#it shouldn’t even be extra it should have been taught

[draconicsplendor]

If my professor doesn’t fucking appreciate how hard I’m working to make this building model AODA compliant I might literally sue

[imtryingbuck]

Two

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x fem!Reader

Summary: Y/n L/n becomes Queen of Astoria not that she wanted to. Prince James of Winterfeld meets her and falls in love.

Word count: 1,893

Warnings: angst. fluff. mentions of being barren. mentions of hunting.

Masterlist   Series Masterlist

Sitting in the chair that her father had been sitting in only two months prior with a crown sitting upon her head that she was surprised her neck had not yet broke with the weight of the thing, she tried not to wince at the pinching of the corset.

She had been crowned as the rightful heir to the throne and was now Queen. The whole hall erupted into cheers and chants, “Long live the Queen” and “The warrior Queen” hit her ears as she sat with her back straight. The knights all bent their knee to her - Carlson in front of them all, smiling up at her as he pledged his allegiance to her. She saw the scowl coming from Sir Jon as he nursed his ale, she smiled at him just to piss him off a little extra.

The celebration was loud with music and chatter from those in the hall, the smell in the air was intoxicating with food and ale - a lot of that was going to the floor as the guests danced. Everyone including her mother, sisters and Carlson were laughing and dancing, celebrating their new Queen. 

But Y/n, she just couldn’t find it in herself to join in the festivities she just wanted to be left alone or preferably in the woods training with Carlson and some of the other men, or better yet she wished that she was far away from the kingdom as she could possibly get. Looking around slowly making sure no eyes were on her as they were to busy dancing and having conversations amongst themselves, she stood and walked out of the side door. She found herself out in the private courtyard that only her family were allowed to be in, she took the crown off releasing a content and relieved sigh. The cold air soothed the ache of her chest as she looked up to the darkened sky smiling as the stars twinkled.

“Should have known you were going to try and run away. Ah, see you do not startle easily anymore.”

“I could smell you before I heard your boring voice.” She replied still staring up at the stars. “And do you see me running? The answer is no.”

“Listen here, you should have respect for your elders-“ he barked as he moved closer to her.

“I am not the same thirteen year old who was terrified of you, matter of fact I am more scared of a butterfly than I am of you.”

“You should not even be queen!”

Turning to face the man she had known all her life, the man who taught her how to play chess, the same man who would sneak some extra cake slices onto her plate when her parents weren’t watching. “Why shouldn’t I? I am the first born, my father never had a son, so why should I not be queen?”

“You are rotten. You are a barren bitch, what use are you if you cannot have an heir? You are best to work in the whore house-“

“Along with your mistress? I would rather not hear how dull you are at sex, thank you.”

“Y-you have no idea what you are talking about!”

“No? Red head, big tits, pretty face? A stark contrast from your wife, I must say.”

“Rotten you are-“

“So you have already said.”

“Barren bitch whose only deeming qualities lay on the battle field.”

“Again, you already called me that and also a battle field you have not seen in so many years, too busy hiding behind my father. And may I remind you of who you are talking to? I am the Queen, do not like that fact? Go and jump off the cliff, I will be sure to keep your wife and mistress safe and looked after.”

“You-you- wh-“

“You are embarrassing yourself now. You keep forgetting your station and I will end up removing more than your tongue. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes… my Queen.”

“Very good. Run along and leave me in peace.”

“What happened to you? The little girl I knew was nice, sweet and had a heart of gold. Where did that little girl go?” Jon asked her with his hand on the door knob.

“She died the moment you dragged her off that boat. Goodnight Jon.”

Hearing the door slam close she gulped a large breath of air, trying her hardest to keep her heart rate down. She wasn’t scared of him but she did know how dangerous he could be, she had seen it with her own two eyes. When Y/n was younger she use to sit upon a tree stump with her knees pulled up to her chest and watched in fascination as Jon trained the other warriors, she watched in awe of how fast he was though he had years added on to those he was training. And although Jon was friendly and sweet to her she had seen him do things that gave her nightmares or would be afraid to go near him for a few days after. The Jon that stood in front of her just then, calling her those names, wasn’t the same man she had grown up with.

She didn’t know why he was so against something that she didn’t even ask for, he should have taken it out on her father and not her.

“Jon said I could find you here, old man is too busy drowning his sorrows in the corner- hey what is wrong?”

“Nothing. Go back and enjoy your night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You are freezing, come back inside Y/n/n.”

“Would you marry Anna?” She asked changing the subject.

“No. She’s a pretty girl but I do not view her in that way, why?”

“What about my other sisters?”

“No Y/n, what is going on?”

“If you married my sister I could abdicate from the throne and hand it over to you two, and then the kingdom would have a King and a Queen that would have heirs and I could leave and I-I could be happy, I could be free.”

Carlson stood there frozen listening to his friends words, he had half a mind to go back into the hall and attack Jon knowing for sure that he had said something to her for her to be thinking of such things. “You will find a husband of your choosing, hopefully it would be a marriage of love and have your own child-“

“I cannot have them and you know that.”

“You do not know that though. Your father told you that when you was a child Y/n, he was wrong about many of things - he is wrong about this too.”

“I will find a suitable prince for one of the girls-“

“Y/n-“

“I do not want this life Carlson, I never have. And I am not ashamed to admit that I am scared.”

Wrapping his arms around her and pulling her into him, he whispered. “I know. I know you do not want this but I believe in you, I know you will be the best Queen anyone will ever know. I am sorry but this is your life, and please know I will be right by your side every step of the way. I will not allow you to fail or to fall, this I swear to you.”

For the first time since she was sixteen years of age when she was made to take part of the annual hunt and forced by her father to take the life of an innocent deer, she cried. Gripping tightly of Carlson’s shirt she let everything go, the loss of her life, the loss of her fathers life, her stepmother life ending so soon, the unfairness of the life she had to live when she did not want it. She cried and cried until there was nothing left for her to give.

“Queen Y/n.” Her personal servant bowed as the young girl entered her chambers.

“Larissa, how are you?”

“I-I am very well my queen, how are you?”

“Good, have you eaten today?”

“I have not but-“

“Come sit with me, and enjoy some food. I fear the cooks have given me more than enough.” She sees the hesitation in the young girl’s movements, Y/n pushes a chair out and pats on the seat giving her an encouraging smile.

“Th-thank you my Grace.”

“Do not need to thank me, eat as much as you can”

Larissa was not use to this. She thought at first that she was to be the tester to make sure no one had tried to poison the queen, finding herself frowning when Y/n digs into the food before she does. Larissa had always admired Y/n growing up, always finding herself smiling then she would hear the Princess laughing, when she would have the duty to collect herbs from the woods she would see Y/n fighting against men who were bigger in height and weight to her and would always silently cheer on the Princess and finding herself chuckling to herself when she would win against her opponents. Never in her life did she think she would be handpicked to serve her queen directly, and now here she was eating a breakfast fit for royalty, answering questions that Y/n asked, mind and heart racing as her queen actually paid attention to her words.

The bubble burst for the two of them when a knock came from the door, Larissa goes to stand up but Y/n’s hand came into contact with her arm, “it’s okay. Come in.”

“My Queen.”

“Mother, how are you? Would you like to join me and Larissa to eat? There’s plenty to go around.”

“I have already eaten, but thank you.”

“Your loss. What is it?”

“I need to speak to you, privately, please.” Larissa nods and stands, bowing to the two women she leaves quickly.

“What is wrong?”

Y/n watched as her mother take the seat that Larissa had been occupying, her fingers tugging at the flow of her dress - something she tended to do when she was nervous. A habit she herself had taken up. “Please, please do not be mad.”

“What has happened?”

“Y/n, you need a husband and you know it. You need an heir and that is just how it is, you need to marry in order to have them.”

“Mother, you know-“

“Your father was being a foolish angry man, he did not mean it.”

“But what is he was? What if I am barren and I cannot give my husband what is required of me? I do not, no, I know I cannot go through what you went through. I will not do it, it is not fair on me, the man or the other woman. Please mother, please just drop this. I will figure something out.”

There was a deafening silence that followed her words, mother and daughter just staring at each other waiting for someone to speak. Y/n truly wished she had just bid farewell and left her own chambers to go and train with Carlson even though she knew she had other obligations to attend.

Her mother smiled sadly at her and whispered the words that Y/n had been dreading to hear ever since she was a child.

“I have found you a husband.”

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Tags: @sapphirebarnes | @sebastians-love | @sidraaaaaaaaa | @mrsnikstan | @barnesxstan | @hi172826 | @alexdarkacademia | @supraveng

[mychlapci]

Prowl wifefication but it’s /Soundwave/ doing it… it wouldn’t be so much of a slow burn as it would be a long fuse before the transformation. Nobody wants to fuck Prowl, you see, which has lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of truly awful vibes and desperately horny thoughts. Which Soundwave can’t help picking up on, during the somewhat rare occasion they cross paths. Taking Prowl off of the board would be a strategic advantage worth the effort by itself, but there’s no reason Soundwave shouldn’t get something out of it, too. If anyone else was going to stake a claim, they should have done it by now. But he’s going to have to be at least somewhat careful about it.

Perhaps it starts with a subtle virus or two, not designed to do anything but make Prowl a little bit hornier than before. Just a touch more sensitive and suggestible. Nothing too noticeable. Just a few lines of naughty code expertly hidden in a file or two Soundwave can stand to let slip, or delivered to Prowl’s work terminal by an enterprising cassette if there’s time. And every time Prowl plugs in he gets a fresh dose, just enough to leave him horny before bed. Self-servicing every night so Prowl can fall asleep, still sticky. Nothing more until the new routine sets in. Then, a little escalation.

It’s too soon to introduce hypnotic elements—a new datapad would be met with infinite suspicion and Prowl almost never listened to music. So an additional strand of code gets tacked on to the ones to make Prowl horny: just a little incentive to have more submissive fantasies. Any time the Autobot second in command imagines letting someone else take the lead, take care of him, /dominate/ him results in an extra rush of charge and a warm tingling from his pleasure core. There’s nothing to be alarmed about, no need to be ashamed. They’re only dirty little fantasies that leave Prowl panting and desperate to go for a second overload. Normal. Natural.

Once Soundwave has crossed paths with Prowl and confirmed that his coding has taken well, it’s time to give Prowl wet dreams. It’ll be easiest after taking Prowl prisoner, even if the mech is quickly rescued. It’s perfect even: the mech won’t even question his horny dreams, since his self-servicing routine has been interrupted. Still too early to be too direct, but flashes of Prowl on all fours taking spike or riding one like a pro are nondescript enough. Watching the mech grind in his sleep is a treat. On their final night “together” before the mech gets rescued, Soundwave allows a brief snapshot of Prowl’s future to tantalize him. Just another horny dream for Prowl, bouncing ecstatically on a hard spike. Valve hot and slick with arousal as the mech paws his own node. And then, a glimpse of something that Prowl won’t be able to get out of his head: a round, taught, /pregnant/ belly underneath one of his hands. Prowl wakes up in a cold sweat, transfluid cooling on the inside of his panels as he tries to make sense of the dream. His head is still swirling when the Ops team rescues him.

Of course Soundwave has left him clean of viruses this time: he needs his cute little autobot to get cleared for work, so he can get back to working himself up into a horny, submissive mess. While everyone was busy rescuing their tactical officer, Soundwave’s cassettes were busy playing with his datapads. And one in particular has some fun new features to help settle Prowl into the idea of his future role even better. The datapad keeps Prowl hornier than ever before, and the barely perceptible flickering of the screen helps Soundwave encode specific wet dreams and directives while the mech works. And, y’know, also harvests sensitive data for the Decepticons to use. But more importantly it lets Soundwave direct Prowl’s increasingly common wet dreams. Soon it’s all about Prowl’s wet, needy pussy. His spike all but vanishes from the fantasies, replaced by some faceless, nameless stand-ins for Soundwave between Prowl’s legs.

For fun, in the days leading up to Prowl’s real capture, Soundwave will even let fantasies about strong, handsome blue mechs slip through. Wet dreams about being bent in half, thighs by Prowl’s shoulders as he’s thrust into. Arms easily holding him up or restraining him.

And then Prowl is waking up blind and restrained, not knowing that Soundwave has been priming him for this new game: training his perfect little wifey.

oh brother, this is like a prequel to those Prowl Wifefication asks we had going on for a while… Finally, we know who the husband is. It’s Soundwave, and he’s going to make a mamma out of Prowl <3

[mychoombatheroomba]

Proper Introductions

Between the Bones (Leon x GN! Reader) - Chapter 2

You're feeling a lot of regret for your performance in the training yard yesterday. For lots of reasons.

(Cross-posted from Ao3)

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Chapter Index

You had almost forgotten what it was to be a fuckup. You had never been a perfect soldier, by any means, but lately you had been feeling like a competent one again. STRATCOM was kicking the living shit out of you, but you had felt like you were finally cresting the mountain, getting it to a manageable level of daily pain. 

Should have known better than to let yourself get too comfortable. Krauser always noticed when any of you got comfortable.

Your shame and the memory of steel against your side weighed on you the rest of the day, through the training and meals and even into your hour of personal time. An hour that you dedicated to running the drills that Krauser had taught you, trying to clear your head before lights out. 

It only partially worked, and the night was too long and too short all at the same time. When you finally got to sleep, you dreamed of snow and blood, and when you woke the next morning, you felt brittle. Breakable. The dog tags around your neck felt heavy, and you fought the urge to take them off. 

It pissed you off something fierce, so as the day’s training began, you pushed yourself hard, turning that shame into gasoline, letting it burn in your chest. Every shot you fired at the range, every extra millisecond it took to disassemble your weapon was another spark to the blaze. It burned and burned, until lunch time came, and you glimpsed another reason to regret your performance yesterday. 

“Looks like Krauser kicked the shit out of Pretty Boy.” One of your fellows, Valeria, snickered. Her eyes were fixed across the tables, her voice loud enough to carry just as far. Those who cared for gossip looked at who she spoke of, and with the heaviness in your gut, you couldn’t help but join them. 

He’d bruised. That ridiculous haircut of his fell on the wrong side of his face to hide the shiner that was forming across the rookie’s cheek, creeping up to just beneath his eye. Right where your fist had connected the day before. Seeing it made you feel, quite simply, like a piece of shit. It wasn’t the first time you’d given someone a mark in training. Wouldn’t be the last. Still, when he felt all those eyes on him and looked up, you couldn’t help but feel that you’d kicked a puppy. He couldn’t have been that much younger than you, but there was just something about those ocean eyes that deepened the pit of regret in your stomach. That only got worse when your own eyes met his. You thought he’d look away quickly. 

Instead, you found yourself surprised as the bruised cadet held your gaze, just the way he had when his guard had been up yesterday, before you’d knocked him to the ground.

“Wasn’t the Major,” Alejandro, another of your peers, corrected Valeria. Then, you felt the energy around the tables shift and you took your eyes off the kid you’d injured and looked instead at the man speaking. “Way I heard it,” he gave you a wolf grin, lifting a cup of water towards you in a toast, “it was our Sergeant, over here.” 

Murmurs swept around you, and you did your best to hide your grimace.

“Beating up babies now, huh?” Someone jabbed. You almost struck back. He put up more of a fight than you ever have was right at the tip of your tongue. A few years ago, you would have hurled the insult with abandon. Pull the pin and toss. Now . . . well, with the shit sleep you had and the general less-than-ideal way you felt, you just went back to eating your meal. If the scop they served could be called that. 

The rest of the recruits had their fun - as much of it as could be had before they realized you weren’t giving them anything to work with. You, in the meantime, just sank back into your own spiral of thoughts. 

You shouldn’t have hit him like that. Krauser was right, you shouldn’t have been tagged in the first place, but you didn’t make things better for yourself with a cheap shot. 

You’d just felt that knife against you and . . . and then you’d fucked up. You’d brought your own shit into the fight, made it someone else’s problem. Let yourself get scared by a fucking practice knife. It was stupid. 

It was stupid, and you wanted to put it behind you.

You finished your food quickly. Wasn’t anything to savor, anyway. Then, you stood, bringing your empty tray with you as you marched towards him. He was sitting by himself, and you were grateful that no one would be directly privy to this conversation. He had stopped looking at you, but your movement drew some quick glances from him. Even in those glimpses, he met you with a sharpness. That only grew as you approached, and more of his attention turned to you. Inquisitorial came to mind, one of those damn SAT words that you remembered, god knows why. He looked like he was trying to figure you out. 

He had grit, you had to give him that. 

Made you wonder what his life was like before this. Made you wonder about a lot of things. Mostly, though, you wondered-

“What’s your name?”

He looked surprised that you were asking. His expression said 'What the hell are you doing?'

You wanted to ask yourself the same thing. 

Instead, you waited that second or two before he answered. 

“Uh, Kennedy.” 

“I know. Krauser said that yesterday. I meant your first name.” 

Another pause, and you saw the gears turning in his head. “. . . Leon.” 

You nodded. Pointed to his cheek. “Sorry about that, Leon. You got me. Shouldn’t have been such a dick about it.” 

The recruit - Leon - blinked. His blue eyes moved away from you for a moment. Considering what to say. Then, he shook his head. “No, it’s . . .” if he said fine, you already knew that it would be a lie. He’d been pissed yesterday when you did it, and you couldn’t blame him. “It’s fine.” 

There it was. Liar. A polite liar. 

“No, it’s not. I was an asshole. Shouldn’t have happened.” 

He looked at you, confused, and you understood it well enough. Then, that sharpness about him turned to something a little brighter. Cautiously optimistic. “You said it, not me.” 

“I did.” Again, you nodded. There. Apology delivered, time for you to move on. 

You made it a step before Leon spoke again. “Thank you. For the apology.” 

Oh, he was not the sort of person you would expect to be here. 

Everyone you had trained with so far had been hardened bastards, most of them old and grizzled vets or arrogant hotshots. They needed the best. People who were going to get the job done. They were here to do a job, same as you. You’d come to expect no great affection. 

Even so, looking back at Leon, you found someone who looked genuinely, truly grateful. It took no special insight to imagine why. The training for the US Strategic Command was not and never would be the hardest thing you’d done in life, but it ground you down. It was a pressure cooker, and everyone felt it every second of every day. Krauser was a good teacher, but he was the sort who would push you to your breaking point. Beat you down so you never forgot when and how you showed a weakness. He had long warned that there would be no mercy in the real world, so he trained you without it. So, you knew that when Leon looked at you like that, it was because any kindness shown here was a rarity.

“Don’t mention it,” you said back. Here, in the midst of training for the worst of scenarios, on this most shitty of days, it felt nice to be not only forgiven, but maybe even appreciated. That little feeling stopped you from leaving so quickly, and you stepped towards the recruit once more. “And also: smaller arm movements.”

“What?”

“In our fight,” you clarified, “that’s how I could tell where you were going to go. You were telegraphing everything.” 

Leon almost smiled. It looked good on him. “Krauser told me the same thing yesterday. After.” 

“Well, he’s right.” 

“I’ll keep it in mind.” 

“Good.” 

The interaction was awkward, and you, for one, never wanted to do it again. Still, that was a better feeling to focus on than the crushing guilt you’d been stuck under all morning. You readily embraced it as you went into afternoon drills, glad you could at least make good on one of your mistakes. 

As for the others . . . well, those were the ones you clung to as you and Valeria circled each other later, knives flashing in the midday sun.

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Chapter Index

[bellatrixobsessed1]

Sokkla Saturday: Jupiter - Growth

Summary: They say that she needs to change but she always seems to do it wrong.

They tell her that she has some growing to do.

They never tell her which direction she is supposed to grow in. 

She always gets it wrong too.

She picks out new hobbies.

But they are the wrong hobbies. 

She picks out new clothing.

But they are the wrong clothes.

Her new hobbies are still to scary.

She paints grim landscapes.

Her self portraits make people uncomfortable. 

They are too bloody and too depressing. 

She tries swordsmanship.

Glassblowing.

Singing.

Apparently all of her art is aggressive in every form.

They tell her that she has some growing to do.

But they never tell her which viewpoints need to evolve.

She never seems to change the right ones.

She forsakes her own values. 

Her need for perfection. 

But then they tell her that she is careless.

Her need for control.

But they tell her that she has grown detached.

She questions everything she has been taught.

That the throne is inherently hers. 

But they tell her that they are concerned for her dwindling self-esteem

That the Fire Nation is superior to the rest.

But they tell her that she has no respect for her people and country.

Apparently everything she believes is sinister or self-deprecating somehow.

They tell her that she has some growing to do. 

But they never tell her how she is supposed to grow.

She always gets it wrong. 

She can’t grow her mind in a way that they like. 

So she grows herself.

Tries to physically manifest that which she can’t achieve emotionally.

She can’t make herself taller authentically.

She puts on shoes with tall heels. 

They tell her that she is doing too much. 

That she needs to be smaller. 

She has a few extra snacks and calls for seconds after dinner.

She thinks that it makes her look more friendly and approachable. 

They tell her that she should take better care of herself. 

That she needs to be smaller. 

Apparently she is missing the point of what they meant by growth. 

But she is running out of ideas. 

They insists that she still has some growing to do.

They never clarify what they mean.

She thought that she was smarter than this. 

Sokka tells her that they don’t even know what they mean. 

That she shouldn’t grow for anyone else’s sake anyhow.

He asks her if she is happy with any of her growth.

She asks him which form of it.

“Any form.” He replies.

“No.” She answers.

“Actually, yes.” She backtracks. 

She enjoys many of her hobbies. 

She talks about them with him for hours.

He confesses that her art did scare him a little. 

But he liked it anyways. 

And it isn’t so scary now that he knows the meaning behind the paintings. 

He asks her if those heels are comfortable.

She informs him that they aren’t.

He tells her that she can take them off. 

She is happy to do so. 

He asks her if she is happy with how she looks. 

She admits that she does but only for the most part. 

He tells her that time has been very kind to her. 

That he sometimes liked to sneak glances at her when she wasn’t looking.

He asks her if she truly ascribes to her new beliefs.

She says that she enjoys pondering over new perspectives. 

And that her philosophical and intellectual interests have lead to some discoveries. 

He says that he is glad that she evolving for the right reasons.

She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that that isn’t entirely true.

He asks her if she is happy with how she has changed. 

She says that she thinks so.

Mostly. 

She doesn’t hate how she has grown. 

He says that this makes him happy because he rather likes the person she is now.

Even if she’s a little confused. 

And kind of a mess. 

He is too. 

He takes her hand in his and she feels like maybe all of this trouble has been worth it.

[nerdieforpedro]

WIP Wednesday Game

Tagged by @wannab-urs @frenchiereading @megamindsecretlair @pedroshotwifey

Thank you all tagging me 🥰 You all know I always have ideas, the problem is usually follow through. 😂 and completion.

Step one: Post snippets of the fics you're working on (can be a summary if there's no snippet)

Step two: put them in a poll and let people vote on which one you should work on, then prioritize the one with the most votes.

Step three: Ask me about my WIPs! I've got lots of lore to share + more snippets, etc.

My March Spring Prompts! I’m really enjoying doing them this month. I’ve been trying to include as many different Pedro and Oscar characters as possible with some connecting drabbles. 🥰

A sample of part two of "The Lake between Us" (Thank you all for enjoying part one, I didn't quite expect such a response for it. Should I make a tag list for it? 🤔) Ezra AU x plus size OFC - name in future parts:

Things were tenuous at first but they worked out she’s to call him ‘Uncle’ or Mr. Ezra. It worked better in social situations and she became his little ‘Birdie.’ Scaling down the jobs he took on to mitigate risk was a challenge and were worth less but he had to live not only for himself now. The pair moved around some before he enrolled her in school in Louisiana but ensured that he taught her when she came home in the evenings and on the weekends. The child hated the extra lesions, but it enabled her to be leagues ahead of her peers as far as studies went. Ezra was determined not to suffer another fool and would do what he could so that Cee wouldn’t follow in her father’s steps of idiocy. The results of his care, diligence and support was realized at both her high school graduation which he had never imagined attending anyone’s graduation except his own and to travel with his charge to see the college she’d chosen.

Nuestras canciones (Our Songs) Santiago Garcia x Amalia (plus size OFC) @reallyrallyauthor liked my Santiago spring prompt for today so I felt motivated to finally write another part to this mini-series:

Santiago saw a woman by herself lost in the music, the glow from her skin from perspiration. He didn’t see a reason why he shouldn’t make his way over to her so he did, but he waited until she opened her eyes again and was surprised by him. She laughed and apologized where he told her there was no reason to. Holding his hands out, she peered down and slid her fingers along his palms. The last song died down and the next started, it was slower, sensual, intimate. Garcia interlocked his fingers with hers as they moved back and forth, step by step. His eyes met hers, pulling one of her hands toward him and placing it on his shoulder. His palm found a place on her hip as his lips skimmed her forearm up to her shoulder, pulling her closer. They didn’t say anything as they moved in sync. Once the music ended this time, they stepped outside so they could hear each other speak. By the time they finally exchanged phone numbers, the club was emptying out and Amalia looked toward her friends as did Santiago. The pair had spoken about the dancing, club, food, drinks, if they were single, music and a few bad jokes. Well, between the both of them, quite a few bad jokes. 

My third WIP is one that I choose to blame @mysterious-moonstruck-musings since she fancies herself a sweet Dieter. So I gotta deliver because this is what she wants apparently. 🤭 I have vibes and two paragraphs at this point. Basically, you meet Dieter through one of his PA (because he's got 4 or 5 personal assistants who keeps track?) and he finds drawn to you? Was it crocs? Was it pizza? Was it a two am dance party to Paramore and Linkin Park? Maybe it was all of them or something else entirely? I'll work it out.

My last WIP is one I've been kicking around for a bit. It's a WIP I have with Marcus Pike. I've been dabbling him after a shooting or passing his firearm recertification exam and having PTSD (because I haven't tortured a Pedro character recently 👀) This one is also vibes, still working it out. I started mentioning therapy in my March prompts and it snowballed into this WIP.

This is what I have this week. Poor Javi G's outline still isn't vibing with me. I am going to figure it out though. 😭

Let me know if you have any questions about any of them. 🤗

NPT: @maggiemayhemnj @magpiepills @morallyinept @inept-the-magnificent @covetyou @chronically-ghosted @for-a-longlongtime @legendary-pink-dot @gemmahale @schnarfer @romanarose @perotovar @soft-girl-musings @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin @tinytinymenace @alltheglitterandtheroar @drawingdroid @yourcoolauntie @trulybetty @hannibals-favourite-meal @thefrogdalorian @gasolinerainbowpuddles

[xwonderfuldeath]

x \ Obsession - Chapter 4 / x

Warnings : Sexual content, alcohol !

Please, consider supporting me on Ko-Fi ! ♥

The noise surrounding him is deafening—a sweet blend of bass, good music, and pleasant moments. Bodies intertwine, voices shout to be heard. It had been a long time since he had gone out for a drink, and he couldn't deny it: it felt good.

Park Jimin, five-foot-seven, elevated by ankle boots with small heels, round cheeks giving him a babyish look, and typically Korean eyes that crinkled with every sip of his cocktail. He had arrived in this eternal furnace not long ago, unsure of where his steps would lead him. After yet another argument with his brother and parents who never took his side, he had left, determined to put an end to the situation once and for all.

Jimin was the eldest of two children. At first, his parents loved him—or at least tried to. They bought him clothes and new shoes when needed. Then his brother arrived. What a joke. No matter what happened, even with evidence in hand, his parents blamed him. A flowerpot broken by his brother? He’d receive the punishment. A lie about a missing cake? Again, his fault. Even now, at twenty-three, with a stable life, he was expected to help his brother financially so he wouldn’t lose his house.

It wasn’t his fault his brother was too dumb to fend for himself. Jimin wasn’t the solution to everything, and of course, this didn’t sit well with his parents. In the end, maybe it was partly his fault too. He had never really tried to put a definitive end to his desperate longing for loving parents.

He finished his drink with a bitter taste on his tongue. He shouldn’t be thinking about all that. After all, he had responded to a very enticing offer: an all-inclusive stay in lovely bungalows for the next two weeks, fully paid except for extras. He had jumped at the chance. Thanks to his dear little brother, he had lost his job and his small apartment. That scoundrel had lied convincingly enough to make his boss believe in an embezzlement scheme, and to repay non-existent damages, Jimin had been forced to sell his apartment. In the end, even here, they managed to ruin a moment for him.

“— Alone? May I join you?”

Jimin jumped, his eyes leaving the void they had been staring at. He gave a faint smile. The man was small, almost as short as he was, with the same typically Korean eyes, but a sly smile that Jimin half-returned. He gestured to the empty bar stool beside him, inviting the man to pull him out of his dark thoughts as the stranger ordered two new drinks. It wasn’t such a bad idea. He was only on his third drink, after all.

“— A little name I can call you? — Hmm... I don’t think so, no.”

Jimin slid against his stool, giving this man his full attention, a soft smile forming on his face. To be honest, he wasn’t unattractive. Far from it. Attractive enough to have an effect on Jimin, who let his eyes roam over pale skin and dyed hair. He didn’t feel like revealing his name. After all, he was only here for two weeks, no more. This stranger didn’t need to know his name. They’d likely never see each other again anyway.

“— Okay. So what should I call you, then? — Chim. Chim is fine. — Perfect, Chim. — And you? Do you have a name to share? — Suga.”

Jimin raised an eyebrow. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t recall where he’d heard it. It didn’t bother him for long. Their conversation was pleasant enough to send shivers down Jimin’s spine and make him laugh softly before he finally agreed to follow the stranger to his car. His parents weren’t good parents. They had never taught him not to follow strangers at night, slightly too tipsy to walk on his own.

“— New in town? I’ve never seen you before. — I’m officially on vacation. I’m not staying. — Oh, a tourist, then? — Mm-hmm.”

The purring silence of the car helped him feel more at ease as the "cat" beside him drove. He couldn’t help himself: he had spent the evening comparing the man to a feline. Suga reminded him of a big tomcat that would probably enjoy being petted. His slender fingers pressed against the surprisingly muscular thigh of the man, who swore under his breath, glancing at him briefly to ensure he didn’t hit anyone with his car.

“— What? — I didn’t think I’d bring you into my car for this sort of thing. — Then why?”

Jimin wasn’t surprised when the car swerved a little sharply, taking the exit out of the city and into a gloomy forest. His eyebrows furrowed, but he couldn’t help laughing softly. Locals said it was haunted, so seeing someone willingly go there for such activities was surprising.

“— Aren’t you afraid that malicious spirits might come and watch us? — Let them. I don’t mind being observed.”

Jimin could feel the full weight of Suga’s words pressing down on him. The man’s eyes never left him as he unbuckled his seatbelt in the heavy silence. Jimin struggled to swallow. His small nose wrinkled slightly in amusement as he accepted the unspoken invitation without hesitation. He unfastened his own seatbelt before climbing onto the lap of the man who had captivated him all evening. Jimin felt Suga’s desire, hard and pressing against him. He didn’t wait, moving his hips just to hear the man let out an animalistic growl.

“— Though I can understand. Driving in this kind of situation can’t be very comfortable. — Chim. — Hmm? — You talk too much.”

Without warning, Suga slid his hands under Jimin’s thighs, lifting him out of the car and carrying him to the trunk. Their lips collided, rough and burning, and Jimin found himself laid out against the cold, unpleasant metal. Their clothes quickly became an unbearable nuisance. Jimin had never thought that such a place—barely at the edge of a forest—could excite him this much. Suga, though wild in his movements, was surprisingly delicate in his touches, learning how to caress Jimin’s soft skin without leaving marks.

“— I hope this isn’t your first time. — Why? — I don’t like inexperienced people. It irritates me.”

Jimin rolled his eyes but held back his retort, keeping it tucked away for later. He took back control, letting his mouth explore the man’s body beneath him. Warm, smooth, with a faint taste of vanilla. His teeth sank into the flesh, leaving marks and eliciting sharp moans from Suga. A sly smile spread across Jimin’s lips.

“— And I don’t like grumpy people. That irritates me.”

Suga didn’t have time to reply. Jimin’s mouth engulfed him, drawing a raw, feline-like sound from his throat. One thing was certain: Jimin knew what he was doing. Suga’s hips tried to follow, but Jimin gave him no chance. He dominated the exchange, not even offering Suga the opportunity to voice his thoughts. And when Jimin felt the tension building within Suga, as guttural noises escaped his throat, he abruptly pulled away, leaving Suga panting, frustrated, his eyes full of desire fixed on the naked body before him, silently screaming that he wasn’t a novice.

“— I think we can both agree that was a good time. — Hmm... Not bad at all.”

This time, Jimin had no chance to respond. His face contorted in pleasure as a moan, far from masculine, escaped him. Suga’s fingers had found their place with unnerving precision, making him arch his back and release small sounds he tried in vain to suppress. When Suga’s swollen length replaced his fingers, Jimin gasped for air. It was fiery, passionate. Jimin didn’t care about scratching the pale chest beneath him, suckling on skin that tasted like heaven. And when it was all over, he was almost disappointed.

In the end, Suga dropped him off in front of his bungalow. Even though the man clearly wanted to go for another round, Jimin had been firm. It would take more than a casual hookup to earn the privilege of sharing his bed. And while it had bruised Suga’s ego, he hadn’t insisted.

The door closed behind Jimin. Too tired to turn on the light, he used his phone to guide himself to the bed. His body collapsed onto the soft mattress, and he quickly fell into a deep sleep. The shower could wait—until he had the strength and desire to get up.

[wakaposting]

500 words rq. i need them to play board games

“If I tell you, will you promise to behave?”

Yorishige nodded enthusiastically. Then, as if sensing his own over-excitement, he closed his eyes serenely. “Yes, my lord. I will control myself. So please, tell me what it is that is bothering you so.”

Tokiyuki took a deep breath, his eyebrows twitching as he crossed his arms in front of himself, clearly debating whether or not he should speak. He kicked at the floor with the toe of his sandal, and then, quietly: “I would like you… to teach me how to play igo.”

There was the briefest moment of silence between them. Then, in one instant, Tokiyuki found himself wrapped up in Yorishige’s crushing embrace, his head squished against his chest.

“Really?” Yorishige exclaimed in excitement. “I see, I see! Tokiyuki-sama, I see!”

“You said you would behave!” Tokiyuki snapped at him, using all his strength to try to push himself out of Yorishige’s eager grip. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you!”

Yorishige refused to let him go so easily. Tokiyuki snuck one leg up between them and pressed his foot against Yorishige’s chest, pushing with all his might. He finally managed to escape, the extra leverage shooting him out of Yorishige’s arms with significant momentum.

“Ah…” Yorishige clicked his tongue. “You got away. Excellent escape work as always.”

Tokiyuki shot him a glare, smoothing out his wrinkled clothes. “Hmph! I shouldn’t have even asked. I don’t know what I was thinking…!”

“Don’t be so reactionary, my lord,” Yorishige chided him, holding his arms out wide. Tokiyuki flinched back instinctively, poised to make a run for it if Yorishige tried to advance. “Of course I shall teach you. Although, I would have assumed a boy of your lineage would have been taught the game from a very young age.”

Tokiyuki turned his gaze up to the ceiling, avoiding Yorishige’s eyes. “Well,” he said, hesitating slightly. “Of course I had lessons. My father even hired a tutor for me. But lessons are not worth very much if the student refuses to go…”

“How very like you,” Yorishige said good-naturedly, but Tokiyuki huffed anyway, slightly insulted.

“Anyway,” Tokiyuki said firmly, “I’d like to learn now. And you are arguably the best one to learn from, so I had no choice but to ask you.”

Yorishige chuckled to himself. “No choice? What about your retainers? Surely they must be familiar with the game.”

“Ayako can play fairly well,” Tokiyuki admitted, “but she doesn’t care for it. I’ve tried to play with her, but she gets bored, and drags me outside instead… Fubuki’s skills are far beyond my own, and I get frustrated with him. And neither Genba nor Kojiro know anything about it…”

“What about Shizuku?” Yorishige offered.

Tokiyuki made a face, glancing off to the side as if remembering something quite unpleasant. “She cheats,” he said plainly. “Even though she is already much better than me. I caught her rearranging the moku last time we played.”

Yorishige covered his mouth with his sleeve. “...She does that to me as well,” he admitted after a moment. “Even though she almost always has the upper hand.”

[specialagentlokitty]

Thomas barrow x teen!reader - a broken promise

Part two:

You had been warned by everybody to keep Thomas at arms length, and you were doing that to everybody, especially Thomas.

You had been working for a month now, and you had done well in avoiding the man, you left as soon as he entered a room or you refused to talk to him if he spoke to you.

Walking down the stairs, you stopped when you saw Thomas and you pushed yourself against the wall, eyes glued to the floor.

“You’ve been wanted away from me.” He said.

You never replied to him.

“You know, you shouldn’t go around believing everything people tell you (Y/N).”

You stayed quiet and he stepped up a step and you did the same.

“How about we start over?”

You glanced at him and you looked away, quickly shaking your head.

You rushed down the steps and behind him to quickly get away and you stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up at them.

Thomas looked down at you.

“I just want to help you.”

You shook your head.

Thomas took a deep breath and sighed heavily.

You looked around and scurried away, and it wasn’t long until Thomas found you hiding away in the boot cupboard and he walked in, closing the door he grabbed some shoes and sat down opposite you.

You looked at the laces on the shoes you were supposed to be cleaning and you furrowed your brows a little bit.

Thomas flicked his eyes up to you.

“Just tuck them in.”

You ignored when he said and carried on staring at the shoes.

Taking them, he tucked the laces in and handed the shoes back and you looked at him briefly.

“I gather they told you horror stories about me? To stay away? Keep me at a distance?” He asked.

You set the shoe in your hand back down and nodded your head as you looked at everything laid in front of you.

Anna had explained the process of buffing Lady Mary’s shoes to you, but you still had absolutely no idea what you were doing.

Thomas set the boots he was working on aside and picked up another pair and sat back down at the table.

He set his boots on the table and he looked at you.

“You have no idea what you’re doing do you?”

You slowly shook your head.

Thomas sighed and he moved his chair around and he sat next to you, and he explained what everything was and what it was for.

“Just copy what I’m doing.”

So you did, you mirrored his movements, just like you were taught to when you were a child, how to mirror peoples actions.

And pretty quickly you got the hang of it, and you were able to finish both of them before Thomas finished the boots he was working on.

“You’re a fast learner.” He said.

You sat nothing and you set the shoes to the side and put all the things you were using away in the cabinet.

“It’s rude not to say thank you.”

You looked at Thomas and looked away.

“Thank you..” you whispered.

You went to leave and Thomas stood up, placing his hand on the door to stop you and you backed away a few steps.

“People have opinions of me, I know they do. But I should prefer it if you would build your own opinion of me (Y/N), and not let them sway your thoughts.”

You backed around the table and Thomas watched you very carefully.

“You’re scared of me.” He said.

You said nothing and that was all the confirmation Thomas needed.

He stepped away from the door.

“Go.”

He opened the door and you all but rushed past him in order to get out of the room.

Thomas sat back down, trying to figure out why you would be scared of him. He knew you were skittish around people, but you were actually scared of him.

Was it something someone told you?

He had no idea.

And he began to carefully watch you.

Watching how you would dart around not just him everybody, but you kept extra care when you had to pass him.

You only really spoke quietly to Anna and Mrs Hughes, and even then it wasn’t often, and when you weren’t needed you just vanished.

“She really is a mystery.” Mrs Patmore said.

“Who?” Mr Carson asked.

“(Y/N), I asked her if she wanted to come inside for tea but she’s just sat on a log outside.”

“Outside? Its nearly dark.” Mrs Hughes said.

“I worry that girls had a some hard upbringing.” Anna said.

Everybody looked at her.

“You’re all thinking it as well.”

Thomas listened from around the corner to what they were saying it.

“Well, I suppose she does behave rather peculiar, but is that any excuse for us to judge how she was raised?” Mr Carson asked.

“Well, no. But I do agree with Anna, (Y/N)s always so scared of everybody. Perhaps we can try work on gaining her trust?” Mr Bates asked.

They all mumbled to themselves.

“I think she’s a lovely girl.” Daisy said.

Thomas pushed himself off the wall and walked over to the door leading outside, and he stepped out, closing it behind him as he pulled out a cigarette.

Just like Mrs Patmore said, you were sat in a log on the gravel, hands cupped together as you looked into them.

Thomas lit his cigarette and you looked up at him before looking back down.

“Do you not fancy a cup of tea?” Thomas asked.

You shook your head and raised your hands a little to look at whatever you were holding and Thomas furrowed his brows.

“What do you have?”

You got up and you walked over to him with your hands cupped together, and when you were close enough you stopped and opened your hands again.

“Bee.” You said softly.

“Where on earth did you find a bee? How did you catch it?”

You cupped your hands together again.

“It’s sick…”

“How do you know?”

You shrugged a little bit and walked back over to the log and you sat back down.

Thomas took a drag of his cigarette.

“Will you kill it?” He asked.

You quickly shook your head.

“No, we don’t hurt bees..” you said softly.

You looked at Thomas before looking away.

He stomped his cigarette out and walked over, standing a few feet away from you as he looked down at you.

“What will you do with it?”

You shrugged again, and you both looked over as the door opened.

“Is Thomas bothering you?” Mrs Hughes asked.

You shook your head and looked in your hands.

“What’s that?” She asked.

“She’s somehow found a bee.” Thomas said.

“Good heavens (Y/N) you can’t go picking things like that up throw it in the grass.”

You quickly shook your head and stood up.

“She says it’s sick and she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with it.” Thomas explained.

Mrs Hughes looked at him confused and he shrugged his shoulders a little bit.

“Well, can you make it better?” Mrs Hughes asked.

You nodded your head.

“How?”

“Put some sugar in water..”

Thomas and Mrs Hughes shared another look.

“Thomas go tell Mrs Patmore to make you a cup of sugar water and bring it out with a spoon.”

“What do I tell her?”

“Just tell her it’s for (Y/N).”

Thomas walked away and Mrs Hughes walked over, standing next to you, and you stood up, showing her the bee and she stepped away.

“I don’t like bees very much.”

You nodded your head and pulled it away.

“Do you like bees?”

“I like animals..”

“I see, do you have a favourite animal?”

Mrs Hughes wondered if this was a chance they could use to get to know you a little better.

You glanced at her then back to your new friend, and you shook your head a little bit.

Thomas came back out and you sat down, holding the bee in one hand, you set the cup on the ground and put some of the water on a spoon, and set it on the ground, setting the bee on it.

You watched it in fascination, carefully watching it, and a few others came out to see what was going on, all of them water the little bee.

After a few minutes, you picked up the bee and set the spoon in the cup, and you walked over to some plants, setting the bee on a leaf.

“Bye bee…” you whispered.

You wondered back over to the log and you picked up the cup, holding it carefully.

“What happens now?” Thomas asked.

“He rests, then flies away…”

“And it’ll work?” Daisy asked.

You nodded your head and she smiled brightly.

“Wow, do you know a lot about animals?”

You shrugged a little bit and looked around.

Without another word you wondered back inside and Mrs Hughes sighed softly.

“Well, that was something.” She said.

“She’s got a passion, you can’t fault her for that.” Anna said.

Everybody went inside and like always you were gone, the cup and spoon had been washed and you had vanished somewhere.

The next morning you were sitting at the table waiting for breakfast and Thomas sat next to you, and you moved chairs.

“How do you know that sugar water would help?” He asked.

You sat nothing, and you stared at the piano in the corner of the room, so Thomas looked as well.

“Can you play piano?”

You shook your head.

“Do you know what a piano is?”

“Don’t be rude Thomas.” Daisy said.

She set your tea in front of you and smiled at you, and you whispered a small thank you.

“I’m not, I’m just curious.”

Daisy turned to you.

“Have you seen a piano before?”

You shook your head and you got up, walking over to it as you inspected it carefully.

“You just press the keys down, like this.”

Daisy pressed a key down, and you jumped at the noise, shaking your head a little to try and rid of the sheer loudness of it.

“Oh I’m sorry!” Daisy panicked.

You shook your head, rubbing your ears with your hands as you backed away from the piano.

“(Y/N)?” Daisy asked.

“Daisy give her a minute.” Thomas said.

They both watched you, and you removed your hands from your ears, and you walked back over to your chair and sat down.

“Not a fan of music then?”

You didn’t reply to Thomas and he frowned a little bit.

You sipped at your tea and you rubbed one of your ears again.

Thomas watched you carefully, and you finally stopped, and you sipped your tea again.

Thomas said nothing and he went back to reading the paper again, and you just sat there in your own little world.

“Her ladyship is asking for (Y/N), and Thomas you’re needed in the drawing room as well.” Mrs Hughes said.

You got up to follow Mrs Hughes, heard racing in your chest.

You had been here for a month now, and you had yet to meet the family, and you were incredibly nervous about doing so.

Thomas walked next to you and he looked at you.

“Look them in the eye, and address them as my Lord and my lady..” he whispered.

You nodded your head and followed them both into the room, looked around at the two people inside.

“Ah, Thomas, Mr Carson has things to do so you can serve the tea.”

Mrs Hughes led you over to a woman and you looked at her.

“Hello my lady..” you whispered.

“I’ve heard you are quite the bee catcher.” Lady Cora said.

You nodded your head.

“There’s one by the window, and we can’t see to be rid of it, could you help?” Lord Grantham asked.

“Yes my lord.”

You walked over to the window he showed you too and you looked over it, listening and you heard the buzzing a few windows away so you walked over.

Reaching your hand out, you held it up and wait for the been to crawl onto your hand, and you brought it back down, covering it with your other hand.

“Wow, and you can do it that easily?” Lord Grantham asked you.

“Yes my lord.”

“Well, thank you.”

You nodded your head and rushed away to release the creature, and Thomas watched you in curiosity.

Not everybody would just walk up to a bug and happily touch it, and not everybody seemed so passionate about them either but you did.

And it gave him a little more insight on you, and a new possible way for him to get you to interact with him, so he added it to the list of strange things about you he was making in his head.

He wasn’t quite sure what he was searching for at the moment, but he was sure that all of these strange behaviours you had were linked by the same thing.

That evening when he went outside to smoke he found you sat in the same place as last night.

“Another bee?” He asked.

You shook your head and looked at him.

You got up and walked over to him, holding something else in your hands this time, and he recognised it as a deck of playing cards.

“Do you want to play a game?”

“A game?..”

Thomas reached out and you flinched back, and he raised his hands.

“Alright, alright. Have you played card games before?”

You shook your head.

“Where’d you find them?”

“Mine…”

“I see, okay. Well, how about I teach you an easy game?”

You titled your head at him a little in interest, and Thomas realised that was his way in. Your curiosity about things, if he could teach you about things you didn’t know, he could hopefully get to know about you and who you actually were.

You quickly shook your head and held the cards to his chest.

“Okay. If you change your mind I’ll teach you one.”

You nodded and sat back on the log looking at the playing cards in your hand, and Thomas sighed to himself.

There was something definitely off about you, and it seemed so familiar, like he’d heard it or read about it somewhere but he wasn’t sure what it was, and he wanted to know

[hannahssimblr]

Chapter Eighteen

Back in Clontarf, I perch at the gleaming, marble island while Jude prepares dinner. I watch him doing it with undisguised interest, because he cooks the way that I imagine he makes art, fully absorbed, with precision and confidence, and completely and utterly in the flow of his own enjoyment. He connects his iPhone to a Bluetooth speaker and plays music for a while, until Ivy bursts in and complains that she can’t focus on her homework with all of the noise.

He switches it off for her, but even in the silence he moves around to the beat of the music in his head, with a smile on his face that only endures the more stupid questions I ask him about what he’s doing. He’s making a spice mix in a pestle and mortar, he’s coating the fillets in flour, that’s actually rose water, not vanilla, yes, he taught himself how to do this, those flowers are actually totally edible, they’re not just there to look good, so a shallot is actually stronger than an onion, that’s why he’s using it. He prepared a lot of it earlier, marinating fresh fish in harissa for hours, and par boiling the potatoes so that they’d be oven ready by the time we got home from visiting Jen, and when I ask him where he found the time to do all of this he explains that he was simply procrastinating, because he doesn’t want to write his thesis. 

We eat at the dining table with Ivy, who shovels the food into her mouth in the span of about five minutes despite her complaints about it tasting bad, and gives a series of very bored, one word answers to his questions about school in between mouthfuls. He reminds her that she should practise for her piano lesson tomorrow and tells her that he can’t collect her from afterschool hockey so she’ll have to get the bus. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the most un-sibling like relationship I’ve ever witnessed. Perhaps it’s a symptom of their age gap. 

“Where’re your parents tonight?” I query once Ivy rushes off to her bedroom to reconvene whatever teen girl things were interrupted by dinner, and he looks down at his plate. “Working late again.”

“Seems like they really like to work.”

“They sure do. Or they really like not having to be in this house.”

He’s said things like this to me before, these kind of vaguely troubling statements about his parents in very casual, matter of fact ways, as though they’re entirely absent and have no love for each other whatsoever, and this is something he finds normal. I’ve never asked him about it before, and something I’ve never quite been able to handle the idea of broaching, but now, since we’re… kind of, sort of going out with each other it suddenly feels important to know whether his expectations for his own relationships are different to his parents’ strange marriage.  

“What is it about them?”

“We don’t have to discuss these grim things about my family, it’s alright.”

“We don’t have to, but I think I’d like to know about it.”

He pushes his food thoughtfully around his plate. “They just shouldn’t have gotten married, I suppose. I think they meant well initially but it’s ultimately done more damage than good.” He glances towards the closed door and up towards the ceiling, where his sister is, and lowers his voice a little bit. “I think they’ll probably get a divorce as soon as Ivy finishes school.”

“Oh.”

“I’m the reason they’re married, and she’s the reason they’re still together. They had this amazing idea at one point that having another child would solve all of their issues, but now they’ve just trapped themselves in a bind for an extra nine years. They could be blissfully divorced by now, but they won’t do it until she’s moved out, because they don’t want to disrupt her schooling.” 

“How old were they when you were born?”

“Nineteen and twenty one.” 

“Oh, God.”

“Yep, big mistake. Whoops.” he tosses a chunk of potato into his mouth and leans back in his chair. “Mom finished school and went to stay with her aunt in America, took up a job at a department store in Albuquerque, hooked up with a med student at a bar on her first month there, and well…” He throws up his hands in mock celebration. “Here I am!”

“I suppose that being unmarried with a child wasn’t really an option for your mother at the time.” 

“No, not at all, I mean, she had come from catholic Ireland. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to live at home again unless she married the man from that bar.” The way he speaks about his father is strange, as though despite his presence in their lives, he’s still some random, nameless med student from San Bernardino. 

“And then what?” 

“Well, then my dad continued school, and my mom began her studies and my great aunt took care of me on and off until my dad got his doctorate degree. Then they had Ivy, on purpose, by the way, and when she was a baby we moved back here.” He shrugs. “That’s all.”

I breathe out a laugh. “You’re so cagey.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah it’s like you don’t want to talk about them, or your home life, like, ever.”

He doesn’t look like he’s all that bothered by my interrogation, he just gives me this self-effacing little smile. “Come on, Evie. It’s because this stuff is boring.” 

“I don’t think it’s boring at all.” 

“Well, okay. They didn’t want to be together, they shouldn’t have had kids, and they act like they never did because they barely parented either one of us. Has anyone ever told you that you’re bad at letting things drop?”

“Yeah, loads. Has anyone ever told you that you’re bad at talking about serious things?”

“Of course.” The corner of his mouth quirks up and he lifts my arm from the table to kiss the inner part of my wrist. “Has anyone ever told you how pretty you are?”

“Yes, you. Tell me what it was like for you when you were growing up.” 

“I’ve told you loads about my childhood already though.” 

“Yeah, you have, and I loved hearing about how badly behaved you were and what it felt like to live in America, but I wish you’d get into the guts of it, the real stuff.”

“The real stuff?”

“The stuff that makes you so clearly sad. You get that look on your face whenever it comes up.”

He hasn’t let go of my wrist, and now his thumb is gently stroking the skin that he kissed a moment before while he stares out into the garden through streak-free glass patio doors, and he chews on his lip before deciding to speak. “Well, when Ivy was born I stopped being a kid, I suppose. My parents didn’t have a lot of interest in caring for either of us, and I was lucky, because my great aunt in Albuquerque did all of that for them when I was little, but when we moved here the support system really fell away. Nobody had considered that. We have my mom’s parents, but they’re about as warm as she is, and even though we’d be dumped over to theirs at the weekends, it wasn’t like we had especially fun or memorable times. Usually we’d get some bucket of crap toys from the seventies and whatever was on the three TV channels that they had. They were okay, but Ivy was a really nervous toddler. She didn’t like being around unfamiliar people, to the point that our grandmother would have to roll her bottles down the hallway to where she was hiding at the bottom of the stairs so that she’d drink anything at all. She just screamed whenever either of our grandparents came near her. It just wasn’t working out, so we eventually stopped having to go, and by then, when I was like eleven, it just made sense that I’d look after her instead.”

“What did that involve?”

“Everything. Feeding her, dressing her, putting her to bed, shopping for food, toys, eventually bringing her to the creche. She used to go to the childminders while I was at school, but only until I finished at three or four o’clock, and then I’d swing by and get her. A child collecting another child, like, I don’t know if they’d let that kind of thing happen anymore, but it was a small family run childminders, the kind of lawless place where they have this one old granny looking after about twelve children in her house and everything and anything goes. My mom used to come home and cook dinner for a while, but she was delighted when I got old enough to do that for her too. It meant she could stay out of the house for longer and do whatever she used to do. Have affairs or whatever.” He huffs out a laugh. “I mean, I really don’t know if that was ever the case but I wouldn’t be that surprised. Everything got really confined because of Ivy, you know? I always had to be home, and helping, and collecting and living my life on this schedule while all the other teenagers were just being blissfully selfish and… just teenagers.”

“But you had time to yourself, surely?”

“Yeah, at night when my parents were finally home from work, but I mean, yeah, it wasn’t about not having time to do hobbies or hang out with my friends, it was about having to do it at all. It was about having to consider those things. Nobody should have to parent their siblings, it was really stifling and really unfair. If my parents wanted another child then they should have been prepared to take care of her. You can’t just offload that responsibility onto the older child. I resented it, and I still do.”

I spear my fingers into the side of his hair and run my hand down the back of his head. “That’s why you went to Berlin.” 

“I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“You shouldn’t have ever had to.”

“Right.” He hesitates and his teeth rake over his lower lip, pulling the skin until it’s taut and white. “I just feel like going to Berlin was the most selfish thing I could have possibly done though.”

“No way.” I say. “It forced your parents to do what they should have been doing all along, and look after your sister.” 

“Yeah but it didn’t really do that. I look at Ivy now, and she’s doing a lot of those things I used to do for her all on her own. My parents never stepped up like I hoped they would, so she’s just becoming another teenager with too many responsibilities, and parents that will divorce as soon as they can and leave her without a solid base to come home to when she’s in college. And then, you know, on the other hand I think about Jen, and how bad everything has become for her and I know that if I’d stayed, and if I’d been here for her then maybe I could have-”

“It’s no use thinking that, Jude. You had to be on your own for once. You can’t hold up the whole world on your shoulders.”

“I’m selfish.” His voice is acidic, and the moment I feel his fingers loosen on me I grab a hold of his sleeve, because all of a sudden it feels vitally important to keep a connection between us.

“You didn’t get a proper childhood. I’d be even more selfish if I were you. You need to be doing the things that you want to do, seeing the world, partying with your friends, all of that stuff that you’ve been doing for the last four years. It’s all food for your soul.” 

“You’re too forgiving of me. It’s okay to say that I’ve been generally inconsiderate.”

“You’re way too hard on yourself.” I say quietly. “And you know that’s not true. You’re a good person, and you were always so nice to me, even when I was quiet and shy. You made an effort to talk to me at that time that Jen invited me to that modern art exhibition in Dublin, and you made me feel so included and asked so many questions about me even though I felt so nervous around you both.”

“I feel like that’s the least anyone could have done.” He says sulkily, as though he doesn’t really feel like being talked out of his mood. “The more I dwell on it the more I think there is something seriously wrong with me. Something that should have been figured out a lot earlier, but like, here I am, a twenty two year old, in the final months of my final year at college and I feel a bit… I dunno, lost, or something. I’m floundering, and I don’t really know who I am anymore. I swore I had it figured out at eighteen but now that seems laughable to me.”

“Nobody tells you how weird it is to be in your twenties.” I declare. “They insist that it’s amazing and fun and you’ll have all of this independence, but actually it feels strange and vulnerable, and there’s no rule book about how to navigate your way through it. One day you’re a stupid teenager and the next you live on your own and you have to know how to use the city bus and remember the pin of a debit card.”

“Yeah.” 

“It’s alright that you find it hard, is all I’m saying, and I for one, feel like I truly knew nothing about being an adult. To be honest sometimes I get a bit freaked out by how lost I feel. But then I try not to think about it, and I just go on with my day.”

“That’s your advice?” He says, with the hint of a smile threatening to crack through the gloom. “Just don’t think about it?”

“Probably shouldn’t be, should it?”

“I think that’s terrible advice, Evie.”

“Well that’s all I have for you.”

He leans into me and lightly kisses my jaw before going back to his food, and the featherlight touch of his lips sends shivers right down to my toes. “Well I think we should think about hard things.” He says. “I think that ignoring them only gives them more power, actually.”

“Maybe some things aren’t meant to be processed now. They’re meant for later.”

“How much later?”

“I don’t know. Just later.” I push the last of my dinner onto my fork and into my mouth and try not to feel self-conscious about the fact that he’s watching me like I’m under a spotlight. 

“I just want you to know that if you ever wanted to talk to me about any of the things that happened you in first year then-”

My chair makes a hideous scraping noise against the parquet floor. “Do you have any pictures of you when you were small?” I say, wiping my hands on the thighs of my jeans, and he blinks. “Um. Why?”

“Just when we were talking about your childhood, like,” I stack his empty plate on top of mine. “I was wondering to myself what you might have looked like as a little boy. That’s all.”

“There are some, somewhere yeah. I can root them out if you want.”

“I’d love that, would you mind?” I hastily pack things away in the dishwasher, and I put the plates in crookedly, and I can’t find where the cutlery goes, and Jude is there, and he takes the forks out of my hands and gingerly places them into the sink. 

“It’s fine. Leave it.” He says. “Come into the living room, I’ll get the baby photos out.”

Beginning // Prev // Next

[somethin-nice-abt-everymon]

Now for the champion of the kanto Johto area or Lance

For this one given it’s the last of Kanto I’m going to go extra :3

I like his gen 4 design the most tbh tbh

Dad figure 2 (you’ll see dad figure 1 later)

I find Lance really silly

And he’s adopted Silver in my mind bc the kid deserves better

Tbh he’s a comfort character for me given I relate to Silver

I love including him in aus tbh tbh!

Ok now how he interacts with the other elite four members

Starting with Lorelei who he got Dragonite plushes from and he keeps those plushies on a shelf in his living room (they have gotten scratched up with time but he’s can sew so fixes them but one has a star patterned orange patch given Silver’s Sneasel scratched at it so it needed major repairs and was missing a decent spot on its back) (Lance actually taught Silver how to sew while fixing it up)

Next is Will who Lance usually let’s complain about the stolen lunches issue but in all honesty he’s not getting too involved because this more seems like a Will and Karen being friends issue not a workplace issue but he’s told Karen off at least once or twice

Karen is next and she’s usually nice to Lance but they are kind of just coworkers

Bruno is nice but coworkers

Agatha is also nice and Lance really respects her in all honesty

Koga is also nice and him and Lance talk about their kids together happily often

Now MCs

He interacts with Red for around 2 hours of time that they’ve fully been interacting (battling, Red giving champion to him after a few months bc the work of being a champion was a lot) but Lance feels the kid has potential to be the strongest trainer ever possibly

Blue was a simple Blue win but Lance has respect for the kid and Agatha seemed to have a bigger reaction then him to Blue

He’s not met Green

I haven’t read kanto pokespe so I don’t know abt Yellow

Gold also had potential but also handed Lance the role of champion back after less then a week

Silver is Lance’s kiddo and Lance is trying to help Silver through his trauma and be a good dad figure for the kid (I’ll probably talk abt this more when I get to Silver :3)

Now how about other champions?

Starting with Steven who Lance usually lowers his voice around given he understands Steven is autistic and Lance doesn’t want any chance of overwhelming him

Lance has interacted with Wallace a few times but not enough to exactly be friends but Wallace did ask him “Shouldn’t Dratini be a water type it lives in water after all?” and Lance has thought about that ever since

Lance doesn’t talk to Cynthia much

Lance and Alder are buds 100% especially when Alder thinks about adopting N and Lance is just like “Of course you should! Kids of evil team leaders need guidance the most” and now they talk about it together

He doesn’t interact with Diantha much

He’s battled Leon a couple times but they aren’t really friends exactly?

He’s probably no longer champion once Geeta is champion of Paldea logically but they’d get along tbh

Now for a surprise all of his gym leaders and how he interacts with them!

Brock is first and Brock hasn’t interacted with Lance much but Lance has pet Brock’s onix

Lance also hasn’t talked to Misty much but he did ruffle her hair once (Misty stared at him afterwards)

Surge and Lance have interacted a couple times and they vibe

Lance actually always asks Erika how Celadon is doing and sometimes stares at her disappointed when she’s gossiping (Erika usually stops gossiping till he leaves then the drama is back on!)

I’m putting Janine here and Lance always tells her she did a great job when she brings snacks to the league building

Sabrina and Lance are coworkers and don’t interact much

Blaine has given Lance a few quizzes and Lance went along with them

Lance hates Giovanni with every bone in his body

Falkner is chill but they don’t interact much

Buggy has had the hair ruffleddddd (Bugsy actually giggled especially because at least one twig fell out of his hair)

Whitney scares even Lance slightly given if fairy types existed in gen 2 she’d be a fairy type trainer but Lance also checks in with her bc she’s like 16 and the rest of her family moved to Hoenn

Morty and Lance have talked a few times but not too often

Lance once had to referee Chuck and Bruno having a actual fight and Lance just sighed

Jasmine is really chill but they don’t talk much especially because something feels weird about Jasmine and non human but Lance can’t put his finger on it……something feels out of place with her (she’s a alien in my mind btw or a Owlrian in particular)

Pryce and Lance chill but Lance tries to not disturb him too much

Lance and Claire are siblings and no one can change my mind tbh tbh

Now just others of the same type specialty of dragon

Drake and Lance get along quite well but just don’t talk much weirdly?

Drayden is a another case of getting along but not talking much

He’s not interacted with Iris before

If he could pick one dragon trainer to talk to and only them it would be Drasna given if you aren’t going to battle her she is so nice!

Zinnia has actually met Lance and bit him before scurrying off and he was so confused

Ryuki has not met him

Raihan is too much of a fan to approach

Lance really enjoys any time him and Hassel interact tbh given Hassel is really nice

That’s all I hope y’all enjoyed Kanto given Johto is up :3

[littledraga]

Fairy Hunting

Baby Tiffany getting a rare free day and going exploring!

It was finally warm enough to go exploring again after a long and cold winter. The first flowers were blooming in the bright sun as a little Tiffany hiked through the trees. Even at all of seven, it was rare for her to have so much time to herself to go exploring. And she wasn’t about to let it go to waste!

All winter Grandpa had told her stories about the fairies in the woods, and she wanted to see them for herself! She knew about the dangerous creatures in the mountains that protected her village. But it wasn’t often she could hear stories about creatures who only wanted to play and have fun!

With a small wooden box under her arm, she excitedly ran off the beaten path to look for the best spot to see a fairy. The fairy hunting box would help her, just like Grandpa told her when he had shown her. She just needed a good spot.

One hour turned to two, then three. By now, Tiffany was in a place she’d never been before. Something she would normally think was exciting, but the trees were so dense she wasn’t sure which way was which anymore. Sitting down on a fallen tree, she set the fairy box down to have a think and figure out how to get home. Though she most definitely didn’t cry. She didn’t sob and scrub her face on her sweater, afraid she wouldn’t find her way back. No, not at all.

And it was while she was certainly not crying that someone noticed her. Someone who’d never seen a child out this way before. And for good reason.

“Children shouldn’t be here, you know,” said a small voice that made Tiffany jump.

Snapping her head up, Tiffany looked around. But she couldn’t see anyone. Something that made her very afraid. So she did as she was always taught when something was amiss. Keep her eyes open and her mouth shut.

“It’s dangerous here. You should go home,” said the voice again. Concerned this time. And closer.

Tiffany tried to pinpoint the voice, looking around and behind her. But still, no one was there. It was rather strange, she thought to herself as she turned around to sit properly again. Only to have a green light glowing in her face.

She let out a high pitched scream and fell back onto the grass and dirt with a thump and a whimper. If they were that close, she was in trouble.

But instead came laughter. Looking up from where she was sprawled in the dirt, Tiffany watched as the tiniest man she had ever seen walked to the edge of the log, surrounded by a green light that seemed to pulse from wings tucked neatly on his back. He laughed as he watched her, hands on his hips.

“Jumpy little thing, ain’tcha?” He teased as Tiffany fumbled back onto her feet. His hair was green as the light around him. Floating up from the wood, he got closer again.

“Ya heard me, didn’t ya?” He asked and flew around her head, making her spin in a circle and giggled when she did.

“I-I did,” she admitted sheepishly. “But I don’t know where here is to leave.”

The little man crossed his arms and sighed. “A bit old ta be gettin’ lost in the woods, aintcha? Kids your size normally know where you’re goin’. Or at least not ta come out this way.”

“I’m only seven!” Yelled Tiffany, her little hands on her hips. “Northsmen are just tall! Not my fault everyone else is short,” she mumbled as her shoulders slumped. It was hard, being a little girl who could only afford boys hand me downs and was already taller than the boys her age.

“A Northsman, huh? I ain’t ever heard of that. You some type of giant? I’ve met those before!” Spinning around Tiffany again, he flew up high and into the branches above her.

“Had to fly this high just so he’d hear me! You gonna be that tall?”

“No!” She giggled as he came back down to spin around her before lounging on the log.

“Northsmen are humans! We just grow extra tall where we come from. Wherever that is.” Her father rarely talked about where he was from after all. No matter how much she begged. He’d just huff and walk away.

“Humans are weird!” He laughed.

“Fairies never get big. Means we can nap anywhere we like. And I can always have the best hiding spot in hide and seek!”

Tiffany gasped and jumped on her feet.

“You’re a fairy!” she shouted.

“A real life fairy, right?” After bringing the fairy hunting kit this far and she didn’t even need it!

Said fairy watched her a moment before falling back in a fit of laughter.

“I am. What did you think I was? I fly?”

“I’ve never seen a fairy! I came out to see one because I’ve never seen one. Grandpa told me lots of stories all winter about fairies and their games. So I wanted to see for myself. So I borrowed his fairy hunting box so I could find you! Well, a fairy anyway.”

While she continued to ramble and rattle away about stories, and something about running into a frong. Or probably a frog. The fairy sat and watched her with a grin. This was why most fairies like children. Who else enjoyed things as much as a child?

“Sounds like you’ve had an adventure! And I’d know, I’ve been on a few myself, you know,” he told her as he moved to sit on her shoulder.

“Lots and lots of them! I could tell you some while we get you home?” He offered.

Tiffany beamed at the offer. Meeting a fairy and getting to hear their stories? It was better than a Giving! She nodded her head so hard her body moved with her. Causing her new friend to yelp and tumble. Luckily, his wings caught him.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to!”

Instead of being upset, the fairy laughed as he righted himself.

“Alright, alright. I’ll fly on my own then!” He teased.

“Now, where is home for my tiny giant friend, hm? Which set of humans do you belong to?”

It took Tiffany a few seconds to understand, but when she did she made to point. Pausing only once she remembered she didn’t know the way.

“I’m in Kingspool. The village on the cape. I live up on the cliff.”

“All the way down there?” The fairy whistled. Long walk for a little human.

“We’d better hurry if you want to be home for supper, my tiny giant! But lucky you, I know the way. I’ve fought off a few of your cats,” he laughed as they started back down the mountain and to a path to take his new friend home.

"The cats are mean," she agreed while they walked. She never had much luck with the cats in Kingspool. The ones by the docks were the worst!

"They are!" Laughed the fairy flying just a little ahead to mimic swatting them. "There was a tabby that chased down rabbits day and night!" He complained.

"Couldn't have that. Fat cat ate plenty without being a big bully! Took a while to chase him off. Broke my wing too! I thought I was done for," he whined, sinking a little as he flew.

Tiffany covered her mouth and gasped.

"Oh no! That must have been scary! Our cats get big! Was he going to eat you too?" Adjusting the fairy box, she kept pace with her new friend as he flew a bit ahead to show the way.

"Probably. But luckily for me. I'm smarter than a little bunny," he giggled and spun around.

As Tiffany walked behind the fairy, she leaned closer, excited to hear more. A fairy with stories! What could be better than that? She almost hoped she wouldn’t make it home in time for supper. This was better than anything her mother could make.

“What did you do? Oh, you didn’t hurt them too bad, did you?” Even if they chased her relentlessly, she would feel bad if something bad happened to them.

The fairy laughed hard. His head tilted back so far that he ended up flipping back having to steady himself with a few hard flaps of his glowing wings. Human children were some of the most curious creatures and excitable.

“He was alright. Mostly. A couple cuts and scrapes, nothing his humans couldn’t help him with. Managed to get him to run off. And straight into a rose bush!” He laughed again, holding his sides.

Which made Tiffany laugh too! She supposed that wasn’t so bad. She’d fallen in them too. It hurt, but nothing bad ever happened to her! The worst part was the scolding she got for ripping a new shirt.

“I’m glad he stopped being a bully! No one should be that mean! But how did you scare him into the bush if he broke your wings?”

He gave the little girl a smug look before turning to float upside down.

“Cats are stupid,” he explained simply. When that wasn’t enough, he kicked his feet to get upright again. Clearly, a fairy who enjoyed a good story. Or, at least, a chance to brag.

“When he wasn’t paying attention, I threw pebbles at his tail. Huge fluffy thing it was!” He spread his arms wide.

“And when he turned to look at what got his tail, I threw one on his whiskers. Back and forth and over again! Until the stupid cat spun himself silly!”He giggled again at that, spinning around like he was chasing his own wings.

“Then with a loud hiss, he ran off straight into the thorn bush! Dumb cat stayed inside for a week!”Smacking his hands together, he mimicked the cat with a laugh.

Picturing a cat running in circles, little Tiffany couldn’t help but loudly laugh as well. What a silly sight it must have been! She wished she could have seen it for real.

“That’s really smart!” She praised, laughing more when he puffed out his chest with pride. Fairies were better than the stories. Tiffany almost didn’t want to go home, even as she followed him down a barely used path.

“One of the smartest! And the toughest!” He told her, playfully flexing his arms while he guided her on, careful of anything else in the mountains that would want to hurt a little girl. While fairies weren’t the only things among the trees that liked children, it wasn’t for the same reasons.

“Do you have any other fun stories?” She begged as she jumped on a log and walked down it with her arms outstretched.

“Lots!” He chirped as he playfully ducked and weaved between low branches.

“I could tell you about when I fought off a Treewalker!” The fairy stopped at that and seemed to think for a moment.

“Maybe not. You might be a little young for that story. It’s scary.” Tapping his lip, the fairy hummed, before grinning rather slyly at his tiny giant.

Jumping off the long, she hurried to the fairy. Hands on her hips, she leaned forward a little.

“I’m brave! I’m going to be the guardian of Kingspool when I grow up! Grandpa already taught me lots! I can scare off the banshees! And I know when a shadow isn’t a shadow, or or,” she explained how to protect someone from some of the less scary creatures that lived around.

Something the fairy was quite impressed by as he listened, floating backward as she talked. Most adults didn’t know how to take such good care of themselves! What a smart little girl he’d found. He was surprised she was as lost as she was.

The fairy listened until he bumped into a tree from not paying attention. Laughing, he rubbed his head.

“Aren’t you a smart little giant!” He praised with a laugh. Briefly, he wondered if she needed his help. But either way, he was having far too much fun.

“I guess if you’re that brave, I’ll tell you the story of when I stopped a Treewalker that tried to gobble up my friends and chase us away from home.”

That made her stop in her tracks, bright green eyes wide and her little mouth hanging open.

“You stopped a Treewalker?!” She squeaked. Those were too dangerous for the adults!

“Grandpa says they’re super dangerous, and I should run away if I see one. They trick you, making you think they’re just another tree with vines hanging off it.”

The fairy nodded his head as he flew a bit to try to get her walking again.

“He’s right! They’ll eat anyone they can fit between their teeth.” He held his hands up and mimicked eating with his teeth bared. Not even the animals were that dangerous.

“They’re very tough! Their skin is like tree bark. Makes them very hard to fight,” he explained.

Which had Tiffany rushing to catch up. She needed to know! How did someone so small beat something even the adults were afraid of?

“What did you do? Did you use fairy magic on him?”

“Couldn’t! That doesn’t work on, well, most things ‘cept animals and humans,” he admitted with a laugh. Clearing his throat when she frowned.

“I had to fight him off by myself! With thorn daggers and thistle arrows!” Pulling out said daggers, he spun them in his hands and did a quick trick of tossing them up and catching them.

“Tougher than the stuff you find on a bush, but still not very strong against a Treewalker when he’s hungry. But I wasn’t going to let him eat any of my friends!” He explained, swooping low and back up again.

“I stabbed at his fingers and wrists to make him drop my friends, but it wasn’t enough. He was stubborn! No matter how many times I hit him, he just didn’t care. I thought we were done for!”

“Oh no!” Gasped Tiffany, covering her mouth. Treewalkers never stopped until they were full. Though she’d never heard of them ever being full, just always starving.

“What did you do? Did he eat everyone?” She worried and bounced from foot to foot, even as she tried to keep up. The fairies had to be okay! They had to. Otherwise, that wouldn’t be fair. And to a seven year old, fairness was still very important.

“Nah! Fairies are known for being clever, you know.” He pretended to knock back an arrow and winked.

“When I knew I couldn’t stop him from eating my friends, I did the only thing I could do! I shot him in the eyes. One right after the other!” Pretending to let go of the imaginary arrows, he raised his hands triumphantly.

“Then! When he was yelling and scratching at his eyes, I threw a dagger in his mouth!”

Wide eyed, Tiffany jumped. They were so small. How could something so small stop something as big as a tree?

“Was it enough? Did you scare him off?”

At first, he just beamed before he nodded.

“It worked! When he couldn’t open his eyes he got really mad and started to swing his fists like mad! But I dodged him easy. When I threw the dagger, he decided we were too much work and bumped around and away!”

Tiffany cheered loudly, throwing a fist into the air. Happy endings were her favourite.

“You’re amazing! Grandpa was right. Fairies are wonderful,” she praised.

“Thank you! It’s always good to know someone still likes us,” he told her, coming to a stop.

“Maybe if I see you again, I can tell you more stories,” he offered before waving a hand.

They were in a familiar spot. The trees faded away, and in the distance was a small house on a cliff with a tin roof and smoke curling out of the chimney.

Tiffany stood in awe. Looking over her shoulder, she spun around, trying to make sense of everything. They hadn’t walked that long, surely? Had she gotten so turned around that she hadn’t actually gone far?

Watching her, the fairy giggled.

“Your grandpa should have told you stories about fairy rings. And that you should never walk into one,” he warned with a serious look but smiled quickly.

“Sometimes we don’t let you go. Things are different on this side.”

For the first time since she was found, Tiffany looked afraid. Grandpa had warned her about fairy rings! But she never noticed. Did that mean she was trapped?

Though her new friend only let her worry for a moment.

“Don’t worry, I don’t like keeping people. Most the time. Just keep walking straight ahead, and you’ll make it home.”

When she didn’t move at first, the fairy sighed and crossed his arms. It really was only right to not trust a fairy, he supposed. Especially when he’d already tricked her once. For her own good or not.

“Go on. I’ll stay right here until you get inside and see your parents,” he promised.

He wouldn’t lie, right? But if she left, there would be no more stories. Would she ever get to meet a fairy again?

“Are you going to go far away when you go away?” She asked, fidgeting with her hands.

A small hum and the fairy sunk down to sit on her shoulder again.

“Far away for me, and far away for you aren’t the same thing,” he explained. Things were very different for fairies than they were for humans after all.

“But you better not get lost again,” he teased, grinning wide when she giggled.

“Be careful out there, and I bet I’ll see you again if you go hunting for fairies.” A playful nudge, and he shooed her off.

“Thank you for taking me home! I hope you have lots of fun adventures!” She called as she ran to her little house where dinner was being made still.

Once she made it inside, she didn’t even say hello before she looked out the window.

Just like he said, there was a little green light at the edge of the trees. A little bounce, and it darted away as her grandfather stepped over to put a hand on her head.

“Did you make a friend out there today?”

“Yeah! I met the best fairy!” She giggled as she sat at the table for dinner. The very best fairy indeed. With stories she would keep forever. Tiffany would never stop keeping an eye out for a little green light.

Even when she grew too old to play with fairies and the expectations of the village bore heavy on her shoulders, Tiffany always watched for little green fairy lights.

[straveltoriesblogs]

Solace at hill, under the Moonlight

Hello,

Nice to meet you all. It’s been a long time coming. I have been procrastinating from past year. Something we shouldn’t be proud of and I’m not either but that’s how I found the courage to take the first step and let the rest fall in time.

My first solo trip. A trip for which all the arrangements were made at the very last moment, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that it was in my mind long before I started talking about it.

A Solo trip, like everyone else I am hoping to find myself and have a better answer for WHO I AM which includes more than my profession. Well, that’s what I thought before going on one and seeing multiple videos about it. I got the idea of going on this trip from my mom. She is the one who bought a trekking bag for me. The moment I saw the bag a scene from “Yeh Jawani Hai Dewani” flashed when Bunny got a bag from his father with the list of things, he should be careful of. Well! That’s exactly the case with my mom. On one hand, she is one who taught me to live my life on my terms but at the same time, she was worried. Still, she helped me pack my stuff and cooked dinner for me to eat later at night while traveling. 

I booked a cab and left my home with the hope to have the best time of my life. I was not scared rather I was excited to embark on this beautiful journey. I reached the station 1 hour before bus timings, like any typical Indian. Hahaha… and as I was standing at the bus stop after covering a 2-hour journey via cab and a metro as far as I could see I couldn’t find anyone who was standing alone with the heavy bag on their shoulder. All I could see was a group of friends laughing, eating Cheetos, and making fun of each other, while their eyes were shining brighter than the sun and their souls were beaming with light. Like, everything is perfect as it should be. And as I was focused on them, suddenly I heard a lady in a yellow saree and a red cardigan, with a big red bindi on her forehead and kajal in her eyes. She seems like a goddess at first glance. She was shouting at her son who was wearing a thin white T-shirt, blue jeans, and Black shoes. She was forcing him to buy the gloves and cap so that he won’t be cold and as usual like any other teenager he was acting as if he don’t know her.

Gosh! I remembered my first trip with my friends, my mother gave me a blanket even though she knew that I was going to have a blanket on the bus and at the hotel, but she insisted. Without saying anything I packed it with other essentials because deep down I knew it was her way of saying to be safe and extra careful and don’t you dare catch a cold.

While looking at everyone around me, I was like a river, my heart was racing, and my mind was calm and eager to meet new people. A Moment of peace, and with that thought I started my journey from Delhi to Triund.

I’ll explain the logistics in another article.

I sat on the bus and noted there were very few people who were on my bus. I thought not a very good start ha.. but let’s see what the sunshine will bring the next day. I reached the Mcloedganj at 7 in the morning and started the Triund trek around 11 after having breakfast with a group of 9 people. Everyone with a different background, culture, career, and place. As we all move forward together, we shared who we are, most of them were Teachers, and there were a few athletes who aim to be army officers and a Businessperson.

Ohh!! Shoot. I forgot to mention one important guest who joined us.

Any guesses???

Well! There is one thing about that place and in fact most of the mountains in North India that we always found a four-legged friend who will join us for the ride. And that’s what happened, a dog joined us along the way and made our journey more fun, and without realizing it, he became the center of the group. 

The weather was pleasing.

 Green grass, blue sky, rocky roads, heavy breaths, soothing music, chai stalls, colorful small buds, and a will to reach the top.

That’s how the journey was. It’s like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know what was in the air up there, but everything seems peacefully intriguing. As the air was brushing against my cheeks and letting my hair set free. I could hear every thought, notice every moment, and soak it all in.

Why couldn’t we see all these things in our daily lives? As the eyes of the beholder are the same, maybe we are too busy or too tired to lift our heads and see the peace we all are looking for, is right within ourselves.       

From starting point to the base camp, the journey was filled with lots of emotions – We were tired but relentless. There were moments when everyone else around me disappear and it was just me walking uphill. Navigating on my own. Kind of, like Dora.

At that very moment, I didn’t want to have a distraction from the camera, I just wanted to walk and give my brain some rest as it has been sprinting for the past few months. I believe that’s what the trek was all about, teaching us to spend time with ourselves, and helping us to realize that it’s not only about the destination but the journey that teach us. It was a journey that bought 10 people with different backgrounds together. It was a journey where we all helped each other without any expectations.  

With this long ride, I learned to be present and not just show up. After all, this one life can slip away when we are not paying attention.

Anyway, as we continued to leave our footprints along the way and by having a sip of water WE FINALLY REACHED.

The feeling of accomplishment with the cold air brushing against our faces, was a vault heaven. It was a moment where we have our world. We found solace at the surface and floating at the top.

My world, was a girl sitting on top of the hill watching the sunset. It was serene. The colors – Yellow, Orange, mustard, dark brown, kind of black, shades of purple, blue, and white as well, then there it was a teeny tiny star above all. And it’s not all there was a full moon at the opposite end of this. Mesmerizing chaos.

And I realized that’s how poets gave birth to poetry.

They found the beauty in chaos,

Solace in the rain,

 and Silence in the words

 to keep the storm at shores.    

And as the sun went down, we had our dinner and sat around a bonfire under the moonlight creating magical moments. Later., we slept at the top of the hill, having chills but we were happy, peaceful, and unbothered.

                                                                                              To be continued…

[unstablewifiaccess]

Happy WBW, lovely! Not sure why, but today I'm asking about fashion?? What does the fashion-- I'm talking high, street, or anything else-- look like in your world(s)?

Happy late WBW Tori!

I'm actually going to use the scenes I've written to explain, if that's okay!

Under the cut, because it takes up a lot of dash space.

On Jane's island:

She began to tightly braid her hair up, the strands of black becoming two completely straight ropes hanging by her head. Not a single strand out of place, just as she was taught. A simple grey dress laid across the bench right next to her. There was nothing fancy about it, as that required money that a large majority of the island didn’t even dream of having. Just a simple dress made from uncolored fabric used from the wool of a local sheep. It had taken a large trade on her father’s part just to get the dress in the first place.

 It slipped on with ease, though, covering her body modestly. Jane was thankful that her father had spent the extra vegetables just so that it could be professionally fitted to her body, instead of the sack-like dresses that most of the young women would wear. His excuse was that the child of an elder should always look more dignified than the other girls, but Jane knew it was because he was hoping to one day marry her off to some mainland man with money, and that would be easier if she looked the part.

Mainland Clothes (casual):

this one was colorful, a deep blue with little white flowers around the hem. It even featured a tie to cinch her waist inwards like the fashion Madame Cress had shown her from the mainland. The cape was simpler, a blackened cotton lined with sheep wool. It was something that would have cost Jane more than a season’s worth of earnings to buy, simply due to the materials and the usefulness it carried.

On the ship:

There were three tunics, Three pairs of trousers, and another dress- also fairly simple. He insisted that she needed clothing fit for working on the ship, and that it shouldn’t come out of her own funds to begin with.

High Fashion:

The deep green fabric was quite literally shining in the light, looking almost as if it were lighting up itself. An entire bolt of fabric had been used to create the skirt alone, at least. It flowed out like a flower in bloom. The corset was lined with small gems that had to have taken months to apply on their own, giving their own sheen to the entire look.

...

It turned out that the dress had four separate layers, the woman explained as she separated them. There was a corset, a top, an underskirt that seemed to be the reason behind how far the dress sat out, and a top skirt to cover it. And not unlike how the room was a waste of space, Jane felt as if the dress was a waste of time to put on. By the time it took to get all of the layers onto her body, Jane was trying to understand how women would be able to wear these dresses for long periods of time to events, move around in them, and still be able to breathe. She felt like she could barely move, let alone take any deep breaths that would allow her to breathe properly

Sorry, that was a lot, but it seemed easier than explaining it lol

[jodilin65]

SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011 I’ll have to remember to keep a watch on the inmate search site to see if Mary’s released next month like she’s supposedly going to be. That is assuming they don’t pull anything else on her to hold her there longer. Technically they could hold her till 2013 if they really wanted to. I hope not, for her sake. And I hope she’ll leave the bad boys and the babies to someone else and that she’s realized there’s life beyond abuse and having babies. I think she has, even though it’s been over a year since I’ve heard from her.

That’s another thing I have to think about right there - if I do hear from her, should I or shouldn’t I respond? I’d naturally be curious to talk to her, but at the same time, I don’t want to get hit with a million favors even if I do know how to say no. At the risk of sounding selfish, I’m too busy to worry about others. Remember, fair or not, like it or not, I’m one of the “chosen” ones destined to be forever poor and that means having to work my ass off any chance I get when online jobs come my way, as well as with my writing.

In fact, I’m going to see if there are any translation jobs or other jobs available, then crank out the next chapter of my book.

Despite being naïve, brainwashed, and abused, I know prison has taught Mary a great deal and that she has grown tremendously since the tragedy she experienced, so whether I hear from her or not, I wish her the best!

FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011 OMG, Jesse didn’t come down today! Must’ve gotten a tumor up his ass or something.

I was reading an article yesterday about a 91-year-old woman who’s been selling suicide kits down in San Diego. Plastic bags you place over your head that are hooked up to helium tanks. Like with carbon monoxide, you’re dead in minutes if you inhale helium in its purest state. The woman believes that those who are terminally ill should be granted the same right to die and be put out of their misery as we give animals, and I totally agree. It just seems so insanely inhumane to let people suffer while people are quick to label those who would dare let an animal suffer as mean and cruel.

The funny part was that I posted the link to the article and wrote “Go granny go!” on it. Well, Tammy commented on that with “I don’t know about you? Go Granny Go. You little Sis are mischeivious as ever. Maybe thats what changed things for me, and why I do love you very much.”

Maybe that’s what changed things for her? I don’t get that one. I gotta admit, though, her comment was funny. So was the one she sent after I sent her a quiz in Italian. It’s just one of those Who Were You in Your Last Life things, but she said, “Very funny, sis. How am I supposed to take this quiz?”

I was laughing my ass off the other day at the Klammers. They were getting snowed on and down into the 20s while it was warm and sunny here.

I am so sick of hearing people complain that they have no extra money. Yeah, that’s a bitch, but try not having the money for the things you need. I know we can’t help how we feel about things and how we perceive them to be crisis-wise, but I get tired of hearing people describe the flat tire they got as the “ultimate nightmare” that’s practically the end of the world for them. Really, if a flat tire is so rough on them I’d hate to see them ever walk in the shoes I’ve walked in.

After Tom did the math and all that he estimates we should be back on track by June 3rd. I suppose that’s when the shit will hit the fan again to keep us from getting ahead. It’s once we start to climb ahead that shit happens. If this happened every now and then I’d call it bad luck. But when it happens every goddamn time and a clear pattern emerges I can only call it what it is – something hell-bent on holding us back.

I have already given up the fantasy of owning even the simplest of houses whether it’s in a rural or retirement setting. The question is where we want to spend our lives struggling and in whose little dive.

Tom still insists there’s the potential to make serious money with my writing, but as I told him, I’m still a nobody.

“But all somebodies were once nobodies too,” he pointed out.

True, but it all comes down to fate, and you know what that means for me. I’m not going to give up, though, either way, because being a writer isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am. I even got an idea to try to help promote my book and that was to send a steamy clip from it to that erotica site I submitted a few clips to in the past and include the link at the end of it with a note saying that if they liked the clip they could consider buying the book it came from. Those stories get hundreds of views a day. My first one already has over 32,000 views. I don’t recall anything in their rules about not submitting links, so we’ll see.

THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2011 I realize things have to get done around here no matter what schedule I’m on, and I appreciate Jesse helping Tom by bulldozing most of the weeds, but I don’t appreciate being woken up by the damn thing either. So when I’m on nights I’ll have to remember to sleep with the sound machine really cranked up and an earplug since he’s obviously going to make a career of coming down here every day.

My allergies have been on a roll so I had to take Benadryl which makes me really drowsy. I was also on a roll with my book, but don’t know how much I’ll get done tonight until the side effects wear off.

It’s been dry and summery in the daytime and chilly really early in the morning. Trying to sleep on Sunday is going to be tough because we’re to be in the mid-70s. We’ll need the cooler that day for sure, and I’ll have to remember to crack the window before I crash.

I chatted with Nane yesterday while she was at work, and Christine checked my blog, but still no Maliheh. There have been tons of tornadoes in the south that have killed over 300 people, but nothing in NC lately. My guess is she’s backing off because of my crush which is anything but mutual. That’s ok, though. I’m too busy for regular chatter and after a few days of it, I do tend to start getting tired of it. I realize she may’ve picked up the other card but I just might not have been notified. I was never notified when Nane picked up hers.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2011 Life may still suck and we may still be forever “sentenced” to a life filled mostly with struggles and hopeless dreams, but today I feel better than I have in several days.

Tom called when their offices opened and was surprised to get through right away. He learned there was a delay in the processing, but the money will be sent today so that much is good to know. Over the next two weeks, we should have everything we’re owed since he filed for Unemployment.

So after my allergies woke me up and I put a Breathe Rite strip on my nose and popped a Benadryl, I was able to sleep more peacefully than I had in a while.

Jesse came down on the ATV when Tom was out weeding. That’s two days in a row now. Is this going to be a regular habit of his?

TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011 Nothing from Maliheh (I wonder if she lost power again), but I got a quick note from Christine saying she was swamped with work since she was out on jury duty.

I was also delighted to hear from Nane, who was cracking up over the “German omelet” thing. I was telling her how Tom told me Apple’s keyboards do umlauts which sounded like omelets.

She said that the guy she’s been seeing has been hogging up so much of her time that she’s been neglecting friends and family and isn’t sure she likes that yet, but is enjoying things while they last.

As I told her, good things usually do come to an end so enjoy them while they last. Meanwhile, I told her to tell him he’s got envious competition. :) And that I’ll outlast him. I’ll just be doing it from a 6000-mile distance, LOL.

I also dropped hints about writing a story with a character based on her but not with her name, of course, just to see how she takes to the idea.

She was telling me that Nane is Turkish for peppermint and how she thought that was pretty neat. I know it’s also Italian for nannies.

And I was telling her how shitty our lives are and how hopeless things seem.

The money still hasn’t been sent. The federal government just threatened the state government to quit fucking around with those on Unemployment or else! But I guess they don’t give a damn and are still taking their sweet time getting the initial checks out. To hell with anyone whose rent may be due in a few days.

As I told Tom, I’m getting sicker and sicker of this shit by the day. I’m not going to make a career out of “fighting” to live.

Some have commended me for not sugar-coating my life and for being honest about when things aren’t going well. Others say I complain too much. Well, it doesn’t matter what others think. Only what I think. And I think I’m sick of struggling. I didn’t come here to work really hard just to be the equivalent of a welfare bum. That means that no, Tom didn’t get the job. This time he tried to get the temp agency to tell him why, but all they would say was that they “went with the other candidate.” Let me guess – the other candidate was young, not white, or both, right? Only they’re not going to say so, so we can sue their asses and end our money problems the easy way.

Jesse was down on the ATV along with someone in a truck which Tom thinks might’ve been his brother. They got something from the shit pile, but fortunately I slept through it.

Wrote the first two chapters last night of my next book, A Rainbow in Munich, and got my second win. It’s only lotion, though.

The rat’s new game is to take my hair down. I knot it at the nape of my neck and he slowly works it out. Because it’s so long it takes him a few minutes, but he’s gotten quite good at it, LOL.

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2011 Tom had the interview today, and while everything at least “appeared” to go smoothly, it’s not looking good now. It’s a big building but a small company which is run by an older couple. They said they’d call the temp company today, and Tom called them too, but no one’s called to say he got the job. They did say something about the boss being out at the moment and how she was the one with the final say, so it’s possible that she just didn’t make it back yet. Possible, but unlikely.

We still don’t know if it’s his age or what. Just because they’re older themselves doesn’t mean they want to hire older people. Or it could just be that whatever’s got us cursed so badly is going to make sure no one hires him no matter what. I still say it’s too soon for us. Our problems simply don’t go away this fast. Meaning, he won’t have a job before the fall.

All we’ve done since coming here nearly 4 years ago is struggle. I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of being broke for the rest of our lives and always renting dumpy old trailers, but I just don’t know if I can do it. Some things we just can’t adapt to, and I don’t think I can ever “get good” at being poor. I didn’t come here to be a bum. Period. I didn’t come here to have life treat us as if we were nothing but lazy, undeserving people who deserve absolutely no better in life.

Tom keeps saying that the only reason we’re going through this shit is because of the economy. But we’ve suffered on account of other things in the past as well. It’s like something up there uses whatever it can to get at us. If it’s not freeloaders using the law against us, it’s health problems. If it’s not wild neighbors, it’s money. But ever since finally breaking free of the freeloader’s grip in 2003, it’s been mostly money we’ve been beaten over the head with.

The rent’s due in less than a week and we have not one penny toward it. Tom said we’re getting paid even though we haven’t received the money yet, and while Jesse may have no choice but to bear with us and keep on being the understanding guy he says he is, what if he runs out of patience since he’s struggling himself now that he’s out of work, too? It takes 30 days to evict someone in this state and that’s some consolation. And so is knowing that being here 3 years and being good tenants has got to mean at least a little something to him. It’s knowing that our lives are never going to change from here on out that’s the problem. The longer things stay the same the less likely they are to change.

Killing ourselves around the first would be the perfect time to go. As I told Tom, I no longer want our own house, but I don’t want to struggle in dives for the rest of my life either. If we killed ourselves next month, neither of us would have to die alone. We wouldn’t have to live to get old and deal with all the health problems that would bring. We wouldn’t have to worry about being thrown in some state-run nursing home by people who will only abuse us.

The only way to escape this curse and not spend so much time struggling, stressing and living in misery is through death. I’m getting more and more convinced of this. If I can’t have a reasonably happy life without constant money worries, then I don’t want to live. Not if all whatever’s up there wants to do is treat me like shit and see that I spend the bulk of my life suffering.

Again, that’s really sweet of Dad to offer to help, but he’s not going to be around forever to run to and our problems are getting more and more frequent. And more severe.

Our lives will never get better and I know it.

I’m wondering if Maliheh’s lost power again. She hasn’t picked up the second card I sent a couple of days ago, nor have I heard from her.

Nane’s been on Facebook less and less and I have to wonder about myself at times. How is it I’ve come to be so hot for someone halfway around the world whom I’ll never meet? Am I really missing sex with someone I lust for and who wants to have sex with me and not for me? Then again, I never really had much of that to miss, did I? Another thing I can thank our lovely God for or whatever the hell it is that’s so hell-bent on holding me back in most areas of life. I jokingly told Nane she just needs to bug me with 20 messages a day to get herself out of my system.

She’ll fade in time. They always do. But then a new crush will come to replace her and on goes the endless cycle of fun and frustrating little crushes.

I really thought Nane would check in from work like usual, but just because she hasn’t posted anything on her wall doesn’t mean she hasn’t at least read messages.

Christine’s done with jury duty. It was a home invasion thing where a group of people killed one person and left another in a wheelchair for life. They were found guilty on all charges. Now let’s hope Ohio has the death penalty. :)

Why is it that I have a very strong feeling that if I were ever murdered the killer would go unpunished? And God just might let them win the lottery while they were at it, too.

What does it matter, though? At the rate we’re going, I’m going to be my own murderer.

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 2011 My sister sent a message saying she hopes we’re doing better, and “happy bunny day.” Happy ratty day instead, I told her. Tom and I are about as religious as a doorknob, LOL.

We looked online at the place where Tom has an interview tomorrow. It’s a huge building and the grounds are beautiful. There’s even a playground for those with kids (I guess they do daycare, too) and a jogging trail. The pay may not be as good but the benefits are awesome. Too awesome for us, I’m afraid. I just can’t see us being blessed with such a job for him, but hopefully he’ll at least get to be a temp for a few months if nothing else.

They say most of us are cursed in 1 of the 3 main areas of life – love, health and money. Well, to say that I am truly loved is the understatement of the century. I have a man that loves and accepts me as I am. Every ability and every imperfection I behold is loved, cherished and accepted. Then as a bonus, I have friends, cyber friends, family and family-like friends who also love me. Not like Tom loves me, but they love me, and some even have a little lust for me. winks

I’ve also been blessed in the health department since I quit smoking in 1997 with the exception of a set of pretty fucked up teeth that need to be knocked out and replaced with fakes, and the fact that I’ve been waking up with backaches and congestion lately. Snap your fingers and I can run a few miles at just about any given moment. Snap them again and I can throw myself on the floor and do hundreds of crunches.

As for the financial zone; I have been all over the scale. A rich kid who’s a sometimes fairly affluent adult and also sometimes dirt poor and fears she always will be dirt poor from here on out. As I’ve said before, not having much extra money isn’t such a big deal to me anymore. It’s when I have to wonder if we can pay for the necessities that I have a problem.

Tom read an article about how those who have had lots of change throughout their lives are the most likely to continue to have changes along with greater odds of success later on in life. It went on to mention writers and painters who didn’t have success till their 40s, 50s, and even 60s. Well, unlike many people – perhaps even most – who have had the same jobs, homes, phone numbers, love lives, etc. for a million years, we have certainly traveled and lived in many places, learned a lot of things, and have had many a fun adventure and experiences with a few disasters sprinkled in.

At the same time, I have often felt stuck in a rut and that’s pretty much how I feel right now – like things will never change. I am still just as cursed as I am blessed, and just as blessed as I am cursed.

For now, we have our fingers crossed for tomorrow, even if it seems “too soon” for our luck to turn around. He probably won’t know anything tomorrow either way, though. I had a slight vibe earlier about him starting on Wednesday, but my dreams have been more accurate than my vibes lately. So let’s hope I don’t have any nightmares tonight.

SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2011 Made my third book sale! It can’t be from Andy because his computer’s being repaired, so this may be my first “stranger” sale. It’s frustrating that Amazon doesn’t have a tracker so I can at least see what state/country the sale came from. Either way, I’m glad to have made another sale. :)

Tom has an interview Monday morning for an assembly job here in town. You know how it is, though. Our problems aren’t usually just for hours or days but for months or years, so although I do have a good feeling about it, I’m not counting on anything.

Got a box with $11 in spare change from my folks (presumably from their store), and a couple of flower barrettes. One’s bright yellow and the other’s green with glitter. That was very nice of them.

The Belgium winner finally paid for the toy they won, so we won’t have to complain on them on Monday.

Heard from Maliheh yesterday. She was just 500’ away from losing her place. I’m glad she and her house are ok and that she didn’t end up losing work after all.

Jesse drove me nuts with the motorcycle yesterday. He was obviously having a problem with it, so every matter of minutes he’d gun the fucking thing till he finally got it running. You know how that is too – it doesn’t matter if it’s half a dozen freeloaders or one single older person. As long as it’s our neighbor it must be noisy.

I finished my story last night. :) After Alison read the last chapter she said she’s read enough of my stories for the ending not to be too surprising, but would’ve had “Tesla” get arrested for her outstanding warrant so Nane could bail her out, and then have trouble ensue from there.

I thought to myself, what a damn good idea! So I added another chapter and edited that into the ending.

Speaking of Nane, I’ve got some seriously mixed emotions about this new guy she met. I’m happy for her, of course, but I miss her all the more because she’s not on Facebook as much. She used to be on it on weekends, but now she just comes in once or twice during the week from work. She just needs to bug me with 20 messages a day to get herself out of my system, LOL.

I sometimes wish I could stop lusting for those I’ll never meet, but they do make for fun fantasies and great story ideas. In fact, I have a few ideas in mind right now that I’ve been mapping out. I’m just not sure which one(s) I should develop.

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2011 Got my first win in 3 years! It was only a coupon for a free pouch of StarKist tuna, but a win is a win. They just need to keep getting bigger and bigger till they equal thousands of dollars once again.

The other night I dreamt I moved to Florida. Only problem is I was moving from Arizona with my parents. I guess they came to get me or something.

Tom said, “Well, as we know, the details of your dreams don’t always matter. It’s the positive message behind them that counts.”

I still don’t see us ever having the money to move there even though the idea of a tropical climate is appealing to me more and more.

In some ways, I feel like I’m in the same prison I was in as a kid. Stuck where I’m at with no foreseeable way out anytime soon.

Last night I dreamt he called me from work, wherever work was supposed to be.

The only disturbing dreams I’ve been having are these dreams where I’m not in jail, nor in a funny farm, but someplace like them against my will. Perhaps these dreams are just a reminder of the fact that I’m never quite going to be where I want to be in life.

I didn’t realize till now that Marie was following me on Formspring. I congratulated her on her upcoming wedding. Hopefully, life will continue to treat her well and she won’t feel the need to become a pest again, LOL. Just say hello every now and then to let each other know we’re alive and thinking of each other. I could never hate her or not want the best for her no matter how crazy she used to drive me.

It’s no wonder I haven’t heard from Christine. She’s been busy with jury duty. She said she’s not supposed to talk about it till it’s over, but it has to do with the worst thing a person can be charged with. Well, I’ll be looking forward to hearing all about this murder case when it’s over.

I still can’t believe they don’t have trained jurors who do nothing but jury duty for a living. There’s just something unnerving about one’s fate being decided by a dozen strangers who were dragged off the streets. Then again, so was having it decided by an old fart donning a black robe who didn’t even know me from a hole in the wall, wasn’t there to actually see the shit I went through as it was happening, etc. Some people are naturally going to be biased no matter what they do/don’t see. They just won’t always admit it and might not even realize it themselves.

Nane didn’t message me or anything like that but she “poked” me for the first time. I asked her where she poked me when she poked me, LOL.

She tends to count down the days till her vacations, and she wrote “23” in Turkish on her wall. I had to look up what it meant, but in response to it I wrote, “Und morgen ist 22!”

The fuckers in Belgium don’t seem to want to pay for the toy, so we’ll soon be filing a complaint with eBay.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2011 LOL, I just entered a sweep that lets you refer friends and enclose a message as well. So I sent one to Molly and said, "Dear Mrs. M, you’re not very bright for a teacher if you haven’t yet figured out that while you have my site blocked on Molly’s computer, you don’t have it blocked on your own. Please see your daughter for what she is so she can get the proper help she needs to stop her voyeuristic ways."

The troll hasn’t written in her blog in several days which isn’t like her. This makes me think she’s moved on to yet another new account.

Tom debated on whether or not to stop admitting he is qualified as a manager because many companies are afraid to hire them for menial jobs. So then he started applying for positions that actually want managers. Only they pay $18 an hour and I can’t believe anything up there would be nice enough to let him have a job that paid that much. It’s almost gotten to the point where I’m wary of good things happening to us. Where good things should be our compensation for bad things that have happened, we seem to be punished for those good things instead.

Right now he’s off to Roseville for an evaluation test for an assembly job. I know better than to get my hopes up, for chances are it’s just another dry run. If he still has trouble getting a job after he stops telling everyone he was a manager, then it’s got to be age or color discrimination for sure. That was one of my first guesses. It’s a youth’s market out there, and non-whites get first dibs on just about everything these days.

The sweeps are still looking hopeless, but I’m entering as many as I can.

Jesse took off at around 7:30 this morning and there were a few barks since it was cold and early, but nothing like when he leaves at night or used to leave at 5am.

Tom just got back, saying the test was super easy. All you had to do was put 5 numbers in order. And now all we have to do is hope we didn’t just spend $7 on gas for nothing.

TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 2011 Electronic welfare bums, I love it, LOL. We thought we were going to have to go apply for assistance in person and that it’d be an all-day thing, but it turns out that these days you can apply online. So we applied for whatever medical and food stamp assistance we could get. That should be about $210 a month in food stamps, but who knows what medical-wise?

It’s going to take a month or so, and God do I wish we could tell them thanks, but no thanks because he’s got a job! But I know life would never be that easy for us. I also wish we’d known about this when he first got laid off the first time. Had we known about this and MT, life would’ve been a lot easier. We just had no idea we qualified for assistance. No idea at all.

Today I’ve been productive as far as cleaning and working goes, but wasting time in my imagination on Nane. It’s so pointless, I know, but I can’t help but be so damn hot for her!

Molly still views my blog almost every day, but lately it’s just 1-3 times a day. Someone in Dallas, TX finds the Maricopa part of my bio quite fascinating. They even checked out the first part of Oregon.

MONDAY, APRIL 18, 2011 No wonder I haven’t heard much from Maliheh. She nearly lost her house in a tornado! A record number of 63 tornados went through NC and some people were killed. I didn’t hear any mention of Fayetteville, though, so I thought she was ok. But there was a message waiting from her when I got up.

How terrifying that must’ve been! I hope she doesn’t lose her place. I’d be willing to pawn my iMac to help get her out here if she needed a place to stay.

It occurred to me that nothing like that could ever just sneak up on us. I’d have nightmares galore the night before even if they had nothing to do with tornadoes.

The people on eBay sure are strange. The toy we listed sold for $12, plus a fortune in shipping since it’s going all the way to Belgium. But last time around no one wanted the damn thing, LOL.

Anyway, not much going on today. It’s cold and rainy. AGAIN. It’s never warm for long around here so it seems.

I’m taking a break for a cup of soup, then it’s back to work.

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2011 Got back from Kmart, which Sears owns, a little while ago. I returned with a 4-pack of satin string bikini panties, 2 glittery bottles of nail polish, a new set of sheets in lavender, and a few 99-cent smellies. Cucumber-melon, Sexy Musk and New Musk. I also got candy and soda.

Tom read an article yesterday about a new prescription medication for people with my kind of sleep disorder and I guess instead of adding melatonin to the body it somehow enhances the melatonin you’ve got. As he said, it used to be hard to find any information on this type of sleep disorder, so to see an article about it tells us it’s getting more widely recognized.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2011 Every day I awake to a blank canvas of white upon which to tell a story. Only my canvas is that of a computer screen and not the rough material of a traditional canvas. Instead of brushstrokes, it is keystrokes that tell my story. The story of my day-to-day life. Sometimes that story is sad. Sometimes it is uplifting. And other times it is thought-provoking.

What appeals to me most about writing more than anything else I’ve ever had an interest in is the fact that there’s the potential to go from good to great. I got to be a good singer, but nothing can ever make me a great singer. I was a good dancer, but in this day and age, nothing can ever make me a great dancer despite being pretty fit. Even though I have a knack for languages my Spanish can never go from good to great because I will never live in a Spanish-speaking country where I have no choice but to use it regularly. But age, environment and money have no discrimination when it comes to the art of writing. I may never be the best writer in the world, but someday I will be a great writer. And someday I just may take Eileen’s advice who pointed out that I’m doing this ALL on my own and that while I’m a good writer, why not take some creative writing courses if I’m open to constructive criticism? I can only get better if I do. For now, though, I have Mitch, and he is a fine writing mentor who compliments and inspires me when I write well, and who gives me that constructive criticism I need when there’s something I need to improve on.

Being a writer, like many fields within the arts and entertainment area, isn’t just something we do, it’s who we are. And most of us have been at it in some form or another all of our lives.

My journal is my non-judgmental therapist to pour my tears out on as well as my friend to share the good times with, and so I will refrain from apologizing if I’ve sounded down quite a bit lately. Being held back in life and feeling powerless to do much about it other than wait it out and hope it doesn’t last too long or get too rough can be a real stressor. If my journal doesn’t mind what I say, then why worry if my followers might?

I called my parents yesterday to let them know the Magic Jack would expire and that it would be a couple of weeks or more before I renewed my subscription. I told them to call the cell if they needed us. Well, I talked to Dad, actually. Mom was at the store. He said I should’ve called and told them and they would’ve paid for it, and that anytime I need money I should let them know.

I told him that was really sweet of him, but I didn’t want to bother them. He assured me it was ok, that’s what they’re there for, and if they couldn’t help, they’d say so.

It’s kind of sad that Tom’s family really put a complex on me so badly as far as reaching out to others for help after they so cruelly abandoned us in the past, but a part of me is also glad I didn’t ask for help. For one, they have enough of their own shit to deal with, and I also know I can’t run to them for help forever.

I didn’t even tell him we’ve been out of propane. Not literally, but we can’t afford to have the main tank filled because they have a 100-gallon minimum and that costs a couple of hundred bucks. Instead, we’ve been alternating between a couple of 5-gallon tanks, taking showers every day and a half instead of every day, and washing dishes/clothes in cold water. It’s lasting longer now that it’s been warmer.

I also didn’t tell him that we’re not starving, but we’re eating as cheap as we can and doing without the extras that we don’t need like soda.

What I did tell him was that we really, really appreciate the $25 IHOP card they sent and the $50 Sears card. We need new sheets and underwear, so the Sears card really helps out.

“If some people can be blessed in some areas of life, why can’t they be cursed in some areas, too?” I asked Tom. “What if we’re just forever financially cursed no matter what we do? What if this is it? What if it’s actually safe to say that if things are this bad at our age, they always will be? What if owning even the simplest, most ordinary house is just a dream, and what if we’re forever stuck in this tiny old trailer with its doors that don’t stay open on their own, its lack of space, and its floors without insulation that they’re so cold to walk on in the winter even with socks? Really, we live like bums yet we have done everything within our power to try to help ourselves better our lives. So what if it’s hopeless?”

But he got me to see that this world recession that’s going on is a very extraordinary situation that won’t last forever and it’s not something up there that’s picking on us even though it sure seems that way at times and like things will never change. He also got me to see that getting laid off under ordinary circumstances doesn’t automatically mean you’d lose your house if you had one since you’re usually only laid off for a couple of months. Then I remembered that he did get laid off shortly after we were married and we never lost the Phoenix house. He also reminded me that had we been smarter about Maricopa and not gotten such a big place that we couldn’t really afford, we’d still be there, even though we both came to hate many things about Arizona.

He may have a point, but I still worry that somehow, someway, no matter what we do, we’ll always be struggling.

I’m still entering sweeps even though that’s not looking promising at all. Things just aren’t what they used to be where that’s concerned. If I ever won big, Miss Hates to Travel is going to visit friends and family for sure, including my best cyber friends.

Anyway, after getting groceries and talking with Dad and Nane, I was in better spirits.

Nane said it’s a little late, she knows, but she is reading my book and congratulated me again for getting it published.

Instead of being flattered, I felt embarrassed and said, “Not the copy with the errors, I hope!” Then I emailed her the corrected copy.

She thanked me; though she assured me she didn’t mind spelling errors and probably wouldn’t even notice. Perhaps not if your first language isn’t English. Then again, her English isn’t bad at all. Some natives don’t speak/write it as well as she does.

She likes my sense of humor and we have fun with our usual jokes and nicknames for each other. I told her the story of how we “met” and explained how Tom read an article saying that if your native language is English, German would be the easiest to learn, even if I half agree with it. She told me how she ended up in NYC. She met this guy in Frankfurt she was with for two years. After he got out of the army he couldn’t find work, so his mother in NYC got them jobs there. She worked for Wall Street which is pretty big bucks. She was 23 at the time and I was 18 and right next door in MA. If only we’d known!

I’m glad I didn’t dump her, and I know this may sound silly as hell, but I feel like we grew closer than ever for some reason yesterday. And it may also sound silly to say it made me feel really good, but it did. :)

I’m hearing less and less from Maliheh and still I wonder if I’ve got anything to do with it or not. It’s like she’s slowly pulling away. If that’s what she wants, then ok. I enjoyed the time we had. I think it’s time to give her a taste of her own medicine, though, if I do hear from her again, and not be so quick to respond right away. Let her wait for me for once.

The fucking dogs drove me crazy last night. I slept till midnight and figured Jesse would be home by then, but no such luck. They didn’t shut up for another hour and I wasn’t sure if it was because the prick finally got home or if the dogs had simply exhausted themselves. If he left at 7:30 like he usually does, I’d be pretty exhausted too if I barked for 5 or 6 hours.

This morning the damn cock was doing his little engine gunning and running routine, though I think it may’ve been the motorcycle. It’s like he’s idling the damn thing longer before he takes off.

Not surprisingly, Tom “ran” into him at the fork when he was putting the trash up. He was either coming or going and mentioned cleaning the cooler and getting it ready for the heat that can’t get here fast enough. Tom said I was on nights now and asked that he wait till next week and he said he would.

FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2011 Later on this morning I’ll call my folks and let them know their loser of a daughter is about to lose her phone, so they’ll need to call one of the two cells if they want to get a hold of me. As part of my learning to accept the shitty hand the bastard in the sky (or whatever it is) is so determined to deal to me time and time again, I’m trying to focus on the good in losing the phone and not on how much it pisses me off to have to keep on losing this or giving up that. I would prefer to leave my computer on when I’m going to sleep when it’s light out and when the lights on the keyboard and the MJ’s power box can’t annoy me like they would at night. The phone could also ring and wake me up if the computer’s left on. And since things have to get more and more complicated with time, there’s no simple on/off switch for the ringer, and I can’t simply take it off the hook. But now I won’t have to worry about that for a while. The Magic Jack also has a delay in relay and an occasional echo.

I can’t believe I spent most of my childhood and some of my 20s dreaming of moving to California only to end up stuck here in my 40s and hating almost every minute of it. A part of me still wants to scream and cry at the thought of spending many more years or even the rest of my life in this dumpy little trailer. But I think the more we fix it up and make it our home instead of just Jesse’s old trailer, the less I’ll want to leave it after putting so much time into making all the changes. Unless you can buy it outright, it’s just not safe to own a house. One firing or layoff – just one – and you could lose that house or that nicer, more expensive rental in a heartbeat.

By throwing away my dream I then have no dreams to either not be able to achieve or to achieve and lose. Besides, there’s really nothing to “throw away” because it’s not up to me to begin with.

And so every time I long to be in a normal house with adequate space and newer features, I remind myself that it’s better than prison, jail, funny farms, concentration camps, apartments or the streets. It’s even better than an apartment building for old folks only. I’m not stupid. I know that if I lived in one of these places the person above us would have unruly grandkids visiting regularly, the person below us would be obsessed with slamming doors, and the person next to us would be so deaf they blast their TV. Yeah, I know how these things work.

Other than this thing that’s had an obsession with seeing that I’m stuck everywhere I don’t want to be and unable to stay where I do want to be since I was around 15 years old, the weather is improving. We had our last cold day a couple of days ago. Now it’s time to pull the comforter off and put the thin blanket on, though it’ll still be getting cold at night for a while. It won’t be until mid-June before we can have windows open all the time.

So the few trees around here that lose their leaves in the fall are sprouting new leaves and there are baby birds in the nest on the porch. And if they bring Tom a job, it will also be around the same time we can leave the windows open, but somehow I doubt he’ll get a job before most, if not all, of the summer is over.

THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 2011 I miss the beach. I don’t know why. Ocean’s stink, the water’s salty, seaweed’s kind of gross, jellyfish make my skin crawl, walking on sand isn’t easy, and stepping on pointy edges of shells or driftwood doesn’t tickle. Chances are, though, I’ll never see any of it again, so that’s another thing I can forget about.

Tom and I both agreed that instead of buying a place or fixing this place up if I suddenly won 20K, we’d get the hell out of California even if it meant having to go to a place that was cold and snowy. And that’s probably what it would take to better our lives, cursed or not. We’ve been here nearly 4 years now yet he STILL can’t get a permanent job. We spend so damn much of the time being cold enough here anyway that a climate worse than this might be worth it in order to break this horrible cycle we’ve been on for so long.

But I’m almost certainly not going to win 20K and so we’re stuck here. And God knows how many more years things will be as shitty as they have been. I honestly think it will be over a decade before the economy recovers.

What’s both good and disappointing is that the Beanie Babies sold which means less stuff in the way, but they only sold for $37. We were really hoping for $50 - $75, even though we didn’t list the more valuable ones in this batch.

We have a toy I won years ago (a talking animal) up for a buck and it’s got a watcher so maybe it will sell. Meanwhile, we’re so fucking poor I’ll have to call my folks and let them know I’m going to lose the Magic Jack phone since we don’t even have $20 to spare right now to renew it. We’ve got two cells, though, and it’s not like I use the MJ phone much.

Just two days back into exercising and I can already feel a difference in my tummy. I’m still not dieting, but someday I’ll get back on with that, too.

Mitch finally made a sale on Smashwords. :) I’ll definitely take his advice and publish with them too, but not until things settle down a bit here if they ever do.

There are baby birds in the other nest at the other end of the porch now, too. I don’t know if it’s a different family or if Mama Bird moved her babies into this nest. Somehow I doubt they move their babies around.

It hurts to walk on the kitchen and bathroom floors even with socks, that’s how cold it got last night. There’s absolutely no insulation in these floors, none in the so-called roof, and probably very little in the walls. But again, we ain’t getting out of here for a long, long time to come. Might as well try to focus on the good in it – no neighbors attached to us!

Nane really is a fun friend even if she’s not around much of the time. We have our games we play (like what scent I’m wearing) and our nicknames for each other. She’s Goddess Nane and I’m Lady Jodi, even if she doesn’t always spell my name correctly.

I started making my own “hugs” and she thought it was neat and asked how I did it. I told her and she did an ocean scene after I did a rat, not surprisingly for us, LOL.

I told her of a dirty dream I had of her and said she could tell her BF. She said she better keep quiet about it, then laughed and said she just might tell him after all.

The troll took Tuesday off but viewed my blog 3 times yesterday, and I just hit Larry with this second funny/insulting message. I enclosed a joke for old-time’s sake but was sure to insult him a bit along the way, too. It’ll be interesting to see if he ever tells me to fuck off or blocks me. Then again, he may not want to give me a “reaction” any more than the black bitch wants to, who I make a point of reminding of my existence at least once a year. I’d be willing to bet she saves everything I send. Therefore, she had to have been as pissed as I was when Facebook’s latest round of changes deleted old messages, LOL.

Who else from the past have I “dropped” in on? Oh, just Bruce. He was the conceited cock that was a great guitarist. I knew him in Springfield. I liked his guitar playing but I didn’t like him. He was too judgmental but not nearly as bad as Al was. Al was the verbal equivalent of a wife-beater. I even gave him the link to the part of my bio where I mention him, even if it was just one paragraph, LOL. He followed the link but didn’t reply as I both hoped and expected. I just like to surprise people at times. :)

Adonis, my faithful follower with the annoyingly shitty English, said he too, had been thinking about my “preparation” theory. He’s kind of philosophical too, and said what if I’m actually being prepared for riches?

So late in life? I doubt it. I once hoped that my curses would one day be compensated, but each year that passes and I see they aren’t, I give up hope on that one.

Tom said some may think I had it easy just for not having to work out of the house.

Yeah, that’s a definite blessing. But is that blessing why we’re so cursed? Or was I given the sleep disorder as a means of holding us back? After all, I’d be out there working too, if transportation and schedules weren’t an issue, even if I didn’t like it.

Tom said he thinks it’s harder for me because I didn’t grow up poor like he did. It almost makes me wish I had, though, as sad as it may sound. Then maybe I’d be “good” at being poor. Don’t worry, I’ll be a good little bum and roll with the punches sooner or later. I already realized and acknowledged that we’re destined to spend most of our lives struggling. Acceptance will come, probably sooner than even he thinks. I’ve had financial problems almost all of my adult life so it really is nothing new. The only new twist is that starting in Oregon, but mostly starting in Cali in 2007, it went beyond just not having extra money and became a struggle to pay for the necessities as well.

OMG, though! God is going to allow us enough food to eat this week! But wait. Just what exactly did Tom and Jodi S do to deserve the right to eat this week??? Hell, I thought we deserved a little starvation mixed into the shitty hand He keeps dealing us. After all, we’re just a couple of worthless losers who try too hard to get ahead, aren’t we?

Later…

OMG, this is so fucking funny! It’s nice to be able to laugh for once, too. To send feedback on my-diary you have to give your email addy. Or at least most people think you do. As long as the @ symbol is present and you use a real carrier, you could send it from fuckyou@yahoo.com if you wanted to. Someone wrote “You have no life” in regard to the first part of my bio. Well, another thing a lot of folks don’t know is that you can search FB for any users signed up with a particular email addy. So I ran the addy on FB, which is in Sunnyvale, CA, and up came a person with the same name as in the addy. I was a little surprised at who I saw in the profile pic, even though anyone could’ve sent the feedback. Usually, such comments come from kids. Not from what appears to be a woman in her 40s. I sent her a message thanking her for her feedback on MD and let her know that I already figured out years ago that I had no life. Oh, and to have a nice day. :) ROTFL! She is going to be one shocked lady! LMAO!

It’s funny in itself, but hopefully it’ll keep her from being a potential troll. As soon as I “called out” that Canadian troll on MO it disappeared really fast. Guess that’s what you get for fucking with a savvy net nut. :)))))))

TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2011 We have now been in this little old trailer for 3 years. 3 years and counting. Acceptance is getting a little easier, but it’s one of those things that will take time and that will happen little by little. I just remind myself – whenever I start to feel saddened or angry – that there are worse places to spend the rest of our lives in. Much worse.

Death may be the only escape from the curse we’re under, but I really believe that the best way to deal with it while we are alive and the best way to lead a happier life is to just make the best of what we can do/have and stop trying to turn dreams and fantasies into the reality they can never be. So I’m going to keep the list I made up handy of all the things I want to do to fix this place up as time and money permits and make it our home. I think the more we personalize it and remodel it to our tastes and comfort, the happier I’ll be. Maybe we can even add on another bathroom eventually. The clearing that this trailer is on is narrow and so we’re limited as to how much outside space we have as well as inside. It will take many thousands of dollars and many years, assuming we make it through this latest ordeal, but it’s a hell of a lot safer and smarter than continuing on with this stupid fantasy that we could one day own a house and not lose it. Why pay to fix things that break and worry like crazy about losing them until we actually do? Just one lay-off or firing is all it takes to lose a place, and just about all jobs will eventually let you go for some reason or the other. Very few people ever work at the same place till they retire. It may be easier and tempting to want to run to a bigger, newer place if we ever could, but how could I enjoy it if all we’re going to do is stress and struggle to maintain it? We do enough of that right here in what’s just about the cheapest place you can get for being in California.

This is where we live. This is where we stay. This is what’s meant to be.

Don’t know if the Beanies are going to sell or not yet. They’re getting a hell of a lot more views than the last small lot we tried to sell, but in my experience the more we need money the less likely we are to get it.

At least I sold another copy of my book and Eileen’s going to leave a review. I asked her to, since it couldn’t hurt, but only if she likes it, of course, and she said she’d be happy to. Her mother’s going to read it, too. LOL, it’s a good thing we Jews tend to be more liberal.

I’m not going to bother dieting, but I’ve gone back to working out. No need to fall out of shape just because I don’t care right now that I’ve got too many pounds and inches to my name, is there? But why my weight hasn’t kept climbing and climbing is a mystery to me. At this height and age you, can’t just eat like a normal person. But I’ve been eating quite “normally” at 1500-2000 calories a day and being as lazy as can be. I’m not saying I’ll never diet again. I’m just not in the mood to put added pressure on myself until and if our finances get so bad that I’m forced to go hungry. I’m more focused on saving money right now, and part of that means buying cheap food that tends to be higher in calories.

I’m doing arm, ab and leg exercises which take about 15 minutes. Then I’m running 4 minutes every hour for about 10 hours. My screensaver is set to blackout every two minutes, so I’m doing two “blackouts” per hour.

I got a clever idea earlier to take a spring hook off an old purse strap and attach it to my robe. This way I just hook it to the belt loop instead of having to use the belt which only keeps slipping loose.

Again I’m wondering if Nane’s worth keeping as a friend. I’d just hate to dump her and end up regretting it. I reached out to her about a week ago when I was feeling blue and wanted to chat. I realized she could be busy and it’s not like she’s obligated to cheer me up or anything like that, but the least she could’ve done was at least answer the damn message once she finally got back on Facebook which is where I sent it. She just got back from what I could tell, but she’s completely blown me off. I expected a reply or one of her “hugs” or something, but I’ve received absolutely nothing. Makes me also wonder if I should share a certain story with her. :) She did, however, let me know that my book is $3.44 in US dollars in Germany. So almost half a buck more there.

No troll today. I’m surprised. I’m also wondering how long she can stand to go before she does something to try to make me discuss her in my blog which is exactly what she wants.

Later…

I see myself hurrying down the curvy dirt drive and out to the main road. My heart trembles with fear yet with determination as I wait for the next vehicle to round the corner at 45MPH. When it does I refuse to let myself chicken out. I bravely hurl my body in front of it, allowing the impact of the vehicle to smash the life out of me.

Gone are the money worries. Gone are the lost dreams. Gone is the pain.

And then I snap out of this scary yet appealing fantasy given how shitty my life is right now, and reality hits me in the face like a bowling ball.

I don’t have the guts to kill myself. The only thing that’s going to give me the guts to actually do it would be if anything happened to Tom or things got to the point that they were literally unbearable and there was simply no way to survive.

I wish I could know what dying would be like for me and what – if anything – awaited me on the other side. Knowing this may or may not give me the guts it would take to kill myself before things got a chance to get to the point of no return, though it’s true that Tom is another big reason I still exist. He’s a pretty independent guy who could get along just fine on his own. But I know he’d be sad and lonely without me. The older we are, the less likely we are to find someone to settle down with, especially if we’re not very sociable to begin with. So if I died now and he lived another 30 years, that’s a long time to be alone.

Will things ever get unbearable? Well, obviously we can’t live forever no matter what happens. So yeah, eventually Tom’s going to die and I’m going to kill myself if nothing happens before then to cause me to die first or us to die together.

And then another theory popped into mind that got me wondering about something. I assumed all these spells we’ve been going through where we’re teased with our survival were strictly to punish us. But what if it’s something more? Is it preparation of some kind? Back when I was hauled into Florence Jail I got the distinct feeling something was trying to prepare me for something. It was. Six months of hard county time in Phoenix. So if this truly is a preparation of some kind, then what could it be for? Is it trying to “toughen” me up and help get me gutsy enough to kill myself with or without Tom?

“I’m almost 54 years old and things have always worked out,” Tom told me the other day. “So there’s no reason not to think it won’t work out this time, too.”

Ah, but they say there’s a first time for everything.

MONDAY, APRIL 11, 2011 I dreamt that Tom got a call for a job. I don’t know if he got the job, but he got called for one. Although I didn’t wake up feeling as blue as I have been these last several days, this doesn’t mean I think or feel he’ll get a job anytime soon. Unfortunately, most of the dreams I have that come true are the bad ones. He’ll probably get calls on and off for the next few months, but you know our setbacks last longer than just a few weeks. Even so, Tom’s thinking of leaving out the fact that he was a manager in the past. Since all he can get are menial temp jobs, having that on his record is a very bad thing since no one wants to hire managers for shit jobs, and he’s not going to tell them, “Hey, I’m so desperate I’ll take any job.” The tough part is not only finding a job, regardless of pay but finding one in town so he doesn’t have to drive forever. Especially since gas prices are getting out of hand again.

“Do recycled bird’s nests still count as bringing good luck?” I asked Tom the other day. After all, it is a used nest they’re using out on the porch. He assures me they probably had to remodel somewhat. Well, we’ll see what happens over the next few months and if it’s still a “lucky” thing or not.

We listed 100 Beanie Babies on eBay starting at $24.99. Again, a true test of just how cursed we may or may not be at the moment.

Our connection has been slow as hell. Maybe in a few more years or so, we can get reliable service out here without having to play phone with them all day every few months and beg them to give us the speed we’re paying for.

Christine has been sick with a fever so that’s why I haven’t heard much from her. Hopefully, she’s better now.

Molly’s back to viewing my blog. Yeah, I knew she would be. Houston, TX viewed me too, and when I see anything Texas I always wonder if there’s a connection. Especially when it’s a direct jump.

Anyway, it’s back to not allowing anonymous comments on my blog now that she’s coming around again. In her own blog, she’s written the exact opposite of what she said last time. She’s just back and forth and back and forth like a yo-yo. One entry could say she’s sick of her “friendship” with Alison and she’s not worth bothering with, the next (written just hours later) could be all about how she hopes to earn her trust again and win her friendship over. She’s also swung back the other way with Roman, admitting to harassing him again. She said she’s “not sure” why she can’t stop calling and texting him. Then after claiming to feel oh so loved by fellow thoughts members, now she feels slighted.

People have left comments saying you can’t make people like you, the internet is not real life, and that it’s a waste of time feeling hurt over people online when she should be out meeting people in person.

And it’s all gonna go in one ear and out the other.

She supposedly started a new medication, but I really don’t think all the therapy and medication in the world can help people like her. It didn’t seem to help Marie. I think the only way to stop Molly from bothering people online is to prevent her from being able to get online in the first place. The mother’s obviously not very bright for a teacher if she hasn’t yet figured out that while she may’ve blocked my blog on Molly’s computer, the nut can still get to it on hers.

Later…

If there was the slightest, microscopic amount of doubt left in me as to us not being meant to have money, it’s gone now for damn sure. The economy is so damn bad we’re almost certainly guaranteed not to have even a few grand in the pension fund. Anything to keep us poor and from buying a house. Anything. But that’s fine; I already decided I don’t want a house just to lose it and have to pay for things we can’t afford to fix until we do. So fine. We’ll stay right here. But a little extra money to fix this place up would’ve been nice.

It’s all there, though. The pattern is so damn clear. First we lose hope of ever getting anything from his mother (if she can ever die), then the horse program tease, then the partnership tease, and now God’s made sure to use the economy to fuck us out of our pension. “What’s all that tell you?” I told Tom, trying to point the obvious out to him. Yet he insists that there’s no way I could be screwed out of my inheritance and that while it may suck, now’s a “great” time to be poor because the county could end up saving us a whole “boatload” of money on my teeth.

I first thought it would take months and months to get approved for help with my teeth. But the county funds the dental, he learned, which explains why the state could afford to drop it and not have anyone bitch about it. The state, however, is the one that deals with food stamps, so that would definitely take months.

If I could get my teeth done for free or close to it that would be great. But that’s just one thing. What about our overall day-to-day lives? I’ve known since 2007 that we were meant to be poor for the most part. That’s pretty much when it became obvious enough and I put two and two together and figured it out. I also figured as much as far as us getting fucked out of the pension. So then why is it so hard on me? Why can’t I just accept the fate that’s been handed down to me and just roll with the punches? Why get upset over what cannot be changed? Like wasting time getting upset when a state votes down gay marriage. Well, of course they’re gonna vote it down. Most people hate gays. It does get easier with time, but I still need to fully accept it if I’m ever going to have an easier life. I’ve given up my dream of a house, not that I ever had much choice, and I’m sorry it’s taken me 3 hopeless dreams to finally realize that whether my dream is far-fetched or perfectly reasonable, it’s not meant to be if the dream belongs to me. I’ll know better when dream number 4 rolls around and won’t even bother to think of trying to make it a reality.

This reality hitting home more and more makes me all the more hesitant to bother sweeping. Not just because the odds these days are astronomical but because if we, Tom and Jodi S, aren’t meant to have big bucks, then that’s all the more reason to believe I’ll never win.

Again with the troll coming to my blog today, so again I’m thinking of creating our own site and blocking that IP# altogether. Well, Tom will have to do it, but I did suggest it since he’s going to be out of work for months. Yeah, that call I dreamt he got never came. You know only the bad dreams are allowed to come true. Or something bad after having a bad dream.

I HATE God above so bad now! And I don’t care if He punishes me for saying so. What more can He do to us? He’s taken our dreams, taken our pension, taken our LIVES. We are so His little puppets on a string for life.

Later…

I meant it when I said that not having extra money was ok so long as we could pay for our needs, but sometimes I’ll miss the lack of choices and opportunities a life of struggling will bring us. It may not be necessary, but it would’ve been nice had a year of Harry & David’s been a choice for us, and it would’ve been nice to spend a day being pampered at a spa if we wanted to or to decide to take a vacation somewhere if we ever decided we could use a change in town/scenery, despite hating to travel.

To assume we’ll be screwed out of our pension is as reasonable enough as assuming one will be hurt if they fall 20 feet. And we WILL lose the inheritance. God will make sure doctors, hospitals and other medical-related expenses drain the money in the end. I’m not stupid. I get how it works for us. It started becoming rather obvious in late 2006, but each year it gets more obvious.

I am determined to just learn to accept things as they are and roll with the punches rather than waste time trying to change and control what we can’t. We DID try to better our lives, so no one can say we didn’t try. Also, there is some good in being poor. Poor gets you more breaks and freebies and it makes you appreciate those few scattered bursts of good times. So poor is ok and I’m ready to make the best of it since it cannot be changed.

Now, speaking of working with what we do have and not worrying about what we can’t have, here’s a list of long-term goals. We can do these things as money permits.

New carpet New paint New floors I would like light-colored countertops, but that’s not necessary Install more outlets? Flat-top stove Bigger water tank New doors Water filter so we can drink tap water? Twin waterbed for me New bed/couch of some kind for him Shelves Curtains or drapes for the bedroom Square clothesline Soundproofing and or insulation to regulate inside temp Add-ons: bathroom, bedroom, laundry room

This will take many thousands of dollars and many years to do but this is a REASONABLE goal. Having a savings and buying a house is not. I think we can and should do this. It may not be our #1 choice in life, but you know life isn’t what we plan it. We live the lives we were meant to live and I don’t think it’s all that bad at all when you consider how much worse it could be. I do, however, think we should get Jesse in here next fall to fix the heater and faucets. Remember, if we’re going to focus on the good of renting/being poor, it’s having someone else pay to fix things. So life won’t be what we want it to be, but we can make the best of the life we never wanted or intended to live. Sometimes you just gotta MAKE the place you’re in your forever home because it’s the only one that can be forever.

I also want to sell/donate most of my dolls to free up more space.

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2011 Just thought I’d write in between entering sweeps. The sweeps that seem very unlikely that I’m going to go back to winning like I used to. Can’t say I didn’t try, though.

The Beanie Babies didn’t sell. Next we’re trying a huge lot and we’re going to go with parcel post instead of priority mail. This will be a true test as to just how cursed we are since there’s no way this shouldn’t sell.

Believe! That’s what Eileen keeps saying to me. But how can I believe when 80% of the last 3 ½ years have been so shitty? How can I believe when we spend 22 months on Unemployment and then after just 6 months of work we’re laid off again?

I think that people who haven’t had it as bad as we have just don’t realize that it’s not that easy to just “believe.” I know they mean well, but it’s not like we can flick a switch within our brains and believe whatever we want to at will. If that were the case I wouldn’t feel stress, depression, frustration and such an extreme loss of faith, even if I’d only be kidding myself in believing things will work out. And they just may work out in the end, too. But in “working out” that probably means a few months on the job after God knows how many more months of struggling to find one in the first place and trying to make ends meet. All we’ve done since coming to California is just go round and round in circles. I’m coming to hate it here, but if a person is cursed, wouldn’t they just get the same results no matter where they lived?

The stress which has turned into depression is killing my motivation to work out and lose weight. I’ve gained back 17 of the 30 pounds I lost. All lost weight eventually finds its way back home, but why don’t I care? Why can’t I get myself to want to diet and exercise? How much more must I gain back before I finally get my ass in gear in that department?

Instead, all I want to do lately is eat, sleep, write and listen to music when I’m not entering sweeps or doing what work I can do online. Today, though, I got a lot more sleep for the depression. I crashed around 5am and then the sound machine broke and woke me up around noon. The old, ancient portable one did, not the off-tuned radio station on the stereo. Then I fell back asleep and got up around 2pm. I was up for about an hour, and then fell back asleep till around 4:00. Then I got up, fell back asleep around 6:00 and didn’t get up till 8:00. Am I really that depressed that I had to spend most of a 15-hour period sleeping?

During my second round of sleep, I had a dream of being in a tiny, old dump laid out sort of in a square like the dump we rented in Oregon. There was a room on each corner – two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. I was in one of the bedrooms which seemed bigger than the bedrooms in the house actually were and saw rivulets of water leaking down part of one wall. I ran to tell Tom about it but saw that he was asleep on the living room couch. I changed my mind and decided not to bother waking him up for something I simply didn’t want to deal with anyway. So I let it leak and went to change the rat’s cage which was also in the bedroom. That’s when I noticed that all our digital clocks simply had the number 4 for the hour, but no minutes visible. Number 4, the real 13.

Was he laid off as a means of protecting Jesse? I wonder that. Seriously, maybe Tom was meant to lose his job as a means of trapping us here so Jesse doesn’t go further into the hole financially. Had he been hired on and given a raise recently, we just may have moved this summer. On the other hand, I would think Jesse would be able to re-rent this place in just a month or two.

If we were smart we’d take our pension money and make this place as comfortable as we possibly could and just stay here forever. If we live long enough to get it, that is. I’m sure Jesse wouldn’t mind having life-long tenants, and it would certainly be safer. The dogs only bark once or twice a week for a few hours now instead of every day for 10 hours like they used to, and even if Tom got a great job with great pay – well – all good things do come to an end, so it’s better to just stay put than take risks. I’m sure Jesse would let us paint and recarpet and personalize the place to our tastes and comfort as money permitted. It’s something to think about. We’d certainly never have to worry about neighbors being just a few feet away from us in this place.

I like different people’s marketing ideas for my book. Eileen suggested a TV or radio station, Maliheh suggested YouTube, and Mitch suggested another self-publishing company that I guess has better features and pays 85% royalties. I appreciate their suggestions, but right now we have more pressing issues at hand than trying to get my book to sell. And also, good writers that aren’t great simply aren’t good enough for big sales. I need to keep on improving.

Maliheh said people were freaked out about the government shutdown and says people are starting to struggle where she is and that if it weren’t for the army base nearby, Fayetteville wouldn’t exist.

I wonder what’s up with Christine. She hasn’t been to my blog since Thursday and hasn’t replied to my email.

FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2011 Sandy finally made it into my blog, though she only scanned the first page from what I could tell. She must not have gotten the message till a short while ago because her friend count just went up. Larry and Jenny may not have gotten their own messages yet, though I think it’s unlikely that they haven’t. I’m just surprised none of them have blocked me, especially Jenny.

Molly’s latest hilarious entry which included two more “letters” to Alison and Roman, said she hasn’t been spying on Alison because she’s “been asleep for a few days,” LOL.

Her “letter” to Roman starts off with, “The reason I don’t want to talk to you,” yet she’s talking to him in her blog. shakes head What a nut. Just what a nut.

I was feeling a little down last night and reached out to Nane, asking if she wanted to chat come morning time her time, but not surprisingly, she’s blown me off. I’ll probably get a little “smile” or a “hug” tomorrow or the next day to make up for it. I guess I can’t blame her, though. I mean, what can she do other than listen to me vent? If no one here in my own country can help me, then how could anyone in Germany help me? They could momentarily cheer me up and even make me laugh, but they couldn’t fix the problem at hand and lift the curse that’s been on us so we could actually get ahead for once and stay ahead for more than 5 minutes. She probably had to work, too.

I asked Tom what he thinks is the reason he didn’t get the job he wanted – his age or his color – and he thinks it’s because he worked so long as a manager and most people feel that because of it he wouldn’t be happy doing menial tasks.

So much for thinking experience gets you ahead, if he’s right. Don’t you just love it when others take it upon themselves to decide for us what we’d like, not like, want, or not want in life?

Still only one sale. I was really hoping more of my Facebook friends would be interested, but I guess not. And it doesn’t look like the Beanie Babies are going to sell either.

Although I still don’t like the idea of the aches and pains that often come with old age, I want to grow old and die of natural causes while surrounded by people who care about me. But I know this is just a dream like any other I’ve ever had in life, and that my quest for security is a joke. Never will I have even the simplest house where we’re both insured and neither of us has to wonder if we’re going to make it. Instead, here I am, still wondering if we’re going to be alive this summer. Will we be? And if we are, how about next winter? At the same time, it seems something wants us to just barely get by so we can live to be teased, picked on and punished.

It seems we’ve fallen into a regular pattern of wondering if we’re going to survive and we just can’t break this pattern. I wasn’t kidding when I said I missed some of my old problems. They were depressing and frustrating, but they were safer and less scary. Yet it seems the past only comes back to haunt us when it’s in a bad way.

I just want to be happy. I want to laugh, joke and live comfortably. Not like a queen in a mansion surrounded by tons of luxuries; just comfortable enough. I want to go back to worrying about things like my weight, not whether or not we may have to kill ourselves in a few months to avoid homelessness. Each year we continue to struggle, the more I lose faith and the more certain I am that things will never change and that this is what’s meant to be for us. I just don’t know what we did to deserve it.

For now, since I can’t seem to motivate myself to work out, I’m going to get some proofreading done of old journals, but I’m no longer going about it the way I had been by reading them word for word. Now I’m just running a grammar/spell checker through the files.

Later…

I’m sitting here wondering how the hell I’m going to market my book. How can I gain publicity, thus buyers?

If just half a million people in a country of what has over 250 million people would buy it, we’d never have to worry about money again. sighs But this book isn’t the greatest and no one knows who I am. I may be pretty good, but I still need to improve my grammar and things like that. Tom said I should also stop writing stories with characters based on people I know and events based on things I’ve actually experienced.

I almost wish I were suddenly famous or infamous for some reason or another, but without all the other shit that would go with it. If I were suddenly arrested for murder like Amanda Knox was, then people would be driven to buy it out of curiosity. So I need to think of a hook – one much less extreme – that would generate sales. But how? What can I do? How can I pique people’s curiosity since I’m not already a well-known writer?

Eileen suggested I see if a local TV or radio station would have me on as a guest to help promote my book, but I don’t see why they’d care to help promote me out of millions of other writers who are now turning to Kindle. It’s becoming a common thing for writers to bypass traditional publishers altogether and go straight to Kindle. I’m just one person floating about in a sea of thousands and thousands of other writers.

I could sit here and fantasize about becoming some sort of hero by maybe rescuing some people from some kind of disaster and getting publicity that way, but that’s just not going to happen.

And so I’ll probably only sell a few more copies, if even that, and we’ll go on to struggle. It’s really quite a pisser to know that the only way to get a guaranteed roof over your head, food in your tummy, and all the medical care in the world is to do something bad enough to land yourself in prison for life.

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2011 Although I’m trying and trying to shake it, I’m kind of depressed right now. Nothing we’re doing to try to help ourselves seems to be working yet. We have no bids on the Beanie Babies and I’ve only made one book sale so far. I didn’t expect much in the way of book sales since I’m not well known, but it still would’ve been nice to make more than one sale.

Marie did reply to the message I sent her about the book. She was happy for me and seems to be doing well except for a leg injury. She said she wouldn’t email me unless I email her as she knows I don’t want to go back to the constant messages. She said she’d go read my book, but I don’t think she realized she can’t “read” it without buying it, and that I was saying I got a book published for sale, but that’s ok.

She’s also with someone she says she’s marrying this July. I hope she’s happy and that things work out for her. Despite the stress and annoyance she put me through, I doubt I could ever dislike her. I think a part of me will always love her.

I’d say David definitely got my message too, LOL, since someone in Mesa, Arizona did a search for me and stumbled onto my blog. I could see what pages were accessed, but there’s no way to know which pages he himself accessed. Since all but one of the other visitors were regulars, I’d say it probably was he who accessed my archive and photo albums. Only about 5 older entries were accessed. I wonder if he’ll come back, though I doubt it.

Although I didn’t get up till close to 2pm, the day was filled with outside annoyances, though I’m not sure Jesse had anything to do with any of it. A wood chipper was annoying me for a while, then I heard what sounded like a ball bouncing which took me on an unpleasant trip down Memory Lane and back to Phoenix. There I got to enjoy 5-hour basketball games regularly that were just a few feet from our windows. They might as well have been bouncing the damn ball off the wall of our house, that’s how loud and obnoxious it was.

Jesse does have concrete at the front of his house, and while the thumping was relatively soft, it was annoying enough. I first thought his kid was bouncing a ball in front of his place, but it was actually someone hammering in the distance.

Then it was off to run the weed whacker, which I think probably was Jesse. Stupid of him too, since we might get a little more rain this month before it stops till the fall.

I forgot to mention in my last entry that Jesse’s not doing too well either. Of course he’s doing much better than us in that he has land, a nice house with adequate space, more than one vehicle, etc., but he too, has no income coming in at the moment. He’s still trying to get on either disability or retirement. But at least he could borrow money, as we know he did for that little car. We have no one to borrow from, and not having any income other than what we make online is pretty scary. I know I don’t have to take it, though, and that I can end it anytime. I don’t have to take another 30-40 years of this shit.

Sometimes I want to throw myself on the bed and cry, but the tears just won’t come. If bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people so much of the time as is what seems to be the case, do I have to hurt someone to get ahead?

I’m just depressed. Too depressed to care about things like dieting, exercising, language studies and things like that. Right now I’m only focused on how to either make money or save money. Besides my writing, of course, but sometimes even that’s hard to concentrate on.

Being aware of my “life sentence” of struggling in other people’s tiny places is one thing, accepting it is another. Why can’t I just cram reality down my throat and move on?!

I hate older places not just because I prefer the looks of modern places but because they tend to have more problems. So I try to at least be glad we don’t have to be the ones to pay to fix things as they break around here.

Paula called and even she’s doing better than us. Her weather was nicer, her court case might be dismissed, she’s been granted section 8 housing, and she met a “great” guy in a chat room who lives in Sacramento. She was glad to hear about the book, but can’t access the link to that which I enclosed in an email, or my blog because she doesn’t know how to enable links. Hopefully, Justin can set that up for her.

Molly’s still staying away, now claiming that she “learned” from her doctor today that not everyone is going to like her. Wow, you mean it took her 27 years to figure that out? That’s kind of sad. But she’ll get hit with amnesia soon enough. I really think she’s got this sick addiction for bothering those who don’t like her, much in the way I did with the pranks 20 years ago, which she struggles with and has to fight the urges constantly. She’s been the way she is for nearly a decade that I know of, so who knows how long it will go on?

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 2011 Got my first book sale! It’s probably Christine, Eileen or Andy, and my sales will probably drop off to nothing once my friends help themselves, but it’s still pretty cool either way. Poor Mitch, though, LOL. The guy has no sales yet.

Perhaps another reason it’s not that exciting to me besides the fact that everything else in life sucks, is because it’s not a regular book. It’s a lot like selling something on eBay instead, only it’s something I made.

Eileen was busy with her grandkids, so that’s why she didn’t respond right away. She’s sorry about Tom losing his job but psyched about the story and said she’d download it to her Kindle. I don’t know if Christine has a Kindle, but even though I offered to give her a free copy since she’s a friend, she said she’d rather buy it and loves to read anyway. That is so cool of them! Some are posting the link to the book on their Facebook pages.

Nothing from Tammy yet, though it occurred to me that she might be jealous over something like this. Anything artistic tends to do that to her, LOL, though bookwriting isn’t the same as singing, so who knows? It could be that she’s upset that I haven’t talked to her on the phone, but who cares?

I “dropped” my book link on his brother David. He’s the only one of Tom’s siblings/in-laws I could find, besides his two kids. I even let Marie know, though I have a feeling I may regret that one if I hear back from her.

Not sure how the hell I did it, but I managed to sleep through Jesse coming down to fix the pipe. He said something about coming down to do additional work, and tomorrow we’re supposed to have thunderstorms, so I’m sure my sleep will still be disrupted at some point. Now’s when I hate to be on nights and I hate to be on days. On nights I don’t sleep well, on days I don’t get enough time alone with him out of work. I haven’t had any time alone since I got up 9 hours ago. I hate that! I just want to be ALONE! Gotta get used to it, though, since it’s going to be months before he’s working again.

We listed a lot of 6 Beanie Babies on eBay, so hopefully we can start selling them off lot by lot.

I’m going to send my folks excerpts from the book, some jokes, and a screenshot of the book at the online store. Just not until we have extra money for stamps. I don’t want to spend money on anything we don’t need right now.

Here’s Molly’s latest load of bull. She erased all her other entries, but she does that regularly. I’ve come to know her well enough to know that her words won’t mean much for long. The last sentence alone tells me she’s still hoping to “win” us over. I just don’t get why I’m lumped in as one of her “former friends.” Is she delusional as well as lacking in self-respect that she’s got to seek out negative attention from those she knows hate her?

Molly wrote that she was not in a healthy state of mind during the years she bothered her former friends. She said she was sorry for her past actions online, admitting she didn’t know how to stop herself. She apologized for what she did and said online to people and hopes for reconciliation. She claims she recognizes that she wasn’t thinking rationally when online and now wants harmony without conflict or name-calling.

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2011 I called to wish my dad a happy 80th birthday. Ma was on the line too, but I mostly talked with dad, as usual. He sounded chipper enough for being the old man he now is, as amazing and as sad as that sounds. They had a dry spell, I guess, and said they got some much-needed rain today that was to stop by the time they went out for dinner.

Dad’s hopeful for book sales and says to get everything we can get, assistance-wise. Yeah, it’s looking like we’ll have to, unfortunately. I appreciate whatever help we can get, but still, we didn’t come here to be a couple of welfare bums. I’m not sure which was the bigger mistake, moving to Oregon or moving to California. Life is so not what we plan it to be. But sadly, we are where we’re meant to be which is basically nowhere. In 5 years, if we’re still around, we’ll still be broke and uninsured. Same with 10 and 20 years from now. It’s like a life sentence of sorts that’s been handed down to us where we must spend 80% of our lives struggling to survive.

They’re sending another IHOP GC which is so nice of them, so we at least have that to look forward to since there’s no extra money for eating out. We don’t usually do that much anyway. It’s bad for our diets, and most restaurants are pretty wild these days unless you go in the middle of the night or early morning when the animals disguised as children are less likely to be out and about.

I told them a little about the weather, what we found out about the county and the dentist, and our plans to give the Beanie Babies another go on eBay. We’re going to list them tomorrow, so long as nothing comes up to mess with our plans.

I’ve been tired for most of the day because I barely slept 6 hours cuz of the stress. Tomorrow I’ll also be in for some more shitty sleep because there’s a slight leak in the pipe going into the trailer, so Jesse’s coming back down to fix it. Tom told him I’d be asleep till noon, but I’m sure he’ll wake me up anyway. Especially since I may need to sleep past noon. I guess the worst-case scenario is he wakes me up while he’s here, then I go back to sleep. Lost sleep or not, at least it’s another reason to be glad we don’t have our own place and probably never will.

Despite all the fuss the guy at the temp agency made and the way he got Tom all hopeful, he’s been completely blown off, probably because he’s older and white. I’m not surprised as I said before since we’re not allowed any short-term problems in life. He’ll be out of work for months.

I had wondered if something up there would drive us to our deaths to keep us from our pension fund, but if it kills us then it can’t have all this fun cursing us, so we just may get to live after all. Then it can just screw us out of the money somehow instead. As of yet, though, there’s just over a year to go and no one’s notified Tom of any significant changes or problems.

A close friend was saying that she could relate to the stress I’m going through, but as sad as it may sound, it actually gets easier each time something up there feels the need to get a kick out of teasing me with my survival. Oh, I’m still stressing, but another 4 or 5 layoffs and I just might be a real expert at dealing with this shit.

The bird’s nest I discovered on the porch rafters a while ago gives me a spark of hope, too. I guess it’s an oriental thing where they consider the discovery of a bird’s nest nearby a sign of good luck to come (unless old nests don’t count, since these birds seem to be reusing an old nest). Someone told me that last year when I discovered the nest when it was first created. A little over two months later he had a job. So we’ll see what happens in the next 60-70 days. There’s been lots of deer and jackrabbits out and about too, which makes sense this time of year. It’s no longer cold and rainy, but it’s not hot yet either. Unfortunately, we’re going to have another cold snap where it might even rain. This means we’ll need to use more propane. sighs

As I told some people, it’s hard to really enjoy the excitement of getting my book published with all this other shit going on. It just hasn’t hit me yet that I can no longer say I’m just a homemaker or just a “semi-published” writer. I’m a real author now. For real. I may not make shit for sales, but this “pro” status is definitely gonna take time to sink in.

I told Tammy, Eileen and Sharyn about it, and was surprised not to have heard back from Tammy and Eileen. Sharyn told me it wasn’t her that was divorced 4 times. She was actually married to a guy for 15 years. I felt like such an idiot! Obviously, I read the wrong article. She was featured with a few others and I guess I was reading up on the wrong person or something. Anyway, she wished me luck with the book.

Nothing from Larry, Sandy and Jenny still. They not only haven’t viewed my blog, but they haven’t even blocked me. I’m surprised. Then again, maybe they figure that would be giving me a “reaction” they don’t want to give me if they did, same with why the black bitch didn’t block me.

I haven’t even heard from Maliheh lately.

Upon closer inspection of Larry’s page, one of his “interests” is “being with the people I love, with Stephanie.”

Well, Stephanie, who is also on his friend list, is a definite child woman. From the looks of her picture, she can’t be a day over 18.

Tom finally got his own Facebook account, but only for the sake of getting free stuff. He set everything to ‘friends only��� so no one contacts him.

As for the troll, it took a day off today from viewing my blog, but her friend/ ex-friend in Savannah, GA just checked in. Molly spent the day bitching about Roman instead, a local guy who’s been trying to get her to leave him alone.

I’m sick of the constant change on all the sites I use! As soon as I get used to doing something a particular way they run and change it. I hate change! Changing background images is one thing, but the way they change things around and make me have to hunt for where the features are now located and all that shit really annoys the hell outa me.

MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2011 My book is almost published and ready for sale. For some strange reason, they publish it in stages over about 72 hours. So the book’s there, but there’s no pricing info yet. I selected the lowest price of $2.99 since it’s my first novel and I’m still a nobody. Once Amazon takes its cut I’ll pocket $2.00.

I will have to have Nane, Adonis and Mitch see if it’s available for purchase in their countries. It should be, but I don’t know for sure.

Nane sent me pretty pink flowers on Facebook and congratulated me after I told her about it on her wall and sent her flowers as well. She asked if it could be translated into German, but I don’t know that there’s any kind of automatic translator.

We’re also going to have to edit out Tom’s name. Even though we listed him as the illustrator, the cover page says it’s by both of us which leads one to think we both wrote the book itself. It says I’m the author and he’s the illustrator only when you click on the book.

Also, the cover doesn’t make for the greatest thumbnail. We should’ve used the same bright red for my name since you can barely see it. There should’ve been more contrast between the trees and sky, but hey, it’s our first time doing this.

It pisses me off that I have to be careful where I post my book link, but thanks to Molly I can’t just drop it anywhere and everywhere. I’m sure she’ll still find it. As dumb as she may be overall, she’s proven to have an amazing talent for finding the people she stalks, among other things.

Then again, fuck it. I’m going to post it where I want. That would be letting her control me by not posting it where I wanted. Hopefully, she won’t use it as a weapon to harass me.

I said she was probably harmless, but the more I read the craziness in her blog, the more I wonder if perhaps she’s really a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. And how does she know I’ve been reading it? Does she have a tracker there or something? I’m just wondering because, in one of her “letters” to Alison, she asks why her friends read her blog. But yeah, it’s so crazy that it’s almost funny. She groups us all together and includes me in her list of “former friends,” and goes back and forth like crazy on her feelings and actions. I’ve never seen anyone swing up and down and be so damn contradicting like she is. One minute she just loves Alison, the next she’s badmouthing her. She also swings back and forth between admitting she “spies” on us because she’s bored and lonely, and then insisting she’ll never bother again because online friends are a “waste of time.” She talks about panic attacks and having all kinds of anger and other negative emotions. It’s hard to believe she held a job for 7 years as she also claims as an usher in a movie theater. Wonder why she quit. She claims she was raped over a year ago. Maybe this is part of what’s driving her batty, along with this guy in her town she wants a relationship with that wants nothing to do with her.

It doesn’t look like Tom’s going to get that job after all. I’m not surprised either. I knew it was too good to be true and that nothing lets us suffer for that short of a time. It’ll probably be months before he gets something. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to play the Unemployment game again, sit back and endure the rough ride ahead, and watch the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months.

Thanks, God. Just thanks.

The dreams I had pretty much told me we weren’t going to get any good news today, though they weren’t as scary as that dream where the riot was closing in on me.

In one dream the phone rang, I answered, and a woman said something about Tom’s applying for a job at a warehouse. I repeated the message to Tom who was nearby and he said, “Oh yeah, a warehouse,” and took the phone from me. A second later a black woman was there who supposedly had something to do with the job, but then she disappeared. I asked Tom what the caller and the visitor wanted and he said he didn’t know and that he wasn’t sure.

The bad dream, though it had nothing to do with work and money, took place in some house. It looked like a real house anyway and was much bigger. I seemed to be working on some major project, be it cleaning, decorating, packing or unpacking. I had stuff scattered everywhere and music blasting. At one point I looked behind me to find the screen door to a slider open and thought it a bit odd. I guess Tom shouldn’t have been home at that time. I stepped over to the slider. The sun was setting and I could see the silhouette of what I first thought was Tom in a fairly good-sized backyard. But then the person started running away right as I heard loud banging from inside the house. I woke up trying to decide whether or not to chase the person who was running or deal with whoever was in the house.

A woman did come down here today, though she wasn’t black, and it definitely had nothing to do with any job. She just wanted directions. It’s the first time anyone’s ever come down to ask us, too.

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2011 This is it, folks! My book has been accepted for publication and so now begins the exciting countdown to when it’s actually available for sale! It will be available in e-book form only. Not paperback. You don’t need a Kindle to read it, but you will need a Kindle reader which is a free application you can download that will enable you to read it in Word. I will post the link as soon as I get it, probably tomorrow. Buy it and I’ll be your friend for life. :)

Andy’s all excited about it, but I don’t think he realized at first that it’s not going to be available in print. The only way to really get it “in print” would be to print out a copy from Word. I explained to him about the program he can download to read it without a Kindle.

Now if only – if only – Tom could get his own good news tomorrow! I’d give up this whole book thing for him to get the job he wants! It would be such awesome money and I know he would love the convenience the closeness would bring instead of having to drive 45 minutes each way to Grass Valley. We’re still pretty hopeful and I know my good mood will help. I also know now’s a good time to enter sweeps with the way my mood tends to “influence” things in a more extreme way.

As soon as I have the link to my book I’ll start spreading the word and hope others will too! I never would’ve thought I’d get a book published, regardless of the method. All I’ve gotten published before that I’ve actually been paid for was super short stories, articles and reviews. I guess it’s no longer true to say I’m a “semi-published” author, LOL.

Still no poem reviews, not that it matters much, but I got a nice comment on my current book. They said they were glad I posted more of the story and are looking forward to the ending. If life will soon be returning to normal for us, I can get on with that soon enough.

Had someone told me I’d write a story with Maliheh as one of the lead characters, even if I’d change her name, and that she’d know about it and suggest publishing it, I’d have laughed my ass off so hard! ROTFL! I just hope no assholes like Molly post nasty comments in the review section.

Speaking of assholes, no blog views from Jenny, Larry or Sandy. I’m kind of surprised too, though I realize there’s a chance they may not have picked up my message yet. None of them have blocked me yet, so who knows?

Leaving a comment on Alison’s Thoughts blog through Facebook created a new account for me. rolls eyes So I had to run and block Molly since Molly already found Alison’s new account, and when she checks her blog/comments, she’ll find mine. I’m not going to go back to blogging there in the near future.

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2011 The weekend has been going agonizingly slow as we wait and hope that Monday brings a turnaround in our luck – him with a job and me with my book which we submitted for publication a few hours ago. We changed the synopsis but didn’t bother with dedications. Tom did a great job with the cover. I listed him as my illustrator under contributions.

No bad vibes or dreams lately. The two-story house dreams are back, but I don’t think they mean anything. As long as I don’t have any nightmares! Marie and whatever his name was are renting their two-story house down in “Cluster Park,” as I call it. They’re the people who asked if we had a dog on our way out one day and said some dog was keeping them up all night. Let me guess – they’re leaving because they couldn’t get the owners to take responsibility for shutting it up and of course they won’t tell any prospective renters about it, right? Either way, I always did say it was a lousy location down there by the main road where there’s a cluster of houses. That’s why I call it Cluster Park. It kind of defeats the purpose of moving out to the country if you’re just going to have neighbors on top of you. You might as well stay in the city if you’re not going to get any breathing space around you. I guess sometimes you can’t escape everything by running to the country. Barking is just as bad here as it is in the city.

They called off the rain we were supposed to have tomorrow and it wasn’t nearly as warm today. We haven’t needed heat all day but we couldn’t open windows either. Tiny yellow and purple wildflowers are all over the land now and it looks really cool, but the Cali oaks are late this year in budding new leaves. During our first two summers here we could leave the windows open all the time starting in mid-June. Last year it was a week after mid-June. Hopefully, it won’t be even later this year.

My Nane story has had hundreds of reads on Booksie yet hasn’t received one single comment yet. No one’s commented on my poems either.

Still sweeping away like crazy too, but don’t know if it’ll be like old times, so to speak. Not with all the people entering these days and there being fewer sweeps to enter. One sweep listed their odds. My chance of winning a lousy duffle bag these days is 1 in 75,000. Yet I was chosen out of 7,000 other entries for the cruise in 2006. If I don’t get any win notices by the time my 3-month subscription expires, I’ll give up sweeping once again. Sure hope I won’t have to, though!

Found Jenny C and her one friend on Facebook, LOL. I sent a message saying: You still fucking my brother?

That ought to shock her, LOL. I don’t expect or want a reply from the selfish, conceited bitch. Can’t say she hasn’t aged well, though, cuz she has. She’s got her hair dyed blondish now and she’s still slim. Guess she lives in the same house in West Springfield (both her parents are no doubt dead by now) and she has a cleaning business.

Wowee, I just found Larry and Sandy. Only, not surprisingly, they appear to be divorced since Larry’s coming up as living in Southwick and Sandy’s still in Feeding Hills. I’m not surprised at all. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen 20 years ago. My brother, as he himself admitted, is quite a slut.

Here’s what I wrote about him and Jenny in my blog (but not Sandy), assuming they check it out:

Found an old “friend” from something like 20 years and 3000 miles ago that I looked up online out of curiosity. I don’t care to ever be her friend again as I remember her to be rather selfish and conceited (not that I was or am perfect myself as I can get pretty damn selfish, too) any more than I’d want to be buds with my hypocrite of a brother again despite his great sense of humor (and he’s one of the funniest guys I ever knew), but I do wish her the very best in life. According to the one picture I saw of her, I’d say she’s aged quite well.

Speaking of my brother, OMG he pissed me the fuck off so badly back when I was 21 and again when I was around 32. I was young, dumb, naive and scared of just about everything at 21, but had he lived nearby when he pissed me off as bad as he did in the late 90s, not even his size could’ve saved him had I gone storming over to his place on account of it! How could someone piss me off so bad that could be so damn funny at the same time??? I’ve always wondered about this. Really, that guy could make even the most serious of people laugh their asses off until tragedy struck and he seemed to take it out on just about everyone. And why did he have to screw every single female friend I ever introduced him to? Oh well. Now he’s divorced, single and free by the looks of it, so live it up and play the field, dude! You ain’t getting any younger.

Talk about the ultimate karma, LOL! I wonder if they’ve ever looked me up?

I also found their daughter Jennifer, who looks very beautiful and has studied nursing. I didn’t message her, though.

FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2011 Here’s a little freeform-ish poem I wrote earlier today. The words just came to mind and so I jotted them down. Tom and Mitch liked it.

At Seventeen

At seventeen I had high hopes and dreams. But someone tried to murder me at seventeen. I lived for the moment, never worried about the future. The future would take care of itself, I was sure. But then I grew up and stepped into a whole different world. Disappointment, desperation and a loss of hope left my mind in a whirl. All the while there was hardly a dull moment at any point during the ride. Up, down, left, right go the adventures and heartaches of my life. Almost missed out on some things thanks to the person who nearly took my life. Bad news always has me slipping back in time, wanting to end it all. It’s so much easier to skip out on the chaos that sometimes befalls. But things have a way of working out in the end somehow, some way. And so I’m a former singer who was meant to be an author these days. I write and I write as I always have so much to tell. Funny thing too, for my would-be killer was myself.

Later…

The interview went well, though we won’t know anything for sure until Monday. Tom has a way of being overly optimistic, but I don’t have a bad feeling, and they did give him the paperwork and tell him where the company he might work for is located. This is something they don’t normally do unless they’re going to hire you for sure, he said. He may have to take a drug test here in town. These days they just swab your mouth. Sure wish they had that when I was on probation. Having to piss in front of someone for something you didn’t do was a real bitch. I won’t even get to thinking right now about those days of getting off for the things I was actually guilty of and being made to pay for the things I wasn’t guilty of.

Meanwhile, it sucks to have to wait and hope over the weekend, but he feels 80% certain that he’ll get at least one of the positions they need filled. It’s just a matter of whether or not he gets the one he wants most. He’ll take anything, even if it’s minimum wage or part-time or both, but getting over two grand take-home would sure be nice.

And it would get us wondering, once again, if we should move or not. That would be a tough one as both staying and going have their pros and cons. As I told someone the other day, there are two different types of people in this world. There are the smart ones who follow their heads and do what’s safest, then there are the stupid ones (like myself) who follow their hearts and take risks. I still don’t get how I got to be such an adventurer, LOL! Tom said he’d rather be miserable with me than have it all alone and I agree. :) Right now we’re not miserable, and I hope we don’t get there. I hope my bawling my eyes out like I did the Wednesday before last will end up being all for nothing.

Anyway, the company he wants to work for is only open Monday through Thursday, so that’s why we may have to wait till Monday to find out anything. The person who makes the final decision wasn’t there today and the girl was mistaken when she told him he might start today. If he gets the job he’ll work 10-12 hours a day, starting at 4pm.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up even though it’s so hard not to. If he got this job then his being laid off would turn out to be a blessing in disguise, not something that usually happens to us. Usually, when something bad happens it’s to punish us and inflict some kind of pain and suffering upon us. At least that’s how it seems. And our setbacks in life usually aren’t this short either, so that’s why I don’t want to get too ahead of myself on the thought of being able to stop worrying about money again, or being able to call the propane people out to fill us up, or being able to decide if we want to move or not.

Tentatively, we should be able to submit my book to the submissions department tomorrow. Tom’s still working on the cover. In his opinion, it’s not my best work. He says it’s well written, but the story’s about a 7, and the ending is about a 5. He didn’t like my surprise ending which came to me in a dream, LOL, but that’s ok.

[happenstobehere]

I wish you would write a fic where...

You write about Seven and her experiences through an autistic lens so well. I'd love to see a fic set post s3/Legacy era with Captain Seven and how she is dealing with things in her general life. And how she could set herself up for success as a captain

Does she stim?

How does she deal with sensory overload?

Are StarFleet supportive now and help with adaptations and accomadations

Has she adapted things herself

What is her support system?

So i guess in summary. Seven thriving and being successful - but still herself.

First of all, my sincerest apologies that this took an insane amount of time to get to.

Second, this serves as an intro to a bigger fic that I will (hopefully) be finishing sometime soon. I make no promises.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this (even though you've probably forgotten about this ask by now).

Seven looked in the mirror, smoothing down her uniform with her hands. Despite having been captain for months now, she still fights the need for perfection. Her uniform should be free of wrinkles and should sit perfectly, the exact same way it does every day. Everything should go according to plan. She scoffed to herself at the thought. This is Starfleet. Her time on Voyager alone has taught her nothing ever goes perfectly here.

Seven checked the clock. Raffi should be here any minute, she mused right as her door chimed. Raffi walked up behind her and kissed Seven’s cheek, leaning on the counter to make sure she didn’t touch her uniform in the process. 

“Good morning, Captain,” Raffi said with a smile. “Good morning, Number One,” Seven replied. This was part of Seven’s routine — greet Raffi in the morning, have breakfast, start the day — but Raffi found it grounding as well. Seven’s routine had become essential for the both of them, and it filled her with calm to think of how wrapped up in each other’s lives they’d become.

“So, breakfast?” Raffi asked. Seven ate the same thing every morning — but where they ate was dependent on a few different factors, including whether Seven felt up to the extra sensory input that eating in the mess hall would cause. 

They’d eaten in Seven’s quarters for the last couple of weeks after Seven had a shutdown following a situation on the bridge. Raffi didn’t mind it; if that’s what Seven needs, then she’s happy to tag along and be there for her however she could. But Seven felt okay enough to try again that morning. 

As they sat down and Seven started to eat her usual breakfast — scrambled eggs and a strawberry nutrition supplement — Raffi noticed a couple of the lights flickering in the corners of her vision. She ate quietly, observing Seven as discreetly as she could manage.

Seven could hear the lights buzzing on a regular day, but the intermittent sound was making her skin crawl. She starts to shake her left hand then stops, taking a deep breath. She was almost finished with her food anyway, if she could just get through the rest of it…

Raffi spoke softly. “Seven. It’s okay if you need to–” she started.

“I know,” Seven said gently. It’s not that she felt she couldn’t stim, but she felt she shouldn’t need to. Logically, she knew there was no shame in it — hell, half the damn crew was neurodivergent in some way — but she still felt embarrassed. 

Raffi tilted her head. “You don’t have to be ashamed, honey. Nobody would even bat an eye.” The silent implication that they’d have to go through Raffi if they had an issue hung in the air as Seven nodded. Sometimes she really hated the way Raffi seemed to be able to read her mind — this was not one of them. She shook her hand out and felt enough relief to finish her breakfast. 

As they walked to the bridge, Seven took Raffi’s hand and softly squeezed it, a silent request for pressure. Raffi held her hand firmly, only letting go when they made it to their respective chairs.