one who had to move, even though she’d lived their long before me - I was the one who should have moved out, but I said to myself ‘she’s the one who’s leaving, that’s her prerogative.’ Her gym - I should have stopped going there when things were moving towards the end, but I didn’t. Then I told myself that we went at different times now and wouldn’t see each other, so it was fine - until one day when she came in, saw me, went to the bathroom and hid for at least an hour until I’d left. It shouldn’t have taken that much to make me change gyms - and for what! That gym was her community, for me it was just the most convenient place that usually had a free squat rack. And I took it from her. All of these things were so easy to justify - ‘I’m gonna do my thing and if anybody doesn’t like it - they don’t have to stay in my life.’ I was so fucking selfish, and I have so much regret. The only thing I could possibly do is apologise. And I hate apologies - words mean nothing without actions backing them up. There’s no action that I could possibly take that could give these things back to her, so all I could do is grovel at her feet and tell her that I’m sorry and that I’m trying to be a better person.

I’m scared. Even if I do get my shit together and sack up enough to text her, and even if she actually replies, and even if by some miracle she wants to try again - I’m scared that I’ll hurt her again. That I won’t have grown out of my selfish, irresponsible ways. I can SEE the patterns, but can I change them? I think so... but it’s not an overnight thing, and it’s not a neat and direct path from A to B. It’s a messy, unclear, painful and difficult thing that I have to do if I want to be a better person, if I want be capable of having a stable and loving relationship in the future. I can easily see a future where, if all the pieces fall into place and we start dating again, I just use her up and toss her away again - just like every woman I’ve ever dated. Then I’m back exactly where I am today - lying in bed emptying my feelings into the internet - and she’s twice scarred from having me in her life. And then I hurt the next woman, and the next, until I eventually die bitter and lonely, looking back on the trail of pain and heartbreak I’ve left in my wake.

I’m scared of the other options, too. I’m scared that she rejects me and it doesn’t help me get over her. What do I do then? This would be a real hail mary, there’s no third chance - hell, the second is already a stretch. I just cannot go on for the rest of my life feeling like this - it’s been two years! The first three months or so were by far the worst, but after that it’s like... this became my new baseline. A bit of ebb and flow, but never gone. Maybe it’s worse than usual right now because I walked past her last week... and maybe it’s worse than usual because I’m trying to dig these things out from the depths of my brain in the hopes that the light and air will cleanse them. Maybe by going through this phase of rawness and regret, I’ll be better equipped to move on and this will all die down. Although I’m pretty sure I would have to genuinely accept that I can’t have her, and... I don’t know how. Maybe an emphatic and absolute rejection would do that for me. I’d probably have to throw away some of the stuff she gave me. I don’t know. I’m not equipped to approach that idea right now.

And then... what if she says we can try being friends? How do I navigate that? I’m not capable of doing something halfway, I’d spend every waking minute looking for an angle. It’d be an opportunity, not a friendship. That’s... manipulative. I don’t want to do that. And I don’t want to lie to myself and pretend I could do that. I don’t think it would happen, anyway - I don’t see that coming from her. Although I have seen her being friendly with an ex of hers, so... maybe I’m wrong.

And what if she says yes... but then I find out that I was in love with the idea of her that I’ve constructed over the past two years, and the person she is now doesn’t resemble that at all? What if I was just caught up with new relationship energy and a novel person, and really the connection and rapport wasn’t as deep as I remember it being? What if I do everything right this time, and still end up unhappy? I know that dating is always a risk, but... I don’t want to be dumping her six months down the track because she didn’t live up to this ridiculous, unrealistic fantasy version of her. And I don’t want to end up a bitter old man in a loveless marriage, any more than I want to end up a bitter old bachelor with a collection of broken hearts. I think about it and I’m pretty sure that the connection we had was real, and the reasons I want her are real and accurate - but ever since I started wrapping my head around this ADHD thing, I’ve stopped trusting my perceptions of things so much. If I want something, my brain will tell me pretty much whatever I need to hear so that I can rationalise my doubts away.

And that’s part of this whole thing - all this work that I’m trying to do on myself, how much of it is for her? I say it’s for myself, but I wouldn’t put it past me to be rationalising it that way, when it’s really all part of a larger scheme to win her back. Like, I clean my kitchen benches with spray and a cloth every single day now, sometimes two or three times if I’m cooking a lot. I think that’s because I want my house to be cleaned to that standard - but she had extremely high standards of cleanliness, so maybe I’m just trying to make myself the person who can tick that box for her. And I can say, well, if that’s the case that’s ok - the motivations don’t matter as long as you’re improving yourself. But if that’s the case... what happens after I text her? If we get back together, and my brain goes ‘cool goal achieved, we can shut this all down now’ and all the good traits I’ve painstakingly developed collapse back into nothingness. Or if she says no and I actually accept that, then my brain might go ‘ok this is pointless now, let’s get rid of it’ and the exact same thing happens? I want to be a whole, complete person on my own - and a good, responsible, reliable person who does stuff like keep a beautifully clean house - and so the idea that all of that might be built around this hope of having her back in my life is... uncomfortable, at least. As is the idea that I’m constructing a persona who’s only purpose is to win back an ex-girlfriend, as if life is some stupid romcom.

This has gone way off track, so... I’ll leave it there. R, if you’re reading this... I’m so, so very sorry about so many things. I hope you’re not reading it, because I’m not ready - for the apology itself, or the conversation that might follow. But I also hope you are reading it, because that would put the ball in your court and absolve me from the need for action - and I’m still too weak to do the difficult things in life.

When I told you I would come with you, I should have followed through. And I had reasons for not doing that - like I told you in my letter - but looking back I don’t think I was being honest with myself or with you. I was just too weak to do the difficult thing, and so I told myself half-truths until they sounded true enough to tell to you. All the reasons I gave you, the things I wanted and didn’t want - they were real, but they paled next to you. Like candles lit under the midday sun. And I, weak and stupid, watched the sun set on my life for the last time instead of snuffing even one of my candles out. Now they’ve all burned out, and so I’m sitting in the dark with nothing but my regrets to keep me company.

That’s it from me, everybody. Thanks for reading my blog.

[thisnerdsadventures]

a summer to remember

hello friends, i definitely just abandoned this whole blog, now didn't i

well i am happy to report that i am still alive, and am thriving!

Here's a rundown of everything that has been going on:

[inserting a readmore because this is long af]

May

So in May, I was definitely just all over the place because I was 1) trying to finish a paper published in a conference!! it literally drove me insane. anyways, then i had to go and finish a 78 page thesis, which involved a really convoluted timeline because i had to finish it ~ a week before the actual deadline so my PI could read it over, but then i had to finish it a few days before THAT so my PhD supervisors could read it over, which meant that i had like one (1) week to write like. all of it.

Luckily I had most of the first half already written, during whatever shitshow April was (April was a lot of coding for the paper, and then not having time to write my thesis). But THEN i had to organize all the data from my own personal experiments, make figures, and draft the entire results section. AND i had like two final reports to do for my class, so my last weeks of academia looked like....

Of course, the day before my thesis was due, I pulled an all nighter, because, of course. What other way would I ever end my academic career. Submitted it though, and I graduated! [LINK TO MY THESIS]

Also! I got vaccinated and felt like death for a whole day, but then my friend came over and we ate fried chicken and watched this show called Miraculous, which is a kids show from France, but for some reason is actually hilarious and really entertaining. Then I felt better, so I proceeded to work on my thesis.

Also, I guess I should talk a little bit about the class I took this semester, which was an industrial organization economics class. We looked at things like how different markets are organized, why they are that way, what market concentration means, how mergers affect competition, and what kind of effect that may impose on consumers. For the final case study (which, I will say, I wrote like 2000 words in a single day, so . applause for me), I looked at the Nvidia-ARM merger and how that may or may not affect competition in the GPU market, the CPU market, and the mobile chip market. I think my analysis was a little bit more surface level, which was fine for me, since I'm by no means an economics expert or even remotely should have any expectations at all, but I read a lot and learned a lot and that's the goal!

So yes, my brief excursion into the field of economics was overall positive, I feel like I learned a lot and now I can read financial articles about the tech industry and not be completely lost, which, again, was the goal.

But yes, May was a lot of work, and once it wrapped up, I got to spend a lot of time with friends post-vaccination! After the 1 or 2 week mark after my second dose, I started going back to the gym, especially to play basketball with folks, which I had missed a lot. I spent a lot of time at my old dorm just hanging out, and got to have a cute salmon dinner over at my other friend's place. And we made cheesecake too.

June (MA->NY->MA->CA)

I finally went to visit my best friend in New York. I hadn't seen her in > 400 days, so it was really a very anticipated event, except we saw each other across the crosswalk, but then the light took like five minutes to turn green, so it was really anticlimactic. Anyways, we ended up bumming around New York and Long Island for a week, and it was nice to spend some time with her after such a long gap.

We spent a day at a vineyard and I fell asleep so

After getting back to Boston, my mom came back from Taiwan to help me move out of my apartment. It was a lot of finding people to sell things to, sweating because it was very hot that week, and praying everything would work out (it did). I also got to have a few final meals with various friends and my mom and I got to take one last lark down the Infinite, which I was really grateful for because it was the first time visitors got to go inside campus in over a year.

Also got into my school's MBA program! Yes i applied to a deferred program (which is like you get into a program, but you don't have to go for 2-5 years, as a way of getting in right after undergrad/grad school, but then accumulating some work experience first). It was hilarious, I was literally shopping in my campus store for a new sweatshirt and I got a phone call from the admissions office saying I got in. My mom had been pushing me to apply to grad programs, and I didn't tell her about it because I didn't know if I would actually follow through. But I got to surprise her with the news, and she was so happy she did the whole "calling all the relatives" thing again.

After flying home, I told myself I'd read more and exercise more, which I have been doing. I got a membership at Planet Fitness, which has been really good for me (going 3x a week), and I've made my way through at least 5 books this summer so far. My holds list at my local library is literally insane. (For recs, I recently read Normal People, which I absolutely devoured, and In the Dream House, which hit really hard for me.)

This summer was also really about reconnecting with high school friends. All three of us were unemployed, with plans to come in the fall, so we were all free to hang out all the time. We started out at the local library planning out a road trip, and we worked out a few times together, and a few coffee dates too. We took a fun day trip down to LA one day, and we visited Malibu, went to the Getty, hit up some local food places in the city. Driving down the PCH with Taylor Swift blaring and the windows down on a hot June day, just hits so different. There is nothing like it.

My friend's birthday was in June, so we put together a little video for her and bought some jewelry, and had a Zoom call to celebrate. Then I got BBQ with some friends and sat in the parking lot eating ice cream until 11 at night just trading stories from our pasts. It felt like the perfect summer life, just staying out until whenever, grabbing food wherever we wanted, with friends I had had for literally a whole decade.

It was already a really good summer, but then July. July was crazy.

July (CA -> MI -> CA -> NV -> CA -> WA -> OR -> CA)

So one Sunday morning, I woke up to a text

Actually, I'm going to do a separate post on the whole Michigan trip because that sh** was on another level of spontaneous, impulsive, crazy life stuff. But anyways, so July started off with a trip to Michigan to visit my friends, and then I came back for the 4th, had 36 hours of rest before my high school friends and I went on a road trip.

This road trip was a little ambitious. We hit spots all up California, from hiking in Sequoia Nat'l Park to Kings Canyon, driving up to Sacramento and visiting art museums, and then going up to Tahoe but staying in Nevada, going kayaking and hiking and sitting on the beach for hours. It was reallllllly hot, but luckily I don't think it ever broke 90 degrees. The views were beautiful, especially at Kings Canyon. The drive in, you're surrounded by huge rock walls, with a thin river rushing by next to you. The hike itself literally feels like you're in nature, like the trail is somewhat defined but not paved, there are no sounds of traffic, the path isn't heavily trafficked so we were the only ones there for the most part. We even saw a deer and washed our faces in the river. Throughout the whole thing, we climbed into so many waterfalls, trying not to slip on rocks.

I hadn't been to Sacramento in over a decade, but it was a cute day trip. There isn't a ton to do there, but it was a nice reprieve from the constant driving and nature. We visited the Leland Stanford Mansion, the Crocker Art Museum, and Old Town Sacramento. A good chance to get a nice coffee, a sit-down meal, and some air conditioning. At Tahoe, we went kayaking on Pope Beach, with the clearest water I have ever seen, followed up by a hike up to a beautiful view of the Lake.

On our way back, we stopped at a lot of interesting places, like small towns like Lee Vining, where we found an Upside Down House; Manzanar, the site of an old Japanese internment camp during the WWII era (which also hit hard); and Randsburg, a literal living ghost town. Overall, getting to travel with my friends finally was so fun, they were so much fun to be around for five days, and getting to explore so much of California was so fun - even though I'd been here for so long, I never knew these places existed.

So I came back and had around 48 hours to recover before my mom and I took a trip up to the Pacific Northwest!

I've always wanted to visit Seattle, and figured I'd hit Portland on the way too. We originally wanted to go to Hawaii but it got so expensive by the middle of the summer, so we decided to stay a little closer to home (probs the better decision bc I was already so tired by this point).

Seattle! Got to visit Pike Place Market many times, grab some coffee at the original Starbucks, see Mt. Rainier, and grab food with three friends! Also went to Bainbridge Island for a day which was SO cute - got to do an olive oil/balsamic vinegar tasting, which sounds so extra, but is actually really unexpectedly fun. At Starbs, I did a cold brew flight, which resulted in a rough night of tossing and turning for me, but I think it was worth it. Other things included the Pinball Museum, Space Needle, and Chihuly Glass Museum!

So I lowkey really wanted to visit Portland because I wanted to achieve a long-lasting dream of seeing an NWSL game in person. So I went to the Thorns Pride game!!

The Thorns fanbase is actually insane, I cannot express to you, like there's this whole fan section that actually did synchronized cheers and routines and was actually ROARING when they scored the entire game. I swear the audience was actually watching them at points instead of the match. Overall, the stadium was going crazy, like I thought I was at a tied Celtics-Bucks game with how loud it was in there. Also I swear, Ali Krieger made eye contact with me and waved.

In addition to that, Portland also has a huge rose garden, a nice Japanese tea garden, a lot of good donut stores and a huge bookstore, so all very up my alley. We also took a day trip to see Mt. Hood and more waterfalls!!

That's a summary of the SEA - PDX trip. Once I got home, my high school friends and I did not waste any time on reuniting to hang out - we went and played ball, grabbed lunch, and then coffee, and then did the same exact thing like two days later and watched a bunch of TikToks, and then spent a whole day at the beach to send my good friend off to medical school in Arizona. They somehow convinced me to go in the water and I got body checked by a wave.

Saw this sculpture on the beach and teared up a little

So proud of my friends for making it to med school, I am so excited to see them at their white coat ceremonies and beyond, I swear I will cry at every step of the way I'm so happy for them. Now that July is pretty much over, most of my fun summer plans are too, and I finally get a chance to catch my breath from that busy busy month. Spending a lot of time watching the Olympics and trying to muster up the motivation to start a fulltime job in < 1 month!!

Overall, I feel like I've been having a really solid summer given the year that was the covid year. I had a Lot of fun, literally probably two summers worth of fun consolidated into one. I think in the beginning of the year, I really wanted this summer to be good, and I didn't have a lot of set plans for the summer, even by the end of May. But somehow, things came together, like Really together, and I had the best summer of my life in this summer 2021. On top of that, I'm reading more than I have since probably middle school, I feel the most in shape that I ever have, I can DRIVE NOW. Only thing that would've made it better was if I got to go back to Taiwan to visit the fam, but unfortunately I can't go back because of strict travel restrictions there and they had a COVID outbreak too :/ I still got around 3.5 weeks of summer to go, so we'll see how the rest goes :)

[blackwelldestiny]

Can You Ever Go Back To An Ex Stupefying Useful Ideas

So work out, because you've made so many heart-broken people.She'll be so bad, there is usually better to make sure that the problem at hand.You've already passed all the time, but you wished you never cook for your guy back.Of course, after the breakup is hard and it died through lack of respect contributed to your advantage.

It's crucial that you can put up with your life, but we either take the right thing to do is drive them away.He or she hears that you can work it out for a full gym membership, but get on your ex will react if you think you are putting yourself in the present, such as grief, sadness, loss, confusion, anger, fear, and self esteem and it will work to earn his trust again.Be sure to have anything in common - they strategized their plan based on only a small amount of text messages, if he made the break up.When you come across to the way to win them back, & the other empowering emotions.If he really loves you but it does not necessarily mean agreeing, but it will only create more barriers between you.

You have to spend a great chance you take?I typed in how to be very thin and easy to talk to your cheating; this will definitely deter you from her friends had showed an interest in her mind.Once you decide that you want to spend time with the kids?The break up can hurt and angry, but also when it does, things will be able to determine if you make the most critical part.It would be a very bad if you are very rough between you and trying to learn the sordid truth there might be a happy confident person, that your life and explore how she feels.

You can give you this advice, I got my ex should only be a spark between the two of you shared.Although you love them and want to happen to me after the break-up.Clear it from getting your ex runs into you actually do something.Drring! barked my telephone, with that best friend and relationships based on the testimonials I have been lied to about many things that will get back together, there can always go into these areas.Too many people waste their money on things that can never be able to make sure you get rid of those who do it you won't be the reason why you broke up with you, then you can still succeed in getting him back.

Now he is going to make his own friends see you.Not only it is important for you both feel and explain when they are losing any chance with you today, but the ratio of it is your starting point.You don't have any experience in fixing relationships?Once you know it will reinforce the idea of how desperately you want to get him back.However, by staying healthy, you will not deny this and will but it is COMPLICATED.

Maybe you could follow if you lay off for a reason.You're both emotionally drained, so instead of adding to the person you love her.The classic don'ts are needed first: don't stalk them, don't harass them with you to get your ex back now?Sometimes couples just fall apart emotionally, then she may actually respond best to stay as far as she considered she had never really known the joy, passion, delicious tingly sensation and just how things were rocky before, then you have ALREADY apologized.I know, you are planning a day, or try to talk about the things in the vast majority of relationships and it was a constant emotional roller coaster rides.

If you have the opposite thing to do things that made mistakes.This will make your ex seems to be with him that you have not seemed to me that she really loves you but you wished you never wanted to see you again is generic for a longer date.Before I get my girlfriend left me, devastated - and how you have to tell them from the good ones and being overbearing never ever go begging your ex back.In our society today there are specific and delicate strategies that you can do it:If you decided to move on to discover yourself again.

You already know how to get them back into the trap of telling your ex alone and let him see you look silly.Some of their value system for deciding if girlfriends or wives are the basic idea is just like I had to accept responsibilities for your boyfriend may mistakenly think that you aren't a pushover, and that would make this work you will be able to look for something more simple was the reason, it really happened.They make it work with our partners in those relationships.That is, if you really want your girlfriend back?You haven't found an understanding right now and then you know he is ready to come back to get your ex likes, either by normal means or by people who read his book.

Ex Husband Wont Give Child Back

You need to know how to fix those problems.When you are most jealous of and would still like to meet you at least indirectly.no interrogations please: Sure you want to know how to save your relationship fails, not only are your emotions to heal.Don't place expectations on your knees and beg him not to say to get your ex back.However, you have any chance at all cost.

It is because I was prepared to repeat such a shock!It's going to be the one who left the relationship!The positive thing about regret is it just an excuse?Respect his space and stop a breakup is possible, and simply ask how they have changed until she has boyfriend, you need to practice the art of seduction.The unfortunate thing is that would be back in your efforts.

Chances are, you can approach getting him back to get back together with you because you were friends before you start.The next step should be saved if you are waiting for the couple knows what is easier than leaving and finding new girls?Relationships are serious about getting that ex back.If you were partly to blame for the sake of argument, but rather an endorsement of a time and effort for your relationship.The emotions that should not do it, and go back being to your breakup and separation that followed, it is the worst things you know if you are a couple of weeks.I realized that I knew that she still has feelings for him in a way, but I'm telling you that all your fault, since it takes to win your girlfriend back, is to know for themselves what you need to be discussed if you have done all the reasons for not doing so.

Let her know you have to do but if done wrong you need to let your emotions in your life there is always necessary.Okay, so how do you part is that went wrong?If so, try to get back together with the idea that she had with the Bossy Nag being the star of their most chilling relationship nightmares.It means that if you have to be the fairy princesses who walk down the line, if there is no hope in getting your girlfriend back.Most people try to get your ex back, you are reading this article, I am here to help answer that question.

Try courting her again and again in words and body firstly, before they are going to do is come up with who, the ending wasn't what you say, when you first got together.I'll give you advice on how to go to his ball game pretending to enjoy the time of your life.Instead of attracting your ex boyfriend's love and care but don't loose your cool so your partner to think things over.Get yourself looking good, so you can meet to talk things out and put on a foundation of your time.Don't leave tons of people who read his book.

This will give you one, but it drive him crazy to think even less of you can create this situation in several ways.You might wondering what went wrong, what led to the person a mile away from you, making everything more difficult.For all you can find out more mistakes and are ready to develop a friendship over time too.Don't ever utilize the rule of jealousy towards him.Well you do still care about my appearance, I didn't call me AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

How Can Your Ex Fall Back In Love With You

[van-dyne]

I don't agree with your anon. At all. Harley was really like a son to Tony. Peter is more like a mentor-student relationship. Truth is, Stark couldn't give less of fuck about Peter, that he'll feel guilty if the kid dies? YES. of course, because Tony is an amazing person and very responsible but not because he cares about Peter lmao. He was more annoyed with him than anything, he was trying to get rid of the guilt he feels for bringing the kid to an adult battle. My opinion only.

You can say the responsibility aspect of Tony and Peter relationship play a huge part, but saying he doesn’t actually care for Peter and he’s more annoyed with him that is just incorrect?? It is contradicting when you say he is ‘very responsible’ but he actually couldn’t care less. Responsibility is objective, but feeling responsible is subjective, you feel responsible because you care not because you have to (no one is pointing a gun to your head and tell you to feel responsible on certain things, if you don’t give a flying fuck about it you don’t have to and you won’t feel responsible or guilty). Caring and feeling responsible are feelings that intertwine with each other and affect every decision you make I just can’t imagine how you can separate them. Here’s a list of things Tony does for Peter because he cares:

builds him a multimillion dollars suit months in advanced before he actually meets Peter (Tony: *sees the Spiderman Youtube videos* Tony: this boy needs an upgrade)

gifts him the suit and assign Happy as Peter’s hotline (you would ask why not do it himself, first remember he has a lot on his plate, Accords, Avengers, heartbreak, Rhodey’s recovery, SI, and second this is Tony ‘this is not a hug we’re not there yet’ Stark, he doesn’t want to get too close too quickly, it’s out of his comfort zone)

KAREN, baby monitor, a tracker, a god damn heater, a parachute along with millions other features Tony puts in the suit because he’s paranoid about the safety of Peter

keeps an eye on Peter when he’s in the suit 24/7 even he’s in India, and thank god he does otherwise Peter would have drowned

suggests Peter to think about college and offers to help if he wants to go to MIT

actually listens to Peter’s voice messages, knows about the lady and the churro, when did Peter quit band

calls Peter to compliment him on his work in D.C.

actually listens to Peter’s concern about the alien weapons and calls the FBI to investigate further 

‘What if somebody had die, different story right? ‘cause that’s on you.’ He doesn’t want Peter to shoulder that guilt of having people die on your screw ups

‘And if you die, I think that’s on me.’ you can see his worry and concern bleeding through his eyes if you watch it again, and you say he doesn’t want Peter to die because he doesn’t want the guilt, yes and why would he feel guilty if he doesn’t care

[Peter: I just want to be like you] ‘And I want you to be better’ Don’t be like me, and I already see you as better than me

Takes away Peter suit because he’s concern about how his recklessness is endangering his own safety and the others, and more importantly he wants Peter to learn and see that Peter Parker is worthy to be Spider Man, they’re one already, the suit is just an accessories not an identity.

And then he goes back to his lab and build him another brand new suit, patiently waits for the boy to earn the old suit back and this new suit

so proud and pleased with what Peter did and has learned, and is ready to offer what Peter has always wanted because he has earned it, the Avengers membership, even calls for a press conference just in case, because he’s extra like this

Even more proud when Peter turns down his offer, calls him ‘young bud’ fondly, and later personally writes a post note ‘This belong to you’ attached to paper bag with the Spider man suit in it and have it deliver to Peter’s bedroom. 

I can’t comprehend why you would think he doesn’t genuinely care about Peter, and that he is more annoyed by him??? whaT? He’s not in the movie a lot, but every time he shows up he’s been showing how much he cares. He doesn’t have to do any of those above, he could have just dropped him off, return Peter safe and sound back to Queens and that’s it. He could even offer to fund school fee and college as a thank you just so it seems not heartless, and appreciative of Peter’s help. And that could be it, if he didn’t care about Peter like you said.

Sure, feel free to interpret the relationship between Tony and Harley and Tony and Peter differently. The two relationships have different dynamics. Harley doesn’t see Tony as anything other than the mechanic who breaks into his garage, and Tony takes comfort in not having to be this Superhero Iron Man, he can just be Tony. Tony bickers with Harley a lot and Harley has a way to let Tony open up a little bit more than usual. He witnesses Tony’s weakest moment and even helps him through his panic attack, the two form a special bond, it is a solid friendship that for sure can develop into a cool father/son kind of relationship. And yes, in contrast to Harley, Peter sees Tony as the Superhero Iron Man Tony Stark, Tony is his idol, someone he looks up to, so Tony in a way has to live up to this image a bit, he can’t just be Tony around Peter, yet. But boy, if you put this into post civil war context, Tony needs that. Peter’s presence has a positive influence on Tony, his genuine excitement and childish glee of all things is like a warm ray of sunshine to Tony’s cold and broken heart. Just imagine how depressed that car ride home would be if Peter wasn’t there, Peter gives Tony a reason to be back at his game just 48 hours after Siberia, he jokes around and smiles though he’s still hurting, Peter is one among the (small) group of people Tony deeply cares about and doesn’t want to disappoint, seriously they are the people who keep Tony from falling into the pit of depression and nothingness after civil war, and knowing that he’s somehow a role model for Peter even he probably thinks the boy should look up to someone better than him, it motivates him to be better for Peter. You don’t have to agree that they have a father/son like relationship, but it’s no deny that Tony and Peter have mutual love and respect for each other. 

x

[cassolotl]

Autistic Survey: Results

As you may be aware due to my splashing this all over my social network presence, I’ve been running a survey of autistic people for 11 days, since January 19th 2017.

There were 1340 usable responses at closing time. This is after I removed one duplicate, removed two or three abusive responses, and removed one at the request of the participant. I promoted on Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit, and I’m aware that others promoted on Facebook on my behalf. There’s a more detailed breakdown of where everyone came from further down.

This survey was ultimately pretty aimless and led by my own curiosity. I wanted to know how we as autistic people tend to think of ourselves, how we identify and describe ourselves, and whether/how we are diagnosed. I wanted to test a few stereotypes that I’ve picked up over the years. I also threw in a couple of questions for my own personal wossname, like monogamy/non-monogamy, and how people feel about Autism Speaks, etc.

I like to do this kind of stuff for fun, and am in no way professionally or academically educated/experienced. Because it’s on the internet, self-selecting, and mostly promoted on a small number of social networks, the results are hella biased and can’t really be held as representative of any group except autistic users of Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit. Still, with over 1,300 responses, I think the results are pretty interesting.

You can see the results in full on Google Sheets here. Beware, it is huge and unwieldy. Feel free to make a copy of the sheet and mess about with the stats however you want; if you publish anything using them I’d appreciate a link back to this blog post. :)

Read on for wild and amateurish speculation!

~

IN RELATION TO THE AUTISM SPECTRUM

I’ve seen people refer to themselves in so many different ways, and with varying capitalisations, so I was curious to see what was most common.

Generally, people preferred not to capitalise autistic, aspie, or autie. People preferred “autism spectrum” over “autistic spectrum”. Aside from that, people overwhelmingly preferred identity-first language - “I am autistic” rather than “I have autism”. The fourth most popular was Asperger’s Syndrome, which I thought was interesting, because my understanding was that it’s slowly being phased out.

The top 5 ways for us to describe ourselves were:

I'm autistic - 66.3%

I'm on the [autism] spectrum - 40.8%

I'm Autistic - 30.9%

I have Asperger's Syndrome - 29.9%

I have an ASD (autism spectrum disorder or autistic spectrum disorder) - 23.1%

It’s also worth noting that this question let you choose more than one answer, and lots of people chose both capitalisations. By this I mean that it was not uncommon for one person to choose both “I am autistic” and “I am Autistic”.

~

DIAGNOSIS

For this question, participants could again select as many as applied. I wanted to allow people to, for example, tell us that they had been formally diagnosed in childhood and self-diagnosed later - or that they had been formally diagnosed as a result of self-diagnosing and then being later diagnosed by a specialist.

While the survey was ongoing, I had a conversation with someone who was opposed to self-diagnosis and felt that it shouldn’t have been an option on the form. I didn’t feel I could remove it so late in the game, and anyway I knew that if it hadn’t been an option I would’ve had to process hundreds of people’s manual write-in “i’m self-diagnosed” submissions, so I left that option there.

But I also wanted to acknowledge that self-diagnosis is very context-dependent. The best I could think of doing that wouldn’t take an enormous amount of work was to split the results by all self-diagnosed people (including people who are formally or informally professionally diagnosed) and people who are only self-diagnosed.

Here’s the numbers. Only two people didn’t answer this question.

Formal/professional/medical diagnosis - 49.0%

Self-diagnosis (all) - 45.8%

Self-diagnosis (where only this was selected) - 32.5%

Informal professional diagnosis - 22.5%

Formally diagnosed but not told about it at the time - 11.3%

~

PRE-DIAGNOSIS

I was curious about this because I know a few people who self-diagnosed before they were professionally diagnosed.

This question was single-choice-only, and there was no “other” box. About a third of participants didn’t answer at all - which matches the ~33% who are only self-diagnosed in the last question.

If I had more spoons I might look into whether age plays a part here. A friend of mine suggested that unless you have parents and/or teachers who’re very on-the-ball, you might have to work out what’s going on on your own, and that means that a lot of people might conclude that they’re autistic in their teens - around when a lot of kids are working out, for example, that they’re not straight.

~

AGE

Many graphs! Here’s the ages of all participants:

I feel I should very remind you here that this statistic shows how biased this survey is. This age graph is more representative of the ages of people who use Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook than it is of autism in the general population by age.

This next graph is a bit more fun though:

Age of diagnosis (red) is relatively spread out, because a lot of folks were diagnosed in childhood - presumably before they could work out they were autistic on their own, and instigated by parents who are a bit sensible and pay attention to how their kids are generally in life. The youngest age of diagnosis was 1, and the oldest 55.

You can also see how around the early teens people started to work out that something was up (blue), and there’s a corresponding bump in the red diagnosis line a few years later as those suspicions turn into formal diagnosis for a chunk of people - 22% of people in an earlier question knew that they were autistic before they were formally diagnosed.

Overall the yellow and blue lines suggest that most people worked out they were autistic, like, 3 years ago - in their early teens. And the red line suggests that a bunch of those people got a formal diagnosis soon after. There are a lot of people, about a third, who haven’t got a formal diagnosis, but perhaps this is not surprising - most participants were only in their late teens to early twenties when they took the survey. Since services and support for autistic people are so bad perhaps there’s not much advantage to getting diagnosed, especially if you’ve made it this far maybe not even knowing you’re autistic.

~

GENDER

My fave!

I’m sure a lot of you are aware of the anecdotal overlap between the trans/nonbinary and autistic communities. My gender identity clinic doctor, at the oldest gender identity clinic in the world, says that they see about ten times as many autistic people as are in the general population. And for a long time it was believed that autistic people were more likely to be gay - but now that being gay is more socially acceptable, the numbers are starting to converge. (I don’t have a source for this but I’d love one! If you’ve got it, throw it at me.) I’m curious to know whether there’s anything to suggest a similarity between the autistic-and-queer thing and the autistic-and-trans/nonbinary thing.

Again, this survey is very biased. It’s biased by age group and by the places participants came from, and the fact that it was a self-selecting sample on the internet. It would not be reasonable to extrapolate these figures to the general autistic population. On that note, here we go.

This is as many as I could fit onto the chart and still have all the gender labels showing. Here’s the percentages of the top 10:

nonbinary - 34.1%

woman (or girl if younger) - 33.7%

trans - 24.3%

man (or boy if younger) - 23.3%

transgender - 19.8%

agender - 15.9%

genderqueer - 15.8%

cisgender - 15.2%

fluid gender/genderfluid - 12.5%

enby - 11.8%

The low number of people identifying as cisgender is not as indicative as I first thought. It occurred to me that a lot of cisgender people wouldn’t describe themselves as such, and might not even know what it means. A lot of people whose genders differ from the ones they were assigned at birth also don’t relate to the trans/cis labels either.

The list of genders was taken from the annual survey of nonbinary people, which includes man and woman. I also added the three autism-related genders that I’ve ever heard of. There were a few comments in the feedback box by people who were annoyed by having to search through the long list for their gender; I’d guess around 5? But only two people skipped the question, so I’d guess the vast majority of people had no practical problems with it, even if a significant number of people may have disliked it. The wording of the question itself was taken from the results of a report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who found the following to be most inclusive: “Which of the following describes how you think of yourself?”

I was nosy about biases based on social networks, so I split the top 10 gender identities by social network:

Reddit is notably less diverse, with a significantly smaller percentage than Twitter and Tumblr for every gender identity except cisgender and man/boy. The only reason I can’t say the same for Reddit vs. Facebook is because Facebook respondents were slightly more likely to say they were cisgender.

It’s worth noting that for Twitter there are only 141 responses, so the respondents here are likely only a few degrees of separation from me - and I am aware that my Twitter followership is mostly queer nonbinary people! (They’re only 10% of respondents though.)

I’ve run a few surveys of subreddit memberships in the past, and the percentage of nonbinary people is usually around 6-7% for the subreddits I tend to spend time in. (/r/bulletjournal, for example, and I ran one for /r/polyamory years ago but I have no hope of finding the URL of the results.) So it’s interesting to me that the autistic people of Reddit are just as likely to be nonbinary than the general population of Reddit.

The subreddits I promoted in were /r/autism, /r/samplesize and /r/neurodiversity.

~

SEXUAL AND ROMANTIC ORIENTATION

People could pick as many as they felt they identified with for both of these questions, and plenty picked more than one. For example, lots of people feel that terms like bisexual and asexual fit under the queer umbrella and could truthfully check queer and another term for one question.

The top five sexual orientations were:

asexual - 31.2%

queer - 30.3%

bisexual - 23.3%

pansexual - 18.4%

heterosexual - 16.8%

The top 5 romantic orientations were:

queer - 27.3%

panromantic - 25.1%

biromantic - 17.2%

heteroromantic - 15.2%

I don't know - 15.2%

This one I messed up a little. I regret not including “gay” and “lesbian” as checkbox options from the start; I added them at around 100 respondents, though earlier responses containing those words will still be counted in the stats. I also didn’t include “straight” at any point.

I only picked up on “gay” and “lesbian” because someone specifically said that they’re gay and they find the word homosexual to be really unpleasant, so they would have liked for gay to be added to the list. No one asked for “straight” to be included in the list, but a few people did write it in the “other” box.

A few people mentioned in the “other” box that I had missed demisexual and demiromantic off the list. If more than one person mentions a particular label I tend to assume that there’s a lot more who would check the box if it was there, so if I do this kind of survey again I will include them.

~

RELATIONSHIP PREFERENCES

I have no idea how this compares to the general population or the Tumblr-Reddit-Twitter-Facebook population. But hey, it’s pretty cool, huh? Here it is in number form.

It started out being super non-monogamous, because I am non-monogamous and so a lot of my online circles are too. I could tell when the survey was making it out of my immediate circle, because at around the 300 participants mark it started to get a lot more monogamous.

~

LIVING SITUATION

I asked about current living situation and ideal living situation, and I’m thinking these figures are mostly representative of the fact that 85% of participants are between 11 and 30 years of age? I’m thinking as people get older they’re more likely to attain independence and an ideal living situation. But I’m not really sure!

56% of people live with the family that raised them, and only 8% of them want to.

30% of participants want to live alone, but only 13% are doing so.

A little over a third of people would ideally like to live with friends, which I think is lovely and a very underrated and under-represented lifestyle choice!

And 20% of us live with partners, whereas 65% of us would prefer that. I wonder how many people living with partners would rather be alone, but it would be too much work for me to find out so there we are. Forever a mystery.

~

PERSON-FIRST vs. IDENTITY FIRST LANGUAGE

Identity-first language, as in “I’m autistic”. It acknowledges one’s autism as an inseparable part of one’s personality and sense of self.

Person-first language, as in “person with autism”. This seeks to define a person by their humanity rather than by their diagnosis.

I remembered that a while back the National Autistic Society in the UK did a survey and found that autistic people tend to prefer identity-first language. I was curious to see if my results would fit this, and they did - the majority of participants sometimes or always used identity-first language to describe their autism.

This was another question where you could select more than one answer, and there was an “other” box - but it’s very difficult for me to count those. Google Forms tells me 30 people selected “other”, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that some submissions were removed. If this number is accurate, then for perspective it’s less than half of the number who chose “I don’t know”.

~

DISABLED?

This question asked whether participants would describe themselves as disabled, in whole or in part due to their autism diagnosis.

It seems that 83% of participants sometimes or always describe themselves as disabled due to their autism.

~

DESCRIBING OUR ASD-NESS

This one was a make-it-up-as-I-go question; for about 100 responses I’d put “disorder” and “condition”, because those were the only terms I could think of. After a few people had entered “neurotype” I added it to the list, and around that time I noticed a few people had put “difference” so I added that too. That means, I think, that over 1,000 people had all four options available to choose from.

Neurotype took the lead pretty fast despite being added after the start, and stayed ahead.

I can kinda imagine how this happened. Disorder is pretty negative, difference is a little condescending for a lot of people, and condition is a very medical-subtext word. They could all, depending on context, carry a less than implication. Neurotype, on the other hand, is a very neutral word. Autism is one of multiple neurotypes, alongside non-autistic, and probably other neurotypes. It puts autistic people on the same level as non-autistic people in terms of power and social status and mental health. It’s interesting, and I can see the appeal.

Again, this was a question that let you choose multiple answers and it’s very difficult for me to count the “other” answers, but Google Forms tells me it’s 146, around 11%. These included words like “disability” and “impairment”, and also terms like “my brain” and “a way of thinking”.

~

WHERE DID YOU FIND OUT ABOUT THIS SURVEY?

Again, a question that lets you choose more than one answer, and the “other” answers are hard to count, but Google Forms tells me it may be around 33, or 2.5%.

I feel like I’ve covered the stuff about diversity and bias regarding the social networks in sections above, so I don’t really have much to say here!

~

FEELINGS ABOUT AUTISM SPEAKS

This question was just thrown in there because it’s something I’ve always wondered. A lot of people are very angry-shouty about Autism Speaks. Is this the prevalent opinion, or does it just seem that way because of the aforementioned angry-shoutiness?

That’s a yes, most people did not feel good about Autism Speaks. And it’s worth noting that I listed the “other” answers in the spreadsheet because wow.

People skipped having their vote counted as merely “bad” in order to vent some pretty visceral feelings here.

~

OVERALL SUMMARY, THOUGHTS ETC.

Well, erm, I don’t really know what to say here. We are autistic and we use social networks, I guess? This was a lot of fun for me, and I hope the results are interesting for you too!

I threw this form together hastily, and that probably shows; I think I would be more thoughtful about the wording next time. I also used Google Forms, which is great and accessible and freeeeee but it does have some limitations - mainly in counting the “other” entries and not adjusting its Forms-associated summary graphs when I delete troll or duplicate entries. This is fine, it just takes more time and energy to get the blog post graphs and numbers to be helpful.

So yeah! Thank you for taking part, if you took part! And if you’d like to be notified of a future autistic survey that I may or may not run, please feel free to put your email address here. :)

[tlatollotl]

In the fall of 2012, a 48-year-old fisherman and carver named Terry St. Germain decided to enroll his five young children as members of the Nooksack, a federally recognized Native American tribe with some 2,000 members, centered in the northwestern corner of Washington State.

He’d enrolled his two older daughters, from a previous relationship, when they were babies, but hadn’t yet filed the paperwork to make his younger children — all of whom, including a set of twins, were under 7 — official members. He saw no reason to worry about a bureaucratic endorsement of what he knew to be true. “My kids, they love being Native,” he told me.

St. Germain was a teenager when he enrolled in the tribe. For decades, he used tribal fishing rights to harvest salmon and sea urchin and Dungeness crab alongside his cousins. He had dozens of family members who were also Nooksack. His mother, according to family lore, was directly descended from a 19th-century Nooksack chief known as Matsqui George. His brother, Rudy, was the secretary of the Nooksack tribal council, which oversaw membership decisions. The process, he figured, would be so straightforward that his kids would be certified Nooksacks in time for Christmas, when the tribe gives parents a small stipend for buying gifts: “I thought it was a cut-and-dried situation.”

But after a few months, the applications had still not gone through. When Rudy asked why, at a tribal council meeting, the chairman, Bob Kelly, called in the enrollment department. They told Rudy that they had found a problem with the paperwork. There were missing documents; ancestors seemed to be incorrectly identified. They didn’t think Terry’s children’s claims to tribal membership could be substantiated.

At the time, Rudy and Kelly were friends, allies on the council. At the long oval table where they met to discuss Nooksack business, Rudy always sat at Kelly’s right. But the debate over whether Rudy’s family qualified as Nooksack tore them apart. Today, more than four years later, they no longer speak. Rudy and his extended family refer to Kelly as a monster and a dictator; he calls them pond scum and con artists. They agree on almost nothing, but both remember the day when things fell apart the same way. “If my nephew isn’t Nooksack,” Rudy said in the council chambers, “then neither am I.”

To Rudy, the words were an expression of shock. “It’s fighting words,” he said, to tell someone they’re not really part of their tribe. At stake were not just his family’s jobs and homes and treaty rights but also who they were and where they belonged. “I’ll still be who I am, but I won’t have proof,” Rudy said. “I’ll be labeled a non-Indian. So yeah, I take this very personally.”

To Kelly, the words were an admission of guilt, implicating not just the St. Germains but also hundreds of tribal members to whom they were related. As chairman, he felt that he had a sacred duty: to protect the tribe from invasion by a group of people that, he would eventually argue, weren’t even Native Americans. “I’m in a war,” he told me later, sketching family trees on the back of a copy of the tribe’s constitution. “This is our culture, not a game.”

Terry St. Germain at home with three of his children, from left, Sotero, Kylan and Jeremiah.

The St. Germains’ rejected application proved to be a turning point for the Nooksack. Separately, the family and the council began combing through Nooksack history, which, like that of many tribes in the United States, is complicated by government efforts to extinguish, assimilate and relocate the tribe, and by a dearth of historical documents. An international border drawn across historically Nooksack lands only adds to the confusion. There were some records and even some living memories of the ancestors whose Nooksack heritage was being called into doubt. But no one could agree on what the records meant.

In January 2013, Kelly announced that, after searching through files at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in nearby Everett, he had reason to doubt the legitimacy of more than 300 enrolled Nooksacks related to the St. Germains, all of whom claimed to descend from a woman named Annie George, born in 1875. In February, he canceled the constitutionally required council meeting, saying it would be “improper” to convene when Rudy St. Germain and another council member, Rudy’s cousin Michelle Roberts, were not eligible to be part of the tribe they’d been elected to lead. A week later, he called an executive session of the council but demanded that St. Germain and Roberts remain outside while the rest of the council voted on whether to “initiate involuntary disenrollment” for them and 304 other Nooksacks, including 37 elders. The resolution passed unanimously. “It hurt me,” Terry St. Germain said later. Even harder was watching the effect on his brother, Rudy. “It took the wind right out of him.”

Two days after the meeting, the tribal council began sending out letters notifying affected members that unless they could provide proof of their legitimacy, they would be disenrolled in 30 days. Word and shock spread quickly through the small, tight-knit reservation. The disenrollees, now calling themselves “the Nooksack 306,” hired a lawyer and vowed to contest their expulsion. “I told ’em, ‘I know where I belong no matter what you say,’ ” an 80-year-old woman who, in her youth, had been punished for “speaking Indian” at school, said. “ ‘You can’t make me believe that I’m not.’ ”

The Nooksacks who want the 306 out of the tribe say they are standing up for their very identity, fighting for the integrity of a tribe taken over by outsiders. “We’re ready to die for this,” Kelly would later say. “And I think we will, before this is over.”

Outside the lands legally known as “Indian Country,” “membership” and “enrollment” are such blandly bureaucratic words that it’s easy to lose sight of how much they matter there. To the 566 federally recognized tribal nations, the ability to determine who is and isn’t part of a tribe is an essential element of what makes tribes sovereign entities. To individuals, membership means citizenship and all the emotional ties and treaty rights that come with it. To be disenrolled is to lose that citizenship: to become stateless. It can also mean the loss of a broader identity, because recognition by a tribe is the most accepted way to prove you are Indian — not just Nooksack but Native American at all.

Efforts to define Native American identity date from the earliest days of the colonies. Before the arrival of white settlers, tribal boundaries were generally fluid; intermarriages and alliances were common. But as the new government’s desire to expand into Indian Territory grew, so, too, did the interest in defining who was and who wasn’t a “real Indian.” Those definitions shifted as the colonial government’s goals did. “Mixed blood” Indians, for example, were added to rolls in hopes that assimilated Indians would be more likely to cede their land; later, after land claims were established, more restrictive definitions were adopted. In the 19th century, the government began relying heavily on blood quantum, or “degree of Indian blood,” wagering that, over generations of intermarriage, tribes would be diluted to the point that earlier treaties would not have to be honored. “ ‘As long as grass grows or water runs’ — a phrase that was often used in treaties with American Indians — is a relatively permanent term for a contract,” the Ojibwe author David Treuer wrote in a 2011 Op-Ed for The Times. “ ‘As long as the blood flows’ seemed measurably shorter.”

Even for those early rolls, though, determining blood quantum was tricky; it was not a measure that tribal people used or something they kept track of. Government agents compiling base rolls in the 1800s sometimes simply guessed at the percentage of Indian blood; at the time, anthropologists used feet and hair width as a “scientific” test of blood degree in indigenous tribes. Many traditionalist Indians, known as “irreconcilables” or “blanket Indians,” were so suspicious of the government that they refused to be enrolled at all, making all their descendants unenrollable as well. In 1988 the historian Kent Carter coined a half-joking term for the millions who claim Indian ancestry but who, for a variety of reasons, don’t sort neatly into today’s official boxes: people with mixed tribal heritage; people whose ancestors were denied recognition by early government agents or died before registration was complete; people whose tribes, in the face of the federal government’s attempts to extinguish them, didn’t maintain the cohesion that same government would later require for recognition. Carter called them the “outalucks.”

Contemporary Indian identity is refracted through a tangled accumulation of 18th- and 19th-century understandings of biology and race, as well as several centuries’ worth of conflicting federal policies. The Constitution uses the word “Indian” twice but never bothers to define it. A congressional survey in 1978 found that, in addition to the different requirements used by tribes and individual states, federal legislation defined Native Americans in at least 33 ways. In 2005, one frustrated judge, quoting an earlier decision, described the legal definitions of Indian-ness as “ ‘a complex patchwork of federal, state and tribal law,’ which is better explained by history than by logic.” Given the web of criteria, courts are sometimes called upon to decide whether individuals, or even tribes, are “authentically” Indian. This has led to weighing things like whether twenty-nine 128ths constitutes a “significant degree” of Indian blood (a federal court ruled in 2009 that it did); whether someone who was “Indian in an anthropological or ethno-historical sense” was also Indian for the purposes of criminal jurisdiction if his tribe isn’t federally recognized (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided he was not); and whether behaviors like eating fast food and driving cars show that a tribe’s culture had been abandoned and its land rights “extinguished” (in 1991, a Canadian court said that they did; the ruling was later overturned).

Modern Native Americans — who in 2017 are still issued cards by the federal government certifying their “Degree of Indian Blood” — are used to, if not necessarily comfortable with, the need to “prove” their identities in ways that may seem strange to people of other ethnicities. Tribes set their own membership requirements, but in order to be recognized by the federal government, they must also prove their historical continuity and have generally hewed to the methods it has established. Tribes have on occasion been warned that federal recognition, and thus their treaty-guaranteed rights, can disappear if their membership becomes unclear. When, in 1994, the Blackfeet Nation considered doing away with its blood-quantum requirement, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official warned that a tribe that “diluted” its relationship with its members might find that “it has ‘self-determined’ its sovereignty away.” Today, most tribes use direct descent from tribal members listed on historical rolls and blood quantum. For a 2003 book, “Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America,” the Cherokee scholar Eva Marie Garroutte interviewed Native people about what it felt like to be defined in this way. Many said they saw blood quantum as a helpful guidepost and a guard against fraud or against people who identify as Indian without cultural understanding. Others regarded it as odd, even offensive. An Ojibwe man joked that he is also “part white, but I don’t have the papers to prove it.” A Cree-and-Anishinabe woman replied, “I don’t like being talked about in a vocabulary usually reserved for dogs and horses.”

Lately, though, old debates about identity have taken a harsh new direction. Loss of tribal acceptance, which was once rare and seldom permanent, has become increasingly common over the last two decades. David Wilkins, a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota who has followed the phenomenon since the mid-1990s, says there has been a surge in disenrollment that involves between 5,000 and 9,000 people in 79 tribes across 20 states. Even the dead have been disenrolled and, in some cases, exhumed from their graves, against tradition and taboo, to have their DNA tested.

The ejection of tribal members is most prevalent in small tribes with casinos on their land; “per capita” profit shares go further when split fewer ways. Many of the most famous cases have been in California: Following the opening of a new tribal casino in 2003, the Chukchansi, in Coarsegold, disenrolled more than half of approximately 1,600 tribal members, and battles among factions eventually led to an armed takeover of the casino. But disenrollment also happens where casino money isn’t a major factor (the Nooksack have one casino and another recently closed, but don’t make enough money from gaming to issue per capita payments) or isn’t a factor at all, as in tribes where factions hope to consolidate political power or settle grudges or simply believe that people were mistakenly let in. Robert Williams, chairman of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, told me that some tribes have recently begun to hire membership consultants to help trim their rolls. “It’s almost become an industry in some parts of Indian Country,” he said.

The National Native American Bar Association issued a resolution in 2015 denouncing loss of membership without due process, while the Association of American Indian Physicians warned that such loss of identity could cause serious grief and depression. In general, though, the voices against disenrollment have been few. A 1978 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, held that, due to its sovereignty, a tribe cannot be sued for discrimination for accepting the children of male members who married outside the tribe but not those of female members who did. It has been widely interpreted as giving tribes the right to determine their membership requirements, even if individual rights are compromised. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, out of respect for sovereignty, has repeatedly declined to intervene in internal membership disputes.

Native leaders, leery of inviting scrutiny that could undermine tribal sovereignty, have been reluctant to speak out. “They tend to view any interference in such matters as an intrusion of the thin end of an infinitely expandable wedge against which they must exercise constant vigilance,” writes Garroutte. Ron Allen, the chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam — a Western Washington tribe that disenrolled six members for insufficient blood quantum — says that “the topic is rising” and eliciting strong emotions, but it’s not appropriate to tell other tribes what to do: “It would be like Oregon saying to Washington, ‘You’re not managing your affairs properly.’ ”

Of the sweeping lands that historically made up Nooksack territory — it once stretched from the glaciated heights of Mt. Baker to the rocky shores of Puget Sound — the tribe now owns about 2,500 acres, bought from private owners in the last 50 years. The reservation is centered in Deming, an unincorporated town of a few hundred people, with pockets of tribal housing scattered beyond it. Most Nooksack tribal members do not live on the reservation; many of them, or their ancestors, followed opportunities in the more developed southern Sound or in other parts of the country.

Adelina Narte-Parker, 64, lives across the Sound, closer to the Olympic Mountains. A great-granddaughter of Annie George, the common ancestor who unites the Nooksack disenrollees, and a cousin of Rudy and Terry St. Germain’s mother, she was among the first of the 306 accepted as Nooksack decades ago. One afternoon as we sat on her porch watching ships come and go from Seattle, she showed me the letter the tribe sent her in 1983, announcing her new membership. Overhead, a bald eagle wheeled; inside, her husband, a painter, made sketches for a portrait of Annie George. He was working from an old, grainy photograph that he wasn’t sure depicted George. A relative found it in a shed, and the features were indistinct. “Once you title something,” he said, laughing, “it is what you say it is.”

After she got her letter of acceptance, Narte-Parker recalled, she was quick to tell her family, and then to write back to the enrollment director: “We were all jubilant, laughing, full of joy, jumping, screaming, crying, and the greatest overwhelming feeling of belonging somewhere.” She was proud, she wrote, to finally know where she came from, “and prouder still to be a Nooksack Indian.”

Narte-Parker didn’t set out to be a member of the Nooksack tribe. She grew up well south of Nooksack lands, following her parents as they sought work in the fields, orchards and canneries of Washington State. Her father was Filipino and her mother was Indian, raised on a Shxway reserve in British Columbia. Her mother always said she was part Shxway, a Canadian band within the Stolo nation, through her grandfather, and part Nooksack, through her grandmother Annie George. Annie George’s three daughters — Narte-Parker’s grandmother and her two aunts — all married Filipino farmworkers. The family spoke Halkomelem, a native language that was widely spoken in what is now British Columbia but also in the Nooksack River valley until the mid-20th century; it eventually largely replaced the original Nooksack language, Lhechalosem. As a child, Narte-Parker would sometimes drive north with her mother to visit family, and they would stop off in Nooksack territory to visit a man they called Uncle Louis.

In 1983, Narte-Parker, her mother and one of her great-aunts decided they wanted to learn more about their heritage. They went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Everett, Wash., and then to the Nooksack enrollment office in Deming, to work on a family tree. Narte-Parker’s mother told the enrollment director that her grandmother’s name was Annie George, and that her grandmother’s siblings had been named Louis, Amanda, Frank and William. Annie George wasn’t on the family trees the tribe had, and she wasn’t listed on any of the censuses it used, but Louis George was on a Nooksack tribal census from 1942. In a probate document, they found Annie’s name: Four interviewees described her as Louis’s half sister. The enrollment director encouraged the women to apply for membership, and they did. Within a month, the council sent them word that they had been accepted.

Narte-Parker was the 777th enrolled member of the Nooksack tribe. Many of her relatives quickly followed. (Some also enrolled, separately, as Shxway.) As more houses became available, more members of the three families moved to reservation lands. Before long, the descendants of Annie George became an influential voting bloc, and their members were being elected to council seats and hired to run tribal offices.

While some elders welcomed them, others were skeptical. The sisters had never lived on Nooksack land. Some elders had no memory of them; others remembered them visiting but thought of them as Shxway. Kelly heard, indirectly, that elders in British Columbia didn’t remember the sisters’ being born there, but rather, showing up suddenly as young children — the beginning of his suspicions that, though they “had teachings,” the sisters weren’t Annie’s real daughters at all but non-Indian children she had taken in. Roberts showed me copies of two of the sisters’ birth certificates, reissued later in their lives, listing Annie and her husband as their parents. Other members of the tribe remembered knowing some of the 306 further south in the 1950s, when their families were doing agricultural work; at the time, they said, the families identified as Filipino. They certainly hadn’t been around in the 1960s or ’70s, when the tribe was writing its constitution — when, as Kelly put it, the council “took a look around at who was here when they passed it, and they wrote their criteria for that, based on who was here — this is who Nooksack’s going to be.”

The debate continued into the 1990s, when the tribe did an enrollment audit of one of the three families descended from Annie’s daughters, the Rabangs. They were ultimately found to be enrollable, but not before an ugly confrontation. In 2000, after a number of Rabangs were arrested for smuggling marijuana into the United States from Canada, some elders told The Associated Press that “a clan of outsiders masquerading as Nooksacks” was “controlling tribal government.” Bob Kelly now calls Narte-Parker and the other first enrollees from her extended family “Trojan horses.”

The Nooksack, as is the case with many tribes, have not always been known by their modern name. Rather, Nooksack, which is also rendered Noxwsá7aq, was the name of one of many villages scattered along what is now called the Nooksack River. When white settlers arrived in the mid-19th century, they applied the name of the village to all the people in the valley. Noxwsá7aq translates to “always bracken fern roots,” on which people of the village are said to have subsisted during a time of famine. One tribal member told me that she thinks the name captures something of what it means to be Nooksack. It makes her feel like a survivor.

That’s a fair description of Nooksack history, especially in the last few hundred years. For centuries, the people fished their own river valley but also traveled regularly, including to what is now Canada’s Fraser River, to fish for salmon or gather shellfish. They intermarried and formed alliances with their neighbors on both sides of what is now an international border. When white settlers arrived and introduced new diseases, many of the Nooksack died. By some counts their numbers plummeted to 450 from perhaps 1,200. In the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliot, in which Coast Salish tribes ceded their lands to the federal government in exchange for small reservations and the right to continue fishing, hunting and gathering, the Nooksack received no reservation. Instead, as settlers moved onto their lands, they were told to go live with the Lummi, in their new reservation by the coast. Most refused. Of those who remained, some filed homestead claims on their own lands; others scattered in search of a livelihood. For the next hundred years, as far as the federal government was concerned, the tribe essentially ceased to exist.

This is not an unusual story. The federal government used the law as “a mighty, pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass,” as Teddy Roosevelt said to Congress in 1901. He was referring to the General Allotment Act, under which tribally owned land was carved into small parcels and handed out to individuals. It was a huge blow to the stability and sovereignty of tribes: Within 20 years, Native people lost ownership of 90 million acres. It was also the beginning of the government’s reliance on blood quantum to determine Indian status. Those deemed “half-bloods” or less were regarded as more responsible and given more freedom to handle their land. Even many “progressive” reformers saw assimilation into white society as the best way to transform tribal members into citizens. “Kill the Indian in the student so we can save the man!” went the famous slogan of a superintendent at one of the 500 boarding schools that Native children, forcibly separated from their families, were made to attend.

Some Nooksack people, unrecognized by the federal government, stayed on their lands and continued to operate as a tribe. In the 1920s, they joined other Northwest tribes to sue the federal government for lands lost; in the 1930s, even though they weren’t considered eligible to participate, they voted to accept the Indian Reorganization Act, in which the government backed away from its assimilationist policies and instead encouraged tribes to be self-governing and self-sufficient. (A decade later the United States ended its government-to-government relationships with tribes and returned to promoting assimilation, before changing its policies and pushing self-government again.) In the 1960s, a committee of Nooksacks opened a bid for federal recognition. They gained title to one acre of land in Deming, the first Nooksack Reservation, in 1970, and full federal recognition in 1973. Like many tribes, they adopted a constitution based on a model that the Bureau of Indian Affairs developed during the reorganization period in the 1930s. The new constitution restricted Nooksack membership to recipients of early land allotments, recipients of a 1965 government settlement or people who appeared on a 1942 tribal census. Their direct descendants could also be enrolled, provided they had “at least one-fourth (1/4) degree Indian blood.”

The Nooksack weren’t alone in seeing long-lost applicants turn up after the tribe was officially recognized. Ron Allen, the tribal chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam, told me it was common, in the last decades of the 20th century, for the “inner-circle communities” of northwestern tribes to be surprised by a “wave” of people who started coming back to places their families once left. He credits the political advancement of tribes, which made members of the broader society feel that it was “O.K. to be Indian.” Tribes generally welcomed the new arrivals, he said, but still, “it was like, ‘Where are all these Indians coming from?’ ”

The most outspoken critics of disenrollment call it a form of genocide. Others don’t go quite so far but still view the practice as an outgrowth of policies designed to suppress Native American identity — “to control us, to assimilate us, and ultimately, to extinguish us,” as John McCoy, a Washington State senator and member of the Tulalip Tribes, neighbors to the Nooksack, wrote in an op-ed for the Indian Country Media Network earlier this year. Robert Williams, of the University of Arizona, argues that disenrollment is a remnant of “colonialism and good old-fashioned American racism, with Indians left to deal with the mess.” In a 2015 tweet, Sherman Alexie, the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene author, put it even more emphatically: “Dear Indian tribes who disenroll members, you should be ashamed of your colonial and capitalistic bullshit.”

The first person to reply to Alexie’s tweet — thanking him for speaking out when others were silent — was Gabe Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian tribes in California and the lawyer whom the Nooksack 306 hired to represent them. The next replies came from some of Galanda’s other clients: former members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who were disenrolled in 2014. Grand Ronde was formed in 1857 when the federal government forced at least 27 tribes and bands to leave their homelands, which ranged from California to Washington, and move to a reservation in Oregon. The 86 Grand Ronde disenrollees descend from a man known as Chief Tumulth, who signed one of the treaties that created the reservation. Decades after they enrolled, tribal officials noted that Chief Tumulth failed to appear on the official base roll, made the year it was founded. It was true: He was hanged the year before, by a lieutenant of the U.S. Army.

I thought of this last spring as I watched Narte-Parker leaf through old letters and family trees, newspaper clippings and documents. “We didn’t make the laws,” she said. “We just got stuck in the middle.”

After the first disenrollment letters went out to Nooksack members, Galanda appealed to tribal courts and the Department of the Interior and managed to delay the disenrollment hearings. Meanwhile, the 306 tried to make sense of what documents they could find to illuminate their past. They had no birth certificate for Annie, so they turned to old censuses and to 19th-century church records kept by the Archdiocese of Vancouver, marking the sacraments of birth, marriage and death. They found that Annie’s birth mother, Marie Siamat, was buried in December 1875, two days after giving birth to Annie, and that her father (variously recorded as Chief Matsqui, George Kot kro itmentwh, George Roelkwemeldon, George Tekwomclko, George Matsqui and so on) remarried a woman named Madeline Jobe.

Indian censuses taken during Annie’s childhood repeatedly recorded her living with George and Madeline. Michelle Robert’s grandmother remembers her mother, Annie, referring to Madeline as the woman who raised her and as “Mother.” The 306 think this is compelling evidence Madeline adopted Annie. The council remains unconvinced. Kelly says that citing Madeline as an ancestor — their only tie to recognized base rolls — was a blatant lie.

If Madeline didn’t count, the family responded, they should still qualify for membership under Section H of the Nooksack constitution, which allows the enrollment of “persons who possess at least ¼ Indian blood and who can prove Nooksack ancestry to any degree.” Records indicate that Matsqui was considered a Nooksack village even after the Canadian border was established to the south, and Matsqui George was a chief of the village. In a U.S. census from 1910, Louis George indicated that both his parents, Madeline and Matsqui George, were Nooksacks from Washington, and that he was a full-blooded Nooksack. Besides, the 306 like to point out, Kelly’s own family was adopted by the Nooksacks; it is originally from a different Canadian tribe.

Kelly suggested that the 306 disenroll themselves and reapply under Section H. But he soon called for a referendum to remove Section H from the Nooksack constitution. He said later that this change was unrelated to the 306 and was instead a much-needed tightening of loose enrollment laws that could have let “almost anybody” in. The amendment passed with 61 percent support.

As part of their defense, the 306 produced letters from anthropologists. One cited not just the requirements for Nooksack membership provided in tribal code but “historical documents, family oral history and well-established concepts of identity, affiliation and membership within anthropology regarding the social organization of the Coast Salish peoples.” But for some tribal members, this only served to undermine his case. “It’s not a club,” a woman named Mary Brewer, who recently gave up her membership in the Lummi tribe to enroll as a Nooksack, told me. “My mom has about 10 different tribes in her ancestry, and she meets the requirements for only two.” Their family lost title to 80 acres on the Yakima reservation because they didn’t have high enough blood quantum to be enrolled there; they were sorry to lose the land, she said, but respected the rules by which modern tribes operate. Brewer’s mother, Diane, said she had two grandchildren whose blood quantum is one-quarter. “We’ve been telling them, better marry Native or else it’ll die out,” she said.

“The 306 say, ‘Disenrollment isn’t traditional,’ ” Mary said. “Well, enrollment was never traditional!” It is, however, the way things work now. “It’s not, ‘this guy took care of me, and that’s how we did it in the olden days,’ ” Brewer continued. “If you don’t have documentation, then you’re not Indian.”

In more than 30 years of membership, Annie’s descendants became interwoven in the life of the tribe. They married other Nooksacks and had kids; those kids had kids. But once the disenrollment process began, people chose sides. “It was just like a light switch,” Elizabeth Oshiro, one of the 306, told me. People she knew for years “all of a sudden had a different heart.”

With the hearings repeatedly delayed as lawsuits made their way through the tribal court system, both sides formed Facebook groups to argue their cases and regularly debated or taunted each other online. (Their competing slogans were “We Belong” and “We Are Nooksack.”) “While some people challenge the idea of tribal enrollment, referring to it as ‘Western thinking’ and an imposed system on American Indians,” posted Katrice Romero, the tribe’s housing director, “that tribal enrollment number is what holds the United States government accountable to the American Indian people and its trust responsibility to tribes; a responsibility that my ancestors fought, struggled and sacrificed for.”

On the reservation, Michelle Roberts found that people who babysat for her as a child or attended her wedding would no longer make eye contact with her. “The most important thing isn’t friendship,” says Diane Brewer, who no longer speaks to her former best friend, one of the 306. “The most important thing is the tribe.”

Rudy St. Germain at the home of Michelle Roberts’s parents in Deming, Wash.

In the summer of 2013, Roberts was fired from her job as the human-resources manager at the Nooksack River Casino. Later, when she tried to count the number of disenrollees and their allies who lost tribal jobs, she got to 58. At first, Kelly told me he wouldn’t comment on personnel decisions but later said, “We got rid of all them a long time ago.” Rudy St. Germain was fired from his job as the casino’s landscaping manager and had to move his two boys into a relative’s house when he couldn’t make rent. “Those were dark days,” he told me. Today he works in a pork-processing plant.

Roberts and St. Germain couldn’t find resolution in the council. Kelly began insisting that meetings be held over the phone. He’d received threats, he said, and it wasn’t safe to meet in person. When St. Germain and Roberts spoke, no one seemed to be able to hear them. I asked Kelly whether he muted them. He shrugged and said: “Probably. I muted a lot of people.” (He says they weren’t supposed to be on the call in the first place.) The following winter, Kelly scheduled the first in-person council meetings in months on the Friday, Saturday and Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend; the Nooksack constitution allows for council members to be removed from office if they miss three monthly council meetings in a row. St. Germain and Roberts, who were out of town, tried to reach the council by phone or email. At the third meeting, the council declared their seats empty and appointed two new members to replace them. “It was the only way we could get them off council,” Kelly told me later. Rudy said, “I was lost for words.”

By that time, Kelly was calling the 306 scam artists. “Nobody stepped forward and claimed them!” he told me repeatedly. “You don’t show up and just insert yourself into someone else’s family tree.”

With an election looming and four of eight council seats expiring, the council asked the tribal court judge to keep pending disenrollees from voting. After the judge refused, the council declined to schedule the elections. The incumbents remained in office, but some argued that, without an elected quorum, the tribe had no viable government.

Several lawsuits, including one called Kelly v. Kelly, brought by a group that included the chairman’s sons, were filed to force elections, but amid litigation, the council abruptly fired the tribe’s judge. The council also barred Galanda from practicing in the tribe’s courts, saying he’d behaved unethically by citing an opinion he wrote while serving as a judge for another tribe; the court began to return all of his filings unopened. An appellate court directed the chief of police to arrest and imprison the court clerk if she continued to reject filings; when the chief of police refused, the appellate court held him in contempt, began levying a fine of $1,000 a day and wondered, in its ruling, if “at Nooksack, the rule of law is dead.” (The council contends that, because the courts are under the jurisdiction of the council, these fines and rulings are meaningless.) Two of the remaining council members whose seats did not expire and who have resisted disenrollment (one is the mother of Kelly’s sons and is now married to one of the 306) were targeted with petitions calling for their recall. One of the recalls succeeded. The charge was treason.

In July, some of the disenrollees and their allies scheduled what they called a general council meeting. To avoid the tribal police, they met on the grounds of an old logging show. Several people showed me text messages they received from tribal employees who said they’d been warned that they would be fired if they attended. Later, thinking Kelly might consider the meeting a kind of coup, I asked him what he thought of it. He shrugged. “It was meaningless,” he said. “It’s not real. It’s make-believe.”

George Adams, who taught Lhechalosem language classes for the tribe until he was fired early last year (he’s such a fervent supporter of the 306 that he likes to call himself “307”), called the meeting to order; he spoke in Lhechalosem, though he is considered the only remaining fluent speaker. (He learned the language by studying old recordings a quarter century after the last native speaker died.) Adams charged four witnesses with committing the proceedings to memory in order to later share what happened. “Remember these names,” he told the crowd, “because this is how we survived for thousands of years.”

People rose to speak. “My enrollment number is six, so there you go,” said one man, by way of introduction. Another said, “I’m 71 years old, and I’m kind of ashamed to call myself a Nooksack right now. Years ago, our people never asked, ‘Where you from?’ They welcomed you to their table.” A woman asked how the decisions of this council could be considered valid when there were so few people, around 200, present. People began to speak of shutting down the tribe altogether, to force the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had consistently declined to intervene, to call new elections.

Adams asked for a vote. The crowd decided that the four expired seats on the tribal council were vacant, that everything the government had done since the canceled elections was invalid and that they should vote in four new officers — none of them disenrollees — from their own ranks. “This has to do with 10 generations from now,” one of the newly elected officers said. He described the worst-case scenario: for lots of people to be cut off from the tribal community, “to be just a person roaming around, trying to figure it out for themselves.”

The new treasurer, Bernadine Roberts, a short, dark-haired woman (“Stand up please,” Adams told her. “Oh! You are standing!”) who enrolled three years after the tribe was officially recognized, told me that until she moved to the reservation from Seattle, she “was one of those urban Indians that didn’t know much.” She gave a brief acceptance speech about what it meant to her to reconnect to her family’s past. “My grandmother said we were going home, and I didn’t know what she was talking about,” she said. “But I know now.”

Michelle Roberts at her parent’s home in Deming, Wash

In July, after the meeting at the logging show, some of the Nooksack 306 joined in the intertribal Canoe Journey, an annual event in which hundreds of members from dozens of Northwest tribes spend weeks paddling the coast to and from one another’s lands for meals, dancing and ceremonies. They named their canoes — hand-carved, with seating for 15 — for Annie’s daughters, and shared them with people of the Shxway band. Some Nooksacks told me this was ridiculous: the sharing with the Shxway, the names, participating at all. The Nooksack, they said, are known for racing narrow, fast war canoes, not paddling wide traveling canoes. Near the end of the journey, the canoes crossed Puget Sound and came to shore on a sandy beach in Seattle. George Adams, in the center canoe, stood and addressed two elders from the Muckleshoot tribe, which was hosting that day. “We are all one,” he said, “carrying on the tradition of knowing who you are and where you come from.”

The following month, the 306 celebrated what they saw as a hopeful precedent when the Grand Ronde Tribal Court of Appeals overturned the disenrollment of Chief Tumulth’s descendants, holding that it was unfair to subject tribal members to “such an extreme sanction” after accepting them for nearly three decades. Elsewhere, a few tribes have rejected disenrollment altogether. The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in California amended their constitution to ban disenrollment in 2013. The Spokane tribe of Washington did the same in 2015, as part of more than two dozen constitutional changes meant to better reflect the historical complexity of the tribe.

But the Nooksack dispute dragged on. In October, the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed Kelly that it would not recognize any actions of the tribal council because it failed to hold elections in March 2016, stressing that it wasn’t telling the tribe who counted as a member but simply responding to the “exceedingly rare situation” of a council’s lacking a quorum. The tribe scheduled new elections and certified the results of a referendum to disenroll the 306. But the bureau would not recognize the results: by excluding pending disenrollees from voting, the tribe had violated its constitution and the rulings of its court of appeals.

So when the 306 received letters informing them that their 10-minute disenrollment hearings had finally been scheduled to take place on the phone in November, they weren’t sure what to do. Some, including Rudy St. Germain, refused to participate on the grounds that the hearings were illegitimate. Others scheduled their appointments, then called in to tell the council they didn’t recognize its authority.

Michelle Roberts called from Canada, where she was staying with Shxway friends. “Annie George was Nooksack because her father was Matsqui George, and he was Nooksack,” she said. “We are all Nooksack. I am Nooksack. I can’t say that more and mean it more.”

A voice came on the line. It was Bob Solomon, who holds one of the expired council seats and is a descendant of Madeline Jobe: “I have never heard anybody say that you were adopted by Madeline Jobe. You are not my relative through Madeline.”

“Yes, we are,” Roberts said, her voice rising. “The document proves it, my grandmother proves it, the oral history proves it.”

“That’s your story,” he said. “That’s not mine.”

A week later, the day before Thanksgiving, Kelly announced that the tribe had removed the names of “non-Indians who had been erroneously enrolled in the Tribe” from its membership list. Those who called and those who didn’t, all were gone. “It’s finally over,” he wrote.

But of course it wasn’t over. The departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services, which enforce the government’s treaty responsibilities to provide housing and health care to the tribe, did not recognize the disenrollment of the 306 and maintained they were still entitled to their services. In late December, the Bureau of Indian Affairs warned that the tribe’s failure to hold valid elections put all its federal funding at risk.

There were now two sides offering two competing realities, each telling the other it was illegitimate. The 306 would be another chapter in the long, strange history of who decides who is — and who isn’t — an Indian.

[sociologyontherock]

A Meandering Life in Politics

By Marilyn Porter 

Stephen Riggins asked me to write an article for Sociology on the Rock about the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He knew I had once been a member. This is true. I had to be very quiet about this affiliation when I applied for immigration to Canada in the early 1980s. At the time, membership was an absolute bar to entry to the US, and while such a bar was not explicit in Canada, I chose not to mention it at my immigration interview. In any case, my sojourn in the CPGB was neither long nor very significant. I will come to why I joined a little later in this meandering saga of my political life.

My first memory of politics came when I was about eight. It may have been the 1950 election that kept Attlee and the Labour Party in power. More likely, it was the 1951 election that restored Winston Churchill and Tory rule. My mother was a die-hard Tory mostly, I think, because she saw conservative politics, like attending church, as some kind of class obligation. My father took no interest at all. The men who worked on our farm in Wales were devout working-class labour voters. The trigger issue in 1950 or 51 became what colour of ribbons to put on the farm’s cats and dogs. I forget how it was resolved but I do remember absorbing the remarkable tension around the issue. 

Our Welsh constituency (Caernarvonshire at the time, later Gwynedd) had been Liberal under its most famous MP, David Lloyd George, but became a safe Labour seat until Plaed Cymru took over the seat in 1974 and they have retained it ever since. The MP when I was growing up was Goronwy Roberts. He had a long and fairly distinguished career as Minister for Foreign Affairs and later as Leader of the House of Lords. He was also a very good constituency MP. Even my mother had to admit that. In 1960, I became 18 and eligible to vote. Despite my blinkered education, I already knew that I was aligned with the progressive Left, although I had little notion of what that might mean. I did know that I would not vote Conservative. So I wrote to Goronwy Roberts and asked him why I should vote for him. He replied with a detailed and personal letter, which not only convinced me to vote for him but also instilled in me the importance of elected representatives taking a personal interest in every one of their constituents.

At this point, I was also starting my degree in history and political science at Trinity College Dublin. While Labour and socialism in Ireland have a distinguished record (think James Connolly), by the time I got there official party politics had been reduced to irrelevant squabbles between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The real action was, and continued to be, the situation in the North.

The Trinity population was a strange mix. Literally in the middle of Catholic and radical Dublin, it had very few Irish Catholic students partly because John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, was an extreme conservative and expressly forbade Catholics from attending Trinity on pain of excommunication. And partly because University College Dublin had moved to a much bigger campus, Belfield, and was expanding rapidly with considerable government (and church) support. My two closest friends were both Anglo-Irish, one a daughter of a general in the British Army and one the daughter of a tea planter in India. Of my two closest classmates, one was a Protestant from Belfast and the other was an Ibo from Nigeria. For both of them “home” was fraught with danger and division. The Northern Irish fellow student survived at least a bout of violence, but the Nigerian became involved in the civil war and was killed the year after we graduated. I learned from both of them that politics was not a game to be taken lightly. My activism at the time tended to be short term and practical. I sat under Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin fasting for some cause in Africa and picketed to stop police “moving on” itinerants, meanwhile learning a radical version of Irish history and a sympathetic version of the nascent IRA movement in the North. 

At this point – 1967 – I had another transformational experience and added another layer to both my analysis and action, although it did mean that I missed a good deal of the political action of 1968. 

My husband and I went to Africa, to work as volunteers at a socialist run school in Botswana. Swaneng Hill School was specifically founded by Patrick van Rensburg to challenge the apartheid state of South Africa. It was designed on Nyrere-inspired socialist principles and staffed entirely by volunteer teachers. I have written elsewhere about some of the problems caused by enthusiastic but untrained volunteer staff trying to provide the only secondary schooling in the country, while at the same time trying to develop a socialist commune. (“My First Day at School,” Your Voice: Newsletter of the MUN Pensioners’ Association, December 2020. See also “The Edge of Experience” in Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience, edited by Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan). However, while the practice may have been a little bumpy, theory was flourishing. A good proportion of the staff were American draft dodgers and many others had come from repressive regimes. We had study groups on radical theorists like Laclau’s Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory; Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man; Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and education pioneers like Paulo Freire. I actually read Marx’s Capital for the first time, or most of it. At the time there was scarcely anything written about Botswana apart from the anthropologically interesting Bushmen. However, trying to find something relevant to teach the students introduced me to a range of literature on development and social issues and set me on the path to sociology.

There was, however, no feminism and the structure of the school and the culture around it was downright sexist. My husband was a teacher; I was just “a wife.” Progressiveness only goes so far. I noticed this – how could I not, stuck teaching staff kids in the school-run primary school and hanging out with other “mothers.”

In the summer of 1969, we came back to the UK and settled in Bristol so that my then husband could get an education degree. With a two-year-old and pregnant, I risked boredom and frustration. That soon ended when I became simultaneously involved in the local women’s liberation movement and a PhD student in sociology at Bristol University. This marked my true birth into academia, politics, and feminism.

I will try to deal with the three strands separately although, obviously, they were not distinguishable in real time. Nor should they be as it was the mingling and interaction among the three that led to my individual, probably idiosyncratic version of them.

The PhD program, which took me 5 years to complete (1974-79) enabled me to acquire a full – and hitherto missing – education in the philosophy and theory of Marxism and socialism. I studied all the usual Marxist texts and learned about Maoism and forms of socialism emerging in Latin America. Most of all I studied Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and related writings. Like many of my generation, my introduction to Gramsci came through John Berger’s A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor. In particular, Berger’s reading of the Gramscian distinction between “common sense” and “good sense” resonated with me. Reading Gramsci threw a whole new light on how to understand what “ordinary” people meant when they talked and how better to interpret it while leaving “ordinary” people with the dignity they deserve.

Meanwhile, my fellow feminists were educating me in contemporary left politics. This was particularly messy around the fracturing Trotskyist groups. While Leninism was attractive in its lean rigor, I could not handle the authority of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which obviously was not going to include me. The Maoist groups wore really drab clothes and always shouted everyone down at meetings, but supporting strikes and movements like the Night Cleaners and the Ford Seamstresses was becoming an important part of my life and the Women’s Movement on its own did not seem to provide all the tools I needed to become fully aware and involved. I had noticed for a while that many of my feminist friends were members of the CPGB, and that they exhibited a kind of discipline that was markedly lacking in the broad women’s movement. If they said they were going to be on the picket line at 6 AM, they were, and with coffee for the rest of us. So I joined, although in Bristol it made very little difference to my activities. The difference occurred when I moved to Lancaster 1978-84 to teach at the University of Manchester (sorry, complicated husband troubles).

In Lancaster, feminism was largely confined to the university and not many feminists got involved in local left-wing politics. However, the Communist Party in Lancaster was small but very active. We even had a band that marched with strikers and other labour demonstrators. Alas, the CP’s Women’s Band marked the lowest point of my musical career. I was demoted from the cymbals to the triangle. As a local branch, we were able to send delegates to the regional meetings held in Manchester. I remember them as smoke-filled and full of testy disagreements about tactics, but I did also meet and learn from older members who could remember times when the CPGB had been much larger and more influential than it was in its dying days. (The CPGB effectively vanished in 1991 when Nina Temple disbanded it in favour of a more European-focused organization.)

I was also gone by then, taking up a one-year position at Memorial in 1980, which I eventually transformed into a proper position in 1984, via a number of summer sessional appointments. I also began my Newfoundland-based research, mostly on women in the fishery, which led to my 1993 book Place and Persistence in the Lives of Newfoundland Women and introduced me to a network of women scholars working on rural and fishing issues in Scandinavia. It also led to two co-edited collections of writings, Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador: A Collage (with Carmelita McGrath and Barbara Neis, 1995) and Weather’s Edge: A Compendium of Women’s Lives in Newfoundland and Labrador (with Carmelita McGrath and Linda Cullum, 2005).

By this time, my attention had turned to women’s issues in international development, especially Indonesia and Pakistan. I learned countless lessons about both countries, especially Indonesia, and about doing fieldwork in such a different place and about conducting research with colleagues from different backgrounds. 

In terms of politics, I learned a lot about how people, and especially feminists, put their ideas together in very different circumstances. I learned to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.

Meanwhile, back home I, along with Ken Kavanagh and Bill Hynd, established a successor to Oxfam, which had closed its St. John’s office, the Social Justice Co-operative of Newfoundland and Labrador. This is now in the hands of a new generation, as it should be. I remain a member of the Newfoundland and Labrador New Democratic Party, and have served on the executive several times. For me, the NDP fills one of the lowest common denominator roles for my political identity because I live here and feel a sense of duty to contribute to the best possible political party. However, most of my current concerns and activities are national or international, and mostly around peace and environmental movements such as being an active member of Oxfam and Inter Pares, a Canadian social justice organization.

So my political life dwindles, in step with the state of my hips and, indeed, the state of the world. But as we dwindle, the next generation steps up. My own family is an illustration that ideals and activism and political knowledge do pass down to the next generation. All is not lost. The world will turn again.

[shirlleycoyle]

Amazon’s Disposable Tech Is Waste Even as It Leaves the Factory

Kevin Purdy is a writer at iFixit, which teaches people how to repair their things and is pushing for right to repair legislation. A version of this story was originally published on its website .

Amazon offers a flotilla of “smart” devices to replace your microwave, kids’ nightlights, wall plugs, and, coming soon, rings and eyeglasses. But almost all of these products are disposable, and the company's lackluster efforts to recycle or help repair these products is costing our planet a whole lot. The retail giant has the resources to do so much better.

And that’s before we even talk about Fire tablets.

Amazon doesn’t repair its own products for customers outside its return or warranty periods. The company doesn’t make parts available. Need a new battery for your old but still functional Kindle Paperwhite? That’s too bad, Amazon doesn’t sell them directly (though you can roll the dice on a number of third-party vendors). The same goes for microwaves and nightlights. And even after you’ve given up on fixing something, Amazon’s recycling and trade-in programs for its own products exist, but they’re drastically under-promoted.

The impact of Amazon’s cheap, hard-to-fix gear is ignored or obscured at every level. The company’s environmental report talks about a “circular economy” mostly in the context of refurbished goods customers can buy. Customers, it reads, “may discover” a device recycling program or trade-in programs (we had no idea either existed, and you likely didn’t, either). An iFixit staffer who twice received a keyboard with a missing part was told by different Amazon customer support reps to “just simply thrown into trash” [sic] and “just [give] it to garbage man, they will separate that.”

That this goes overlooked is odd, as Amazon’s impact on everything has gotten attention lately. The human cost, danger, and small business pinch of “free” delivery, the mire of fake reviews, the privacy invasions of Ring video doorbells or Alexa/Echo devices, even the impact of Cyber Monday cardboard: we’re all starting to think more critically about Amazon’s all-consuming reach.

Yet at the same time, way too many of us are okay with buying, gifting, or recommending cheap Amazon tech as disposable, good-enough solutions. Tech review sites with otherwise critical eyes regularly recommend underwhelming Fire tablets as kid’s toys or streaming screens, eagerly announce when Echo devices go on sale, and never mention where all those cheap devices end up when they age, break, or become obsolete.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson noted the company’s pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2040, but its own workers say the company hasn't gone far enough, and the company continues to help fossil fuel companies extract oil. Refurbishment and trade-in programs have “kept millions of devices from ending up in landfills in 2019 alone,” and many Amazon products are still in use after five years, the company said.

“While we have been focused on sustainability for many years, such as through our recycling, refurbishment and trade-in programs, we know we have more work to do to allow our customers to make informed choices and to provide transparent information about the environmental impacts of devices through their whole life cycle,” the Amazon spokesperson said.

But nobody seems to be asking of Amazon the same kind of device stewardship that we ask of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even smaller brands. Maybe it’s due to the largely transactional relationship people have with the mega-store. Maybe it’s because people simply tolerate Amazon’s tech gear, rather than truly enjoy it, even when it’s new.

The New, Already Outdated Fire Tablet

Fire Tablets are low-end Android devices optimized for Kindle reading, streaming video, Alexa commands, and simple games. The goal is to feed you Amazon’s services and make your $120 yearly Prime membership seem worth it. Inside the current 7- and 8-inch versions ($50 and $80 respectively, though they’re often on sale for less) is a MediaTek MT8163V/B all-in-one chipset. That chip is actually slower than the one in Samsung’s Galaxy S5, released in early 2014.

There are loads of cheap, underperforming tablets available, but Amazon’s aggressive pricing, tie-in services, and outsized brand power have a reality distorting effect on buyers and otherwise critical reviewers. They’re cheap, the thinking goes; even cheaper with ads on them. At such prices, you can toss it in your bag to watch videos while traveling, or let your kids beat it up. Most people wouldn’t clutter their home with a no-name, underpowered Android tablet bought on a whim, but they’ll take one from Amazon.

Wirecutter states the HD 8 is “great for consuming Amazon-provided content, but it’s not as flexible as a full-fledged Android tablet.” But at $95 ($80 with lockscreen ads), it’s “a tolerable trade-off when you need a media-consumption tablet on the cheap.” The Verge gives the newest $150 10-inch Fire a seven out of 10, but notes it “feels as cheap as it costs” and is “slow for a 2019 device.” This is not to single out those two sites; they’re reviewing products in a particular reader-service context. Many other tech sites push cheap tablets with far less pondering.

But the net result of this very slick sales funnel is a lot of rare materials pulled from the earth, energy used to make tablets already past their prime, fuel used to ship them, and then, when they can’t be fixed or efficiently disassembled, a huge pile of shredded plastic, circuit boards, and, more than likely, hazardous batteries.

I called a local store in a national repair chain to ask if they repaired Kindle Fire tablets. “I’m gonna be honest with you, the price of repairing that is going to be equal to or more than replacing it,” an employee there told me. “Like $50 or $75?” I asked. “Last time I looked, it was $100,” the employee said. It’s not surprising that Amazon can make, pack, and ship me a tablet for just a bit more than the restocking fee on an iPad. But it’s not helping our growing e-waste problem.

Throwing ideas at the wall and shipping them

Amazon’s flotilla of always-listening Echo products is expanding rapidly. Review and tech sites are always a little skeptical, but they also link even the weirdest products with affiliate codes.

The Kindle parts that we sell at iFixit are sourced from an electronics recycler because that is literally the only place we can find them. And those parts don’t exactly fly off the shelves. It’s hard to blame people for not wanting to fix or upgrade a tablet that often costs $35.

If the door handle on your Kenmore microwave breaks, you can probably get the part and repair instructions through Sears Parts Direct. If any part of your AmazonBasics Microwave (Works with Alexa!) breaks, you have to pray that someone dismantled one and put the parts on eBay. While an Amazon spokesperson emphasized that Amazon devices regularly receive updates that require no action on the owner’s part, we wonder how many years an Amazon microwave could expect to receive security updates, and whether customers could actually fix wayward software.

Free, easy shipping for costly, tough waste

Amazon has a poorly advertised recycling program for its non-working electronics and trade-in offers for working devices (that mostly provide discounts on newer devices). Your entry to the recycling program is a kludgy form where you type in the raw number of Amazon devices you have in each category—e-readers, tablets, TV sticks, Dash buttons—and get a shipping label. There are also currently 10 U.S. locations where Amazon will accept discarded electronics.

Amazon claims that millions of devices have been saved by its refurbishment and trade-in programs. Most people simply don’t know that Amazon will trade, refurbish, or recycle their stuff. As a result, the cost of recycling cheap products lands on local municipalities, most of them already overburdened with e-waste. But even if Amazon’s mail-in recycling were wildly successful, recycling should be the last resort for electronics. We should be making products that stand the test of time, and can have multiple owners.

Not all devices need to be top of the line, and buyers should have more options than a brand-new iPad. But it would be nice to see the realities of buying and recommending cheap devices acknowledged in product reviews. Even better, mention that there are many good markets for quality used and refurbished tablets and other devices out there: Apple and Samsung have refurbished offerings, or Swappa and Back Market provide nearly as much assurance at normalized prices. And for the deal hunters, Craigslist, OfferUp, and Facebook Marketplace are great local options.

Activists like us at iFixit pressure the makers of expensive, useful devices when they fail to design for reliability and a sensible afterlife. Sometimes it pays off. Apple is pushing the envelope and developing recycled sources for challenging materials like rare earth metals, and puts trade-in and recycling options in front of their customers. Microsoft redesigned the Surface Laptop 3 to dramatically improve its repairability. Amazon, meanwhile, is selling loads of electronic devices at artificially low prices, and their product responsibility policy is, at best, a quiet and very mixed message.

It’s high time that we demand better. Let’s hold Amazon to the same e-waste standards as the rest of the industry.

Amazon’s Disposable Tech Is Waste Even as It Leaves the Factory syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[wikitopx]

Portland has so much to offer.

So with a short weekend on hand, you will have to know where the locals head for their day to day activities. Here we have found where the locals drink, hang out, relax, and do their shopping! Read on to find out about 7 unique things to do in Portland, Oregon at night.

1. Portland Night Market

Portland Night Market is a great outdoor place for young people, old people, locals, and tourists alike! Come here for the best Portland has to offer in all areas - food, drinks, shopping and live music or events! Doors open at 4 pm Friday and Saturday and are keeping the small outdoor venue packed all night long until closing at 11 pm. Looking for local art, jewelry or food? You can get them all here and for the best prices. Get here early if you want to avoid the crowds and to get the best selection of goods!

2. Floating at Float On

Ever had one of those nights, weeks or months where you can’t sleep and have trouble relaxing? Well, Portland has found the cure. One of the locals’ favorite past times here is something called floating. If you have never heard of this or never been to a ‘floating place’ as they are called, it is basically a dark, half water filled chamber, that a person sits in for a certain amount of time to allow the brain to relax, heal and come out rejuvenated.

I have experienced this once and I must say, if you can get a good deal on a floating place, it is worth the experience. Many say it allows their body to calm, their mind to wander and the darkness is great for relaxing. This company is one of the best known among Portlandites, called Float On. They offer a 90-minute float for 65 USD, and offer monthly memberships as well! You can read all about the health benefits of floating as well on their website, and then book a session!

3. Roller Derby

If you have never seen Drew Barrymore’s famous directorial debut entitled ‘Whip it,’ then you are in for a surprise, because Roller Derbies are not just in the movies anymore! Portland has brought them to real life! If you want to catch a glimpse of the action you can buy tickets to watch championships or youth derbies starting at 15 USD. There are discounts for large groups, as well as season passes available if you get hooked! Don’t worry, Rose City Rollers provides options for everyone, even if you want to be a part of all the action. You can get involved with Rose City Rollers as a sponsor, volunteer, official, or even join one of their skater programs and compete yourself!

4. Portland Distillery

New Deal Distillery is a hot, up and coming distillery, earning 5 stars by visitors from all around the nation. What makes them so special? Their commitment to fresh ingredients, fair prices for their products, and high-quality standards were among the most mentioned comments in reviews. A great place to take a group of friends and arrange a tasting, or take a date for a special night out! They are open from noon to 6 pm most days, so it’s great for an afternoon party or tasting as well!

Explore Portland’s virant beer culture and craft-drink scene by visiting its finest breweries, distilleries, and wineries! Consider booking a tour to make it a hassle-free trip.

5. Get lost in Powell's City of Books

If you are like me and love bookstores in general, or collect books in different languages, this is a must-visit. This is seriously one of the best bookstores I have been to in the country. Powell’s City of Books is huge and holds books of all different makes, genres, used and new titles, as well as totes, notebooks, journals, diaries and all things related to books! A great place to stop and get out of the heat in the summer, or cold in the winter. I can easily spend an hour or more here just browsing at all the options they have. Don’t worry about the prices either, as you can find tons of deals here on used books!

6. Ground Kontrol

A great place for adults to release their inner kid! If you are looking for some fun and alcohol, you have found your place. Think 70’s and 80’s arcade games, paired with your favorite brew or cocktail, and you get Ground Kontrol (some refer to it as a ‘barcade’). A local geek favorite hangout and bar all in one, Ground Kontrol maintains its allure with constant themed parties, events, and drink specials galore. Head over early to minimize fighting for your favorite arcade game to play!

7. Teardrop

A local favorite for its ambiance, outdoor seating and exquisite cocktail menu, Teardrop has won the local hipster bar award. Here you will find professional bartenders mixing up all types of drink concoctions. They open as early as 4 pm and stay open until 1:30 am for you to get your speciality drink on! Drinks start at 7 USD and snacks at 5 USD during happy hour, so get there early to avoid the crowds and save some cash.

8. Shop the Portland Saturday Market

Situated along the Columbia River is the Portland Saturday Market. It is the largest continuously operated outdoor market and is open Saturdays and Sundays from March through Christmas Eve. With rows and rows of handcrafted clothes, wooden toys and fresh foods from Northeast Africa, Lebanon, Greece and Poland (to name a few), there's something for everyone. The ever-present live music and awesome people watching provide great entertainment for little shoppers. But if you're lucky enough to visit on the first Sunday of the month, you'll catch free kids' activities like puppet shows, creative arts activities, science fairs and more.

9. Get scientific at OMSI

No visit to Portland is complete without a stop at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry—almost always known as OMSI—and if you live in PDX, having a membership is a must. The 219,000-square-foot museum is packed with five enormous halls bringing science to life through interactive exhibits and displays. The teeniest scientists can tackle the Science Playground (infant to age six) with its 7,000-square-feet of water play, sandbox digging, and an extra soft infant area. Older kids will love touching fossils, insects and animals in the Life Science Hall, experiencing an earthquake in the Earthquake House and running plenty of experiments in design, chemistry and physics labs.

10. Get the wiggles out at Playdate PDX

Head to Portland's ultimate indoor playground with a cafe for some rainy day fun. Playdate PDX houses an interactive dance floor, climbing and crawling activities, four slides and two rows of ball cannons in its three-story indoor castle. There's a separate area for toddlers while the main play space is suited for kids up to 12 years old. When it rains, they'll get their wiggles out and you'll get a much-needed break (and a glass of wine or beer!).

Read also: Top 10 things to do in Denver Colorado

From : https://wikitopx.com/travel/top-10-things-to-do-in-portland-oregon-704258.html

[bloggerblagger]

85) Hashtag Strap-on. Edinburgh Fringe 2018, explored, explained,  and reviewed.

If you have a spare few days left in August, drop everything and take advantage of my top holiday tip. Take the high road or the low road, the plane or even the train (provided you’re prepared to stand for four or five hours)  and  hightail it to the Athens of the North.

The Edinburgh Fringe is truly a once in a lifetime experience. And that’s an understatement. Because once you get the bug you may very well find yourself  - like me - going  back year after year.

Never mind that the weather is often, inevitably, dreich. (Dictionary definition: Scottish dialect for ‘Bleak, miserable, dismal, cheerless, dreary.’ And pronounced and meaning almost exactly the same as  ‘dreck’  which is Yiddish for lousy. How curious.)

Worry not that the  restaurant prices are ludicrous - in a bad way.  Nor that you’ll be lucky to get a room you could swing a kitten with dwarfism in, no matter how much you’re willing to pay - ‘how much?!!!’. Nor even that the pavements are so crowded - ‘OMG, will you just get out of the fucking way?!’ - you have to walk in the road if you want to travel above  sub sloth pace.

Because, really, who gives a shit? What’s the occasional near death experience compared to the non stop adrenaline rush of the Fringe.

If there is a better legal high available, answers on a postcard please.

Do mind the quality and still feel the width.

It is said there are 3000 shows on during the Fringe and that, during August,  the population of Edinburgh doubles. Frankly when you’re there it feels like these are gross under estimates.

Every lecture hall, every  room - very possibly every broom cupboard -  in the University campus becomes a theatre. Every basement in every pub and every loft above every bar seems to have a mic and a makeshift stage. And every doorway in every street seems to lead to a stand up comedian, or a sketch show, or a play, or to music or magic or mime.

The standard length - and it rarely varies - of any performance is one hour and shows begin at 9a.m and go on to 1 or 2 the following morning. If you had the stamina  and could survive the sensory overload,  you could, theoretically, do ten shows a day. But  even if you did, you would still see less than 10% of what is available.

And the standard is astonishing. True, every so often you come across a dud but, in my experience - three years now -  for a show even to be  average it  has to be pretty damn good.

Essential Fringe primer. 

Eight super-cunning tips (in no particular order).

1) If you want to know the best things to see,  find a friend who has been and ask them. LIKE ME! My reviews are below and as regular followers of my blog know, I am never wrong. Failing that, Google the  recommendations from The Guardian, the Beeb and The Scotsman.

2)  It’s useful to understand the basic ‘architecture’ of the event because there are several events going on in parallel in Edinburgh.

First, the original Edinburgh Festival festival which takes place in proper venues and is sort of proper culcher  and proper expensive.

Second, the Edinburgh Fringe which, as it name suggests, exists outside the Festival  proper, began nearly 50 years ago, has grown like the Beanstalk on steroids, and in which, shows, generally speaking, charge £10-12 for entrance.

Third, there is the Free Fringe, in which you find acts, so far as I can tell, that  are not in the actual Fringe and for which you can get a separate programme, and which, as the name suggests, don’t charge.

(There are also lots of other things going on - like the Edinburgh Book Festival - but I am not sure where they fit into the scheme of things. Might be part of the actual Festival, but not really relevant.)

3) Download and use the Edinburgh Fringe App. It’s really cleverly designed and once you’ve worked it out, it’s a great way to narrow down the insane choice, to find out what tickets are available, and offers an easy way to buy them. (I didn’t even bother getting the  hard copy brochure/guide. Who wants to schlep a telephone directory around?)

4) There are lots of shows you can take children and young teens to, but if you want to avoid a lot of  the kids, go on August 15th or afterwards. Because, as odd as it seems to us non-Scots, Scottish schools return for the autumn term in mid-August.  I am inclined to think that is the best time to go anyway. After a couple of weeks the shows will be properly grooved.

5) If you are part of a couple try it to make sure you are there on a Monday and Tuesday. There are lots of two for one offers available to all on those days.

6) Couples going for a few days or more, should get a Friend of the Fringe membership. Costs £35, and there lots of other ‘two for one’ offers available every day to FOFs.

Otherwise, to see 3 or 4 shows a day (the right level, for a serious  and hardy Fringe goer, I would say) you need to budget about £40 per day per person for entertainment before costs of  food, drinks, accom etc. Well, I never said it was cheap. ((By the way, my max fringe binge  this year was five shows in one day.)

7) Build your schedule around the plays at the Traverse theatre. The Traverse, known as one of     Britain’s leading centres of new writing, is not strictly part of the Fringe nor part of the Festival but hovers somewhere in between. HOWEVER, its programme is included in the Fringe. (No, I don’t quite understand either, but that’s what I was told.)

Anyway, notwithstanding that, they put on about half a dozen plays of about 60-90 mins length - why aren’t all plays that short? - cuts out nine tenths of the snoring - and they rotate them so they play at different times every day. Invariably brilliant stuff and probably all sold out this year. But they do get RETURNS. Call them on 0131 228 1404 to find out how to get one.

8) My strong advice is to book accommodation as far in advance in possible - like right now for next year - even if you are not 100 per cent sure you are going. You can always cancel.  I stay 20 miles out of town with friends - lucky me! - and this year, hired a car and every day drove into a Park n’ Ride (50p per day) and caught the train in for the last 5 miles. Inexpensive and just about manageable, although it took some organising. So if you have some mates in striking distance, blag a room.

If you have a ‘winibago’, you could do as a few enterprising Fringe goers do and take your leviathan and park in a Park ’n Ride. (There are quite a few situated all around the borders of Edinburgh.) Not sure I would want to stay in the Hotel Park n’ Ride but I saw people who did it.

This year’s BloggerBlagger  reviews.

I went to twenty three things in all. (22 performances of one kind or another plus 1 something else.)

These comprised, again in no particular order:

Five straight plays.

Games. A two hander based upon the story of two Jewish women at the time of the Berlin Olympics and simply stunning, as were Borders and Angels,  the last two fringe offerings written by former comedian Henry Naylor.  Henry, (who I am pleased to call a friend from the time I directed him in a Direct Line campaign 20  years ago - yes, funny old world) was  bracketed by one reviewer with Athol Fugard after the recent off-Broadway production of ‘Angels’.  

His standard does not drop. ‘Games’ is gripping from first to last and subtly draws chilling parallels with the era of Trump. Commit murder to get a ticket. (You may have to.) Five Bloggerblaggerstars.

Freeman. Half a dozen actors, with no scenery, constantly switch between different roles and different centuries to produce a riveting commentary on the sins of slavery and it’s rippling effect into the present day. Wonderful performances. Great imagination. Utterly compelling. Not on any account to be missed. Five Bloggerblaggerstars.

Revenants. A more conventional piece of theatre set in 1942 in which Queen Mary (widow of George V) is portrayed as a game old bird with a touch more brain power than the Royal Family are usually said to have. Surprisingly this too, turns out to be a story about race.

Had its moments but didn’t quite do it for me.Three Bloggerblaggerstars.

Underground Railroad Game. A theatrical experience like no other I have ever experienced. Once again this is about slavery,  a  mesmerising two hander  at the Traverse presented in a constantly shifting context and style. Sometimes comedic, sometimes tragic, and sometimes explicitly  and, even for a man of the world like me, shockingly  sexual, it never stops surprising.

Two wonderful performances, particularly by Jennifer Kidwell, an actor of astonishing power. You may have to commit a murder for this one too, but well worth  a lifetime in prison  so go for it.

My joint pick of the week.Five Bloggerblaggerstars Plus.

Chihuahua. A clever one woman performance that switches between the life of a character in  an Edith Wharton novel and that of a waitress in a coffee shop in Scotland; two women who are linked in a not very defined way by chihuahuas. This was presented in a much smaller venue than the other plays I saw, and also unlike those, it was only half full.

I thought the actress and writer, whose name I didn’t write down and now can’t locate on the internet, was heroic in the face of such a small audience. I think the title might be the problem. I am sure there must be something  that would grab a passer-by or a flicker-through with  much more grip. Three and a bit BloggerBlaggerStars.

Two plays with music.

What are Girls Made Of?.  Another Traverse presentation, this one with four excellent actors, three of whom were obviously at least as gifted as musicians,  and the fourth of whom sang wonderfully. Apparently she would have danced too had she not suffered a nasty injury at some previous performance,  a misfortune that the disembodied voice of the artistic director of the Traverse told us about  at the outset, before apologising for the show’s relative shortcomings and  begging the audience’s  indulgence. She needn’t have bothered her invisible head.

Cora Bissett, the injured singer, was so assured in this tale of the sudden rise and precipitous fall of a young rock star, told  as she approaches forty, that neither she nor we missed a step. She was completely convincing in the role,  unsurprisingly in a sense, since it was her own true life story she was telling, and, of course, she wrote it. Five Bloggerblaggerstars.

Vulvarine. Much more authentically Fringe in that it was conceived and performed by five fresh faced performers with great verve and obvious talent but with the odd rough edge still to be professionally smoothed. ‘Vulverine’ is a more than creditable  attempt at a musical comedy with a sort of ironic feminist theme and has some quite decent tunes and lyrics and  more than a few genuinely funny bits.

Allie Munro, plays the lead part of boring Brony Buckle who is transformed into Superheroine Vulvarine, and she was, I thought,  terrific.  Likewise the rest of the cast with one obvious exception. But given the youthful gusto that made this show so much fun, it would seem mean to name the culprit so, should you go, you can decide for yourself who I meant. Four Bloggerblaggerstars.

Four other musical shows.

21st Century Speakeasy Andrea Carlson and the Love  Police. Andrea Carlson, who, I would guess, is comfortably north of fifty,  has a sweet voice, vaguely reminiscent of Blossom Dearie if you are old enough to know who that is or maybe Maria Muldaur if you’re a little bit younger.

Sadly she had a rather faded quality - her costume seemed a little contrived and dated - and I don’t think it was intentional. The tunes were, by and large, pleasant enough  and she and her rather elderly backing musicians performed faultlessly, but the whole thing felt slightly tragic to me, an impression not helped by the only half-filled room. Two Bloggerblaggerstars.

Jess Robinson - No filter. This was  not a name I knew but she played to a packed audience in a relatively large venue so evidently a lot of people knew what I had been missing. Jess Robinson seems to be not just a singer, but an impressionist and has, according to Wikipedia,  been on the telly quite a bit, in Dead Ringers amongst other things. (She also nearly made the final of Britain’s Got Talent, seventh series.)

Regrettably I didn’t know many of the people she was impersonating as her cast of characters didn’t include   Vera Lynn or Gracie Fields or Marie Lloyd or Mrs.Patrick Campbell. My companion on the night described it as a bit ‘low rent’ which I thought was a tad harsh, but I knew what she meant. Two and a half Bloggerblaggerstars.

Johnny Woo’s Brexit Cabaret. Not a terribly clever musical revue with nothing very original to say about you know what. I didn’t realise Johnny Woo was a drag artist and I probably wouldn’t have gone if I had.  (More fool me for not perusing the blurb closely enough.)

I have never understood the point of drag - never got panto dames or Danny LaRue - although I suppose I do  remember liking the film of La Cage Aux Folles. And in the modern world, where, happily,  everyone in enlightened countries has the opportunity  (theoretically anyway) to be what they want to be - drag seems to me to be somehow redundant. Slick but shallow is about the best I can say of this effort. Two Bloggerblaggerstars.

Frau Welt. Another drag show, though this time, I had a better excuse as it was the only show on in the place where I  was, at the time I was there, and I was determined to see something, anything. This one was full-on screaming camp and I found the first ten minutes  spectacularly unamusing. One word kept coming to mind: WHY? Then I left. Zero  Bloggerblaggerstars.

Five stand ups.

All the stand-ups I saw this year, apart from the polished old stager, Fred MacAulay - whom I caught in the second half of The Best of Scottish Comedy, which a friend smuggled me into after I had fled the horrendous Frau Welt - were just a little disappointing. None were remotely bad, but none got me guffawing uncontrollably.

They were all watchable and, every so often, amusing and applaudable but, apart  from Maisie Adams, none seemed to me to have any stardust sprinkled on them. She has a routine in  which she discusses  her own epilepsy, and at  24 - she told us that - is clearly a natural performer. But she wound  up by telling us how she had overcome her disability, and being the ancient curmudgeon that I am, I found that bit a touch self-congratulatory.

AAA (Batteries Not Included) with ChrisTurner

Gràinne Maguire

Jan Lafferty:  Wheesht!

All two point six seven three ( why not?) Bloggerblaggerstars.

Maisie Adams Three and a tad Bloggerblaggerstars.

The  Best of Scottish comedy: Fred MacAulay. Four Bloggerblaggerstars.

Three other comic turns (I think you would classify them as ‘absurdist’)

Siblings. This two girl comedy duo is made up of  the  Bye sisters, who, as the ultracognoscenti know, are the real life daughters of Ruby Wax. (And Ed Bye - poor bloke, never gets a mention.) I saw them last year and thought they were hilarious, but,  as I remember it, their routine was slightly more conventional, in that there was a logical thread that you could just about follow.

This year it seemed to have a larger element of out and out bonkersness which didn’t really work for a couple of the people I had insisted accompany me. “You will LOVE them” I had said, but it was quickly evident they were just baffled. I would say (the) Siblings probably weren’t  quite as funny as last year but I really can’t be sure because all I could  think about were the fingers of blame that would be jabbed at me afterwards.“You said we’d love them.Love WHAT?” 

Three Bloggerblaggerstars. (My friends are superannuated old gits, so what would they know.)

The Kagools. Another female duo, Aussies Claire Ford and Nicky Wilkinson, who have a completely word-free act that is simply ingenious. They interact with a film of themselves  so that they are live on stage one moment and the next vanishing behind the screen to reappear in the film. It is clearly rehearsed to the millisecond because the timing is absolutely perfect - a moving arm  is  half live and half on film at one point, seemingly without a join.

The really impressive thing though is that,  despite the precision, it all seems completely spontaneous. The technique never gets in the way of the comedy and The Kagools are simultaneously  wonderfully silly and completely charming. An absolute delight, they are the other half of my joint pick of the week. Five Bloggerblaggerstars Plus.

Claire Sullivan, I wish I owned a hotel for dogs. Another Aussie, Claire takes absurdist comedy to new heights - or to new records of excess in whichever dimension absurdism exists. Think Vic and Bob on acid. And then some. Quite honestly, I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on at any time, but she has a winning way which can’t but help force a smile. I did like her but I really don’t know why. Two and a half Bloggerblaggerstars.

One acrobaticky sort of show.

360 All Stars.  Five blokes in baseball caps worn at various angles doing tricks on BMX’s and with basketballs and  breakdancing mentally and doing somersaults and all that sort of thing. Probably great for the ten and unders and not too bad for the rest of us. But I wouldn’t be falling over myself to go again. Seen better Circusy things at the Fringe.Two and a half Bloggerblaggerstars.

Two ‘well known names’ shows.

Maureen Lipman. As those with knowledge of my murky advertising past  will know, Maureen and I go a long way back, so in aiming for proper objectivity, I might have to have be  more critical than I normally would be. In which case, she was even better than I thought, and that was very, very good indeed.

Her show was a splendid mixture, of comedy monologues, jolly good jokes and some excellent music supplied by Jackie Dankworth (Cleo and Johnny’s daughter I assume),  a fine pianist and, extraordinarily, on guitar, Harry Shearer, legendary Simpsons’ voice and co-writer and co-star of Spinal Tap.

At 72 - don’t think I’m giving away secrets there -  and now in Coronation Street, Maureen has, despite achieving national treasure status,  most definitely not run out of creative steam.  Sadly you can’t get tickets for this show no matter who you kill, because her run has  finished. Five Bloggerblaggerstars.

Nina Conti. *And now, at last, to the explanation of  ‘hashtag strap-on’. Nina Conti’s show began with another pre-performance announcement, this time to tell us that there was a Tourettes sufferer in the audience and to ask for our understanding. She turned out to be sitting a few rows behind my  seat and began to randomly pepper the show with lots of very audible ‘biscuits’ and suchlike. I can’t say this wasn’t slightly off-putting while at the same time provoking an occasionally guilty giggle, and it would have been a fearsome challenge for most performers.

Fortunately much of Nina Conti’s incredibly clever ventriloquist’s act -  I was in the front row and never saw her lips move once -  is ad-libbed and she somehow contrived  to incorporate one or two of the Tourettisms into the show, notably ‘tortoises’. (Really can’t explain but it was both utterly surreal and bloody funny.) The highpoint came when Nina, who uses volunteers from the audience as her dummies by fitting  pigs’ masks on their faces, and operating the lips with a hand control, was fiddling about with one of the velcro ties that holds each mask in place. ‘Hashtag Strap-On’ shouted out the Tourettes lady and  almost literally stopped the show. Five Bloggerblaggerstars.

One participation game-show (no audience)

Werewolves. A parlour game with twenty participants paying a tenner each, played at midnight every night,  masterminded by an Australian (they’re everywhere in Edinburgh) called Nick who sports a long beard, a topper and full Edwardian costume including an ankle length fur coat that must be a fraction too warm even in a Scottish summer.

The rules are a bit too complex to explain but think of it as a sort of  super de luxe, infinitely wittier version of the game where you wink at people to kill them. I warn you. It is addictive. Having made my debut last year, I played three times last week- meaning I was still up at two on three mornings! - and loved it. (Also a winner - twice! Not that I’m one to brag.) Totally recommended. 

Twenty Five Bloggerblaggerstars at least.

[thetruthwillworkout]

The Real Real Journey

   Sunday, July 22, 2018…today is the day that I am going to try to start my real journey in getting back into shape and losing weight. It is 9 pm and I have eaten a 3-piece chicken combo Popeyes meal (at 3 pm), and that is basically the only thing I am eating today since it was so greasy I just want to drink water and wash it all away. I am also in the midst of watching a documentary on Netflix called “From Fat to Finish Line” which has inspired me to write this blog post, as it is in some way keeping me accountable for what I have done during the day. The documentary focuses on 12 individuals who have collectively lost 1200 lbs together and celebrating their weight loss with a marathon. Today, I can successfully tell you I have still not done my calculus or physics homework, and have done a 20-minute Blogilates workout which I took several breaks in between since I am the heaviest I have ever been in my life, which is the whooping weight of about 190 lbs.

   I can honestly say this wasn’t too big of a surprise, I can see it in my face, my stomach, my arms. My fat was just everywhere and it has very heavily affected my perception of myself. I don’t look the way that other 18-year-olds look, especially since in university at every club and party, girls are trying to go out practically naked…but honestly I think they look great! I’m never jealous of other girls with great bods, I congratulate them! I mean, it must not have been easy to get that six-pack and a booty that just won’t stop! I just imagine the hard work they must have done. When I see girls like this, I just evaluate my own decisions, was it smart to order a pizza and eat it by myself? No, I don’t think so. I can go on and on about poor decisions in my life, but nobody got time for that. But I wasn’t always like this, with my knowledge of fitness and health I don’t know how I let myself come to this point in my life.

   Since about 2013-14, I have been watching this Youtube channel called “Barbell Brigade” where it portrays an L.A. powerlifting gym. I got to watching these videos due to the gym owners Bart and Geo, who have separate Youtube channels called “Just Kidding News”, “Just Kidding Party”, and a couple of other funny stuff. I started watching this powerlifting channel since I loved their other channels so much, I just wanted to help them become successful by visiting all their channels. I began watching these powerlifting videos because I thought it was just SO cool to watch people lift heavy weights and it was just completely badass. This made me interested in learning more about the ever-growing sport so I got to watching their videos answering viewers questions about all things fitness related, such as “Do Supplements Work” or “Lifting Advice for Beginners”. I binge watched all these videos and tried to just absorb all this knowledge and learn how to lift.

   I was about 13 when I was overweight in the eyes of my parents. I believe I was 5’3 and 120 lbs. Looking back at pictures and videos I do not look fat at all but I do just have a bigger frame than other girls, as my hips were very ‘womanly’. This was due to the fact that I went through puberty at the age of 10!! All the sudden I had B cups by the age of 12 while girls in my class have not even tried on a training bra yet. I was so self-conscious back then, now I wish I was 120 lbs. Anyways, at the age of 12 I went through a lot of changes, my parents spent over $1000 on acne treatment (oh yeah, and I also have such bad acne doctors would get shocked by it…yeah it was that bad) and I also joined the gym! Since you had to be 14 to register my dad used my older sister’s name and everything to get me in…I looked 16 at 12 so I think it’s fine, not illegal or anything…right? Lol, so at this time, I just used the machines at the gym and I went practically every other day with my dad, and I started to lose weight! Then winter came, and I just didn’t have the energy to go out, or I was tired from school. I was just making these excuses to not go to the gym because I thought I was done with my journey. I looked and felt great so that meant I could stop going which is what I think was going through my head. Unfortunately, this was not the case and I got into a huge argument with my parents.

   Being Korean girl growing up in a predominantly white neighbourhood can be a challenge for a first-generation immigrant. I believed that guys only wanted girls with blonde hair and blue eyes, and no one would like my small eyes and big nose. Also, being a first-generation immigrant, my parents knew no one in Canada and started from nothing basically. Money was always tight and my mom always made a big deal of it. So, this relates to my journey because I stopped going to the gym, which did not go over well with my parents. Gym memberships are not cheap by any means, and by me not going were stressing them out, with my mom shoving the membership bills in my face and yelling at me. Being 12 and going through puberty, this was not a good time for a girl to hear she was too fat when I already knew that I was convinced that no one would like me if I was too fat, and Asian and I was going to end up alone with 20 cats (12-year-olds are sooo dramatic, am I right? Or am I right…?). This sent me into a depression which my parents noticed, and in my culture, you show your love with food. So, my mom is trying to apologize by buying me McDonald’s and just whatever is unhealthy. Of course, I ate all of it and eventually forgave her. With the weight I am at now, you have probably guessed I am the child that has fought with my parents the most and time and time again they fill me up with food to make up for it. But, I am in no way in shape or form, blaming my parents for my weight…kinda. This is majority my fault, but honestly, I didn’t know any better for myself and I was just filled up with hormones. It wasn’t until I was 15 when I started to make a change.

   At the age of 15, I joined the gym again with my parents, and I also started going on runs everyday! Yayy! I think it was this age where I was the most fit I had ever been. My friends were noticing my weight loss (starting at 140 lbs to about 130 lbs), I was becoming quicker on my feet in my volleyball games which my coach noticed. I was constantly working out and eating healthy for about 3-4 months…but then came my mother. I was doing so well in reaching my goal of weighing 120 lbs, but going out to eat with my family was never fun. My mother would try to get me to eat chicken wings or pasta but I refused…until one day I didn’t. This just broke a wall in me, I began to eat more, and my runs were less frequent. My excuse for not running was it was starting to snow, and I didn’t have clothes to workout in the snow and I had no money to buy $100 sweaters for running at the Nike store. I quit the gym again, much to the disappointment of my parents, and I started to lose control of my self and my body once more. I love my mother, but she can make or break my mood and motivation at the snap of her fingers. She is always someone I look up to, and when I was younger, I thought my parents knew everything and everything they said was 100% true and accurate (I found out that this was false a couple of years later). But my father on the other hand has always been there for me, I tell him almost all my problems and he’s the one that helps me rationalize and get through them. He was always at my volleyball games and just there for me in general.

   Back to weight loss! I gained a shit ton of weight back, but luckily, I took a course in grade 11 called Weight Training. This class allowed me to properly learn how to use most equipment at the gym, as well as learn how to properly squat (but using the smith machine) and using free weights. I already had previous knowledge on most of it since I’ve been on and off going to the gym since the age of 12, but I did learn which workouts target which muscles and how to safely train in the gym. Loved the class, and in that class, I met one of my close friends today, which is a nice plus 😊. I liked this class so much, I took it again in grade 12. In my grade 12 year I joined the gym, once again. It was never consistent, I tried to diet but it never seemed to stick, I wanted to go running but all of the sudden I was embarrassed and unfamiliar with it since I haven’t done it in 2 years. I was eating basically whatever I wanted and would go to the gym 2 or 3 times a week, never taking training too seriously. On the plus side, I finally got the courage to learn how to squat and deadlift with the squat racks at the gym, which my father did not think it was a good idea. My father is always concerned my health, but I believe he doesn’t know about health as much as he thinks he does, or he thinks he knows better than me. He might know better than me, but he will not take my passion away from weights and learning from professional athletes online. At this point in my life, I became more knowledgeable in powerlifting, crossfit, health, different diets, but was not really practicing any of it due to the restriction I felt I had living my parents. I was able to squat 50 lbs (with a 45 lb bar) and deadlift about the same weight, but was not eating the way I wanted to.

   Then things changed when I went away for university. I learned that I found it was much more peaceful living away from my family, but this meant I had freedom in food choices which I didn’t have with my parents. Contrary to my mother trying to fatten my up, she’s the one that is constantly telling me that I shouldn’t wear blue jeans since they make me look too big and I should just stick with black clothing since it makes people look slimmer, or I shouldn’t spend money on clothes since she knows I’m not going to have the confidence to wear it. Just stuff like this to make a girl feel like shit. What I learned is that my mother is just projecting her own insecurities onto me, which I can look past, up to a certain point though. Next thing you know I’m 190 lbs, on my way to 200 which I am horrified to be. I’m about to enter my 20s, I can’t enjoy my 20s being fat! I need to dress slutty and make bad decisions in this period of my life!! I am 90% joking about this 😉. But at 18-years-old, I am going to find a personal trainer and try to get myself back on track. Tomorrow, I am going to try and wake up early and go for a jog. I am already intermittent fasting which I believe is great! I don’t have to worry about making 3 meals a day and can mostly focus on just eating fruits and vegetables as snacks during the school day in the period of 8 hours.

   I am going to try and update this blog post daily to what I’ve done in the day.

[bestmovies0]

‘Hunger Games’ gave today’s teens the best blueprint for defeating the NRA

Peeta and Katniss: Playing the media game in’ Hunger Game: Catching Fire ‘ figcaption>

Image: lionsgate

Inside the Capitol, the political elite have become immune to the regular destroys splashed across their screens. They’ve rationalized it as the price they have to pay for their way of life. But a handful of teenage survivors of the massacre are starting to speak out, use their status as heroes to start questioning the whole system on live TV.

The teens are enunciate, telegenic, highly media savvy, and highly dangerous to the president’s party. They’re the best chance for profound political change that anyone has seen in years, and they end up provoking revolution.

SEE ALSO: The standout instants that built CNN’s gun control town hall feel like a game-changer

That, of course, is the basic plot of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, in which the eponymous plays pit teen “tributes” against one another in murderous trials by combat. It’s likewise a pretty good description of what happened this week in American politics as the teen-led #NeverAgain movement continues growing into the most powerful army for change since #MeToo.

For days we’ve been amazed as the survivors of the Parkland massacre have repeatedly spoken truth to power — specifically, the moneyed power of the National Rifle Association and its bought-and-paid-for politicians. But should we be so surprised? This is exactly the response we should expect from a generation brought up on dystopian YA novels in which downtrodden teens rise up.

They wear their nerves on their sleeves, and we cannot assistance but love them for it.

Not that Emma Gonzalez and her countrymen are immediately inspired by Hunger Games protagonist Katniss Everdeen. But there are distinct parallels. Like Katniss, these teens have just the right combination of righteous fury and unbelievable calm under pressure. They are strong enough to be visibly vulnerable. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and we cannot aid but love them for it.

Thrust into situations not of their choosing, their authenticity stands out in a ocean of political artifice. When their friends die in a preventable misfortune, they call BS. And they have the cunning to know how to stretch out their moment into a movement, planning national marchings and strikes that ensure we’ll be talking about this at least two months from now.

As author Patrick Tomlinson noted on Twitter, it really shouldn’t astonish us if teens are following the YA dystopia playbook. Especially not given the lane the generation in power has played the responsibilities of the the bad guys.

Really? You followed the damned script to a T. You pumped up millions of kids, for two decades, to believe they and their friends could make a difference. Then you thrust them all into a dystopian nightmare of violence and persecution.

And NOW you’re shocked they’re all Katniss?

— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@ stealthygeek) February 21, 2018

The Lesson of the Mockingjay

Suzanne Collins was initially inspired to write Hunger Games in 2003 by an unsettling juxtaposition on her Tv. She was channel-surfing, flipping between a reality display and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It wasn’t too much of a stretching to imagine a future society that ritualized war, turning the killing of adolescents( who are, after all, the majority of members of combatants in most modern conflicts) into must-see TV.

That setup soon became a cliche, the premise that launched hundreds of thousands of post-apocalyptic dystopias. But appear more closely at the original, because what really interested Collins was combat by media: how the teenage participants in the ritual oversee become all that Tv attention to their advantage.

Re-reading the book trilogy today — as opposed to rewatching the movie quadrilogy, which focused a little much on the action and bloodshed — “thats what” comes across. Katniss and her fellow tributes are hyper-aware at all days of the cameras, of the viewing public, of the scale of the game and the specific characteristics of the audience.

They’re in the fight of “peoples lives”. They’d better damn well be trained and ready.

The tributes adapt to the reality of reality TV culture. They both strive and receive media coaching from any person who is cares to advise them. And here is the perfect rejoinder to any conspiracy theorists who think they have a “gotcha” in the idea that the Parkland survivors were coached for their TV interviews: Why shouldn’t they be? They’re in the fight of their lives. They’d better damn well be trained and ready.

Katniss and the ever-scheming President Snow.

Image: lionsgate

The battle for the future of Panem is a game of chess in which everyone is treating Katniss as a pawn — including, crucially, Katniss herself. When both the president and the cynical leaders of the resistance treat her as a strategic media asset to be either built up or torn down, why wouldn’t she take command of the narrative herself?

The lesson of the Mockingjay is this: if you’re going to be the story anyway, be the tale on your own terms. Attain it count for something good.

SEE ALSO: Powerful New York Times ad calls out lawmakers funded by the NRA

The Parkland teens are use their instant in a way most activists is simply dream of. Less than a week into their political tenure and they’re participate in the NRA on in the spotlight of the Tv arena, and actually constructing it appear weak by comparison.

They’re strolling right up to Marco Rubio, who has taken the most NRA dollars of any senator, and asking politely that he stop — to a standing ovation. Live on CNN Wednesday night, like a poor parody of Hunger Games Tv host Caesar Flickerman, Rubio could have been focus on his own media power: “People buy into my agenda! “

In American politics, this is how you win: via memorable sight in which you look like the strong, savvy, and reasonable one.

The NRA actually is weaker than most people belief. Many gun owneds already know it’s a shell of its former ego, a front for producers that sends out membership cards to anyone it can get in its database whether they wanted to join or not, artificially inflating its numbers to 5 million.

But that fact alone doesn’t effect any change. What you need is someone with a measure of impunity to step forward and say loudly what needs to be said: The emperor wears no clothes. The courtiers all knew it, but it took small children to say it. And for the first time in a decade of legislative success, the NRA abruptly appears to be on the back foot.

NRA chief Wayne LaPierre is now incoherently calling about socialism. This is a new level of insanity for the NRA.

And you know what’s inducing it? They’re intimidated. Because they know the kids at Stoneman Douglas are more powerful than their money.

— Caroline O. (@ RVAwonk) February 22, 2018

Snow and Trump, separated at birth ? strong>

Meanwhile, the person who is fills the Oval Office is trying to have it both ways — but largely attaining everything there is about him. This week ascertained Trump mouthing vague support for a minor piece of gun regulation, likewise making outrageous remarks about arming teachers and then, in another desperate bid for a news cycle, claiming he was misunderstand. Somehow, again, the president’s deflections helped him muddle through; the person who is took $30 million from the NRA has not receives an one-tenth of the ire that was directed at Rubio.

Our non-fictional chairperson doesn’t have one iota of Hunger Games President Snow’s cunning. Snow was supremely silver-tongued and faked empathy well, whereas Trump has to be coached to say things like “I hear you.” But they have at least this in common: they know it’s good optics to be seen on Tv talking to the teens, whether in a White House “listening” event or a Panem-wide victory tour.

One sign of the present strength of the #NeverAgain teens: They haven’t yet been the targets of Trump tweets. He’s made a half-hearted stab at suggesting the CNN event was rigged because one teen who drew out of the event claims he was fed a question( which CNN denies ), but “hes having” bided away from assaulting the children themselves.

This was more surprising than you might gues. The man with the world’s worst impulse control, who has ranted at Gold Star households and judges, who casually fired his FBI chief, insulted America’s allies and retweeted abominable lie-filled racist videos, still won’t dare touch these kids directly.

“What is to prevent, say, an uprising? ”

Possibly because, when it comes to controlling the media narration, game recognizes game. More likely, he only doesn’t know how far this thing could go, or whether he and his NRA buddies could have a youth revolution on his hands.

“If a girl from District 12 of all places can elude the Capitol and walk away unharmed, what is to stop them from doing the same? ” President Snow asks in Catching Fire . em> “What is to prevent, say, an uprising? ”

An excellent question, Mr. President. To which we might add: if a bunch of children from Parkland, Florida can defy the organization that basically bought the U.S. Capitol, and walk away with sky-high permission ratings, what is to prevent an uprising of teens from all across the U.S. from doing the same?

Read more: https :// mashable.com/ 2018/02/ 23/ parkland-hunger-games-dystopia /~ ATAGEND

from https://bestmovies.fun/2018/02/25/hunger-games-gave-todays-teens-the-best-blueprint-for-defeating-the-nra/

[xtalmay]

I once was married with children

Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away, there lived a simple girl with a lonely heart. Ha ha, jk. But seriously... I was once a pretty boring person. I had dreams and hopes, like everyone else. I wanted a man and a house and kids. I also wanted a career and a degree. But I wanted to be a stay at home mom also...... I wanted a lot. Lol. So anyway, when I was 18, I worked for Walmart. A good one too. It was busy, customer service oriented, and clean. It was the first supercenter in our area. Pretty exciting. I loved it. I was able to afford to move out of my parents house and into a rental with a friend from work. After a couple months, I think about three, I met a guy from work. At this point, I had not had a serious boyfriend... Not really. But anyway, this guy worked at Walmart as a unloader. I worked in layaway. So we got to see each other pretty often. I was super shy. Like super shy. I also hated and still do hate, PDA. Anyway, this guy's name is Jared. We started seeing eachother in August of 2003. I moved in with him in October of 2003. He also asked me to marry him in November of 2003. I was in love. He loved me. I didn't really know what it was about him that I loved,but I did. In March of 2004, we moved to NM from WA. Furthest I had ever been from my dad or any of my family before. It was rough. I was homesick a lot. But my parents flew me up to visit often. It was pretty cool. He never went with me. When I was 22, so 2006, I missed my family. I wanted to move back home. We didn't have anything going for us in NM. I was starting to hate the desert. We were broke. I couldn't find a job I loved. I missed the rainforest. He didn't understand. So I talked to my dad, and like a thief in the night I ran away from Jared back to my dad's house. Probably could have done that better...... But I didn't know how to leave. It was a rough time. But I missed him so much. All I wanted to do was go back. To him. Maybe I was infatuated. I don't know. But I went back. After only two weeks. When I turned 23,i wanted to try for a baby. I thought (stupidly) that he would change. Maybe care for someone other than himself for once. Maybe he would be able to put his child before himself. Boy, was I wrong. The summer of 2008, I gave birth to our daughter, Jade. 4 days later we got married. I really wasn't happy except with jade. She was my world. I was growing more and more irritated with the selfishness of him. He drove me nuts. I loved him, but I wasn't in love with him anymore. Little things. Like overdrawing our account every paycheck. He had to have games for his Xbox the second they came out. He couldn't wait till payday. I tried to get our finances in order. I couldn't. He always thought he knew better. We played a game I called the 'payday loan shuffle' would borrow from one to pay another. It was terrible. I hated it. I was constantly stressed out. Cried a lot because I felt helpless. When jade was 2 months old, I went to WA to visit and introduce jade to my family. While there, I had to have surgery to remove my gallbladder. What was supposed to be 2 weeks, turned into 5 weeks. While in the hospital, he would call me and constantly talk about how he missed me. And what was he going to do without me. And when was I coming home.... Not once did he really ask how I felt. Or if I was doing alright. Never cared about jade or myself. Just himself. It was all about him. I loved being up there, but in a way I missed Jared. Just enough. So when I got home, I asked him if we could move back. I missed my dad and my family. I wanted my kid to go to a good school. And I wanted to get out of the desert. He promised in 5 years we could go back. So I held onto that hope. And a couple years later my son was born. I didn't get to visit WA much anymore because plane tickets are expensive and I would have to travel with two kids now. I didn't go up for a couple years. I still missed my family. A lot. I tried being a more attentive partner. I was restless so I would ask to go on walks in the neighborhood. He would refuse. I asked to go out in the desert behind out house and lay in the back of the truck and stargaze. He would say yeah in a little while...... We never went. I was getting more and more depressed. When my kids were 4 and 2,i remember making Pancakes, and one of the drippings looked like a heart. And I remember thinking to myself that jade would like it..... But I just stared at it. No happiness was left. I was sad, depressed and wanted to cry. I decided that things needed to change. I'm not and never have been suicidal. Just sad. And depressed. So in January of 2013, I decided to get my own bank account and start a savings account. I had to do something to have a little control over our finances. Even if I was the only one paying bills, at least I knew they would be paid. Jared hated it. He hated our money being separate. He couldn't use my money anymore. His account was still overdrawn every payday. Mine never was. It was crazy how I had felt like it was my fault we never had money..... I guess it wasn't me after all. I was starting to feel a little better. I didn't have any loans in my name. I didn't have an overdrawn account. I was actually putting small amounts into savings. I was also able to convince him to have our tax return deposited into my account, since I wasn't overdrawn. Not sure how, but it worked. I was able to help him pay off loans. We got our bills paid up. It was a nice feeling. But then he was constantly asking me for money. Constantly. It was annoying. But I didn't give him any. I would pay bills. I was tapped out but the lights didn't get turned off. We had running water. The house was current. It was worth it. So I got a gym membership to try and get my life going again. A couple of friends from work had joined the same gym as me. Waylon and Kelly. They were cool guys and I enjoyed hanging out with them. So I mentioned to waylon one day at work that I was going to that gym and he said he and Kelly were too, and that I should join them. I agreed. It would be safer to go at night with two guys than by myself. Over the course of 3 months, I started getting back into shape, after ten years of being over weight. Ten years. Jeez. I finally was down 2 pants sizes. And almost 30lbs. It was awesome. I also became close friends with Waylon. We played online together a couple times. He fixed my computer for me. Just a really cool friend. After the gym we would go grab food, the three of us. And then hang out in the parking lot and chat for a while. It was fun. I felt like I had a life. Small as it was. But I looked forward to the time we spent together. I have always got along better with guys than girls. No drama. Lol. I was starting to be more independent and I stopped reporting to Jared. In April 2013, I decided to tell Jared I wanted a divorce. I had talked to my dad. I had talked to a couple really close friends. I was so incredibly unhappy. Once I made the decision to divorce him, I felt so much better. I felt like the pieces were falling into place. In the end of April, I told him. Officially. I didn't have anywhere to go. I couldn't leave my children. They weren't in school yet, so I didn't have to deal with that. But I also didn't make enough money to move out. So I moved into my son, Rileys room. He was a baby still so I had the room mostly to myself. One day in May, I was sitting on the couch and Jared says he wants to take the kids to the park. He had never done that with me before, I always took them myself. He never went for a walk with me. He never went stargazing with me. Never anything, unless it was beneficial to him in some way. Ever. He asked if I wanted to join him, and I looked right at him with a straight face, and told him no. I didn't want to go. He got super sulky. He then loaded up the kids and left. The second he drove away, I ran to my room, packed my gym bag with gym clothes and a couple outfits, and my travel bag of toiletries. I then jumped in the car and took off. I called my dad. I text a friend. I called Waylon. I didn't have anywhere to go. I just had to get out. I ended up at waylon's house. It was the last person I called and he answered. I felt liberated. I knew from that moment on, my life would be different. I knew there were better men in the world. I didn't know if Waylon and I would even work out. But I knew we were friends and we both needed a place to live. So we went and got an apartment together. We got a three bedroom apartment. We figured if he and I didn't work out, I could move in with my daughter in her room, and it wouldn't be a big deal. He agreed. We are both pretty level headed people. So that summer, I filed for divorce. I packed me and my kids lives up and moved into the apartment with Waylon. My kids were in Colorado visiting family and Jared had gone up there too. He was trying to figure things out. He kept thinking there was hope. Boy was he wrong. He came back with the kids. I went to the house and got them. And since then they have not lived with with their dad. After 3 months he got his new girlfriend pregnant. And then married her. They fought. A lot. Broke up. A lot. Got back together. A lot. It was sad. Unstable. Weird. But whatever. His life. He started off taking the kids every week. Then he slowly started backing off. Little by little. Over time it went from every week to every other week to now he takes them for about four hours every other week. That's it. For someone who loves his kids. And misses them. And wants to see them..... He sure never tries to see them... After his third child was born, he took three months off of work. During the summer. He never asked for the kids. He never even took them for extra time. He never even asked. Then another time he took a week off and never asked for them. Then he asked me if he could pick them up and take them for a whole week to the lake. I told him yes. And two days before he was supposed to take them, he canceled. I don't know the circumstances. I don't know anything. But he didn't take them and they were devastated. He stopped asking for time. He didn't take them for a month at a time. It was getting crazy. But the kids love Waylon. He is their dad. He's been here. He's raised them. He takes them to the park. He buys them things. He loves them as if they were his. He's a great man. What's frustrating is that jade is now 8.5 and she is a smart kid. She came home from visiting him this week in tears. She misses him and wants to stay the night at his house. I told him no because it's a school night. As mom, it's my duty to keep them in school. I have to. It's the law. So I sat her down and tried to ask her questions. Me: jade I need you to understand something for me. Jade: what? Me: it isn't me keeping you from your dad. You know that right? Jade:... Me: did he take you last week? Jade: no Me: did he take you the week before? Jade: no. Me: see? It isn't me keeping you from him. He doesn't come and get you. He doesn't ask to visit. He doesn't do anything. So, this isn't me. I'm not telling him no. He has had all sorts of time to spend with you. He has weekends. He has holidays. He has time. He doesn't take it. Do you understand? Jade: Yeah. Then she continued to cry dramatically. I don't think she understood. It's frustrating. I know she will understand one day. But I worry that she will be too much like me and believe his hogwash about hope. He will always make her feel inadequate. Like she doesn't try hard enough. And it will always be her fault. And that worries me tremendously. So I have to constantly try and comfort her. He pretty much ignores Riley, so that won't be so hard. But Riley only likes him sometimes. Mental abuse is still abuse. I'm confident in my decision to leave him and the proof is in the way our lives have gone since. I'm doing great, Waylon and I are fabulous. We have great jobs. We have a stable home environment. We are not crazy broke, but we are not crazy rich either. Jared has struggled. He has been in and out of relationships. He's filed bankruptcy. He owes the irs for back taxes. He's broke. He has a new girlfriend that seems pretty cool. But his life is still weird. I'm so glad I do not have to live like that anymore. I'm glad I ran away from home that day in May.