#i still write essays even years after I graduate college

[jasontoddiefor]

Yeah sure we’ve all binged a long fic, but have you ever read a WIP and followed someone’s life?

Tidbits of information - (“I graduated today!”) - and small joys (“It’s my birthday!”) and you get to be there to say “This chapter made me cry, happy birthday, thank you for gifting us this”.

I remember reading this fic of someone at the end of high school, older than me then. They seemed infinitely wise, spoke of their future career and getting into the college they wanted. I remember them posting on days they felt like nothing could bring them down - and on days the whole world did and it’s the aftermath of a hospital visit. Cancer, I think it was, their father. I got to the end of the story, I know their father was fine, but also they got to finish their WIP. I graduated three years later than them, still dutifully wrote thank you notes in every comment. I wonder if they remember me, or just the collective of people reading the story as it updates.

Four years ago I was into my first year of university, my first year of figuring out being out in public spaces. I made excuses as to why my name didn’t match my paperwork and read a fic on the train, the same five chapters over and over again for the next years as I thought the story abandoned. It updated this week after such a long hiatus, I left another thank you comment.

There’s an author I love, they update their stories like a clockwork. When they don’t, I check their blog, just to see if their doing alright, not because I feel like they owe me, just to ensure whether I better get out my laptop to write that really detailed university level essay chapter analysis to get them smiling when their day sucked.

And then, once, when I was 17, I read a fic that hadn’t updated in over a decade. I wasn’t even in primary school when it started posting. On the last chapter, I left a comment that, in retrospect, was horribly rambly and most likely full of grammar mistakes. The author replied and though I couldn’t see their face, I thought of them crying. They were married now, had children, and hadn’t thought about this fic in years. They went through their files again, found another half written chapter and an outline. I got two new chapters to read that year.

And then, recently, someone told me they got back into writing original fiction because of my comments. I get to read nearly weekly chapters.

I love binge reading a finished fic, but nothing is ever going to top the feeling of anticipation of waiting for a chapter, the pure joy when someone tells you I was done with this, but you made me think of it again, so this is for you.

Anyway, I think we should romanticize reading WIPs more, growing up alongside the authors writing the stories we love.

[judysxnd]

Hello! Can you write one where Pedro surprises his girlfriend at her masters graduation? (She studied psychology if that has any importance :)) It doesn’t have to be a long one! 🖤

I actually have no idea how the ceremony for the graduation in America is like, I’m French and we don’t get anything when we graduate in college.. I just know how it goes at the end of high school, so my bad if it sounds similar even if in reality it probably isn’t. I actually remembered one that I saw in the show “my wife and kids” (that I love sooooo much), but it’s pretty old so idk if it’s still the same!

Also I’m trying not to use the same pics on my fics, but it’s hard to remember the one I used, and I’m running low 😂

——————————————————————————

Today is a big day. It is your graduation. You’ve been pretty nervous but also extremely excited. There were a few ambiguous feelings forming in your stomach, but all for a good reason. After years of hard work, studying on a passion subject that you always loved and will always be loving: psychology. It’s always been a big part of you, you’ve always been interested in psychology and a lot of people told you that too.

At first you had been very hesitant to go back to college. You had tried a few years back, but it didn’t really work. Also it wasn’t the same degree. You feared it would do the same thing this time. Luckily, you close friends, family and your boyfriend were supporting you. You had a lot of phone calls with your mom, lots of texts with your dad, and it was Pedro who helped you go on campus, to meetings and stuff before actually making the move to go there.

Pedro has been a huge part of your decision. If he hadn’t been here supporting you, you didn’t think you would go through this alone. It’s a big decision, change in situation to go back to college after working and earning money. A lot is aspects change. But Pedro didn’t care, of course he didn’t. He can support you financially, even if you don’t like it. He insisted, said that he was here for you, either emotionally, or financially. That’s why you were so thankful for him.

He also helped you a lot during your studies and researches. Hell he even could graduate with you, that’s how much he helped you. He loves to learn new things, so he remembered and learned a lot of your stuff. For your exams he helped you study until 2am, he helped you correct and edit your essays, he really supported you in every way possible.

That’s why you’re also pretty nervous for you graduation. Because he can’t be here. Unfortunately your graduation happens the same day he films the first part of his latest Gladiator movie, in an entire different country, so he really couldn’t be here. So you had to go through without him, and you didn’t like it. Your parents are going to be here, but it’s not the same without him.

So here you are, waiting in line, surrounded by the other graduates, looking for you parents in the crowd. You knew they were in the front rows, they wanted “the best sits for the best moment”, that’s what your dad said. When you finally found them, you recognized another person next to them. One less person in front of you, still two and it’s your turn. You look again, as you got a step closer, and as unbelievable as it was, Pedro was next to them, smiling and waving at you. Wide eyes, tears forming, there was a feeling of relief when you realized it was him. You blew a few kisses at him. Still one person.

“Y/n Y/l/n” your heart started to beat very fast, your legs were moving by themselves. Next thing you knew, you were on stage, holding your diploma, looking rapidly at the crowd and then at your parents and Pedro with a big smile, before walking on the other side. Your foot barely touch the ground that you ran in Pedro’s arms.

“What are you doing here!!!” You said excitedly, still holding him tight.

“I wanted to surprise you cariño” he said kissing the top of your head. Feeling his touch, smelling him, just little simple things were what you needed. You needed him.

You parted, looking at him with nothing but love.

“I finally did it” you said, showing him the paper you had in your hand. He couldn’t stop smiling either.

“I’m so proud of you princesa, we all knew you could do it” he said, glancing at your parents. You let go of Pedro to hug your parents.

“You worked so hard honey, we are so so proud of you” your mom said, playing with your hair, some tears forming in her eyes.

“Thank you. I couldn’t do it without you guys” you looked at the three persons in front of you.

“All credits to you, we were just supporting you” Pedro added.

“Now we have a free psychologist” your dad joked

“Be careful, it’s not always a good thing” you added, you all laughed.

“How about we go to a nice dinner, so we can celebrate properly?” Pedro asked

“That’s a great idea!” Your mom said.

So you all left, very happily, and had a nice dinner, with a few bottles of champagne. You were surrounded by the people you wanted and you accomplished what you wanted the most. A new chapter is coming for you.

[soundwavefucker69]

honestly I agree with the joke of getting queerbaited by the MCU is like losing chess to a dog. I do. but I'm interested in queerbaiting in the MCU on like. an academic level. like stevebucky happened bc you put a bunch of men in a room that never processed their intensely homoerotic friendship in college with their roommate they randomly stopped talking to five years after graduation and can't figure out why when they think about that guy they feel weird. they got told to queerbait and so they did but bc of their unprocessed bisexuality they actually made an incredibly compelling narrative that ended just the way their cishet life did: Steve walking away from his "college roommate" and getting the wife and the picket fence and a couple of kids, maybe, and disappearing from the narrative forever without ever once considering or mentioning the impact of his friend on his entire fucking existence. bc you know. that's how it's supposed to end.

lesbian queerbaiting was not allowed incidentally bc for queerbaiting to work women have to actually have emotionally compelling arcs that complement each other and women only existed as props in the MCU, with all of its male directors and male writers and male execs and the one random female writer that would pop up on a team of men every five movies or so and try to give the women a little depth before she never appeared in an MCU writing room again.

buuutttt alas the MCU can't do that anymore bc they're running out of male heroes and there's more female fans and everyone's fucking mad at them. enter the female directors and writers who have been excluded from the boys' club for a long time and they're not really pissed about it entirely, it's not like the MCU will be considered anything but cheap television that's criticized for its relentless monopoly and abuse of overworked and underpaid CGI artists bc they're not unionized that was designed to sell market appeal and never once respected movies and television as an actual art form. so it wasn't like they were missing out on joining the boy's club that will eventually collapse anyways bc you literally cannot keep a franchise running for 20 fucking years. people get bored and people that want to get into it look at the backlog to understand what's going on and go nah no thanks.

problem is male execs are still here working with the ladies and telling them what to do. they're not bitter, not yet, but oh holy hell will they be, bc who queerbaits in 2024? are you still relying on that? Just let them kiss!

anyways, the only reason I feel compelled to watch the MCU now is bc i want to see how vicious the fighting will get. I want to see how far these new writers and directors will push the side of queerbaiting intentionally. the accidental stevebucky tragic love story was fine, but now I'm more interested in the psychological warfare with the writers and the old boy execs.

honestly when the MCU starts generously allowing gay love stories I'll probably lose interest bc the gay love stories will be boring and sanitized and scrubbed clean of grime to be acceptable as possible. and it'll collapse in on itself in a fiery cataclysm before they get to the point where they can even allow a little purposeful toxicity and messiness, not the toxicity pointed out by someone who's entire career is rage farming discourse with video essays on YouTube about how this relationship is a bottomless pit of abuse bc someone had a trauma reaction once and got mad at their partner who didn't deserve to get yelled at. they won't even get to the actual fun gay love stories that make sense for the medium, considering being a superhero is actually really fucking traumatizing and traumatized people are sometimes shitty bc of their trauma. but. ya know. whatever.

[muffinbeliever]

Introducing: Luna Mae Winchester

Pairing: Spencer Reid x OFC

Word Count: 1710

Warnings: canon-typical violence, brief mention of child abuse, j*hn winchester

A/N: ok so dont hate me please but last week i was struck by sudden inspiration to make an ofc that was a crossover between supernatural and criminal minds and im rly just running w it now... this is her background/introduction that serve as a basis for the fics i'll write for her

Masterlist

about luna:

☽ sam and dean’s younger sister, born on september 20, 1984

☽ (5 years younger than dean, 3 years younger than spencer, and 1 year younger than sam)

☽ height: 5’6 (she had a short mom in comparison to the brothers lol)

☽ hair: dark brown; eyes: dark brown (giving the girl in the gif but not quite)

☽ physically fit, liked to run as a workout and got into yoga in college 

☽ as smart as, if not a little smarter than, sam, but she doesn’t flaunt it 

☽ people like her for her looks but it’s really her mind that is enticing 

☽ generally has a bubbly personality but she is an introvert so it doesn’t really come out unless she’s close with the person or she is really excited

birth

☽ technically the winchesters’ half-sister (bc timeline) but it’s not obvious at all that they’re not full siblings 

☽ john met her mom on a hunt shortly after mary died → luna’s birth was a secret from john until her mom was murdered when luna was only a month old

☽ her mom left john a voicemail before she died telling him about luna because she felt like she was being stalked

☽ by the time john and the boys got there, she was already dead and left luna behind

☽ her mother’s killer was never found.

childhood

☽ the brothers tried their best to give her a normal life, especially dean when he was left in charge while john was away

☽ dean would steal food to feed himself and his siblings, but he would also steal a stuffed animal or toy for luna so she never felt like she was treated differently/worse than the boys 

☽ sam encouraged her to try hard in school because that’s what he also wanted to do, but dean encouraged her because he knew that he never could really do the whole “school thing”

☽ even if dean told sam about what john did on his hunts, the brothers agreed to keep luna in the dark as long as possible so she could have somewhat of a normal, worry-free life 

☽ john had a tendency to get physical when he was really upset (i.e. dean’s wrists when he was sent to that boy’s home) and wouldn’t give luna any special treatment just because she was a girl 

☽ so dean always took the brunt of john’s anger, especially when it came to her, by shifting the blame onto himself and even lying so that she wouldn’t get in trouble

☽ we all knew john was a terrible dad but he was an even worse girl-dad

☽ she found out about monsters/hunting when she was 14 and it scared her a lot but she would still go on hunts because john said so

☽ excelled in her classes and took a lot of sam’s senior classes her junior year because she’s just smart like that

☽ she was devastated when sam left for stanford, not just because she saw how much it broke dean but also because she felt like she would be pushed into the family business even more 

☽ when sam left for school, luna was a senior and john wanted to pull her out of high school before she could graduate because he was worried she would follow sam’s path 

☽ surprise bitch ! dean vehemently refused to side with john and encouraged luna to apply for college anyways

☽ “if a dumbo like sammy can get in, you can get in anywhere”

☽ definitely asked sam for college advice and he read her essays… she got into caltech 

☽ john didn’t speak to her for two weeks after she found out but dean and sam were so proud of their little sister 

☽ dean drove her out to california and helped her move into her dorm while john was helping out another hunter 

meeting spencer reid

☽ double majored in psychology and philosophy at caltech, which was where she met spencer

☽ fun fact, her degree in philosophy was one of the biggest reasons why Spencer went back to school to get a bachelor’s in philosophy → she inspired him :(

☽ spencer was 21, finishing his bachelor’s in psychology and he ta’d for her human memory class (a real class at caltech lol i did my research)

☽ even though his degree wasn’t complete yet, the professor obviously thought he was smart enough to be the primary ta/reader for the class… he even guest lectured the eidetic memory unit 

☽ a lot of students in the class found him really annoying/hated him because he was a harsh grader 

☽ he gave luna a b- on her first essay but she went to his office hours to discuss her grade and after speaking with her (and lowk getting seduced by her beauty and intelligence) he let her rewrite the paper for a better grade as long as she didn’t tell anyone 

☽ she got an a- 

☽ she invited him to dinner as a thank you but he didn’t think that was appropriate so they got coffee instead 

☽ he complimented her rewritten version and they ended up missing the class because they were so caught up in chatting about her work

☽ turned into a coffee tradition before class; they would meet up but only talked about class material/readings

☽ because the class only met once a week though, they only hung out for about two months before the semester was coming to an end 

☽ she invited him out to dinner again at the end of the semester, and this time he accepted because he liked her company 

☽ they became close friends (he didn’t really have anyone else)

☽ he was lowk appalled when he found out she had a fake id (it’s spencer lol) but really just wanted her to be safe especially when she was drinking

☽ she took him to a party once but he hated it so they left shortly after arriving and got a bottle of wine instead and drank at his place 

☽ her friends thought he was a little weird at first but she had him over a lot for movie nights/hanging out and they saw how well they complimented each other 

dating spencer reid

☽ started dating towards the end of her freshman year after she drunk called him and told him she liked him

☽ they had cutesy dates where they either do work/read together or they’ll go to a bookstore or museum 

☽ she loved listening to him ramble off random facts about things they see out and about

☽ dean was so shocked and flabbergasted when she told him about spencer, he stole a car to drive to california to meet him 

☽ at first dean thought it was a power-trip thing of an older guy/younger girl once he actually met spencer and realized he really wasn’t like other guys™ they got along well

☽ spencer graduated that year and was recruited to the fbi so he had to move to virginia but him and luna spent the summer together before he had to go/she started her next year

☽ they did long distance for two years but it was really difficult towards the end 

☽ they had a mutual break up but they still loved each other

post-college hunting 

☽ dean and sam waited for her to graduate before pulling her back in (1 year after dean told sam john was on a hunting trip)

☽ she always felt a pang in her heart whenever they impersonated fbi because it reminded her of spencer

☽ she considered reaching out to him, especially when they were in/near virginia but then she saw him in a tabloid kissing lila archer in the pool and she was heartbroken because he moved on 

☽ she threw herself into hunting and staying with her brothers 

☽ spencer saw dean on the tv during “Nightshifter” (spn) and had garcia look up his record; he was shocked and confused when he realized that the three of you were on the fbi wanted list 

☽ two weeks later, spencer was abducted in “Revelations” (cm) and had bigger problems to deal with than his criminal ex-girlfriend 

☽ a year later, garcia told him that she died after hendrickson faked everyone’s death in “Jes in Bello” (spn) and he regretted never reaching out  

reuniting with spencer

☽ it happened in “Demonology” (cm)/“Death Takes a Holiday” (spn) while the brothers were looking for reapers 

☽ she took on the case because it seemed to be demons and ended up running into spencer at the hospital when they both tried to interview the same witness 

☽ spencer was shocked to see her (she was supposed to be dead ???)

☽ she tried talking to him but he didn’t want the rest of the team to make the connection of her crimes and put her in danger so he said no (also he was lowk mad)

☽ she bought him coffee and they talked… she gave him the monster talk and they worked it out 

☽ BUT she had to go back to her brothers and he was still in the fbi so they only exchanged numbers and nothing more 

☽ she told her brothers when they got back and at first they were a little mad but then they realized that spencer is actually protecting her (and them) and they leave it be 

☽ sometimes her and spencer texted but it was really rare and mostly just to see which cases were monster-related or psychopath-related so they didn’t have crossover

☽ spencer discovered the supernatural books and read them ALL and i mean ALLLLLL

☽ it allowed him to catch up with their years apart and he realized why she was wanted as a criminal

☽ (he especially liked the chapters that he was in) and since it was written based off her inner monologue, he realized how much she loved (and still loves) him

☽ “The Eyes Have It” (cm) where an unsub seemed to be taking people’s eyes turned out some of the victims were actually due to an angel burning them and spencer and her work together to investigate/hunt, rekindling their relationship 

☽ (they got drunk and hooked up) and they ended up getting back together afterward

☽ it was even harder to date this time because of distance and crimes ofc, but they worked at it every day and finally made it work

☽ at one point i’d like to believe that the bau eventually catches luna’s mom’s killer

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I've been listless for too long, wasting my life by following the path of least resistance, but I've decided to take initiative and go back to school to get a degree that isn't worth less than the cardstock it's printed on.

Math was my passion growing up. It was fun and exciting to me, like solving a puzzle, and I wanted to be an unspecified brand of Scientist™ someday; my mom wanted me to be a mechanical engineer like my grampa. She decided my natural aptitude for math wasn't fast enough for her liking, so she skipped me ahead from algebra straight to AP calculus without geometry or trigonometry. I was completely out of my element, miles behind every other student, so she made me take two year-long homeschool courses in one month to help me catch up before I flunked out. It didn't help, it just made my existing course load even harder. I was burned out and I barely coasted by with a C- and a newfound hatred of math.

I never managed to grok calculus, and promptly forgot everything about it the second I graduated. When I learned that the major my mom wanted me to take in college would require more calculus and physics, I said fuck that and settled for something easy. I bounced around for my first two years, got my AA, and finally chose to pursue English (the greatest mistake of my life) because I had vague ideas of becoming an author, but my university had a shitty English department that didn't teach me anything. All they offered were glorified high school courses, "read a book, write an essay, take a multiple choice test, repeat. Congratulations you're an English major." I never learned grammar or style, I still don't know how to punctuate certain clauses, I completely wasted my final two years taking the most bare bones credits I needed to get a degree with no real goal after graduating. I went to college because it was expected of me, but my plan evaporated in high school because my mom pushed me too hard and even though I passed all my classes I feel like I failed miserably.

I want to go back. I want to retake the high school math I missed in my own time then reapply to my alma mater for another bachelor's program. I want to go into astronomy/astrophysics because all the science classes I took as electives in school were as fun and exciting as I'd hoped they would be, and I remembered that I loved to learn. I want to go back and try again with a real goal this time, to major in astrophysics so I could get a job, a career, doing what I'm good at and enjoy. It's not going to be easy, but I've been taking it easy my entire adult life and I'm trapped in my home town working as a cashier at a side-of-the-highway tourist trap motel at 26. I need to apply myself. I need to live up to the potential I had in high school. I need to go to the moon in this d'cade and do the otha things, not because they are easy, but because they are hahd!

Astronomy and earth/space science were my favorite classes in college, but I never took any beyond the 1000 level, and the suggested semester plan for a BS in astrophysics requires advanced 3000 and 4000 level calc, physics, mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, stats, and differential equations to name a few, so I have my work cut out for me. I need to buy some textbooks this summer and relearn prerequisite math before I can even hope to jump into this field. I'm not gonna enjoy it, it's not gonna be fun and exciting all the way, I'm gonna wanna give up, but I need to prove that I'm capable. I need to push myself to do what I don't want to do. I don't need to be a savant, I just need to pass. Cs get degrees. My little sisters are in college now, and both of them are taking a relaxed schedule, part time credits, only a couple classes per semester, however long it takes. The full astrophysics major requires 120 credits, but only 62 are critical, the other 58 are gen ed, and I already have my BA so I can skip those. 62 credits is 2 years of full time work (year and a half if I take a summer semester, though that's four months of work in half the time, so I'd once again risk burnout), but I could bang it out as a part-timer in 3 or 4 years. Hell, if I went back full time I could take a bunch of fun gen ed classes for a minor, or even a double major, but I'm getting WAY ahead of myself.

Start small.

I need to brush up on

Algebra 1

Geometry

Algebra 2

Trigonometry/Pre-Calc

Calculus

It's too late to apply for fall semester this year, and I wouldn't want to anyway because 5 high school math classes are a lot to get through in 3 months. They don't allow spring applications either, so the earliest I could start is fall 2024, 10 years after I started college in the first place. That gives me over a year to master the maths I missed. That's plenty of time! I'm fairly competent in algebra and geometry, so I'd only need to relearn trig and calc.

This is doable.

It's never too late to start over.

[inspired-aspiring-artist]

Youre so coolio !!!

Uh uh uhm do you,, can i learn about your headcanons for your sillies (the dca) or or even funcacts abotut yururpself !!!/nf

This has been sitting in my ask box for far too long

Thanks for sending me asks! Also you’re coolio too!

I’m still cooking my dca headcanons tbh, I have a fanfic idea bouncing around my skull but idk if anyone would actually want to read it, and I’ve never written fanfic before. If you want to learn more, please send an ask cause I’d love to yap about it :3.

Fun facts about me:

I grew up on Kauai (the Hawaiian island)

I keep my hair pink irl (it’s been pink for 5 years now with only a few weeks going back to nonpink before I get it repinked)

I used to have a pet axolotl named Alexander Jacob Thunderberkin Kippensquire, or Kip for short (I had to rehome him when I left for college)

I had a retinal detachment in my left eye when I was 16 which could have left me blind if I didn’t get emergency surgery on Oahu (I had to fly to a different island) . When I woke up after surgery, my mom asked me how I was and I told her “I’m all right now!” When I was still recovering from surgery I had to keep my left eye covered (for about a year) so I put a winking eyelash embroidery sticker over my left glasses lens and medical tape on the inside. Somehow being monocular made it easier to draw (but not to walk, cause no depth perception!) so I really improved my art in that year. I ended up getting the artist award in my graduating class in high school and I used my experience to write a great college entrance essay so some good did come out of it. To this day my peripheral vision in my left eye is bad and I frequently get waves of floaters which block out my vision in that eye. Also now my left pupil is smaller than the right one so I have to let any doctors know that my eyes are just like that and I don’t have a concussion.

I am a direct descendent to one of the more famous taxidermists (they are named on the Wikipedia taxidermy page), they did a lot of taxidermy for museums and also did sculptures and statuettes of animals. Some of their work is still on display at the Denver museum of natural history, and there are statuettes that are family heirlooms (we have one of a leopard on the hunt)

Thanks again for the ask! I’ll answer them quicker I promise :3

[melodraca]

Hey! I saw in one of your posts, in the tags, that you were an English major. I'm going to college soon, and I was wondering if you had any advice on picking out your major. What do you like about majoring in English, and what exactly do English majors do? Thank you!

First of all, congrats! That's really exciting! I really hope you enjoy your time in college! Second, this is gonna be a bit long, so I apologize in advance o7

I'm honestly not sure how helpful this is, but for the longest time I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I actually enrolled in university as a mature student a good 5-ish years after I graduated high school. I was so tired of school-related stress (and the way that the public school system functioned in general) that I was honestly considering not even going to post-secondary. I bounced between different potential majors, although I couldn't help but feel tired just thinking about them, like I would be going to school out of obligation or societal expectation rather than genuine passion.

When I came back around to the idea years later, I started poking around my local university's website. As I was going through, reading everything over, and clicking through different subjects, I realized that I was actually really feeling excited about school for the first time... pretty much ever. Because I realized that I had the chance to do things at my own pace, with a focus on subjects that I actually liked, rather than what my family expected would get me a traditionally "good job."

I narrowed my major down to a choice between English and creative writing, but I ultimately went with English. As much as I love creative writing, I prefer doing it as a hobby. It's the same with art for me: getting too serious with it made me feel less passionate and creative (to be fair though, I did take two first year creative writing classes as electives and I am genuinely proud of the stuff I wrote for them!)

With English, I could do my favourite thing in the world: overthinking literature and talking ad nauseam about the media I like. I love rambling, and writing essays is pretty much just organized info-dumping. I also wanted to learn more about history and culture, especially the way that they influence and are influenced by the works of literature, film, etc. of the times. In my experience so far, English classes have mostly consisted of reading or watching a bunch of texts, analyzing them & picking them apart, discussing said texts with my peers, and comparing/contextualizing them with each other. It's way more fun for me than it probably sounds to most people haha

Side note: I'm also taking biology as a minor (specifically with a focus on zoology because I love animals). The contrast between using the more creative and writerly side of my brain, and the more logical sciencey and side works well for me.

I'm still not super career focused, though I have certainly thought about it. I'm on disability support right now, so thankfully I'm fortunate enough to not need to juggle work and school. Ideally, I would love it if my degree landed me a stable job that doesn't make me feel miserable or put the same strain on me that retail and food service do. But I'm kinda just going with the flow for now.

Anyways, that's all to say: look over all of your options and narrow it down to the ones that draw your interest and passion the most. Consider what you want out of school, explore the potential career options that each subject could bring if that's your goal, and generally go with what makes you feel the best.

I know most schools have exploratory courses and academic advisors that can help you figure out what you want to do, so I would definitely look into that! Oh, and look into the required classes for each subject too! It personally helped me organize and prepare for everything I would need to do so that I was less blind-sighted by, as an example, my mandatory statistics class for my biology minor (I'm DEFINITELY not a math person)

Good luck, and I'm sorry again for how long this got! I wish you the best :D

[willcodehtmlforfood]

The quickest way to second-guess a decision to major in English is this: have an extended family full of Salvadoran immigrants and pragmatic midwesterners. The ability to recite Chaucer in the original Middle English was unlikely to land me a job that would pay off my student loans and help me save for retirement, they suggested when I was a college freshman still figuring out my future. I stuck with English, but when my B.A. eventually spat me out into the thick of the Great Recession, I worried that they’d been right.

After all, computer-science degrees, and certainly not English, have long been sold to college students as among the safest paths toward 21st-century job security. Coding jobs are plentiful across industries, and the pay is good—even after the tech layoffs of the past year. The average starting salary for someone with a computer-science degree is significantly higher than that of a mid-career English graduate, according to the Federal Reserve; at Google, an entry-level software engineer reportedly makes $184,000, and that doesn’t include the free meals, massages, and other perks. Perhaps nothing has defined higher education over the past two decades more than the rise of computer science and STEM. Since 2016, enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has increased nearly 49 percent. Meanwhile, humanities enrollments across the United States have withered at a clip—in some cases, shrinking entire departments to nonexistence.

But that was before the age of generative AI. ChatGPT and other chatbots can do more than compose full essays in an instant; they can also write lines of code in any number of programming languages. You can’t just type make me a video game into ChatGPT and get something that’s playable on the other end, but many programmers have now developed rudimentary smartphone apps coded by AI. In the ultimate irony, software engineers helped create AI, and now they are the American workers who think it will have the biggest impact on their livelihoods, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. So much for learning to code.

ChatGPT cannot yet write a better essay than a human author can, nor can it code better than a garden-variety developer, but something has changed even in the 10 months since its introduction. Coders are now using AI as a sort of souped-up Clippy to accelerate the more routine parts of their job, such as debugging lines of code. In one study, software developers with access to GitHub’s Copilot chatbot were able to finish a coding task 56 percent faster than those who did it solo. In 10 years, or maybe five, coding bots may be able to do so much more.

People will still get jobs, though they may not be as lucrative, says Matt Welsh, a former Harvard computer-science professor and entrepreneur. He hypothesizes that automation will lower the barrier to entry into the field: More people might get more jobs in software, guiding the machines toward ever-faster production. This development could make highly skilled developers even more essential in the tech ecosystem. But Welsh also says that an expanded talent pool “may change the economics of the situation,” possibly leading to lower pay and diminished job security.

If mid-career developers have to fret about what automation might soon do to their job, students are in the especially tough spot of anticipating the long-term implications before they even start their career. “The question of what it will look like for a student to go through an undergraduate program in computer science, graduate with that degree, and go on into the industry … That is something I do worry about,” Timothy Richards, a computer-science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. Not only do teachers like Richards have to wrestle with just how worthwhile learning to code is anymore, but even teaching students to code has become a tougher task. ChatGPT and other chatbots can handle some of the basic tasks in any introductory class, such as finding problems with blocks of code. Some students might habitually use ChatGPT to cheat on their assignments, eventually collecting their diploma without having learned how to do the work themselves.

Richards has already started to tweak his approach. He now tells his introductory-programming students to use AI the way a math student would use a calculator, asking that they disclose the exact prompts they fed into the machine, and explain their reasoning. Instead of taking assignments home, Richards’s students now do the bulk of their work in the classroom, under his supervision. “I don’t think we can really teach students in the way that we’ve been teaching them for a long time, at least not in computer science,” he said.

Fiddling with the computer-science curriculum still might not be enough to maintain coding’s spot at the top of the higher-education hierarchy. “Prompt engineering,” which entails feeding phrases to large language models to make their responses more human-sounding, has already surfaced as a lucrative job option—and one perhaps better suited to English majors than computer-science grads. “Machines can’t be creative; at best, they’re very elaborate derivatives,” says Ben Royce, an AI lecturer at Columbia University. Chatbots don’t know what to do with a novel coding problem. They sputter and choke. They make stuff up. As AI becomes more sophisticated and better able to code, programmers may be tasked with leaning into the parts of their job that draw on conceptual ingenuity as opposed to sheer technical know-how. Those who are able to think more entrepreneurially—the tinkerers and the question-askers—will be the ones who tend to be almost immune to automation in the workforce.

The potential decline of “learn to code” doesn’t mean that the technologists are doomed to become the authors of their own obsolescence, nor that the English majors were right all along (I wish). Rather, the turmoil presented by AI could signal that exactly what students decide to major in is less important than an ability to think conceptually about the various problems that technology could help us solve. The next great Silicon Valley juggernaut might be seeded by a humanities grad with no coding expertise or a computer-science grad with lots of it. After all, the discipline has always been about more than just learning the ropes of Python and C++. Identifying patterns and piecing them together is its essence.

In that way, the answer to the question of what happens next in higher education may lie in what the machines can’t do. Royce pointed me toward Moravec’s paradox, the observation that AI shines at high-level reasoning and the kinds of skills that are generally considered to reflect cognitive aptitude (think: playing chess), but fumbles with the basic ones. The curiosity-driven instincts that have always been at the root of how humans create things are not just sticking around in an AI world; they are now more important than ever. Thankfully, students have plenty of ways to get there.

[oh-negative]

Un named hellsing fic part one

Greetings mortals, hear a first taste (ahaha..) of a fic we started on…let’s us know what you think or if you’d like to see us add on! We have great ideas for the plot but we’re still pretty rusty…it’s been a while,enjoy!

……………………………..

As a kid you loved reading, both fantasy and non fiction, anything to escapes into another world outside of your own.

It didn't matter if you were learning about the infinite galaxy's light years away, historical figures of yore, or even magical worlds filled with adventurers and princesses to be rescued from the furthest roomed tucked away in the highest tower....

But your favorite was the supernatural. Nocturnal creatures who danced with shadows,beasts who transversed in the full moon or phantoms who haunted empty halls of abandoned cathedrals.

So it was no supervise you chose to study folklore, despite being the top of your graduating class. Unfortunately that wouldn't have flyed under the roof of your parents,who would be funding your time in secondary education,so you spent your college years bent over bio engendering textbooks,essays on organic chemistry and genomics only to balance them out with your secondary course of study; folklore and mythology.

    Your parents, though less the thrilled about your minor courses- not seeing them as practical- just learned to drop the subject after a while....after all how can they continually bug you about it if your status on deans list never seemed to budge. Mom still would occusually fret over the extra work load distracting you from your other classes,But you insisted you knew what you were doing, and once you got you first big girl job, neither could have been prouder. It took a couple years after graduation to land it, in the mean time working as an intern in a biotech company doing mainly intern related work- but you made it. 

Your hard work paid off and you were given the opportunity of a lifetime to work across the pond,..England to be exact. 

Looks like those secondary courses paid off. Your academic writings on the biology of the undead & how they could help cure viruses landed on the right desk - somehow you knew your pandemic ramblings were well justified after all.

               It's been seven years since you made the long, and far, move to north London to serve as the leading specialist of the bio-science of the supernatural & undead at the renowned protectors of his majesty & London itself;

                                                                          Hellsing.

   CHAPTER ONE: 

                    North France; 1:00 AM 2030

It took everything in you to control the eye twitching,brain numbing prodding being spoken before you, after all you did promise Integra you would be on your best, and certainly not sarcastic, behavior. But truth be told you knew even some promises had to be broken in order to get what you wanted...and right now what you wanted most was for the three older gentleman seated at the oval table before you to stop talking, agree to your request, so you could go back home and possibly sleep on the way there.

Ever since the pandemic of 2020 one of your main areas of study was how to possibly save lives with the use of supernatural DNA. For you it wasn't about politics,eugenics, or increasing the human lifespan- it was about saving lives, But of course in the wrong hands that could absolutely be the case. But no matter how serious the whole matter was you could almost feel your eyelids threaten to close for a second,before you had to re-explain yourself to axis powers who never seem to age out of their political standing...sometimes you wondered if you should be studying them instead of the things that go bump in the night.  You clear your voice to speak up over the men once more, who have started chatting amongst themselves while you zoned out briefly...

     " sir, with all due respect, I feel like our division at Hellsing is really on to something, the only problem is...we have no one to test...most supernatural creatures- ..mainly of the the vampiric persuasion immediately turn to dust and iron when killed or exposed to direct sunlight. Our bio-science fraction have proposed a idea that I think will help us further the possibilities of pursuing test subjects " 

Now that the eyes have all fallen back on you, you feel your posture stiffen and all of a sudden you understand why Integra always went around in her studious apparel-..confidence, and for a brief moment you wish you'd have waited for her availability to allow her to come with you..until you remember the type of anxiety induced headaches she can cause with her presence.

A man you knew as France's security for NATO urges you to continue,eyes sternly fixed on you, the others follow suite waiting for you to continue

" yes miss y/l/n/h please continue...surely you're not considering testing humans ...are you?"

" no sir" you clear your throat " it's a little bit more difficult,like I said it's pretty much impossible to get a sample of the undead without endangering myself or others, the samples I do have are not enough,not nearly pure enough. My prospect is this.....by now we know the catacombs all over the world - including the ones here in Paris- have had undead remains found perfectly preserved. That's no coincidence. I believe through the text we have obtained in our field of study that we could find remains that have not been destroyed to use as possible testing subjects."

You watch jaws drop over what you have considered to be the least invasive thing humans have done for the sake of "saving lives" since antiquity and can't help but to wear your smugness bluntly in the face of their surprise.

"Your wish to …transverse the catacombs?!"

" precisely "

You extend your hand, the manilla folders holding your months worth of research across the table, as you watch the prime minister's facial expression briefly resemble that of a child who just tasted a lemon for the first time.

Hours pass, in that time you have defended your credentials at least a half a dozen times, sworn to the country of France, England and the United States that you're not bat shit insane, and eventually folded to a group call back to fletchley to have your boss back you up. You really didn't want to have it come down to that, as it was your first time dealing with a conference by yourself, but hey, when your boss saved London and,essentially the world, from an undead super army of nazis, she makes a good trump card. You would just have to prepare for the verbal lashing for interrupting her own meeting when you arrived back to London.

Some hours later in north London

You felt exhausted by the time you and  the security guard who accompanied you to France returned to the Hellsing manor. No matter how fast the private jets were, it always found a way of draining you. The sun was well past the horizon by the time you got into the entrance, saying your goodnights to the security guard before starting the trek to the corner of the manor that housed your own dwellings. Briefly you consider going to your work space located in the basement, but thought against it. Knowing a certain draculina would be waiting to chastise you on your priorities. Surely she already knew of your safe arrival.

An elevator ride later to the upper floor where the personal chambers were and a long walk down a corridor before you couldn't help but to let out the longest, draining sigh as you opened the door to your quarters.

You looked down at your phone. Dead. No doubt there was probably some questionable text messages from boss lady as well as some emails that could use your attention- but after a long day of arguing your years worth of education in order to get the grant and support from a bunch of crotchety old  men,your were exhausted and decided it would be a problem for the morning,as you set it on the charger dock at your bedside table.

It was all you could do to kick off your shoes and slip off your jacket before plopping into your bed and immediately succumbing to the day's events,sleep consuming you almost immediately. Apparently a shower would have to wait as well.

You fall into such a deep slumber,the kind where it knocks the sense of time out of you,wrapping you in an unconscious blanket of blackness. With slumber falling on you so heavily you didn't so much as twitch when the sound of bullets being discharged from a pistol rang out into the night during the wee hours of the morning,alerting the residents of hellsing to an intruder.

[caffeinejournalist23]

Suburban Nightmare The Scariest Part About Moving to the Suburbs is the Fear of Having to Move Back to the Hood

I grew up in the "hood" of Northwest Ohio and throughout my childhood I was repeatedly told by teachers and social workers "you have to have a college degree." To survive, to live a good life, or to go on vacation once a year, they never specified why we needed to have one - the adults just told us this from the third grade onward in a tone that was serious and haunted us as we clawed our way to high school graduation. Well I moved to the suburbs to pursue a college education, received my Bachelor of Arts, but then wound up jobless for the first 2.5 months after graduating, fearing that I may have to return to the life I thought I left behind in the hood.

This is what it was like.

Part 1/3: Restless

The first few days were not too bad.

I finished school on a Tuesday and had the graduation ceremony the following Saturday. Though I was anxious to begin working full time again after taking almost a month off to focus on school, I forced myself to appreciate having a few days to catch my breath after completing the toughest semester of my undergrad career - under the assumption that my boss would call me back to give me my schedule as promised.

But they never called me back.

I texted. I called. I emailed. Nothing.

I reached a supervisor in my department who promised they would make sure my employer called me once they returned from vacation, but the supervisor also warned me "if you get a new opportunity, take it, because I'm not sure what [they] are planning with you."

I texted. I called. I emailed - for weeks.

Still nothing.

Feeling scorned, neglected as an employee, and painfully confused, I knew I shouldn't go back; not only was I completely ghosted, but this happened on top of several occasions prior when I was not paid on time, not paid the proper amount, and even scammed by a company hacker. And I knew I didn't deserve the shame of going back to a place begging for employment where I had already been so mistreated.

So the job search began.

Part time. Part-time remote. Entry level. Entry level temporary. Full-time summer. Freelance. Temporary full-time summer.

The amount of key terms I came up with to expand my search for jobs ought to have earned me a certificate in SEO optimization. Within a matter of weeks I had easily applied for hundreds of jobs; some remote, some on-site, some part-time, some full-time, some freelance, some temporary.

Job applications had just one line to mention my education - school, degree, and major; I have a degree in English and Digital Media Studies. I could generalize my degree to a Bachelor's in digital communications. I minored in criminal and social justice. I took a digital photography class. I've completed course service-learning hours and internships with a variety of non-profits. I took an HTML coding class. I wrote a parody of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I graduated with a 3.6 GPA. I got an A+ in a digital journalism class. I wrote a 20+ page essay for my capstone that I plan to expand into a book. My second capstone was a documentary I could submit to a film festival. These extra points of academic accomplishment were bullet-listed in applications where there was a degree description space, otherwise these were only recognized and respected in my LinkedIn profile.

There wasn't enough space in the education history line to explain all of the challenges I surpassed or all of the awesome awards and accomplishments I earned while getting the degree to write in my education history. I started a student org focused on newscasting. I was the VP of our Black Student Union for 2 years and spoke on behalf of the union at a peaceful protest following the death of George Floyd. I won recognition for Student Org of the Year - twice in a row. I became the student manager of the student engagement department. I was an active member of the Latino Student Union for over 3 years. I petitioned for a town-hall meeting for students and faculty to better our DEI awareness across campus. I was invited to a one-on-one meeting with the university president. I advocated for PRISM and LGBTQ+ acceptance across our campus. I hosted and evaluated numerous surveys to better serve our campus community. I participated in a plethora of volunteer opportunities and campus events. I was an orientation leader. I was an RA. I served as a mentor to underclassmen. My name consistently appeared on the Dean's List.

Suddenly it seemed like my degree did not carry much value. Few job postings prioritized candidates with my degree type - "digital communications but a degree in marketing preferred." It's like they wanted the skills earned from my degree as part of the job description, not the qualifications. Most job postings didn't seem to value my degree at all: "remote communications strategist - degree in journalism or other related field a plus, not a requirement." I had slaved for four years; four years of 18 - 21 credit hour semesters while spear-heading a student org and working anywhere from 2 to 4 jobs at a time, and some trauma healing/family drama because the Universe likes to keep herself entertained I guess. I was the first in my family for over 4 generations to earn a college degree. I took out tens of thousands in student loans. I went to an exam on 4 hours of sleep. I closed work at 1am and went to class the next morning at 8. I had nervous breakdowns and still got my 8-page essays turned in by 11:59pm.

But none of that seemed to matter. In the eyes of employers, overcoming all of those obstacles and challenges did not reflect how I was a good candidate for their position.

The only thing employers seemed to really take into consideration was previous work experience; that shouldn't have been a problem for me, as my resume was rich with experience by having to work to pay for school anyway. I'm a previous graphic designer. I was an intern for a local newspaper. I was a full-time social media manager for one summer. I have various experience mentoring kids/students ages 14 through 19. I was a shift leader at Family Video before the pandemic made us close all our stores. I was a remote political journalist during the 2022 midterms. I've been a coffee barista and was promoted to opening shift leader after my first 30 days. I coordinated a friend's wedding. I became a freelance state manager for a remote election reporting company. I managed the student engagement department and adapted our traditional events to a virtual medium. I've filed parking permits and incident reports. I've painted yard signs. I've hosted people to their dining seats. I've supervised. I've lead. I've delegated. I've supported. I've created. And I've always worked so so hard because in any and every job I could not sleep at night unless I did my best.

The few jobs I did hear back from said they chose "a better candidate" - aka someone with more experience. Either places are preferring to hire older people who have had the chance to garner more experience after college, or getting a college degree is redundant - and that notion of my hard work, discipline, and financial sacrifices from the past four years amounting to arbitrary value was what really started to freak me out.

The college dorm I was escaping homelessness in started looking like a haunted house; the frustration and hopelessness was written in the walls. My life started getting scary. Had my hopes and dreams been built on a lie? Was college just a deferment of the demise set for me by being born and raised in poverty?

The vacancy of my roommate's absence was soon followed by my own absence of income, food, and purpose. No meal plan. No job. No savings. No fail safe. No side hustle.

And no idea what to do next.

[rickmoya]

the books I read in 2022

Picture Me Gone, Meg Rossoff

Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng

William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls, Ian Doescher

Food as Communication, Communication as Food, ed. Janet Cramer, Carlinta Greene and Lynn Walters (1)

How To Live With Your Teenager, Peter Buntman and Eleanor Saris (2)

Fablehaven: Keys to the Demon Prison, Brandon Mull

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Channel of Peace, Kevin Tuerff (3)

Hatchet, Gary Paulsen

The Pigman, Paul Zindel

Fish in a Tree, Lynda Mullaly Hunt

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig

The Hunger Pains, The Harvard Lampoon (4)

Good Eats: The Final Years, Alton Brown

Dragonwatch, Brandon Mull

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

Big Fish, Daniel Wallace

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

Dragonwatch: Wrath of the Dragon King, Brandon Mull (5)

You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty, Dave Barry

italics: read it before bold: read it to my kid in bed struck: unfinished

Woof. Bad year for reading. I don’t even have a good explanation for why my numbers dropped so precipitously from previous years. Perhaps continued struggle with the to-read shelf and what it signifies. It got even bigger this year, as my intentions eclipsed my performance. I know I was busier with school, going back in person and taking on more classes. But still. This is pitiful.

This year’s only goal: clear that fucking shelf. (28.) If I can read more than that, it’s a bonus.

NOTES

This is a collection of essays given to me when I finished my master’s. I finally got to it this year, and chipped my way through it while waiting in the car for kids to be done with activities. As mentioned above, it took most of the year.

I bought this book as part of a $2-a-bag library clear-out sale not long after graduating from college. Not grad school — undergrad. At the time, I think I was looking for ideas on how to be a good teacher, or to maintain a connection with youth for my writing. Like ... why do I still have it? But the 1980s discussion of how to have open and trusting communication was still surprisingly valid.

True story about being on a plane that was diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, because of 9/11 attacks. I had to read it before we went to see Come From Away (spousal assignment of sorts).

I found this in an Airbnb in San Diego on our summer vacation. It’s a parody of The Hunger Games and is as stupid as it sounds.

Really starting to get sick of this universe, just in time for my son to get the next book in the series for Christmas/birthday. I didn’t realize how much was left to go when I posted this initially, but we’re more than 2/3rds through and will finish so I’m still putting a number on it/not counting it for 2023.

[mannatea]

this just reminds me so distinctly of my 4000 level/graduate mixed literature classes. i had classmates talk about how difficult the classes were, how strict the professors were, how they were barely scraping by with Ds and Cs on essays. one or two people confided in me while we waited for the previous class to let out that they were afraid they were going to fail.

meanwhile, i was begging the professors after class to grade me on a graduate level (so that i could write longer essays lmfao) and i was pulling literal perfect scores on almost everything i submitted...even when i didn't even read the fucking book.

it boggled my mind because i'm largely self taught as a writer and i've never been a particularly intelligent or intellectual person; i'm not super well read. i re-read the same books over and over when i was 16 and read things below my reading level for my childhood years. yes, i went to college a decade later than most (and age can help with perspective!) but i worked in a factory before that and hated school growing up.

more importantly, this wasn't a beginner english course; everyone was at the same education as me or higher!!! HALF the class was working on a masters! 3/4+ of these people were creative writing majors.

and many of them were doing much worse than me for reasons i couldn't parse.

until i overheard several of them talking about a book we were reading where a character was in a situation that made them feel trapped, wherein the narrative used a birdcage (and the character feeling shrunk to fit inside it) as a metaphor for this.

and they all thought the character was literally being shrunk down to the size of a parakeet and shoved into a birdcage! they were actively discussing their confusion over this happening "out of nowhere" before class. i can't even make this shit up.

i'm sorry? that you don't understand what a metaphor is? and when the narrative is being metaphorical in the limited perspective of a character? oof.

this was around 2014. before tiktok. before the death of media literacy was something being actively discussed online the way it is now.

so shit where people mock "growled" and such... it's like, there are two options here: either they're doing this for clicks (just complaining about anything just to have something to complain about, since people love negative video content) or they're actually just media illiterate.

and in my experience watching booktube, it's oftentimes both of these things together. in a creator's quest to make a negative video, booktubers reach for low-hanging fruit to get more videos out faster, and in doing this they oftentimes completely misunderstand something in the book they're talking about, or actively miss something that contradicts their point later. because it's like, if you're posting 3 videos a week about books (for example), you literally do not have time to read these books thoroughly AND do deep, thought-provoking videos about them. you only have time for the lowest-hanging fruit because you have to still edit the video, do thumbnails, do a description for the video, and start reading the next book. that doesn't even include the booktubers that have patreons with extra rewards to keep up with.

like the amount of criticism i've seen in booktube videos were the critique is just the creator actively misunderstanding the words in the sentence (or the sentence in the larger context of the novel) is astounding—and I even notice this regarding books I've never even read myself, where just the context of the full sentence is being completely misunderstood in the pursuit of grabbing low-hanging fruit to complain about for clicks, because negative videos get way more traffic than positive ones.

just some food for thought.

I’m so sorry but in the nicest way possible do yall actually read books or just read words??? Cause I’ve been seeing that trend of people not understanding how “snarled” and “eyes darkened” and “eyes softened” etc. was used in a book and like…

Genuinely, do yall just not have imagination?? Or not understand figurative language??? Also eyes do literally darken and soften have you not lived a life??? How do you read with no imagination? Is this how you get through so many books in one month - you simply don’t take the time the understand the words as they are read?

[sa7abnews]

I'm a Yale graduate but can't afford to live on my own, so I share an apartment with my mom. I have no plans to move out.

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/11/im-a-yale-graduate-but-cant-afford-to-live-on-my-own-so-i-share-an-apartment-with-my-mom-i-have-no-plans-to-move-out-2/

I'm a Yale graduate but can't afford to live on my own, so I share an apartment with my mom. I have no plans to move out.

The author, left, loves living with her mom, right.Courtesy of Mia TsangAfter graduating college, I couldn't find a full-time job, so I moved into my mother's apartment.Multigenerational living is heavily stigmatized in American culture but valued in my family.My mother's support has allowed me to thrive, and our relationship has never been stronger.In May 2021, I prepared to graduate from Yale University with a degree in molecular biology. Instead of pride in my accomplishment or excitement to finally enter adulthood, I was filled with dread.I had applied to over 60 job openings throughout my senior year but could not secure a full-time position in any field — let alone the highly specialized field for which I'd been trained. I had no job or plan, so two days after my graduation ceremony, I moved into my mother's rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment in Queens.For the first summer I lived in New York, I worked odd jobs like babysitting, teaching short-term writing workshops, and editing high schoolers' college essays. I revised my résumé and sent out a job application every day. I've always been passionate about writing, so I expanded my range to include literary and publishing jobs. No bites.The salary ranges for every entry-level position I applied for were well below what I would need to live in New York City without my parents' help. Even with a full-time job, I wouldn't be able to afford to move out. But I ended up right where I needed to be.My mom welcomed me back home after graduationMy mother immigrated to the US from Ecuador when she was 8 years old, and my father from Mexico when he was 9. The three of us are incredibly close. I was raised in Rhinebeck, a small town in the Hudson Valley, which is predominantly white.Our family's cultural values constantly clashed with those of my peers' families, especially regarding multigenerational living. My friends' parents constantly emphasized to them that "the minute you turn 18, you're out."Those families seem to represent the norm around the US. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that only 13% of non-Hispanic white Americans live in multigenerational households, compared to 26% of Hispanic and Black Americans.In contrast, throughout my life, my parents made it clear that if I ever needed to live with them again after college, no matter the reason, they would welcome me with open arms. My father has always said, "We're not just a family. We're a team. Whatever you want to do, we will support you in any way we can."My family's culture normalizes multigenerational living, so I felt comfortable moving in with my mother.I love living with my mother and have no plans to leaveSix months after graduating, I finally got a 15-hour-a-week position as a marketing assistant at a literary nonprofit. My mother was thrilled I had found a job I was passionate about and over the moon that I would have to keep living with her.Overall, it's been better than I could've imagined. We eat dinner together most weeknights and then watch an episode or two of whatever TV show we're binging together. On weekends, we go to the beach or concerts in the East Village. We even went to Queens Pride together for the first time.This time together has only brought us closer together, and our relationship has never been stronger than it is now. I am grateful for this time we have together.I still work for the same nonprofit. Though my hours and pay rate have increased, I am still not full-time, but I'm fine with that. I love the work I do and the people I do it with. That means I will be living with my mother for the foreseeable future, and I am OK with that. Not having to worry about making New York City rent allows me to save most of my income.I use the extra hours in my day to write. It's paid off: My first book will come out next February, and I couldn't have done any of it without my mother's support.

[midorismorningsessions]

before proceeding, listen to the full episode here:

as i write this, i seriously do not know the question to this answer. having reeled from the loss of a friend to the perils of a staggered thesis writing journey coupled with random reminiscences of past memories while working on my narrative report, as well as the inherent final projects needed to be accomplished, made for a turbulent first few weeks of the new year for me. i think i might've fallen into a major depressive episode.

i decided to deactivate my facebook account so i won't have to recall these memories he left me dealing with, but everytime i turn up to school for the most random of reasons, i find myself just catching all the sadness this world ever has to give me. i've hesitated to come back since. or even turn my focus to these impending projects i still needed to finish. i just can't put my heart out into these projects. not when i'm still getting myself together, both as an individual student and the person a lot of people count on.

sure, i may have a long list of things i've wanted to do after school ends by this year. pursuing music full-time, teaching at the same department that has broken my heart and left me devastated twice, streaming myself playing valorant with an ever-cursing mouth, writing more and more pieces and essays about my experiences in life, producing and hosting a podcast about these same experiences, they have all crossed my mind. but nothing will ever replace the constant loneliness i have been feeling since time immemorial, a feeling that was once filled by my now-former college bestfriend, currently busy with the most important project he has undertaken yet—his own thesis.

i kind of don't like calling him that. but he has since grown cold as ice, not just towards me, but everybody else he has probably ever known. that excludes his own friends, ones that he encounters and spends time with everyday. these lucky bastards. that may be too much of a word to say, but they're lucky enough not to bear the brunt of losing a friend. they're lucky they will never grieve over losing someone so important to their lives, despite them being very much alive and kicking.

we never ended on a bad note, he said to me one time. so you don't need to block me. but knowing myself, i will definitely have the urge to tell him about random stuff, my adventures, my thesis, internship and everything in between. i did it for my own sake. of fucking course, it'll leave me haunting for days and weeks on end. and i did it time and again.

i told him about what i have been feeling in the brunt of all this in a lengthy rant on our messenger chats. i couldn't pretend any longer. i wasn't fine with everything happening at all. i wasn't fine with him being cold, or him deactivating. hell, he even told me that i could just dump everything and he'll read them all, but i couldn't do that now. i don't know if he even reads the rest of the emails i sent him. however, he read the first one that i sent in early january, saying that i didn't want to bother him any longer as he keeps himself busy with work and graduate school. i still had hope, but it has since faded with each passing day as i see him spending his time happily with his true friends.

i was never one of these friends. although he has been telling me that i am one of his for keeps friends, i don't know if that is even true anymore. he has been with me for all of my major milestones in the past year, but i couldn't even cheer him up in his most turbulent time yet. i don't know if he still considers me as a friend, or a phase now enamored by our respective personal endeavors.

i don't know where to go from here. that's the most obvious answer. i don't even know if i'll be able to graduate in about six months time. i don't know if i'll be able to survive this phase at all.

⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠

today's ending theme is 5 seconds of summer's amnesia from 5 seconds of summer. enjoy listening!

[kylekozmikdeluxo]

CW: mental illness

At age 31, I think back to when I was 13. Reverse the numbers, haha. 13, back in the years 2005 and 2006. I'll stretch things a little further to 2007, when I was turning 15...

A lot of these last few years, amidst an ongoing pandemic that continues to mutate in messed up new ways, late stage capitalism clamping down on all aspects of life, and fascists trying their damnedest to regain power and poison the population with hatred- that seems pretty bad, right? Amidst all of this chaos, I've been re-unlocking myself. Or at least younger versions of me that needed fine-tuning, but were instead locked away or over-corrected.

These last three years, however, have not been an easy journey...

For me, this is crucial for my own creative endeavors, namely my writing and my slow move into comic-creating.

At 13-14, I would write and draw some pretty wacky stuff. A lot of it was nonsensical and mostly non-sequiturs, but not in the way something like the Lewis Carroll ALICE stories - off the top of my head - were or similar works of nonsensical storytelling. There really wasn't much of a vibe to it, these were more the ramblings of a young, overexcited autistic who wasn't given the tools to navigate through and around a very neurotypical-inclined world... and a young autistic who had much to learn about the world around them. For example, I had as much understanding of politics as - say - a leafblower. And for context, we're talking the mid-2000s here, where things were much tougher than they are now...

I look back on a lot of that stuff and I often wince at it... Well, the aspects of them that I consider bad, were bad, even. But there's a lot of stuff in there that I still love and still try to incorporate into what it is I do nowadays. That spontaneity, that I miss- That I feel like I might've lost because of my over-correcting of myself, and because I'm three decades old and regularly deal with adult stuff/responsibilities that wrack my autistic/ADHD brain that also dials up my health issues *and* my executive dysfunction to 11.

You see, I made the mistake of showing this stuff that I wrote and drew to the wrong people when I was 13/14... And I got the expected smackdown for it, I acted like a dingus in retaliation, and in the process... I did it to myself and my work, and a lot of it took a hit when I was 15, when I went through a really toxic depressive self-hatred period of my life.

After snapping out of that before I turned 16, I began to write weirdly again, but as I was getting closer to graduating high school... I was reading film criticism, I was "studying" film, I was starting to understand what apparently made good storytelling what it was. And this was on the cusp of the era where straight white men really dominated the film conversation on YouTube and message board forums. The likes of Doug Walker, the Red Letter Media crew, etc.... We were now in the era of multi-part "essays" on why the STAR WARS prequels were worse than nuclear holocaust, tryhard videos on why flawed but distinct blockbuster movies from the '90s should be forgotten and written off as mistakes... Like a young adult trying-to-be-straight fool who wanted to prove themselves and be a "good" storyteller... Someone who knew what they were doing and was destined to make all the things... I had these people on all the time, partially because I really liked the funny bits, but also because... You know...

That isn't to say I always agreed with the Plinkett stuff or the Nostalgia Critic videos. Often times, I vehemently disagreed with a lot of Doug's "observations" on various movies (particularly in his Disneycember reviews from the days of yore), and also was like "Whaaa?" at a lot of what was in the RLM videos... But I typically watched their stuff circa 2011-2017. This was all while I was slowly lurching through college, eventually going for an art degree and getting it. This was during the relatively quiet Obama years and then the spring-launch back into GOP misery when The Former Guy got into office.

Meanwhile, I was still trying to write my weird stuff, but a lot of it got very over-explainy. Like, the weird stuff that just comes to mind... Whenever I wrote it down, in the text, I would overexplain things. I'd write some bullshit reasoning as to why something weird happened in the story, or if the character had a vision, it would be a lot more explicit instead of how a better storyteller - to my estimation - does it. By letting the story itself feel, to immerse the audience in that feeling. The opposite was what I was doing, it'd be like the filmmakers at the Disney studio coming up with some rhyme or reason as to why - say - Dumbo and Timothy both saw Pink Elephants metamorphosing into all these weird-ass things instead of the film just simply showing them accidentally drinking a bucket-full of wine, blowing bubbles in a stupor, and then seeing all that stuff... And then waking up high in the tree. How could I admire such filmmaking in a classic Disney film, and yet not write that way myself?

Because I suppressed it. I was told that it was all awful, that I was "high" when I wrote it, that it was garbage. That it would never go anywhere... So a lot of that correcting of everything, as if a CinemaSins *ding* was going to go off if I so as much wrote a scene as I felt... Was a big mistake.

Yes, I had a lot to learn, and a lot of growing to do. At 31, I'm still growing. I recently came out as queer because I hid/denied a lot of that throughout my life, my politics were very muddy and unfocused for a long while until I shifted more left, you see...

Some people are "late bloomers", they take time to grow into the people they want to be. The problem is, this capitalistic world is constantly telling you that you missed the boat. That you had to be this spontaneous, amazing, do-it-all person at age 18. That I should've been interning at, say, DreamWorks Animation halfway through college. Or should've published my first graphic novel around that time.

At age 31, I've achieved none of that. I had to unlock many parts of myself before I could really seriously commit to making something and confidently putting it out into the world. I mostly hid behind blogging about animation news and making videos about my Disney VHS collection, to the point where social media algorithms have pigeonholed me as that and nothing more than that. And given what all these platforms have become, it's hard to escape that image of you, to stomp that out and be your rebooted, better self.

So what makes that journey hard is that when you see other people seemingly flourishing, you feel like you've missed the boat and that you don't have that spark anymore. Or that you're trying too hard. It can be quite grim being this age, because the world is constantly bellowing at you that you had to have made it as a 20-year-old. You should've traveled, achieved your goals early on, had an amazing social life, etc.

The way I see it now, I'm freeing my 15-year-old self from a prison cell. A once-spontaneous person who was spiraling into despair, and was kind of broken by it... And it's like I'm telling them it's gonna be ok, encouraging them to embrace their weird, guiding them to shed their immature "edge" and lack of self-awareness... Guiding them with my current knowledge, so that they can channel that spontaneity and weirdness into something.

When I threw away the "rule book" when COVID-19 hit in early 2020, and started writing like I used to, when I was 12-15 back in the mid-2000s... It was a real joy. It was a stepping stone to what it is I do now, but it was an important first step.

[why-rock-look-tasty-if-no-eat]

I was a good and obedient kid, though I did have an imagination and a small mischievous streak. (Keep in mind, all of the examples were when I was under 10)

I was told to eat something? Already ate it, thanks for the food, can I have some more please?

Told to stop doing something? Are you sure I can't keep doing it? No? Alright, I'll stop.

Go be quiet and wait for the next hour? Looks like it's time to play make believe with any small objects around me and keep the game in my head.

Do your homework/hand write the essay? Already did it during school lunch/recess/class

Pick an instrument to play? I wanted flute and piano but the clarinet is perfectly fine to

Do (competitive) ballet, modern dance and baseball? How come I can't do gymnastics? Or why not both ballet and gymnastics? I don't want to do dance but alright. Though why can't I do soccer instead? Because you said so? Well, alright

When it came to concerts, theaters, movies, and plays I would sit still the entire time and pay attention to it without a fuss

But gods forbid that I get upset about having to wear clothes (literally only overalls and skirts) that I hated. Or just acting like a kid in general and not a miniature adult. As a seven year old I was doing the families dishes, laundry, and cleaning inside and outside the house. I also had to mediate between my family and grew up catching food to eat when we ran out money. During clothing store trips I used to hide in the clothing racks because I rarely got to go shoping, but I got yelled at everytime that it wasnt cute and is bad behavior.

Later on my 'teenage rebellion' was literally just me going to college during my last two years of HS and walking through the woods to get home. I never left the house after curfew and I never snuck out, simply because I never wanted to. The degree I was working on? It was science related and would have given me a strong foothold into my dream job, forensic science. The reason why I didn't get my associates before I graduated HS like I was supposed to? My mother didn't want to drive me to the second year campus, even though it was free college paid by the HS. Literally paid in full by the HS, and all that was needed was transport on my end.

Every school year I'd place in the top percentile of national tests; 1% English, 18% science, and 27% math. Those were my last test results because I remeber crying about my mothers response. Her response? An eyeroll and the papers being tossed aside and told that could do better at math. My Senior year I just gave up because I did all of that to get her recognition, and experiencing that broke me.

I got reccomended for scholarships when I was in Sophomore year. I was taking AP, Advanced, Band, Choir, and college classes while working 35+ hours part time with little to no transport for the last two. To get to my job I'd walk 40+ minutes or take the bus and waste money for an easy walk. The busses stopped after 10 pm so I would have to walk home, after midnight, by myself in a city that had plenty of nightlife. I also (unpromted) paid for my own food, entertainment, school supplies, and clothes since my Junior year.

For almost my entire school life, I'd go straight home and just learn more from NatGeo, encyclopedias (I ran out of books to read), science journals, KhanAcademy, hell I even watched college classes on YouTube, back when Berkeley still had them up, during middle school. I wouldn't go outside after curfew or sneak out, I'd be watching documentaries. The most trouble I got into was staying up watching documentaries at 1 am, I had headphones on to.

Then I got into a small job industry that's highly competitive, and I scored among the highest applicants and could pick from hundreds of jobs except for two? I must have cheated, because there's no way I'm that smart. My mother to my older sibling, almost verbatim.

Now what would my mother do when she was my age? Go out with her friends and get into trouble, eat as a group, sleep over at each other's places, and not take school seriously. She didn't get a job during HS, she wasn't in any AP or advanced clases, and most certainly didn't have a job during HS or college because her parents paid for it all. Which didn't matter since she dropped out of college to take care of my older sibling.

My mother went back to college during my Sophomore year and was complaining about how hard her classes were. I ended up helping her with her homework because I already did those classes during MS or Freshman year.

She would get impatient if I took more than three minutes to get out the door, but then I would have to wait fifteen for her to get everything. I found it easier to just run a checklist before we left so we wouldn't have to waste more time by turning around.

I would have a city/state/tristate competition for marching/choir/jazz band/ballet/modern dance/baseball (last three were droped before MS, but I still did compitions for ballet and dance) and if it had provided transportation then it was a toss up on if my family would be there. But if my mother or older sibling had a public event? Then I was dragged along and scolded if I complained about it.

Meanwhile my older sibling was staying over at friends houses, skipping school, doing drugs, drinking alcohol, sneaking out at night, smoking cigarettes, and not helping six year old me clean the house. But it was alright for older sibling to do it because they were older than me. OS didn't have to worry about curfew, and OS didn't worry about helping me out around the house.

OS got to eat as much food as OS wanted, but yet I got yelled at for asking for more food. Like I wasn't a growing kid and one serving was enough to tide me over. OS did have to get a job during HS though, because by that point our mother was raising us without child support. Even with OS helping with money we were still below the poverty line, and I had to stop doing many extracurriculars to save money.

Because my family were in dire straights monetary wise for my entire life, I was also worrying about money my entire life. When I was eight I was worrying about losing our home, which did happen a few years later so it wasn't unfounded lol. By the time I was twelve I was cutting back on my allowance to save money for food since catching it wasn't an option anymore at that point.

Suffice to say, whenever my mother talks about her childhood it's like getting whiplash. The differences are so crazy. I don't think my mother truly understands just how easy and nice she had it. Like, what do you mean you had a happy childhood that wasn't spent doing everything but what you actually wanted?

What do you mean you got to hang out with your friends whenever you wanted? What do you mean my MS math class was your HS class? What do you mean you didn't have to think of family before you even as a kid? What do you mean your parents went to every event you and your siblings had? What do you mean you didn't have to catch food for your family as a kid? What do you mean college's didn't require a 3.5 GPA, 25+ ACT score, and four years of foreign language?

Nowadays my mother is just pestering me about why I'm not in college and making a big fuss about how I can't be burnt out from my old job because I'm still college age. My old job where I would work up to 18 hours for two weeks. Every other month. For years.

TLDR: The stark difference in two generation's childhoods is real and it's really depressing

Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Like, everyone I talk to who's over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just... dont.