#like if you finished the section on health insurance

[a-method-in-it]

In this case "tentative agreement" means that the studio execs and the union's bargaining team have reached a deal --- however, it can't be final until all WGA members have a chance to vote on it.

Unions are democratic institutions. The people who negotiate are doing so on behalf of the membership (sometimes the negotiators are themselves elected, sometimes they are chosen by elected union leaders, but they are always ultimately accountable to the members). So even if they say "This is a good deal and we are happy with it," it can't take effect until the members sign off.

In this case, you can pretty much guarantee that the members will approve it. I mean, they achieved all of their goals! Which is presumably why union leadership already decided to call off the strike.

But right now, members have until October 9, 2023 to cast their ballots on whether or not to ratify the contract.

Just to clarify my mind a bit, does the WGA meeting a ‘tentative agreement’ mean not all the meets were met to what they want?

[gay-sin]

Severance, flip phones, far from home: the impossibility of opting out 

I finished Severance by Ling Ma about a week ago. I loved it so much. I am not in school anymore and I am having a hard time trying to fulfill my desire for intellectual conversation. It’s not like I’m not learning anymore. I’m learning so much. These days, I am filling in the gaps of my learning in the sections of life that I chose to put off while prioritizing academia. I’m learning to take care of myself, complete tasks, hold myself accountable, and generally survive. It is hard and I miss the conversations I would have in school that felt like they truly challenged and deepened my worldview. Reading has been a great solace to me in that way but it often feels lonely to read something and not get to discuss it with others. I can never simply read or watch something without wanting to dig in and discuss the implications. I like to use fiction to interrogate real things. I have so many thoughts about Severance and what it had me thinking about in my own life as I read it. I decided to write it down to at least converse with myself as I did so. I'm posting it online to see if anyone would want to engage in conversation with me as well. It is not in MLA or whatever. I’m not in school. I can write how I want. 

I think that the title of Severance is very layered. On the surface, it references the phenomenon of severance checks (payments given to terminated employees that are fired due to layoffs or retirement). The payments are based on the amount of time that an employee has worked for the company. Effectively, it aims to take care of the people that have taken care of the company until they can find new work. Severance describes how companies have cut long-term employees and these checks in order to maximize profits at the cost of minimizing quality. This seems to echo a larger trend that the novel revolves around: a cutting off (or severance) from our interconnectivity under our current systems of hetero-patriarchal white supremacist colonial capitalism. What a mouthful. But basically… Society is severing us from the things that make living meaningful, and for many, possible. 

The characters of the book all seem to be struggling with the desire to opt out of this system (who wouldn't want that?) The narrator, Candace, immigrated to Salt Lake City from Fuzhou as a child. This severance from her ancestry, culture, and family was done in aims of giving her a better life in the United States. In many ways, it was an action done by her parents in order to attempt to opt out of the struggles of life in Fuzhou, made increasingly difficult under global capitalism. Even so, the choice was really just opting into a new set of struggles. The book describes the complex effects of this immigration on Candace and her family. In addition, it describes the guilt of leaving and the burden of feeling as if you are in a country that despises you while you must constantly prove yourself to it.

Candace’s ex-boyfriend felt dehumanized by the working in corporate America and therefore lives on the fringes of the system, skimping by. He believes himself to be opting out of the system. In this quote, Candace interrogates his lifestyle.

“I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice” (205).

The illusion of opting out is a privilege. Jonathan, unlike Candance, is American. This gives him the ability to exist in America without questioning or proving his belonging. He does not carry the weight of supporting his family or really anyone but himself. Even so, he barely manages that. Candace, not afforded many of Jonathan's privileges, works for in a corporate office. Jonathan, idealistic and blind to his own advantages, is consistently criticizing this choice.

I have always had dreams of opting out. I've spent much of my life dreaming of this. I think that part of why I went to college was to opt out of joining the workforce for four more years. I studied art because it seemed like that would be opting out of the monotony of having a Real Job. I bought a flip phone to opt out of smartphone addiction. I moved across the country to opt out of my family. 

Severance depicts a world-ending incurable pandemic. The illness is called Shen Fever and it is somewhat akin to a zombie apocalypse without the eating of humans. The sickness comes for everyone, even if it does demolish the areas with the least privileges first. In the end, everyone is susceptible. You cannot opt out. You cannot buy your way out of an incurable disease. 

You cannot buy your way out of climate change, even if you can avoid its consequences for longer. Sure, you may be privileged enough to be given the illusion of opting out but this planet is deeply, densely interconnected. You are not opting out. You are delaying the inevitable. 

Over the summer, I went to an anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia and bought a book called Meaningful Flesh: Reflections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet. I would read the essays on my breaks from work, trying to see if I could be someone that reads academic theory in my free time. It ended up being very dense and difficult to get through but it was incredibly interesting to me. I was reminded of the second essay of the text when reading Severance. It is called, “Irreverent Theology: On the Queer Ecology of Creation” by Jacob J. Erikson. The essay aims to queer our ideas of nature and matter with a theological lens. That is a massive oversimplification of the text but I don’t want to stray too much from my original point here. I just wanted to include a quote from the essay to gesture to how these concepts in Severance have resonances in so many areas of life.

 “For this particular nature-cultural moment, we must be irreverent of old stories and ideas in our constructive creativity. Ideas of pristine nature, untouched wilderness, essential selves, essential genders, and uncomplicated assumptions of desire and sexuality, deaden and violate the messy and embodied realities of creativity, embodied ecology, and enfleshed divinity” (74).

Collectively, we have attempted to sever ourselves from the environment that we are interwoven with, dependent on, and constantly in conversation with. The consequences are far-reaching and the effort is inevitably futile. You cannot sever yourself from the environment that sustains you. You are the environment.

On Saturday, I took an Uber home from my friend’s house and chatted with the driver. We talked about daylight savings and how stupid it is. Why make the sun go down sooner? I wish I could opt out of it, but then I’d be an hour early to every event from now until spring. I told him that I thought that the government was supposed to get rid of this system but apparently they were too busy committing genocides. We talked about Palestine and how clear it is that what is happening is devastating but how some people still blindly support Israel. We agreed that people have lost a fundamental part of their humanity: a severance from the part of themselves that sees innocent people dying and is devastated and outraged. In America, we have the choice to participate in these colonial ideologies,  push against them, or to not have an opinion (to “opt out"). It is an American privilege, the illusion of opting out of mass murder. None of us are separate from this conflict. Our tax dollars are being spent on the weapons that do the killing.

I am a white American. I have a large array of privileges that give me the illusions of choice. But at the end of the day, none of my choices have truly opted me out. At the end of the day, these severances have only handicapped me in other ways. I have gotten lost and missed appointments that I could have simply typed into Google Maps on a smartphone. I walked to urgent care by myself when I could have called my mom to pick me up if I didn’t move so far away. I carry the debt of my art degree and I will be making monthly payments from now until forever. I don’t have enough money to get out of an unhealthy living situation.  How free am I? How much have I opted out? You can opt out and be crushed by the weight of what it means to be alone, still dependent and existent within the system you’ve supposedly broken out of. But if you opt in, do you get sucked in? What choice is there?

“To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” (290).

In Severance, the fevered mindlessly repeat patterns. Their condition is an identifiable sickness. Yet, at the same time, Ma also gestures to the fact that it is not too different from the condition that we all share. Our daily repetition, often mindless, trying to find pleasure. The condition one must adopt to survive in this world. The sickness is not individual, it is collective. The cure is not individual, it is collective.

My coworker is moving home across the country after moving away from his family many years ago. He told me about how stressful the process has been for him. I could relate a lot to what he had said. The unsustainability of not having family closeby. The feeling of - what am I proving? The unsustainable nature of being alone and the sometimes equally unsustainable nature of family. Every choice seems to be a choice to sever yourself from one thing or sever yourself from another. Either way, the choice is rarely to come together. The deeper we just get into becoming a mess of severed pieces. 

I got a flip phone back in 2021 when I took a year off from college. At the time, I had fallen headfirst into a lot of the crushing realities that I had never really wanted to face. I was back home living with my family. I was coming to terms with my health, my sexuality, my lack of funds, my place in the world. I was cut off from my illusions of Making it Big and was faced with what Making it Small would entail. I was trying to shoulder the weight of the world that seemed to slowly be collapsing. I got a flip phone as an experiment, to see if I could do it, to see what it would feel like.  I wanted to know what it would be like to have to figure things out on my own, to be in silence, to be present in the moment that I was in. I wanted to stop opting out of being alive. 

About a month ago, I switched back to my smartphone on a whim. To see if I could, to see what it would feel like. It hasn’t solved anything. It hasn’t cured me. It has made my life easier in a lot of ways but harder in others. I miss the way I could walk around with a built-in excuse as to why I had not seen your email. I liked not having the pressure of every piece of knowledge at my constant disposal. I miss the way I felt I could walk around the world without trying to sever myself from it. I would walk in silence instead of trying to impose some soundtrack onto my reality, the soundtrack of the life I’d rather live.

[racefortheironthrone]

Advice About Grad School

Public history guy and yes, I think I did get a little confused. Sorry about that.

Any advice about grad school would be amazing! I’m going in on a graduate assistantship, but it’s been a few years since I finished my B.A due to life issues and I’m a little concerned about getting back into it.

Advice about grad school I can do.

The first piece of advice I can give is that you should not go to grad school unless you are fully funded. In the past, pursuing graduate education was a pretty reliable ticket into the ranks of the economically secure if not the outright affluent, but unfortunately the transformation of academic job markets over the last 10+ years has meant that even a PhD is less and less reliable, as full-time jobs became scarcer and competition for those jobs increases. 

So it’s of vital importance that if you want to pursue a PhD for non-monetary reasons - whether it’s a particular topic that you find fascinating, or whether you love teaching in a university setting, or whether you love archival research and uncovering previousy unseen documents, or whatever - that you don’t go into debt in the process. A PhD in history requires on average of eight years where you can’t work full-time because of coursework and reading and research and teaching, and where university jobs don’t always pay the most, so it’s going to be an economically stressful time. You don’t want to make it worse by having to take out loans to pay tuition, health insurance, and living expenses, so make sure that the package you’re offered provides enough in the way of tuition remissions, living stipends, and/or university employment to cover your entire time at grad school. 

The second piece of advice I have to give, and here I’m speaking as both a former grad student and a former grad student union activist, is to not self-exploit. One of the things that you will find in grad school is a dizzying array of activities that all seem like important opportunities - research and publication collaborations with professors, invitations to attend workshops and conferences, offers to teach more advanced discussion sections, offers to be a part of student academic journals, offers to be a part of departmental student governance, etc. And then of course there’s wanting to do a good job as a teacher, and you can always spend more hours in classroom prep or written feedback on assignments or more office hours, and so on. 

The larger point is that there’s a lot of social pressure to say yes to all these requests and they can all feel potentially highly useful and important to your future prospects, but one of the most important things you have to learn as a graduate student is when to say no. There are only so many hours in the day and getting your own work done so that you actually complete your PhD on time really has to be your first priority. So one of the most valuable skills you can pick up as a graduate student is a sense of which opportunities really are worth the time commitment and the ability to tactfully decline offers that are not. And when it comes to teaching in particular, remember that you’re only getting paid to work a certain number of hours a week - if you put in extra hours over that, you’re giving your employers overtime for free. 

The third piece of advice I can give is to practice self-care. As I’ve already suggested, grad school can be a very stressful time: not only is there a lot of high-stakes academics and long-term job market issues to worry about, but there’s also stress about low wages, high rents, long hours, and commute times, and then there’s also the stress of your daily life. And sadly, one of the things that grad students often do is to mismanage their stress by focusing on their academics and/or their jobs and in the process neglecting themselves in dangerous ways. In my case, I dealt with my stress by stress-eating and put on a lot of weight and I developed stress-related ulcers and acid reflux. Even worse, I became really negligent about going to medical appointments and dentist appointments, so that smaller problems became bigger problems. But my biggest problem is that I wasn’t talking to anyone about my stress, because I think just about anybody who would have heard that list of bad behaviors would have told me that I was really harming myself and needed to change my routines in order to improve my quality of life. 

So one of the things that I absolutely recommend is to make use of mental health services from the beginning. Having a trained professional to talk to, even if it’s just about how things are going and what your day-to-day is like, who can give you advice about ways to handle things better or who can warn you when you’re not handling things well, is really invaluable, especially since grad school often means you’ve moved away from your previous support structures and need to rebuild them. Likewise, make sure that you have a convenient primary care provider and dentist and make sure that you do regular check-ups and other forms of preventative care. 

The fourth piece of advice I have to give, and this is where I’m actually going to talk about academia and job markets, is to develop multiple strings to your bow. With the academic job market going the way that it is, you can’t rely purely on your dissertation, your publications, your fields of study, and your letters of recommendation to get a good job in your area of expertise if there aren’t any job openings in your area, or if every job has 15 applicants with unbeatable resumes. 

So keep an eye on the AHA and OAH’s job listing databases, but also keep an eye out for museum jobs, state and local history society and commission jobs, the National Parks Service, state parks services, where having a degree in public history can be a big advantage.

Moreover, acquiring skills and knowledge bases that aren’t covered by your fields or your dissertation can be really helpful in applying for jobs outside of history. In my case, even though I was a public policy historian, I did a lot of independent reading and blogging on contemporary public policy and public policy analysis and public policy design, which helped get me some paid gigs writing reports for think-tanks, and it all helped when I ended up applying for public policy teaching jobs, and then ultimately teaching in public policy. So make some time to read widely throughout history, social science, and any other field that interests you, because it might help down the road in applying for a job in that area. 

At the same time, one of the things I regret is that there are certain skills, like statistics and quant in general, or graphic design and photoshop, or programming at least to the extent of being able to build websites, or additional language skills, that I never took the time to pick up, because there’s a lot of NGO jobs and the like where they get huge numbers of well-educated applicants but where what we could call general professional skills are in demand and thinner on the ground. 

[abra-opticians]

The Ultimate Guide to Scheduling Your Eye Exam Online

In today’s fast-paced world, convenience is key. The ability to schedule appointments online has become a standard expectation for many services, including healthcare. With the advancement of technology, scheduling an eye exam online has never been easier. This ultimate guide will walk you through the process, highlighting its benefits, steps, and tips for a seamless experience.

Why Schedule Your Eye Exam Online?

Online scheduling offers unparalleled convenience and flexibility. Gone are the days of waiting on hold or trying to coordinate appointments during office hours. With online scheduling, you can book your eye exam at any time, from anywhere, using your computer or smartphone. This accessibility empowers individuals to take control of their healthcare on their own terms.

Step-by-Step Guide to Scheduling Your Eye Exam Online

Research: Begin by researching eye care providers in your area that offer online scheduling. Look for reputable practices with positive reviews and a user-friendly website.

Visit the Website: Once you’ve identified a potential provider, visit their website to explore their services and online scheduling platform. Most websites will have a dedicated section or button for scheduling appointments.

Select Your Service: Navigate to the scheduling page and select the type of appointment you need, such as a routine eye exam or a specific concern like dry eyes or vision changes.

Choose a Date and Time: Next, choose a date and time that works best for your schedule. Many online scheduling platforms will display real-time availability, allowing you to select an appointment slot that suits you.

Provide Personal Information: You will likely be asked to provide personal information, such as your name, contact information, and insurance details. Be sure to double-check this information for accuracy.

Confirm Your Appointment: Once you’ve entered your information, review your appointment details and confirm your booking. You may receive a confirmation email or text message with further instructions.

Prepare for Your Appointment: Prior to your scheduled eye exam, gather any relevant medical history, insurance cards, or previous prescription information to bring with you.

Tips for a Seamless Online Scheduling Experience

Check Insurance Coverage: Before scheduling your eye exam online, verify that the provider accepts your insurance plan. This will help avoid any unexpected out-of-pocket expenses.

Plan Ahead: Schedule your eye exam well in advance, especially during busy times of the year. This will ensure you secure a convenient appointment slot that fits your schedule.

Be Flexible: If your preferred appointment time isn’t available, consider being flexible with your scheduling preferences. Keep in mind that some providers may offer evening or weekend appointments for added convenience.

Set Reminders: Once you’ve booked your eye exam online, set reminders on your calendar or smartphone to ensure you don’t forget about your appointment.

Arrive Early: On the day of your appointment, plan to arrive early to complete any necessary paperwork and ensure a smooth check-in process.

Conclusion

Scheduling your "book eye test online" offers a convenient and hassle-free way to prioritize your eye health. With just a few clicks, you can book an appointment at your convenience, eliminating the need to wait on hold or coordinate schedules over the phone. By following the steps outlined in this guide and utilizing the provided tips, you can navigate the online scheduling process with ease and ensure a seamless experience from start to finish. Take control of your eye care today by scheduling your next exam online

[chanthurukanthan7]

Air Duct Cleaning

You've likely heard a large amount of debating over the merits of the services of an air duct cleaning company. This may lead you to question whether you will need to have your ducts cleaned in an attempt to maintain your home clean and safe, or if this sounds like just something you can forgo. In reality, much like other things that is due to your house, whether you receive your ducts cleaned is really a completely personal choice. If you're debating the merits, however, you need to know that the Ecological Protection Agency has specific guidelines that recommend homeowners get their duct system cleaned when they notice some things about scalping strategies. For more information on Professional Air Duct Cleaners Near me, visit our website today.If you have been unwilling to utilize the services of a cleaning professional, reviewing the guidelines which are put down by the Environmental protection agency can assist you to make an educated and assured decision regarding the health insurance and cleanliness of your house. The Ecological Protection Agency states that any homeowner who notices the following difficulties with their air duct system should quickly have the ducts cleaned:The inside surface of the air ducts or any of the components of the heating air conditioning have grown to be visibly moldyAn intensive examination with a professional has resulted and discovery of mold in sections of the duct system that aren't easily visibleYour air duct system is becoming infested with insects or rodentsThere's too much of dust and dirt buildup in the ducts, which buildup is seen from the supply registers or vents. Want to know more about Dryer Vent Cleaning Services Sandy UT? Visit our website for more information.While it might be tempting for you to try and clean your ducts by yourself, you need to know that does not only is wanting a do it yourself cleaning of your duct system potentially harmful as you don't have the understanding of the system which an air duct cleaning professional has and may finish up damaging your house's duct system or hurting yourself, but cleaning of a duct system requires tools and techniques that may get beyond just the visible area of the ducts. Which means that should you make an effort to clean your ducts and do not reach these unseen areas, you're departing behind the dust, dirt along with other contamination which was the problem in the to begin with. It is best to believe your house to some trained, knowledgeable cleaning professional which will utilize his skills to provide you with the the best results possible.

[manorlake22]

Assisted Living Facility Wyoming Division Of Health

The score shown is the general expertise ranking which is an average of the critiques submitted for those communities. The overall expertise rating is a star rating retirement home that ranges from 1 being the bottom to 5 being the best. Your family member might want to adjust to a new home and routine.

It’s definitely a life-style change and often pricey, but for older adults who are somewhat unbiased with only a handful of extra care needs, assisted living may be the most effective answer. However, it’s well price contemplating, given the funding and finance options we mentioned, and the expanse of possibilities available for older adults, such as fitness courses and social occasions. Plus, I’ve witnessed a big discount in stress in both older adults and caregivers when endeavor such a transfer. Thereby, I’m convinced assisted living is worth a second look for families attempting to resolve on their subsequent best step. Whether you’re an older grownup or a liked one, selecting to move from the consolation of your home to an assisted living facility just isn't a call that’s made flippantly.

As seniors age, they could typically want help with daily activities. This contains bathing, laundry, hygiene, and housekeeping activities. This additionally consists of any facility which offers, or represents to the public that it presents, a helpful or protected surroundings particularly for people who've psychological illness or disabilities. These amenities could additionally be referred to as “assisted living” supplied they meet the above definition of community residential care facility.

Click here to finish your residential assisted living marketing strategy at present. In addition to explaining the sort of assisted living facility you will operate, the Company Analysis section of your marketing assisted living hamilton strategy wants to provide background on the enterprise. The second most common type of funding for an assisted living facility is angel buyers.

Regardless, these activities are meant to ease their loneliness and encourage them to socialize with different seniors. Moreover, the Harvard School of Public Health researchers came upon that sustaining an active social life helps slow down the speed of reminiscence decline. Regular social activities also decrease emotions of isolation and despair. Furthermore, the facility assisted living facility will want business insurance protection to operate safely and lawfully. In addition to being properly skilled and experienced, the workers should also be friendly and courteous. Their angle could make all the difference in the care facility’s setting, in any case.

[payrupp]

Cars24 Financial Services Private Limited Loan Repayment

Just in case you have missed your online loan payment, we have just the right payment facilities to help you out with the same.

You can either pay through your bank account using Payrup’s fast payment gateway or you can utilize digital payment options like UPI, net banking, Razorpay, Bharat Billpay, etc. to clear your dues. Speaking of loans, it can be anything - a bank loan or any other loan payment online. When the world is thinking digital, so are you because it is just so much more convenient to do so. Clear all your loan repayment with quick loan payment facilities only on Payrup.

The digital mission for digital payments 

Payrup is a very popular online digital partner for bill payments, recharges, ticketing, and much more. It is a brand for customers who prefer to get work done on the go!

We at Payrup, believe India is a market that requires facilities and facilities as these help digital India grow ahead day by day.

Why is it so easy to make loan repayment at Payrup? Making payments is now easier using various payment channels mentioned on our platform. Select the most suitable channel to clear your loan payment and within seconds it is done.

How is the payment done? Find out below in the next section

Just follow these simple steps to process your repayment:

Step - 1:

Login to your account on Payrup

Step - 2:

Click on loan repayment from the various modules listed on the website

Step - 3:

Select your loan repayment operator to proceed to pay the loan/overdue loan online

Step - 4:

Once you select the operator, a user must enter all the details needed for the loan payment, then hit the fetch bill button to get the actual loan amounts payable.

Step - 5:

“Proceed to Pay” the loan repayment once all the amounts are correct and verified

Pro hint! Always check the displayed details carefully to be sure that the payment is all correct before you proceed to the next step.

Step - 6:

Enter the amount and click on "Proceed to Pay" & Choose the desired payment option from the many available.

Step - 7:

Choose from the desired payment option, proceed to finish the payment 

Step - 8:

Receive the online loan payment confirmation on your registered mobile and email id once you finish doing the payment. You can even download the invoice from the “My transactions” tab in your account.

Successful payment will reflect in your EMI loan account within 24 hours of successfully completing the payment.

So, this is how a loan/overdue payment is successfully completed in a few easy steps on Payrup. For many such simple payment facilities, we are always there for you 24*7.

Final Thoughts…

Popular bill payment facilities are available on Payrup!

Payrup has a host of facilities that can all be paid online using our platform.

Choose to make payments for mobile prepaid, mobile postpaid, dth, electricity, landline bills, piped gas, broadband bills, water bills, e-gift cards purchases, cable tv bills, credit card bills, health insurance purchases, housing society payments, life insurance premium purchases, loan repayments, hospital payments, subscriptions, education fees, fastag payments, LPG gas bills, municipal services, and municipal taxes’ payments Payrup has it all covered for our users under one roof.  visit us : Cars24 Financial Services Private Limited Loan Repayment

[xoxo-denver-xoxo]

Um hello.. are you taking request if so can you do the fluff alphabet with Albert Wesker from resident evil?.. 😣

A/N: Requests are always open! Also, this ended up surprisingly long. I don’t even know that much about Wesker. I’m glad it turned out this long, though. Sorry if the disclaimer and mental health hotlines annoy you, they are there to insure the safety of others.

Fʟᴜғғ Aʟᴘʜᴀʙᴇᴛ ᴡ/ Aʟʙᴇʀᴛ Wᴇsᴋᴇʀ

𝑊𝐴𝑅𝑁𝐼𝑁𝐺: 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟, 𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑚, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦. 𝑃𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.

𝐷𝐼𝑆𝐶𝐿𝐴𝐼𝑀𝐸𝑅: 𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑠 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑟. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑢𝑝 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒. 𝑃𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔.

𝑆𝐴𝑀𝑆𝐻𝐴’𝑠 𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝐻𝑜𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒: 1-800-662-4357 (𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑆𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑟𝑠. 𝑀𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑜𝑟 𝑓𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑎𝑛𝑑/𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑢𝑏𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠. 24/7)

𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝐶𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑠: 𝑇𝑒𝑥𝑡 𝑆𝑈𝑃𝑃𝑂𝑅𝑇 𝑡𝑜 741-741. (𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑔𝑜𝑎𝑙 𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑝 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑎 ℎ𝑜𝑡 𝑚𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑎 𝑐𝑜𝑜𝑙 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑚, 𝑔𝑢𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑛. 24/7)

𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝐴𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑛 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐼𝑙𝑙𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠: 1-800-950-6264 (𝑁𝐴𝑀𝐼 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚𝑠. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑙𝑦 𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑. 𝑀𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑦-𝐹𝑟𝑖𝑑𝑎𝑦, 10 𝑎.𝑚.-6 𝑝.𝑚.)

Aᴄᴛɪᴠɪᴛɪᴇs

He enjoys cooking or reading with s/o. He just needs some time to relax.

Bᴇᴀᴜᴛʏ

He enjoys an open-minded and strong s/o.

Cᴏᴍғᴏʀᴛ

Albert is probably the worst at comfort. He’d most likely just give you some space.

Dʀᴇᴀᴍs

Honestly, I couldn’t say. Considering the fact that he’s pro-human extinction, Albert probably only sees a good future being one where the two of you are dead or “evolved”.

Eǫᴜᴀʟ

He most definitely considers himself above his partner. He’d never say this allowed unless you two were in a very heated argument.

Fɪɢʜᴛ

As said before, Albert would definitely insult his partner in an argument. Sometimes he means it, other times he doesn’t. He also isn’t very open-minded. He won’t change his mind.

Gʀᴀᴛɪᴛᴜᴅᴇ

He loves his s/o very much and is extremely grateful that you’ve stayed by him this entire time.

Hᴏɴᴇsᴛʏ

He’s mostly honest. As stated in the fight section, Albert is the type to insult his partner in an argument. Sometimes he means, other times he doesn’t. However, after every fight, he’ll tell you that he didn’t mean it, regardless of if he did or not.

Iɴsᴘɪʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ

As I already said, he isn’t very open-minded. You won’t be able to change him on anything. And I hate to be the one to say it, but if you tried to change his mind on the whole human extinction thing, he’d kill you and (if he considers his work finished, aka humans are mostly extinct) kill himself afterwards.

Jᴇᴀʟᴏᴜsʏ

He believes he’s better than most people (you included) so he never gets jealous. Why would you leave him for someone that far below him?

Kɪss

Albert is a rough kisser. On more than one occasion, your lips will be busted.

Lᴏᴠᴇ Cᴏɴғᴇssɪᴏɴ

Gotta be honest, he wouldn’t be the type to confess. You wouldn’t have to confess either. One day he’d just start being slightly more affectionate and treating you like a romantic partner rather than an acquaintance. You can ask him what his issue is and he’d just be like “is that NOT what lovers do?” You can refuse him as much as you want but he will still treat you like a partner.

Mᴀʀʀɪᴀɢᴇ

How would y’all get married? He literally plans to kill you and him unless you somehow evolve.

Nɪᴄᴋɴᴀᴍᴇs

Love, Dear, Dearie, Darling.

Oɴ ᴄʟᴏᴜᴅ ɴɪɴᴇ

As I stated in love confession, when he is in love, he’ll just start treating you like a romantic partner. He’s narcissistic and he thinks he’s better than everyone else.

PDA

He isn’t one for affection in general. Some (lip busting) kisses and some hugs are fine here and there.

Qᴜɪʀᴋ

Well, he doesn’t get jealous? I can’t really think of any pros to dating him, gotta be honest.

Rᴏᴍᴀɴᴄᴇ

Even in the apocalypse, he’s super romantic when he tries to be.

Sᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ

He’ll support you in everything as long as you’re willing to do the same. Unless you’re trying to stop the apocalypse or you’re trying to look for a cure. Doing that is how you get killed.

Tʜʀɪʟʟ

I don’t think he’d feel a need for risks. However, he doesn’t have a set schedule either. He’ll just go with the flow.

Uɴᴅᴇʀsᴛᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ

I’ve said this so much. He isn’t open-minded in the slightest.

Vᴀʟᴜᴇ

Ehh, I can’t really say. He loves you, but he doesn’t consider the relationship too important? Like, he wouldn’t stop believing in the whole human extinction thing for the relationship.

Wɪʟᴅ Cᴀʀᴅ

This isn’t fluff, but if you ever got bitten and turned to a zombie, he wouldn’t let that affect him. He’d simply just muzzle you and make sure you don’t get too far away from him. He’d also become the first person to tame a zombie. Albert can’t have you attacking him or his acquaintances. This wouldn’t stop him from loving you. Id anything, this will only make him love you more since now you’re dead! Whenever the rest of the human population is gone, he’d let you kill him.

XOXO

As said, he isn’t very affectionate. A few kisses here and there are fine, but he won’t be the type to hug you daily or kiss you every morning. He doesn’t hate affection, you doing all the lovey dovey stuff is fine, he just doesn’t care for giving it back.

Yᴇᴀʀɴɪɴɢ

I don’t think he’d miss his partner. As said in the wild card, he won’t let your death affect him.

Zᴇᴀʟ

Not really. Albert isn’t open-minded and won’t change his ideology for you. He’d do the exact opposite, actually.

[givemethatgold]

Fix’er Upper Pt. 3

Pairing: Eventual Frankie Morales x F!Reader Warnings: Clumsy injury, more stupid fighting Length: 2.5k Notes: If these two dummies could have one (1) adult conversation they’d be in bed together by now. Instead, we get this! *waves around vaguely*

PART ONE, TWO

Money was tight. You had been trying to ignore the dwindling stack of cash, telling yourself that you didn’t actually need to fix the cracked drywall, replace the old oven, or fill in the missing patches of shingles. 

That ignorance had finally come to bite you in the butt. You were rudely woken at three a.m. to the clap of thunder and the pat-pat-pat of rain hitting the house. You loved storms, the excitement of the lighting, and how fresh the air smelled once the rain had passed. 

You rolled over onto your back so you could watch the lightning flashing between the cracks of your curtains. A tap on your forehead quickly destroyed the excitement you were feeling. The wet ‘splat’ was quickly followed by another, and another, and before you were able to scramble up and search for the closest thing resembling a bucket, it had turned into a steady stream.

“Fuuuuuuuck!”

The next morning, the sun rose and shed its light upon a beautiful scene. The leaves, now free from dust, were beginning to turn, the grass glimmered with raindrops, and the sky was clear. You, on the other hand, were a verifiable disaster. 

Hair unkempt, heavy bags under your eyes, and wearing the first items of clothing you could find in your scramble last night. Your exhaustion was so complete, it hadn’t even dawned on you to change or freshen up a bit before going out into the public eye. All you could focus on was getting to Hank’s Hardware and buying all the shingles you could get your hands on.

Once again, however, you were harshly reminded of your dwindling savings and just how expensive fixing up a house could be. The owner, Allan if you remembered correctly, had shown you the right size and style for your home’s roof and you nearly choked at the price.

“You know,” he had said gently, “we do have the option of a payment plan. I don’t let just anyone use it either. It’s for trusted customers. I have a good gut on who I can trust.”

“Really?” You asked, feeling a little pathetic while also knowing now was not the time to let pride ruin such a good thing. “And, um, what does your gut tell you about me?”

“Welllll,” he smiled, hooking his thumbs into his suspenders and leaning back a little to size you up. “You’re hard-working, feel like you have something to prove, won’t back down from a challenge, and are in way over your head with that damn old house.”

“Oh.”

“No offense, ma’am! Sometimes I forget myself and talk to strangers the same way I’d talk to my friends.” He patted your forearm gently then hooked it back into his suspenders, pretending he didn’t notice you jumping at the physical contact. “But it’s true. No denying you won’t be able to shingle all by yourself. I’d offer, but I’m in no shape to be climbing up roofs.”

“That’s very sweet of you, truly. But I’ll manage! I doubt I could afford a handyman, so it’ll be me and my stubborn self scrambling around up there.” You joked, but it fell a little flat since the both of you knew it was the truth.

“I’ve got an idea...” Hank trailed off, his gaze searching around by the till. “Maybe you two can help each other out?” He fiddled at the computer for a minute, then grabbed a flyer from the corkboard mounted behind the counter before handing you two pieces of paper. One was a receipt of what you owed him after this latest excursion and a detailed timeline of when small payments could be made. 

Glancing up at him, you gave him a watery smile and thanked him for being so kind. Allan waved you off and pointed to the second paper.

‘Help Wanted’ it read, ‘Morales Acres. Light physical labour, quiet environment, rate of pay dependent on quality of work.’

“So friendly and welcoming,” you murmured, sarcastically, under your breath. Not quietly enough though because Allan snorted out a laugh and agreed that the ad was worded very abruptly. However, he vetted for the owner of the farm and suggested you head over to see if he would be willing to trade labour for labour.

Or at the very least, you thought, pay you so you can afford a roofer.

Following the directions Allan had provided for you, you quickly found Morales Acres. Surprisingly, it was a very short distance from your own home, making you wonder if the owner had been one of the people to drop by during your first weeks here.

The driveway was a beautiful, winding drive. The view of the farm was obscured by thickets of trees on either side of the road but you managed to catch glimpses of a pond and a few bales of hay before rounding a bend and driving into the yard.

A small gasp left your lips at the sight. It was picturesque! Something out of a travel magazine, or on every city girl’s Pinterest board. The driveway came to an end in front of a statuesque barn painted in the classic red and white, stone walls cordoned off certain areas that, from where you sat, looked like they could be used to house sheep or hens. A few small sheds were lined up along the other edge of the yard but the main attraction was the neatly lined rows of apple trees all heavy with fruit.

Climbing out of the cab, you slowly made your way into the yard with your mouth hanging open dumbly. It was just so peaceful here and it was obvious that the owner cared deeply for the property. You were enchanted and fell immediately in love.

“You must be the help Allan called to say he was sending over,” a warm voice rang out.

Looking around for the source your gaze widened, then immediately hardened, when you caught sight of who was talking to you.

“You!”

“You?!”

To say it had been a smooth business agreement would be a total lie. You and Market Asshole, Frankie you reminded yourself to call him, had bickered back and forth for the better part of an hour before shaking hands. Surprisingly, you had both argued more for the other person’s benefit, something you had been mulling over since.

If this guy was such an ass, why was he also acting like his help with your renovations wouldn’t be worth as much as you picking apples? You knew your presence disturbed his peace, and that you weren’t as strong as he might have hoped his helper would be, and he still hadn’t trusted you with all the workings of his orchard. 

So, while you weren’t going to argue anymore, you knew you were getting the better end of the deal: you help him gather his harvest and get it safely stored in the barn, then he spends the same amount of hours helping you. While the weather during September was prone to drizzle, you had convinced him that a tarp thrown over the baldest patches of roof would be fine and that the apples couldn’t wait. 

He had grumpily conceded your point but had sworn that as soon as the last of the fruit was picked he’d be over to do a proper job of it. So continued the uneasy truce between the two of you for the past four weeks. The first week was the hardest as your hands, unaccustomed to work, blistered, and your muscles ached from sudden use. You had initially tried to pass the time by making conversation but you got the hint and stayed quiet once Frankie started choosing trees farther and farther from yours.

Slowly, however, the blisters healed and gave way to callouses. Your muscles became accustomed to the work and you were able to carry twice the amount as you had started off with. Your home could now boast electricity and running water everywhere it should be, and the pile of discarded furniture had been reduced to ash by a spectacular bonfire which Jacquie and her family had joined you in admiring.

Today started off as a normal day. You showed up for harvesting at the break of dawn, having discovered you much preferred the cool morning air over being up on a ladder with the midday sun beating down on you. The trees were obscured by a low fog that had yet to burn up, but you knew what section you needed to start on. 

Enjoying the way the fog enveloped you, making you feel like you were in a magical world, you began to hum and your steps took on a dreamy dance-like quality. You had never taken lessons or had even been allowed to make such a spectacle of yourself while living with Brad but now you felt free enough to spin, twirl, and glide. Overcome with the joy your freedom gave you, you began to belt out “These Are a Few of my Favourite Things”, The Sound of Music having been played on repeat when you were a child. 

Once you reached the ladder, you hoisted the basket onto your back and continued to sing whatever songs you could remember while you worked. A particularly boisterous rendition of “Do Re Mi” had you flinging your arm out wide and leaning back on the ladder for a dramatic finish.

The apples threw you off balance. 

With a screech, you fell backward, managing to twist yourself around to land awkwardly on your hands and knees instead of on the basket of apples strapped to your back. You seemed to have come away unscathed, with just scratched knees and a throbbing in one wrist. Thankfully it wasn’t your dominant hand.

“Whoa!” Frankie called out, catching sight of you on the ground with the ladder tipped on its side, “Everything okay? Are you okay?”

Coming to a skidding stop next to you, he grasped the basket and slipped it off your back with ease. 

You took a few deep breaths and nodded. “Fine! Fine, just bruised knees and ego...” you assured him.

“What were you thinking?!” He tore into you, “You could have broken your neck! Or ruined a whole barrel of apples! Then what would I do?! This job doesn’t come with health insurance for Christ's sakes!” Running his hands through his curly, brown hair he let out a huff of air and walked over to where your ladder lay on the ground.

“Un-be-fucking-lievable!” You called out, incredulously. While trying to get to your feet, to march over and wag your finger in his face, you put too much pressure on your injured wrist that caused pain to scream down your arm.

You managed to mask the cry of pain as a cry of frustration and got to your feet. Surreptitiously cradling your hand against your chest, you grabbed another basket and walked past Frankie to start climbing the ladder again. Looking at the ground so he wouldn’t see the tears of pain in your eyes, you mumbled, “I’ll be more careful, alright? I’m sorry.”

Stopping your ascent with a hand on your arm he stuttered out what might have been the beginning of an apology but he couldn’t quite seem to put the right words together so he just cleared his throat.

“Just...” he said in a much softer tone, “just be more careful. Okay? I can’t lose my best worker.” 

The lame joke made you smile despite yourself. 

“Employee of the month,” you replied in a dry tone, “hurrah.” 

You shared wry smiles while a silent apology passed between the two of you. His dark brown eyes held a warmth to them you had never noticed before. Their hue reminding you of every tree in the orchard from the early light to the sunset, golden flecks reminiscent of the sun. His face, weathered from so much time spent outdoors, was marked with laugh lines, worry lines, and a small scar gracing his left cheek. 

Your eyes wandered past the scar to note how long his scruffy facial hair had grown and how it had started to obscure those pleasantly pouty lips. 

Then, with a start, you realized you were staring at this infuriating man’s lips like a hormonal teenager. With an embarrassed squeak, you quickly scurried up the ladder, hooking your elbow around each rung to avoid any more pressure on your wrist.

To say Frankie was coping well with having someone around would be a gross overstatement. 

It’s not that he didn’t like the company or wanted to be alone. The problem was that he was starting to like her company too much, to care too much. And caring too much had been the root cause of all Frankie’s sorrows.

First, there had been his Dad, trying to impress the man who never even wanted kids. Then the force, always feeling like he needed to prove himself and desperate for praise. After that was his wife, ex-wife, and trying to be someone he wasn’t so she would stay interested and in love. The pressure created by caring about these people and the expectations they had for him drove him to abuse drugs. Then his friends came calling and Frankie went against his gut because they had cared so deeply about something and he had cared deeply for them.

His wife, his kid, his family, his job, his friends. He had cared more than they did and he had come away worse off. At least now he was clean and sober, and was very aware of the irony of him now making and selling an alcoholic drink.

No, it was best to stay alone. He loved too freely and put too much stock in being loved back and every. single. time. it hurt him.

So, he closed himself off from you. Initially, he didn’t think it was going to be an issue, especially considering how you two had met. But then he found himself smiling at your stories, idly leaning against a branch so he could watch your graceful moments. He hated watching you leave, knowing you were going home to that piece of shit house that he should really be fixing up for you.

He recognized the signs and nipped them in the bud; working farther away, replying to questions with the fewest possible words, focusing purely on work, and maintaining a professional relationship. It pained him to push you away but deep down he knew it was best for the both of you.

Which brings him back to this moment.

Frankie was too stunned to notice your awkward climb up the ladder. Standing there, dumbly, for another few seconds. Wondering, all the way back to the idling tractor, what the hell had just happened.

One minute he was just driving the tractor minding his own business and the next he was having a mild heart attack after seeing his only worker laying limp on the ground. Then, after arguing like usual, you had shared a...a moment and stared at his mouth almost long enough to tempt him to use it.

Part Four

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[stuckinapatriarchalbullshitland]

🌹 - ɟ

Hiii babies and dear Anons 👋🏼🤗 You know how it works by now. These are the answers to the asks Mari/Stuck sent me. And happy Valentine’s Day to you all!! 🌹🌹 Enjoy 🙃

 A lot of people have been interested in them, dear Anon. From managers, to publicists, to sponsors, partnerships, producers, etc., etc. and no, it was never a problem between them. That’s part of their job.

 No, dear Anon. Camila and Ashlee are best friends. Ash ships/ped Camren. She has helped them a lot of times. I know why you thought this. Just as I know it may seem that Ash takes advantage of Camila because she created a lot of videos with her, made two songs about her, and brings her up at every opportunity, but it’s not what it seems. Do you have any idea how hard it is to try to emerge as an artist in that world? Do you have any idea how many artists there are out there that you’ll never hear about because they’ll never make it to the top? Why do you know Ashlee? Thanks to 5H. Without having been their guitarist, you wouldn’t even know she existed. The fans that Juno has, are Harmonizers/Camilizers and some that she managed to make herself afterwards.

Ash is a real friend to our Mila. She has helped her more times than we could ever know, even by leaving the tour to help her friend. And Camila’s the same for her. Did you know that on June 13, 2020, in the face of the Black Lives Matter Movement she helped Ashlee sponsor a free scholarship for 20 black students to participate in the JUNO’s Guitar Bootcamp to help them create more opportunities in that field in their future? [Diana Foster, who I believe is her girlfriend or a great friend of hers anyway, also helped] Why on earth would Camila willingly help someone who ‘presumably’ would be taking advantage of her friendship? May I suggest you go watch one of the last videos they have together in Camila’s backstage? It dates back to 2019. Go watch it, dear Anon, and tell me if you don’t get an automatic smile on your lips.

 Forgive me, Anon, with all due respect speaking, but what are you saying? “Camila has made mistakes (she has not been the best girlfriend possible)?” Are you for real? What are you talking about? Camila made her mistakes, but so did Lauren. So why are you only pointing the finger at Camila? Did you pay attention to their story? Did you hear/see what Lauren said on the podcast? Have you ever listened to their songs WELL? Because apparently, you didn’t. A couple is made up of two people and mistakes are made by two, not just by one.

 No, dear Anon. Closer was never a song of hers in the first place, let alone one she could sell. The Chainsmokers wanted her in the song. She recorded a rough demo for them and then turned it down. I know that when she turned it down and they passed it on to Halsey, she wrote and contributed to some of the lyrics (she appears as a songwriter in the credits), so I believe she wrote those in the place of the ones Mila wrote in her version, but I’m not sure. I don’t know if Camila had the time to write her part like Ashley (Halsey) did, or if she directly recorded the demo as she did with The Middle. Until it’s leaked, we won’t have an answer.

The fact is that Closer was simply a project that was proposed to her when she was still in 5H and that she turned down because 7/27 was about to come out. Just as she declined to participate in Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood music video for them (5H). And I still wonder how the haters still consider her a bitch 🙄🙄

 Ligas, or hair bands, or también se dice colitas, verdad? Or hair ties as I like to call them, were originally Lauren’s. Lauren had two on her wrist at X-Factor and then, magically, one ended up on Camila’s wrist. I personally think that was their first symbol, but of friendship. And no, dear Anon, they didn’t replace the rings. The rings didn’t yet exist at that time. If the rings were one of their symbols of love, the hair ties were symbols of friendship, at least in the beginning.

P.S. dear Anon, I would like that as soon as you finish reading this post, you’d type ‘garters’ on Google and click directly on images 🤣 I really, REALLY, love you for this, believe me 😉❤️

 I watched all the interviews held in Spain in 2015 and you can see the differences, dear Anon. The two interviews with Revista Bravo and the one with Vodafone Yu are more or less normal. There’s tension between all of them because the big mess had recently happened. But in Alyson’s one with NSP PROJECTS and the one with LOS40 in which Alyson is in as well… Gosh… Your second question is my answer, dear Anon. Yes, they broke up, but that was even before they went to Europe.

As for your last question, on the one hand, I think she was single, attracted to the interviewer, and that she didn’t have to be accountable to anyone because being single, she could do whatever she wanted. But on the other hand, I think it may have been done on purpose for revenge since they’ve always played these jealousy games. I don’t think she managed to control herself though. It shows in both of those interviews, although it’s much more evident in the one with NSP PROJECTS. I don’t think she really realized the gravity of what she was doing because she was too wrapped up in Alyson and too busy in impressed her than everything else. I don’t think she noticed, at least not during the interviews, how hurt Lauren was.

I don’t want to tell you yes or no if her behavior was correct or not, simply because I don’t know if she did it because as I said she was single and didn’t have to answer to anyone, or if she did it out of revenge because she wanted Laur to be jealous. My instinctive response would be that it wasn’t corrected because of the effect it had on Laur who was also going through the dark diary period, but I don’t really know why Mila did what she did. She may have had her reasons, and maybe knowing them, my answer would be different, or the same. I don’t know because I don’t know the reasons behind this. Lauren has done a lot of things in the past that have hurt Camila, and Camila has done a lot of things in the past that have hurt Lauren. They’ve hurt each other many times. Sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. So I prefer to abstain because, at least in this case, I don’t feel like judging something I don’t know. Much less point the finger.

 Hi @ camilalauren0327 😄👋🏼 yeah, writing is therapeutic for them, as it is for many other people, myself included. Dancing was for me as well. Many people find it therapeutic to play sports, others find it in various forms of art, etc., etc.

I don’t know if Camren did couples therapy 🤷🏻‍♀‍ I think if they really did it, they did it after 5H.

Doctors of all kinds, and therefore also psychologists, consultants, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. are bound by the federal law HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Many therapists themselves indeed, prefer to establish confidentiality limits even before starting therapy. For example, the fact that they’re required to maintain therapy content is established regardless, but with you, they can determine who they can contact with your written permission, or if they can’t contact anyone. If YOU client prefer it, you can also establish that outside those four walls, you’re not really in therapy and that therefore if you meet your therapist in a supermarket, for example, they’ll pretend not to know you and will not acknowledge you at all in order to protect your client-therapist confidentiality. So, at the end of the day, it really depends on you and what you establish with your therapist.

This, however, is sometimes not enough for celebrities. Those who really, but really care about privacy and don’t want to take risks, require their therapist to also sign an NDA as a backup and reinforcement plan, so that it covers everything, including sections that HIPAA doesn’t administer.

Both, dear @camilalauren0327, and hi again 👋🏼😊 In the Consequences video and on the day of Say You Won’t Let Go she was paying tribute to Lauren and to the old Camila. For Consequences, that was one of the many symbols we find in the video that served as a clue. For Say You Won’t Let Go it was yes a tribute to Lauren and to old Camila, but it was more of a message for her. The song was for her, the bow was for her, and the rose on her pants was for her. It was like: “Hey, I’m still here. I’m still me. See the bow? See the rose? The song? It’s all for you. The title of the song already speaks for itself. Let’s try again”. That was indeed still the period of rapprochement between them. As for the other times she wore it, and I remember that she even wore it around her neck on more than one occasion, it was for style.

 Sure thing, dear Anon 🙃 Curious is a song discarded from the album Camila, and I don’t know if you’ll like my interpretation, dear Anon, because this song is not about Lauren (for me).

Verse 1

“I lose myself when you start talkin’

There’s something riveting about you, it’s got me confused”

Camila finds this girl so fascinating, that not only does she gets lost when she talks, but it also makes her confused. Confused because she didn’t think another girl could have this effect on her while her mind was always on Lauren. And yes, girl. It’s not the first time that Camila has had to mask this in her songs.

“If we went back to your apartment

Would you be a gentleman and a bad boy too?”

She’s provocative here. She’s literally provoking and teasing the girl: “Could you be sweet and at the same time rough enough to slamming me against the wall?” If you know what I mean…

Pre-Chorus

“I know you think, I’m innocent

Little do you know where my mind has been?”

When you see Camila in videos and interviews, you’re hit by her energy 80% of the time. She’s this cute and goofy and clumsy and dorky ball of bubbly energy that cracks a smile from you all the time. She’s funny with her lame jokes that however always make you laugh, and most of the time, you see her in this innocent light. And it’s true. She looks like this innocent little bean that must be protected at all costs. But we also know that she’s far from innocent. And here, that’s what she’s telling the girl: “If you knew what I’ve been thinking about you, about us, about what I want to happen, you’d understand that I’m not that innocent after all.”

“I don’t have much experience

Could you relieve me of my ignorance?”

The only sexual experience Camila had had up to that point, had been with Lauren. So unlike this girl, Camila had only had one partner, and she’s telling her just that: “I don’t have much experience as you do. Could you help me out?”

“It’s true (It’s true, it’s true)

Been wondering about you”

Here she’s basically questioning whether the expectation equals the reality.

Chorus

“I’m just cu—, I’m just curious

What you do, just got the two of us

Hit me down, take me up

Can you teach me how to love?

I’m just curious”

She’s telling her that what they do in private between them, will stay between the two of them. And then… Ahem-Ahem! *Throat clearing* I’m really trying to hold back as much as possible here guys… If I hadn’t received complaints in the past about some of the answers I gave in other posts, I wouldn’t have had any kind of problem explaining exactly what she says sentence by sentence, but I’ll just limit myself by saying that she’s asking her to teach her to be more expert on the subject matter.

Post-Chorus

“Dum, dum-dum-dum

You got me feeling

Dum, dum-dum-dum

You got me feeling”

This girl makes her feel in a certain type of way that Camila herself refrains from saying what she really wants to say. Still if you know what I mean…

Verse 2

“I’m kinda nervous but I like it (Yeah)”

Because it’s a good kind of nervous. An exciting kind of nervous.

“Will you live up to the image that I got of you?”

Again. As I said before, she’s basically asking if the expectation equals the reality.

“You’re not usually my type, yeah

I think that that might be the reason that I’m here with you (Oh, oh)”

And this, speaks for itself. Who’s Camila’s type? With whom is she making the comparison? Who does she have in mind to justify her actions? She’s there with this girl because her type is who?

Before I wrap up, I want to explain to you why this song has nothing of Lauren for me. So I’m going to rewrite some pieces of the song to debunk it’s about Lauren.

“If we went back to your apartment”

Lauren didn’t have an apartment yet. She wasn’t living alone yet. 5H had two apartments that they shared together in the months of recording, and for the rest, they lived constantly in hotels. This girl (older than her) had an apartment.

“I know you think, I’m innocent”

Lauren and Camila had already had sex. Hello? Since the Like Friends Do situation. So she’s not talking about Lauren because she already knew Camila wasn’t innocent.

“I don’t have much experience”

Again. Experience she’d precisely had with Laur.

“Been wondering about you”

She had to wonder about Lauren if she had already been with her sexually? What would have been the sense?

“What you do, just got the two of us”

If she was really talking about Lauren, this would’ve been a big bullshit because there were people who knew about them. The ones closest to them for sure. Like DNA. DNA knew about them right from the start and lived their story basically along with them. Not to mention that they heard them on more than one occasion. Hell, even we heard them thanks to that takeover.

“You’re not usually my type”

Definitely not Lauren! Isn’t Lauren Camila’s type? In which universe?

“I think that that might be the reason that I’m here with you”

Exactly! This girl, whether it was physically or of character, wasn’t like Lauren.

Aaand these are the reasons why I’m 100% sure this song is not about Lauren, dear Anon.

 Of course I can, dear Anon 😄

Cleopatra is a song discarded from the album Camila, and created during The Hurting. The Healing. The Loving. era. C ended Something’s Gotta Give in mid-March 2017 and we know it was the last song of The Hurting. The Healing. The Loving. era before the album name changed to Camila, so Cleopatra was finished before that.

Verse

“Ridin’ ‘round town in the backseat

Looking like the real deal

Looking real, real, real

Spent so long cuttin’ my teeth

Thought you were the real deal

But it wasn’t real, real, real, uh”

Camila is in the back of a car and, you know how sometimes you find yourself spacing out and thinking about something in those moments? Maybe by looking out the window but not really looking because you’re thinking about that something? It can be something trivial or something important, and in Camila’s case, in this case specifically, she’s overthinking about her relationship with Lauren. They had clearly broken up, and Camila is thinking about how she believed L was the real deal.

With ‘cuttin’ my teeth’ she used a slang to indicate that she learned something early in her life. The slang of cut my/your/her/his/their teeth was born in reference to the exit of the teeth from a baby’s gums and consequently indicates a first experience. So, here she means that she spent too much time learning the ropes believing for real that Lauren was for her, and then realize that she wasn’t.

[Don’t be discouraged and keep in mind that in this case, they were passing thoughts because she was definitely angry, bitter, and sad. We all are after a fight or a breakup with a partner. Besides, we all know that L is the love of her life. Think of songs like Never Be the Same (It’s you, babe), All These Years ('Cause after all these years, I still feel everything when you are near), Taxy (The greatest love story that’s never been told), and many others up to one of the ‘most recent’ ones: Anyone (You are the only one I’ll ever love) 😉]

Pre-Chorus

“Every night it was a different fight

It was a different girl

It was a different lie, ooh-ooh

Every night it was a different fight

It was a different girl

It was a different lie, ooh”

Aaaand back at it again with their communication problems. Even if she has generalized a lot here, she still makes us understand the essence of the problem.

Chorus

“I think I kinda wanna cut my hair like I’m

I’m Cleopatra”

When people move on or try to move on after a breakup, what do they usually do? They look for a change. They want to separate themselves from their past selves, of the ones they were when they were in a relationship with the person they broke up with, and they seek a change, aka self-improvement. Most of the time visual, and therefore physical. This change is seen as a new beginning, a new chapter in their life where they want to feel good again. They want to feel attractive. And this is how self-innovation begins. Some go on a diet, others change their style and wardrobe, and then there’s what many see as a rite of passage: a new haircut.

Camila in this case used Cleopatra’s cut as a metaphor for the change she wanted to make about herself. Cleopatra is one of the most famous known queens in the world. Strong, intelligent, powerful, and that radiates charm in everyone since ever. But Camila isn’t talking about Cleopatra the person. She’s talking about her haircut. Cleopatra’s cut in this case is a symbol of power and freedom for Camila. Remember how I said earlier that Camila finished Something’s Gotta Give in mid-March and that she finished this song before that? Well, although this song talks about 2015, it was made in 2017. And guess what happened in that same period? Camila cut her hair by getting bangs. To be precise, it happened on March 31, 2017 (picture + caption: “joined the bang club now”). Coincidence? Yeah, sure, I don’t think so. Plus, although she used it as a metaphor, Camila has actually always wanted a Cleopatra cut, thing that, if you think about it, she now has for real. [Oh, oh and, rumor has it that Cleopatra was bisexual as was 100% Julius Caesar🤫🤭]

“Wanna dance on cars

And forget it all after

Skip these sad love songs cause I

Need something faster and now baby

Kinda think I’m ready”

The freedom I was saying before? (Cleopatra’s cut in this case is a symbol of power and freedom for Camila) She talks about it here. She used the wanting to dance on cars and the skipping sad love songs as figurative expressions of the freedom she wanted to feel, and that she wanted to feel fast because there was gonna be no crying in the club this time. 🤣🤣🤣 Sorry, dear Anon, I had to 😝 No but, seriously though. She just wanted to shed the past and move on right away because she was ready. And she was also ready for the power part I referred to earlier that she explains here:

Post-Chorus

“Needed to be all eyes on me

Baby all eyes on me, ooh

That’s what I want

Needed to be all eyes on me

Baby all eyes on me, ooh

That’s what I want, yeah”

Now. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now. We have a double interpretation here. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Camila is a fucking genius. And being the fucking genius lyricist that she is, she used a double meaning here to let everyone interpret this part as they please. The double interpretation is so well hidden, that people who listen to this song without knowing the details, such as for example knowing something about Camila’s life or the year the song was made, would never know because they wouldn’t even notice.

The first interpretation ties into what she says about wanting to dance on cars in the chorus. That’s also a way of saying she just wants to dance thoughtlessly and have fun, but on cars? It’s a metaphor to say that she wants to do it by drawing everyone’s attention. I want you to picture something now, okay? Picture a party with a bunch of people dancing and drinking, and in the midst of the fun, someone climbs on the hood of a car or a counter or any other high surface to keep dancing. Can you picture what would happen at that moment? Can you picture how all the people there would turn to look at that person and shout, clap, and cheer them on? Now picture the same scenario with a person still climbing on something high, but to announce something. It’s the same thing. It’s the same purpose. Getting on top, getting on top of something, is to automatically draw attention. So the connection that leads us to the first interpretation is: Wanna dance on cars - Needed to be all eyes on me.

The second interpretation, on the other hand, is basically the same as regards wanting attention on her, but with another direction and another chorus sentence. Camila is a singer. She’s a performer. She LOVES to perform. She LOVES the excitement, the adrenaline rush, the anxiety, the nerves, the pressure, and the feeling of shitting herself before entering a stage. She LOVES the almost blinding stage lights, the screams, the cheers, the applause, and all the love from the fans. She LOVES mastering the stage, interacting with the audience, and delivering a show. She sings her heart out and LOVES it when the audience sings back to her. She has so much passion and she’s so fucking good at what she does. Why am I saying all this? Because with this hidden interpretation, Mila refers to her solo debut. Like I said, this song was made in 2017, remember? So the connection that leads us to the second interpretation is: Now baby, kinda think I’m ready - Needed to be all eyes on me. Ready for her debut.

Both indicate the attention and power (feeling of power) that I mentioned earlier that comes with it.

Bridge

“See, see

You right to be that

You bein’, you needin’

See, see

You right to be that

You bein’, you needin'”

This part is cryptic. Since they broke up here, I think she’s just saying that it’s okay. That it’s okay for Lauren to be the way she is and that it’s okay if they’re letting each other go (Yeah, sure, Jan 🤣). No hard feelings. Or at least, that’s my interpretation.

—

Before concluding this post, I’d like to make amends. My friend, the same one I ‘roasted’ in my last post (📄 - ɟ), hey, hi girl 😝 literally shoved her phone in my face a few days ago to show me an ask sent to @emisonme (hi to you too if you’re reading 👋🏼😄) in which I was mentioned. I’d like to apologize to all of you because I made a mistake, although not intentionally. I didn’t know Simon was no longer one of the directors of Simco Limited. I went to check it out and immediately understood why I didn’t know. Because it happened more or less recently (on September 17, 2020) and I hadn’t done a thorough research on the piece of shit since last summer (July) when Syco integrated into Sony.

I got really mad at myself for doing one of the things I hate: giving out wrong information. Camila and Lauren are ‘free’ from Simon, and I put that in quotes because one of the clauses that are in every Simmenthal Cow contract includes not being able to speak ill of him. I’m not kidding. This is a piece of an article from many years ago that is still on the internet today that talks about X Factor contracts: “The contract, which runs for 80 pages, also reportedly states that the rules are enforceable anywhere ‘in the world and solar system’ and that artists may not be critical of the company, ‘including its personnel and, in particular, Simon Cowell’. The contract makes clear no-one can speak badly of X Factor supremo Simon.”

Supremo… Supremo? Like what, the Supreme from American Horror Story (some fans of the series like me here)? Should I start calling him Cordelia? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I could never. I’m sorry Sarah (Paulson) for even giving it the slightest thought, love. I’m deeply ashamed. Sooo, like what? A supremo Super Saiyan (Dragon Ball)? If he clenches his hands into fists and screams, does his hair turn blonde? No, huh? So like what exactly? The supremo asshole? You know what? It doesn’t matter. He’s ridiculous enough per se.

Anyway.  Camren are free I hope completely from Simon, but we don’t know yet if the contract ended along with Simon’s exit or if it’s still standing. We’ll see as soon as one of them releases a new song.

Please accept my sincere apologies, guys 🙏🏼 And thank you @emisonme for giving me a great news, albeit indirectly. You’re a real one 😊

🤸🏻‍♀‍🤸🏻‍♀‍🤸🏻‍♀‍

Aaand I’m done 🙈 I hope I was helpful in this case too. As usual, I’m always available for those who have questions, so feel free to ask 🙃 And as always, I thank Mari for giving me space in her blog and for making this exchange possible, and thanks to you Anons for your asks 🥰

Be kind, to others and to yourselves. Be a good example. Be patient. Be safe and take care of yourselves. Sending you virtual love and hugs 🤗🤗🤗 I love you, babies. Always with love, F ❤️

P.S. who wants to be my virtual Valentine? 🌹 🌹 🌹

____

I have to say sorry to F again because this submission should be posted last night and I couldn’t. Thanks for the long ass post F. 

Another advice, I closed the inbox for anons as you know and I will open it again in a few days when I don’t be too busy. Save your asks for F anyway, anons!

[okay-victoria]

Random Personal Rant

For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.

With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn't qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad...did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don't mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn't an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.

My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom's friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and...my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn't go 😂

So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true "day job" worked day labor in construction. My dad's father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn't beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn't own any.

My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn't afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).

It is hard not to believe in "toxic masculinity" when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide 'help' isn't the worst word in the English language, and you know you've only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don't-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn't that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed "male pride" in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I'd saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn't tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn't been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they'd taken from me without asking because I'd like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn't have my own bank account].

While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad's father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn't get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn't even accrue over time, just...whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn't giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the "big donors" events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom's wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.

And look. When I say "these people"...honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did...go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you'd arrived, and come back after you felt you'd 'centered' yourself. She didn't understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren't taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn't quite know how to explain that saying "most" people couldn't afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn't even cover it, as "most" sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.

I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most "city" guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn't because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad "mesh" put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn't have the money to win a lawsuit over.

I don't know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather's money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I'll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.

I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I'd had mom sound instincts from age 9.

I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn't and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn't ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn't give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their "marriage contract" type agreement and she couldn't ever stay with us overnight when there wasn't a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad's life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.

The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn't conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers' education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn't think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn't want to risk asking for the standard week's bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn't built up a reputation yet.

My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he'd taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they'd reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although...tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he'd gone, we'd live on just fine without him because that's how he'd raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don't think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God's sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.

That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of "fair" is one you don't easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I'm doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn't afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don't care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?

Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I'd spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went "the government needs to confiscate more money from me". The narrative is always that the "undeserving" will use it for dumb things they don't need like iPhones or refrigerators...?...but like...I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either....?....who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money....?....not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.

My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don't have it. It's the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just...pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn't have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin' best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.

...anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.

I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn't come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn't be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don't breathe heavy or anything, and I'm actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like "fine if you don't go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out" and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn't really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn't even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.

They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for "skipping" chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn't have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn't rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.

After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad's discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like...etiquette school....? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to "finishing" school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn't entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like "what a rich man wants in a wife" school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.

I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn't count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.

It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it's one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don't remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I've given don't always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.

Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.

Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.

[causticsunshine]

i was tagged by both the lovely @dyingstars-x and @harrymegirlfriend to answer twenty questions about myself! this was a lot more candid than i anticipated but here we go~

💗what do you prefer to be called name-wise?

alex!

💗when is your birthday?

july 21st! cancer season baybee

💗where do you live?

in the US! i've been in the pacific northwest for about eight years but i'm definitely still a californian at heart

💗three things you’re doing right now?

1. jobhunting 2. trying to open my online shop 3. attempting™️ to finish deadline stuff and this HSLOT drawing i've been working on since saturday 🤞🤞

💗four fandoms that have piqued your interest right now?

i go through little phases where i have my one big primary interest—one dee since returning to it last summer—that sticks around for awhile and then some smaller, less involved ones that tend to come and go, so i'd say right now the only other 'fandom' i'm kinda in is for MDZ/the untamed/cql, even though i'm a very late member to the party!

💗how is the pandemic treating you?

okay i guess? i'd really like to be moved out already as being in therapy and gaining confidence since my big mental breakdown last fall—accompanied with quitting my job of nearly four years that didn't get me anywhere in life—i've realized how many unhealthy behaviors and mindsets are perpetuated in my household and how they're....really not good for me at all. but i also know i can't get to the place i'd like to be mentally and emotionally without moving out, i also can't move out until i find a 9-5 with bennies with all my health problems + me losing my insurance in the new year so it's been....a time.

buuuut besides the soul crushing terror of being an adult living at home with people who don't understand you, i'm confident now and a lot of my mindsets have changed to healthier ones and i've regained my love of art and being creative?

💗song you can’t stop listening to right now?

it's a combination of 'i wish i never met you' by loote, 'crowd' by sophie cates, and...... 'stay' by the kid laroi + justin bieber (although i think that one's just an earworm i need to work out lmao)

💗recommend a movie

i just got to rewatch 'cowboy bebop: the movie' and it's sooo fun....(spoilers) i know the ending of the anime is supposed to be purposefully open as it just covers a section of time in the characters' lives where they're all together but i kinda wish i'd watched the movie after as opposed to when it takes place because it's a little bit...of a nicer (and much clearer) wrap up!

💗how old are you?

twenty five 🧓

💗school, university, occupation, other?

currently jobhunting for a Boring grown up job just for some regularity and insurance (and $$ to get my ass OUT) but i want to take on freelance commission work again too! i dropped out of uni in like 2018 because the school i was going to kept fucking me over with credits just to get my associate's but maybe i'll go back one day.....maybe.....

💗do you prefer hot or cold?

HOT only because it's so gd cold and wet where i live now and even when the summers are warm they're super short and don't compensate for the months i spend not moving out of arthritis pain and freezing my ass off

💗name one fact others may not know about you.

i always come up with fun ones when i don't have any reason to share them lmao but i guess.....staying on-brand with 1d stuff, and i might've said this before, but louis gave me my first bout of gender envy that i recognized as actual gender envy when i was like, fifteen? and as i was coming out of my obvious emo phase into one more subdued, i totally dressed like twink louis for almost a year....haircut and everything....

if i can find the one photo i'm thinking of i'll post it but until then use your imagination sjkgdf

💗are you shy?

i can be? i think once i vibe with someone enough it becomes easy to talk to and open up to them but before that i can be pretty closed off and a bit impersonal.

💗do you have any preferred pronouns?

they/them!

💗any pet peeves?

i'm one of those 'people talking or random noise being made near me while i'm trying to concentrate on something fuels my murder response out of nowhere' people but otherwise...outside of common courtesy/manners stuff being ignore, i don't think so? although i genuinely hate when people walk right behind me or right in front of me...shit makes me anxious and ticks me off dfjkngdf i got shit to do!!

💗what’s your favourite “dere” type?

am i boring if i say tsundere just because it's relatable? although dorodere is kinda fun in the right setting....i love a good character twist!

💗rate your life 1-10. 1 being really crappy and 10 being the best you could ever be.

i'd say a 5? there's a lot more i want to do and achieve and things i know i could have right now if my ADHD and anxiety didn't still have such a death grip on me but i'm also in the best headspace i've been in in years so i'll take that as a win!

💗what’s your main blog?

this one!

💗list your side blogs and what they’re used for.

swmpwxtch is my art-only blog because i'm slow at finishing things and know there's no point trying to make this an 'art blog' when i reblog so much, and then prickelndauge is my insp blog (so if you're wondering why there's a startling lack of fashion and art on this blog, it's mostly over there!), then i have one for creepy/spooky stuff (bonepickng) because i know not a lot of people want to see that on main, aaaaand am-ref a ref blog for art tips, life things, donation pools, etc.! (and some old urls i have saved)

💗is there anything you think people need to know about you before becoming friends with you?

at the risk of sounding like a YA protagonist: my heart is full of love and i try to be as understanding and open as i can be but i also have a very short bullshit fuse, so while i'm still happily understanding of certain behaviors and mindsets, if you cross the line that i put very bluntly in the sand, you're not crossing back over.

(ie i love my friends but don't be a dick and if you are you get one warning and that's all <3)

uhhh i know a lot of people got tagged already and have done this so! i'll be tagging @grimmpitch @hershelsue @niallnailme @dragmedown @ialwaysknewyouwerepunk @justmehernthemoon @non-binharry @genius0flove @mamaharry @theymetinthetoihlet @saintqueer and uhhh anyone else that would like to!! and if you've done this already please ignore me~

[olivinesea]

Off Souls, pt. 3

Part 1 Part 2

a/n: We’re back. Things are still serious but maybe not as rough? Let’s call it soft-anxiety. This part and the next were supposed to be one but it got out of hand. So stick with me for a few more feelings and I promise there will be a little action soon. ~3.7k

Some problem solving.

There was no miraculous recovery to their friendship. Things remained tense between the two of them. Emily was on edge for obvious reasons and he still wasn’t sure where he stood with her. The split had shaken his trust more than he wanted to admit. Still, he knew he needed to be there for her. Despite her best efforts he saw how delicate she was right now. He saw her tensing in crowds, grinding her teeth whenever someone brushed past her, hanging back ever so slightly as they entered buildings. He was familiar with all these little grasps at safety. He could have made a list without a second thought. They were all things he had seen his mother do, things he had felt himself doing. Emily was scared and she wasn’t sure when that danger would reappear.

He did what he could, staying close and being mindful about the spaces they went to. He first realized he needed to be more cautious after they tried to go to the dining hall during the midday rush hours. Emily didn’t eat anything. She spent her whole time stiff, searching the faces of the other diners. She had been worried about running into him ever since the first time he had appeared unexpectedly. Now she had to worry about Hotch, too. She distinctly did not want Hotch to know his identity. He was unable to mask his fury whenever the topic surfaced. She knew nothing good would come of their meeting. She appreciated that he wanted to fight for her but what she really wanted was for this to never have happened. Hotch getting involved, bringing some sort of vigilante justice to him, made it much harder to pretend.

Plus she didn’t want him getting in trouble over her. She knew how hard he worked to keep his clean record, his scholarship contingent on high grades and good behavior. In a less concrete way she also knew what it would mean for Hotch’s relationship with his parents if he were to find himself in trouble. He was evasive but had slipped up enough for her to have a rough picture of the Hotchner household. It wasn’t all so so different from her own, she thought. Opposite sides of the same coin perhaps—love that didn’t exist within normal boundaries, too present or too distant. The lonely place in her heart hollowed by frosty absence, his carved out with a heated knife. She didn’t want to be the catalyst for any conflict there.

That first day he found her she had been unable to discuss options. Far too overwhelmed by her current reality, she waved him off when he tried to bring it up and curled into herself in a way that made him kick himself for asking. A couple of days later while they were walking back to the dorms he tried to tactfully broach the subject again only to be surprised by her short reply.

“I’m going in Friday.”

“Oh, ok. Good. That’s good?”

She looked at him, squinting slightly. “Yes? Are you surprised?”

He shook his head quickly. “No, of course not.”

“What? Did you think I wasn’t going to get an abortion? That I was going to have a fucking baby?” She stopped and rounded on him, growing angrier with each word.

He stopped also, but carefully backed up to the side of the path, pulling her gently with him. He dropped his hand when she snatched her arm away. “No. You just didn’t seem like you knew what you wanted to do before. I thought maybe you wanted to talk about it before you decided.”

“I can take care of myself.”

He rubbed his face with his hand, not sure how he had offended her. He spoke through his fingers.“I know, Emily. I just want to be there for you. For whatever you need.”

He looked up and she was glaring at him.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he offered.

She wanted to stay mad. The anger felt good even though she knew it was a little misplaced. She remembered how she had imagined he would look at her once he knew. She hadn’t let herself hope for understanding. She didn’t want to admit it to herself but having him back in her life had been a huge relief. She didn’t have the words to properly express to him what it meant to her that he was there. That he hadn’t hesitated to hold her close, hadn’t questioned or abandoned her.

Now she was acting ungrateful, lashing out at him when he was only trying to help. She had worried he might second guess her decision, have some moral hang up bred of his conservative upbringing. She hadn’t wanted to involve him in this step, didn’t want to need help. She was afraid to discover a limit to the grace he’d given her. She hugged her arms around herself and nodded, feeling too awkward to look at him directly.

“Please.”

“Then I’ll be there,” he said simply and started walking again. She followed a half step behind.

The time between that conversation and Thursday dilated uncomfortably. Every moment she was aware of what was happening inside her: cells collecting and dividing, a slow, sinister act of creation. She knew she couldn’t literally feel what was happening but her skin crawled with the knowledge. If she let herself think about it, it would consume her. Frozen by the thought it felt like hours before she she could move again, only to find just moments had passed. She could only keep track of the passing time by the different foods that were available in the dining hall. Waffles, it must be morning; stir fry, evening again. She followed Hotch around and he led her to class, to eat, back home again.

She looked up from her plate, still filled with untouched potatoes and greens. He was looking at her and she knew he’d asked her a question but she didn't know what it was. She thought she remembered him asking if she wanted more water, though that could have been during a different meal or a dream.

“Yes,” she said, faking confidence.

He stared at her blankly.

“Sounds good.” She hoped she wasn't agreeing to anything serious.

His stare became somewhat anxious.

“I have no idea what you said,” she admitted reluctantly as she looked at her full water glass.

He exhaled sharply, everything still too bleak to laugh. “What time do we need to be at the clinic tomorrow?”

Was it tomorrow already? For her it had been weeks since yesterday and yet only this morning that had been the Tuesday before last.

He waited for her to answer, watching the wheels turning slowly, gears mismatched and stuttering. She pressed her thumb hard against the sharp end of her fork, trying to pull up the relevant information.

“Noon. The appointment is at noon.”

He reached out and touched her hand gently. “Okay.”

They left early to walk to the clinic. Rather than use the campus health center and risk detection by her mother, she found a local clinic about a twenty minute walk from campus. Their walk was quiet, both attempting to appear more stable than they felt. She was eager to be done with this whole experience. He was not sure what to expect, everything about it still a mystery to him. Too uncomfortable to ask questions, he hoped his presence would be enough. As they approached the low cement building, she slipped her hand into his. Only slightly surprised, he squeezed her fingers softly.

They went inside and were struck by the quiet. There were people sitting in about half the chairs, mostly young women. Everyone looked similarly focused, no one spoke unnecessarily. Emily walked up to the counter and gave her name and appointment information. The receptionist was kind, smiling patiently as she stumbled over her words. Once checked-in she was given a clipboard of forms to fill out. She turned to find Hotch still standing awkwardly by the door. She eyed a couple empty chairs between them and nodded to them with her chin. They met at the corner seats and she dropped her bag onto the floor beside the chair as she sat down. He sat a little more reluctantly, still scanning the waiting room.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

She was focused on filling in birthday and address and didn’t register what he said.

“Hmm?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know if you wanted me to go up there with you or…” he trailed off. He hated that he was so nervous. He had waited in dozens of rooms like this before, many far more chaotic than this. It was tense in here but it was also hopeful. He stopped looking around and dropped his gaze to his hands in his lap. He traced a nail with his thumb, feeling all the bumps and edges.

She looked over at him, saw the apprehension shadowing his eyes. “I’m going to be ok,” she promised. She was not yet convinced of this but it felt good to say.

He nodded. “I know that. It’s just—“ he swallowed. This was no time to be bringing out his own problems. Regardless of what he wanted though, he could feel his stomach tightening, a conditioned response to the danger presented by medical offices. He hated doctors with their cold gloved fingers pressing into fresh wounds, only to act surprised when he shrank away from the pain. It was always harder to lie when they confused him like that, the sensations blocking out thought. His well-practiced story would seem to slip out of his mind and his mother would look at him, terrified, as he grasped at the correct details. Waiting rooms were not his favorite place to be by a long shot.

She was too involved with her paperwork to notice how he’d retreated into himself. After skipping the section on insurance (it’d be much easier to hide a couple hundred dollars pulled out of her checking account than a claim for abortion on the statements her mother received), she’d come to a form asking more specific questions about her body. She was trying to count back weeks in her mind but kept getting tripped up. She pulled out her phone to look at the calendar and her heart sank when she confirmed the number she had been hoping was a mistake. Had it really been two months? She’d lost so much time.

She finished filling out what she could of the forms and leaned back into the vinyl chair. She did feel more calm now that she was here. The anticipation had been difficult but now all the pieces were in place. She’d gotten herself here, now she could just follow along with the rest of the ride. She leaned her head onto Hotch’s shoulder. Absently he turned his face towards her and kissed the top of her head. His only reflexive act of affection, he had done that to soothe Sean more times than he could count. He had never done it to Emily, however. She closed her eyes and smiled, again thanking the universe that she had somehow earned a friend like him. They waited for her name to be called.

Though she was expecting it, hearing her name still made her jump a little. They both stood up and turned towards the nurse.

“That’s me,” her voice sounded squeaky, unable to get enough air into her lungs.

The woman smiled sympathetically. “I’m afraid your friend will have to wait out here. We can bring him into the recovery room as soon as your done though. Is that going to be ok?”

Emily and Hotch looked at each other, exchanging silent messages. They had known this was probably how it would happen. She didn’t really want him to see her like that anyway. But still, it was hard to let go when she had been spending the past week relying on him to keep herself standing. He knew she would be taken care of but he still didn’t want to let her disappear into the back hallways and exam rooms of the clinic. In his mind the building stretched out infinitely, hallways becoming mazes, folding and twisting into inescapable loops. Once she was beyond that door he wouldn’t be able to get to her quickly; once she was out of his sight, he couldn’t make sure she was safe. What if she needed him and he wasn’t there again?

She settled on a quick hug. “I’ll see you on the other side.” She was trying to be light but it came out sounding grave.

He nodded. “I’ll see you soon, Em.”

She followed the nurse through the door and he returned to one of the stiff chairs, this time deliberately choosing one with a view of both doors. He looked at his watch. It had already been more than an hour. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to be but he figured he could safely assume it wouldn’t be quick. He’d brought a book because the thought of flipping through waiting room magazines made him uneasy. He opened to the scrap of paper he’d been using as a bookmark and stared at the page. His mind refused to focus as he read and reread the same three paragraphs.

Eventually he gave up and leaned his head back against the wall behind him, narrowing his eyes but never fully closing them. No one paid attention to him, everyone there was too tangled in their own personal dramas. He started making lists in his head: adjectives starting with each letter of the alphabet, working backwards from Z, animals that migrated, the different license plates he had memorized. The last one had begun as a way to drown out the fighting as his family traveled to and from his grandparents’ house several hours out of town. He would try to remember each license plate that passed, whispering them to himself in a long string of letters and numbers, an incantation to prevent disaster. It was never clear whether it was ineffective or if his definition of disaster was too small.

Emily was led to an exam room. The nurse checked over her forms, following up on some pieces of information she hadn’t properly addressed. The nurse explained how the procedure was going to work, how the anesthesia was likely to make her feel and what she could expect in the following days. Emily nodded when she was supposed to, affirming that her decision was hers alone. She made fists with her hands to stop from picking at her nails, determined to appear calm and in control. The nurse gently patted her shoulder before she left, promising that the doctor would be in as soon as possible.

As soon as possible wasn’t all that soon it turned out. After sitting nervously at attention for twenty minutes, Emily laid down on her side on the exam table. The white paper crinkled beneath her as she tried to find a good position. She kept an eye on the door, alert to any sound or movement coming from its direction. She didn’t want to be caught sleeping, already feeling far too vulnerable in this place. She stared at the white paint of the door for so long that she started to see shapes floating on its surface. They grew and melted and she was mesmerized by it until suddenly the door swung towards her. She sat up quickly, trying to look as if she had been upright the whole time, but the creased paper gave her away.

This time there were several people that entered. She got more considerate smiles as she was introduced to the doctor, the anesthesiologist, the nurse from before. Again she stayed quiet, just nodding when it was appropriate and wondering what Hotch was doing out in the waiting room. There was more explanation of what was about to happen and she shifted uncomfortably, partly wishing that she didn’t need to know quite so much detail.

Finally things got started. It was not a pleasant position to be in and she second guessed her decision not to choose the at home option. Her dorm room just hadn’t seemed like the best place to try to go through something like this. The promise of a quick procedure, in, out and on with her life had landed her here. In a cold white room, outnumbered by people in white coats and sterile gloves. She felt her heart rate picking up, panic threatening to overpower her. She felt a light touch on her shoulder and turned her head to see the nurse smiling at her.

“You’re doing great.”

Emily closed her eyes. The anesthesia started to work and she felt herself begin to drift. When she opened her eyes the nurse was still there, still smiling at her. She had said something but Emily hadn’t registered it.

“All done,” she repeated.

“Oh,” was all Emily could say. She thought she had only blinked a little long. But sure enough she saw the doctor straightening up the different medical detritus on the counter. The anesthesiologist was busily wrapping up some tubing.

“Let’s get you dressed and over to the recovery room.”

“Is Hotch there?” Emily felt a sudden pang of worry. What if he had left, had decided she was too much trouble after all?

The nurse looked confused for a moment then realized what she was asking. “If you have someone waiting for you we can bring them back once you’re settled.”

Frowning, Emily accepted that answer. If she had someone waiting. Did she? The drugs were making her mind hazy. She remembered coming in with Hotch but she also remembered him being upset. Had he been upset with her? It was hard to be sure when it felt like all her recent memories had been shuffled like a deck of cards.

She let the nurse guide her to another room down the hallway. This room was softer, lacking the metallic equipment and raised exam table. Instead there were a couple arm chairs and one particularly soft looking couch. A side table held individually wrapped snacks and tea bags. Without invitation, Emily dropped onto the couch, leaning heavily against the arm and enjoying the pressure of the cushions behind her.

The nurse asked her if she wanted something to drink but Emily only looked at her with glazed eyes.

“Where’s Hotch?” She did her best not to sound desperate but there was a tremble in her voice she couldn’t contain.

“Ok, I’ll go get him. But think about having something to eat and drink. It’ll help.”

Emily nodded to show she would obey and the nurse left her, closing the door quietly. Emily leaned further into the couch, she was feeling a little nauseous and the colors around her appeared upsettingly bright. She closed her eyes and tucked her face into her arm. She completely forgot about eating or drinking anything.

As the nurse walked Hotch to the recovery room, she listed advice on how to take care of Emily. “She’s going to be tired and probably a little confused for the next couple hours. It’s best to just relax, watch a movie, nothing too strenuous. Make sure she eats and drinks plenty of water. We’re sending home some painkillers if she needs them.”

They reached the door. “Take as long as you need but she will probably be ready to go in half an hour.” She open the door. “Emily?”

Emily turned her face up from where she’d pressed it into the couch. Her vision was momentarily clouded by black spots that scattered in the sudden change of lighting.

“I’ve brought your friend, Mr. Hotchner. He’s going to sit with you until you’re ready to go. I’ll come back and check on you in a little bit.”

Emily nodded vacantly.

Hotch thanked the nurse as she left and crossed the room to Emily, who was still looking dazed. He crouched down in front of her, one hand on the arm of the couch. He looked closely into her face and she stared back at him with her wide brown eyes. She blinked.

“You’re very pretty Mr. Hotchner.”

He snorted, ducking his head, hair falling across his forehead. She reached out to push it back, running her fingers through it.

“So, so pretty.”

“Alright you,” he said, standing up, trying to hide a smile. “Let’s get something in that drug-addled brain so we can get out of here. What sounds good?”

She sat up and shrugged one shoulder. It didn't matter to her, she was just glad he was here. He grabbed a peppermint teabag from the basket and put together some tea for her. She watched him from her spot on the couch as he considered the snack options. He sat down next to her, pressing the paper cup into her hand and tearing open the package of dark chocolate cookies. She yelped when the boiling water burned her tongue.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, looking genuinely apologetic, as if he had intentionally overheated the water. She just shook her head and tilted her face down into the steam coming from the cup. The smell was soothing even if she couldn't drink it yet. She heard crunching next to her and looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

“Those are supposed to be for me.”

“There’s more,” he defended himself, mouth half full.

She laughed and he felt himself relax. He had been painfully on edge for days, probably weeks. She had been so distressed and he hadn’t known what to do to fix it. He hadn’t been sure how this experience might complicate things further. Too familiar with disappointment, he had prepared to find her still broken, still consumed by grief. But here she was, laughing at him again. It was the thing he loved and had missed most about her. He allowed himself to hope a little. Maybe this was going to work out. Maybe they could get past this and everything would be okay again.

~Part 4~

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Weeping Statue | Feeding Habits Update #6 & let’s chat about quitting writing

Hello! Are we back for another Feeding Habits update (finally)?? Let’s chat chapter 7, Weeping Statue.

Just a reminder: This is my original work and plagiarism of any form will not be tolerated.

Can we talk about struggle? Because this chapter was IT. I believe I started it in late July and finished it earlier this month. I’ve taken my time with chapters before, but this was next level--the amounts of changes I went through in one chapter was astronomical, and reminded me of drafting chapter three earlier in the summer. I went through so many stages writing this chapter: from enjoying it, to feeling no joy from writing at all, to nearly quitting this book altogether!

Scene A:

Harrison and his mother Suzanna simultaneously avoid each other over breakfast after he failed to return home the night previous

She lowkey calls him out (calling out his denial of missing Lonan)

Scene B:

Harrison goes to a farmhouse owned by Theodore Harvey, a friend of his mother’s, to drop off the rescued litter of kittens from chapter 6. He realizes he is missing one kitten and concludes Reeve has stolen one after dinner the night previous.

Scene C:

Harvey invites Harrison inside for coffee where he admits his coffee machine is broken.

Harrison fixes the coffee machine, and is hired by Harvey to flip the rest of the farmhouse as he and his wife are moving.

Scene D:

On his way home, Harrison stops at a gas station where he buys a bouquet of tulips for his mother, a dog collar for the puppy he found in the kitten litter, a pack of gum, pastries, and sunscreen before heading to a beach.

At the onset of a lightning storm, Harrison swims in the ocean and has an epiphany--he decides to accept his miserable life (a development!)

Scene E:

After the beach ordeal, Harrison returns to his apartment ready to accept the plainness of his daily life when an old ghost from his past (his! ex!) Lonan appears to be having dinner with Suzanna

This chapter brought so many things. A) many... breakdowns lol (I cried a lot!), B) many false epiphanies that wound me back into ruts, C) a desire to quit this series that was just as terrifying as it sounds and D) an ideology I never would’ve gotten on my own. Just have to thank my sister Sarah for telling me a few weeks ago after I insisted that I knew what needed to logically happen but couldn’t write it no matter how hard I tried. She said: “It’s not about what works, it’s about what you want” << literally changed my philosophy on writing, even as someone who tries their best to advocate for care and enjoyment in writing. Not sure if it’s because of the timing when she said this, but I’d probably never had made it out of the rut without having this said to me.

I was *not* planning at all to have my boys reunite so soon in the book. Technically, it is not very soon and we are almost done the book, but for some reason, I really didn’t think it would work so early because I felt Harrison’s POV was so undeveloped already (I still think it is). HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is: it was not working at all. I knew exactly what I needed to do to get to point A to Z but the thing about writing is, it is not formulaic! I tried to make fit what I thought worked, but as time progressed and I immensely struggled, less and less did I want what worked. Writing was miserable and that’s not what I want writing to be for me. So I took Sarah’s advice, and I did what would make me happy, and that was, and has always been, seeing my boys interact.

Now that I’ve finished this chapter, I’m not sure if I made the right decision! I have yet to write the boys interacting so I don’t know if it will work, but what I liked about this method is that it freed me from this constriction I’d written myself into and opened a new avenue to do something that DOESN’T “work” for the story but that does work for me. To me, this project, this series, is more important to me than making something “work”. Sustaining my health and happiness (which were declining on the path I was on) is critical for me and my writing journey.

EDIT: by the time I’m editing this post, I have written the boys interacting and haha yep this was the right decision! Was doubting myself for a sec, added in a lil robbery, and now it’s all good (oops)

Excerpts:

I don’t have too many for you because this chapter does need an edit to “set” it in place (right now it feels like liquid Jello that has been in the fridge but is yet to set up). I know it needs one more scene but I cannot :) write :) what :) it :) needs :) no matter how hard I have tried, and so I am giving that section of the story a break instead of over-kneading it and toughening up the dough unnecessarily.

Here is part of the opening scene! There are things I don’t like about this but I am trying not to self-hate, so !!!

The next morning, Harrison gets up at dawn to drop the kittens off at the farm, and Suzanna makes coffee for one. This is unusual for both—Harrison rarely leaves the apartment, and Suzanna always makes coffee for two. In his room, Harrison combs his hair and twists his earring, its blue gem pearling in dribbles of sunlight. In the kitchen, Suzanna stirs coffee like it’s wronged her. Harrison dabs cologne onto his throat and blinks off his hangover. Suzanna flecks her spoon onto the tabletop so it leaves an egg of amber on the surface.

When he approaches the kitchen, Harrison pretends he does not see his mother and his mother pretends she does not see him. They move like this, repelled, one moving left, the other moving right, one opening the top cupboard, the other opening the bottom.

Harrison stops at a convenience store and buys a hodge-podge of things (also the beach scene which yes mirrors the last scene in Lonan’s POV hehe I indulge myself):

He picks up the best bouquet of fuchsia tulips, a collar for the dog he left in his bedroom even though it’ll be weeks until she’s big enough to fit in it, a pack of spearmint gum he doesn’t need, a package of pastries, and a tube of sunscreen—SPF 30. He almost drops every item at least once on his way up to the register, and definitely drops them when his receipt is spitting from the machine and the store clerk says she likes his earring—is it vintage—and he nearly vomits in the parking lot, trained against the hood of the taxi—is it even his taxi—the plastic bag teetering from his wrist, rain coiling against his cheek, the air so humid, his clothes so heavy, it is no wonder the next place he ends up is the beach.

It is never smart to swim during a storm. If he thinks hard enough, his mother’s voice warns him to keep from the shore, stand behind the yellow line, stay safe, stay where you are, don’t run under a tree, and even more, don’t run into the water. He does everything wrong in an even worse order—dollops sunscreen into his palm before opening the pastry so his teeth freckles with zinc, chews the gum and the pastry at the same time so his tongue becomes a slime of crumbs, rests the tulips too close to the shoreline so they wilt under a wave, misplaces the dog collar in his own left hand, and dives into the water fully-clothed.

Harrison getting very angsty about Lonan’s future (which he’s predicted completely wrong haha):

He will die alone. Reeve will not think of him again and he will deserve that. Somewhere in the city with the missing kitten, drinking bottles of holy water because there is no drink more fitting for a woman so sacred. His mother will miss him only briefly, and then return to her daily life of no longer needing to clean up after him. Maybe she’ll find the tulips. Put them on display until they wither, then use their carcasses as fertilizer. Save electricity. Use the coffee machine less. Downsize to a smaller, cheaper, prettier apartment with arched walkways and stained-glass windows. Harvey will think he is a fluke who missed his first day of work and will never think of him again. The dog isn’t old enough to recognize him. Suzanna will give her the collar. And Lonan will continue his life in Las Vegas, tottering after Eliza, refilling her wine, getting neon at house parties, watching French silent films without captions because he’s probably learned another language, cut his hair, gotten a tattoo, learned how to cross-stitch, bought life insurance, a yacht, a coastal summer home, learned how to play the mandolin, perfected his lamb sous vide. He’s probably married. Him and Eliza family-planning. He’ll expand a future, and Harrison will do the opposite. There is something freeing in being unmissed.

Lightning snaps across the sky like a wishbone, sounds like the prick of tambourines from under the water. Everything turns violet—the clouds, his skin, the waves. Tomorrow will be a better day, as he sinks lower into the current, tomorrow will be a better day, as the light fades and dissolves into blackness, tomorrow will be a better day, as seaweed wraps his throat, as the freezing water impales his ribs, as he burrows under and simultaneously, rises up.

This next part comes right after!

In the stomach of a tidal wave, the sky is so much bluer. An unrolling of cyan like fractals of a baked marble. There is so little to remember. No grocery lists, no fresh turmeric, no shift of portabella mushrooms. No outstanding to-dos—no kibble to by, no resume to update. Harrison folds in blue and lets it gorge his eardrums. He gives his body to that wide chasm of water and breaststrokes not into a second life, but a third.

Here is the last bit:

He buzzes back into the apartment at 3:00AM, tracking in saltwater and SPF, puff-pastry gummed to his palm, a dog collar wound around his ring finger, a sheath of tulips shedding into the elevator behind him.

He hits every floor button twice and is undisturbed when the elevator lurches and reopens in sixty-second intervals. A man rotating a jade cuff on his wrist gets on at the fourth stop and gets off at the sixth. A woman wearing a lynx cape gets on at the eighth stop, breaks up with two girlfriends, and gets off at the eleventh. Two children in coveralls tail in after she leaves and throw jacks at each other’s eyes until one of them bleeds, and by then, they are on the fifteenth floor and the children are leaving like they have not left behind accidental shell casings. On the sixteenth floor, a deer head chihuahua patters in with no owner and barks at the door chime the moment it releases and lets him out. A mother and daughter shell pistachios on the twentieth, a maintenance man introduces himself as David though his nametag says Maxwell on the twenty-second, a flock of teenage girls in whirl about a new way to blend oil pastel on the twenty-third. So it is no wonder by the twenty-fifth floor, Harrison misses his stop and becomes one of these people too—the man with zinc down his eyes like a weeping statue, juggling pastry and a dog collar and a seedy bouquet of tulips.

He tracks seawater in that hallway, parts of him scattering with the zinc, the petals, the crumbs. Like a way to get back home even though he hasn’t started at his destination, he moves through the labyrinth of halls, both starving and nauseated. Tomorrow he will rise at dawn and taxi to Brooklyn and hammer four nails into two pieces of plywood and repeat. He will feed his dog. Learn how to cook something that will impress his mother, something French that he can’t pronounce like brasillé or oeufs cocotte. Find liberation in the constrict of routine or at least pretend to. It will be good for him, the rising, the taxis, the hammers, the nails, the dog food, the cooking—it will all be good.

By the time he gets to their door, his fingers are oiled and dripping with sunscreen. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. He nearly drops the house keys. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. Tomorrow will be his arrival. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. His beginning swelling as he turns the lock. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. There is no other way out.

The apartment is dark when he tracks in. The scent of cinnamon steeping the air like Suzanna’s pulled a saucepan of papas off the stove. At first he doesn’t hear it, but he should, the voices leafing the kitchen like a flit of moths. He steps out of his shoes but never sets anything down, even after he passes the coffee table. Two plates ringing the centre, streaked with and caldeirada and bayleaf. A pitcher of lemonade sweating onto the glass. It is almost like he never left, like he and his mother shared dinner, sipped from each other’s cups, cleaned the tines of each other’s fishbones. And he almost believes it. He never went to the farm. The kittens are where he left them, just a few feet away, not in Brooklyn. He doesn’t have a job to tend to. He never fixed the coffee machine. He didn’t go to the convenience store. He is not slathered in sunscreen, not holding a dog collar or pastries or a bouquet of tulips. He never dove into the ocean like it was some port to asylum and didn’t emerge soaked and walking half-dead to his apartment because he never left. This reality is so easy to believe, he is unfazed by the voices and how they get louder when he reaches the kitchen, when one says “Were you shopping for the apocalypse?” and the other one chokes on its drink and apologizes for its rudeness and stares at him in daydream, those eyes like forget-me-nots, gas fires, seafoam, the wing of a starling, his drop earring.

Harrison is grateful he is soaking wet when he enters that kitchen and Suzanna and Lonan sit at the table sharing a box of petit fours. At least he has an excuse when he drops everything.

That’s it for this update! The tea starts HERE!

--Rachel

[tundrainafrica]

Title: Division of Labor (2/?)

Summary:  

“The past years, we have noticed a lot of our fresh high school graduates knew nothing about responsibilities the that awaited them outside high school and even college. Many students do not master budgeting, taxes, household planning, loans and we hope to raise a generation who can navigate the adult world without the consequences of bad decisions they are bound to make going in blindly…”

Paradis High school starts a program incorporating adulting into their curriculum and Hange and Levi are paired together.

Note: From request of @a-golden-hearted-snk-fan. See this link for the request

Other Chapters: 1 3

Link to cross-postings: AO3

"This doesn't make any sense."

Jean had always been one of the more vocal ones in the classroom when it came to inconvenient developments. More often than not, people had just brushed off his complaints and banter as an inevitable part of his personality. That was one of the few times everyone else agreed with him.

The rest though just sat silently in the classroom while both Erwin and Shadis went out of the room, to get what was supposed to be their "kids."

Having taken classes on reproduction and health growing up, most if not all the people in the room already knew the amount of money it took to raise a child and the importance of contraception.

Oddly enough though, the number of kids was decided at random, only justified by the fact that they would never know how many dependents they'll have to care of one day.

"Every single one of you will be faced with the prospect of taking care of a dependent one day, maybe for a few years, maybe for decades," Erwin had explained. He had a natural charisma in the way he carried himself and spoke that made everyone in the room aware of their own tendency for altruism. Everyone had somebody in their life, they probably would have dug into their savings to support be it a mother, a sibling or a close friend.

They were all silently doing their own reflections of who that person would have been as Shadis passed around sacks of flour at random.

"Just be lucky you don't have to do this in real life yet. This adult experience is fucking watered down already. If we could simulate the pain of childhood or the stench of a dirty diaper, we would. " Shadis' words were a stark contrast to Erwin's.

Either way, everyone was too distracted by the number they were getting and the whole prospect of having sack babies in the first place to even react to his words.

"We initially thought of using actual eggs or flour but if you're going to be taking care of this for the whole year…” Erwin fell silent for a second. “That would be disgusting."

The sack was definitely much lighter than what Levi had expected. He squeezed it, noting the firmness of the sack. It was stuffed with cotton. They thought some of it through at least.

Erwin turned on his projector, looking undisturbed by the awkward silence in the room. "By the end of this month, these are what I expect from all of you," He started. "An overview of career plans, a meal plan, a house design based on real estate prices around the area and a breakdown of house responsibilities."

He moved his tacky pointer towards the line on meal plans. "Every two weeks you and your partner go to the supermarket, assess grocery prices and submit me a list of groceries you would buy and a meal plan based on that for the family you have with you. Remember, you are still limited by your wage and each sack represents an extra mouth to consider when you make the meal plan. I will be sending a more detailed version with the deadlines and a prescribed format through email.”

The class was silent for a time. The only notable sounds coming from that room were the scratching of pencil and paper and a few sighs. Hange was taking notes next to Levi while the latter wondered why she even bothered when Erwin was going to send the rest of the information through email after all.

Erwin spent a good few seconds taking stock of everyone in the room before letting out a subtle sigh of his own. "Don't look too overwhelmed, these assignments will be incorporated into all your other classes anyway. Just don't expect teachers from other subjects to spoon feed you though. As much as possible we want you to learn to work with it independently."

                                         Division of Labor

Regardless of what Erwin said, everyone was left overwhelmed anyway. The prospect of having to deal with that heavy of a workload and having that performance affect their chances at college had people spending their precious one hour of lunch time with their partners.

Despite his generally antisocial personality, Levi was rarely alone for lunch. Most days he spent his breaks with his classmates Petra and Oluo. Sometimes Gunther and Eld from the other section would join in. That was unless he felt particularly compelled to spend a lunch break alone. It was as if everyone silently agreed to use that short hour to discuss and strategize with their partners. Levi did not even have time to protest that trend, as his own friends filed out of their seats with their partners, not even bothering to ask if he would be joining them for lunch.

Or did they even need to ask? Hange was right next to him, already taking out her lunch and looking at him expectantly. “Let’s go?”  

“Wait, who said we were having lunch together?”

Hange gestured subtly at the already empty room, as if to ask him “what else?” Levi cursed himself for even complaining about groupmates who never pulled their weight. At that moment, an overly enthusiastic groupmate seemed more unbearable and Levi almost wished he could have gotten a lazy and uninterested groupmate instead. At least then he’d be able to decide for himself when to start working.  

They sat on one of the picnic tables in the school courtyard, Hange with a boxed lunch and Levi with his homemade sandwich. Their two sack babies were stacked up to the side of the table.

"So what do we name them?" Hange asked.

Levi grabbed one of the sacks from the pile and propped it up on his lunch bag, an attempt to use that empty slate of a sack as a guide to imagining what should be a face.  With that, Levi could pretend they were at least kind of living and maybe they did deserve names.

"Flour," Levi suggested. His attempts to see life in faceless sacks came out fruitless.

"Let's try to be a little more creative Levi."

"Why do we even have to give names to these things? They're not even alive. Like nobody is gonna press charges if I stabbed it right now anyway."

"Because they're grading us,” Hange took out a permanent marker and carefully drew a smiling face one sack. She made sure to add a few lines of what looked to be bangs. As she went for the other sack, Levi could not help but notice the goofy smile that appeared on her face.

Levi narrowed his eyes. "You're enjoying this?”

"We’re here. Might as well enjoy it right?" Hange shrugged." If you're not gonna name them. I will." She propped the one she had just finished drawing on, up on Levi’s lunch bag. “This is Flora.” She continued drawing on the other sack. “And this is Fauna."

The names sounded to Levi like science terms he had learned too long ago and had wanted to forget. They flew into one ear and out the other within seconds and Levi had settled for internally naming the sacks the first thing he thought of when he saw Hange's artwork: “ugly bangs” and “eyelash.”

He made sure not to tell Hange though. She seemed way too enthusiastic about her naming choices.

                                         Division of Labor      

Although Levi did have a natural talent with numbers, this potential remained untapped through most of high school. The most apparent reason for this being the fact that the person teaching them Math, at one of the most important times in their high school life was an utter prick.

That utter prick of a Math teacher during their sophomore year made a comeback as their teacher for their junior year. He did not look too happy about it either. Levi at least shared that same sentiment.  

"So I'm supposed to be teaching you guys about taxes but really, believe me, you won't really use half of this shit, just hire an accountant.” Zeke Yaeger propped his feet on the teacher’s table, not bothering to even explain the table of tax rates he had flashed as a powerpoint slide next to him. “ Or... just get an employer, they’ll calculate it for you anyway.”

“Do you mean get a job sir?” It was Marco who so politely asked the question.

“Get a job, get an employer, same banana.” Zeke answered, in between gulps of coffee.

Somehow everyone knew that getting a job would probably be not as easy as the phrase “get an employer” implied it to be. Zeke was their teacher though and he probably knew much more than they did, given the decades of work experience he had in his belt.

“Don’t we need to know how to calculate our taxes based on the table?” Armin asked. He looked to his partner Annie who seemed to be furiously taking notes.

Zeke looked once again at the board for a few minutes before slamming his cup on the table, spilling out some coffee in the process. “Just remember, if your employer promises you 70,000 dollars a year, don’t be surprised when you end up taking home 50,000 dollars coz of some bullshit about the government needing money, insurance and retirement.” He rolled his eyes. “Not like we all live that long to enjoy that  K410 nonsense anyway.” He added bitterly, adding some venom on that part about that string of numbers in particular.

“If we own a business, how do we file them?” Annie asked.

“No one needs to know how to do this. Besides, you’re all in high school. Don’t stress yourself over this. Like I said before, just get an accountant.”

“What if we can’t afford an accountant?”

“Then don’t own a fucking business.” Zeke rolled his eyes. “Fine… Look, I didn’t prepare for that question, gimme a sec.”

The class watched as he closed the powerpoint, quickly opened an incognito window and went on google.

How to file taxes as business owners?

Zeke stared at the next few pages for what seemed like minutes, before clicking on one particular page.

“So yeah, it looks like you just fill out this form and send the money to the tax office.” He shrugged. “Your generation grew up with ipads glued to your faces. I’m sure you’re way better in googling shit than I am so yeah, just google the rest of what you need. Free period until your next class, now go talk about your fake taxes or your fake house or something.”

                                          Division of Labor

Even with the free period Zeke had so generously given them, no one was able to start anything until they got home. It was eight in the evening when Levi opened his school email to find the information on their next tasks, which was sent only a few minutes ago.

September*

Week 3

Housing plan (Wednesday)

Housing Design (Wednesday)

Daily routine

Meal Plan

Week 4

Breakdown of Responsibilities

*Unless otherwise stated, please submit output by Friday of said week  

Levi did not even have time to finish scanning through the guide to their housing plan task as his computer started to slow down, unable to take the quick scrolling. He soon realized it was not the scrolling that had made the computer so dysfunctional. On the lower right of his screen, he saw the notification.

Hange Zoe

New Message

The badge next to his messaging app, quickly rose from 12 unread messages to 26 to 45. Even the screen looked unable to display the messages properly. Wanting to save his computer from anymore torture, Levi grabbed his phone from his bed side and called his partner.

“If you have a lot of things you need to tell me, call .” Levi said, not even bothering to wait for a hello from Hange.

“Oh great! So you did get the messages! For a while I was wondering if your messenger app was broken.”

Levi looked back at the screen to see that the badge next to his app was already displaying a “99+.” If his application or his laptop was not broken then, it might break when he opens the application.

“What the hell are you sending anyway?” Levi asked, delaying the inevitable of having to open the messaging app.

“Links to houses for the housing plan,” Hange answered matter-of-factly. “Unless you’d rather I just say the links out loud for you to type it in the browser yourself.”

With a part of him so nervous at the possibly of his computer hanging or even breaking, Levi had ended having to slam his finger on his mouse when he opened the messaging app. He looked away not wanting to see how his computer tried to process the 99+ messages.

He lay on his bed opening the file on his phone.

“So, since I’m working freelance, I pretty much have a work from home job so we can live anywhere. We have two kids, so what do you think of a three bedroom house?”

“A ‘house house?” Levi looked around at his own living space which his uncle rented for him. He lived in a studio apartment and the concept of living in a house, even in a simulation seemed too unrealistic. “Like a house, with two floors, and multiple bedrooms?”

“And a garden!” Hange said excitedly. “So Flora and Fauna can run around.”

It took Levi a few seconds to comprehend that Hange was discussing their flour sack babies running around an imaginary garden. Levi was sure Hange was not an idiot though and had decided to at least entertain the expensive option of a fully furnished three bedroom house with a sprawling garden.  “And, how were the prices?” Levi walked back to his computer to see that most of his messages had already loaded.

“Well, I found some for 1500 dollars a month, others for 1800 dollars a month. I earn 3600 dollars a month apparently, so I don’t think spending half of it on rent would be too much right?”

“I mean, it’s your wages right?” Levi replied. In truth, a part of him just did not want to go through all one hundred houses Hange had linked him too on the messaging application just to decide on a house.

Hange sent a picture of a split level house, with a wide front garden. “This is my favorite! It comes with a large backyard. And it only costs 1800 dollars a month!”

Only 1800 dollars a month. Levi almost choked. The words “only” and “1800 dollars a month” just seemed too absurd to his ears that someone saying it so casually had him speechless even if Hange was talking about a three bedroom house with a sprawling garden. He cleared his throat. “You’re the breadwinner.”

“Okay! Let’s design the house! I’ll move to my laptop.”

For some reason, Levi had a bad feeling about the listing Hange had shown him. He quickly brushed it away as it came, attributing it to the fact that he never really grew up with enough money to entertain the idea of spending on luxuries. He lived with less than three hundred dollars a month after all, all funded by his absent uncle.

Hange had seemed confident with her decision though.

I’ll stick to what I know best. In the end, Levi decided to leave the larger purchases to Hange. Hehad confidence only in his ability to manage a household. Maybe he would be able to contribute then.

[sevenfactorial]

Info about applying to PhD programs in pure math

This is... basically what it sounds like. I’m sure a lot of this is applicable to other PhD applications but I’m only very familiar with pure math. This is aimed at current seniors about to apply, but there is a section about prepping for applications in advance.

The highlights:

Recommendation letters are the most important thing. Most schools ask for 3ish. Try to get people who know you well, not just a student in the class. Someone you've conducted research with and one from a different institution are ideal if possible

Ask for rec letters at least a month before the due date is a good rule of thumb.

Research experience is probably the second most important.

Get the opinion of multiple professors who know you in order to build a list of potential schools. Then widdle it down to your will-actually-apply list (probably 8-14 ish). 

My opinion but please apply to at least 3-4 safety/match schools. Even when you're fully qualified, acceptance rates are simply low enough that a bit of bad luck means getting rejected or waitlisted from a few of them.

Most pure math due dates are in early-mid Dec but a few schools are in Nov and some are as late as mid-Jan. 

Schools will generally have their own graduate application portals. Some are better organized than others. Some require you to submit all your material before you can send a request for submitting rec letters so plan accordingly.

Acceptance letters will very slowly start going out in mid-Feb but the vast majority of programs won't send out anything until like, March and not be done until later than that. Accordingly, wait until at least mid-March to begin freaking out if you haven't been accepted anywhere.

You should 100% be expecting a tuition waiver and stipend from a program if you're applying for a PhD.

The rest of the posts is.... ridiculously long so I’m putting it under a cut. I mention things to do in advance to help you decide if grad school is right for you and things that make your application look good, give a full time line of the process, a list of things applications commonly ask for, and some miscellaneous notes. (The points above are repeated in more detail).

In addition, some links to other resources math students may appreciate:

an old post of mine about grad school apps (overlaps a lot and features some ranting from during the application process)

about REUs including my addition specifically about math ones

summer programs for undergrads that aren’t REUs by @counter-example and @jungleuniversity

Tips for prospective grad student visits 

Also about prospective grad student visits by @thisurlhasbeenleftasanexercise

Also for context, I went to a large state school in the US for undergrad. I started as a CS major and added on math as a secondary major after my first year and dropped CS during third year. I’m primarily interested in discrete and algebra, though I have a significant topology background from undergrad too. I got most of my advice from people around the department, as I became pretty involved during my third year. Now, I’m a first year grad student at another large state school in the US, generally considered pretty decent though not a “top math program” at all. Not that much else has happened so far.

Things in advance (aka things to help you decide if grad school is for you and things that look good on an application)

Take the standard classes. For pure math, this is at least one semester of linear alg, abstract alg, and analysis each. Linear and analysis are also good for applied math but I'm not sure what else if anything is considered standard.

Take some grad classes if you have the option. Most people are not ready for this until senior year, but some do manage as juniors. Talk to people who know you well and the prof teaching the class before you do this though.

Try to get involved with research whether this is through independent studies at your home institution, REUs, internships, or other stuff.

Be involved in your department. This helps with getting you more personalized advice for applying.

The rough suggested timeline (assuming junior yr is your second to last year and senior is your last of undergrad)

Junior April: Take the math subject GRE so you can take it again in Sep or Oct if desired (perhaps not applicable atm). The general can be taken kinda whenever; I suggest fall of senior year.

Junior April/May: Start talking to professors/post docs/mentors/etc. about programs you may be interested in. Write/type it down. Don't worry if it gets long, you will shorten again later.

Summer: Do some research if possible; an REU or research at your institution (if an REU, also get your mentor's opinion on potential schools towards the end as well)

Senior Sep: Start whittling down your list. 8-14 seems to be the "normal" range of schools to apply to but some people panic and do more. Remember that asking for waivers is completely acceptable but applying is still just generally expensive (I spent around $800 for 10 schools)

Senior Sep: Apply for the NSF GRFP. You can apply as an undergrad senior and once during your first or second year of grad school if you didn't already get it. The due date is in mid-late OC but ideally you'll have a draft of your essays and ask for rec letters by the end of Sep, if not earlier.

Senior early Nov: Ask for rec letters if you haven't already. The rule of thumb is a month before the due date. Provide them a list of schools you want to apply to including due date and where/how to submit as soon as possible (as well as anything else they request of course; many ask for a resume and a draft of your personal statement).

Senior Dec-Jan: Submit stuff! Pure math programs typically have deadlines in Dec or early Jan. I think the big days are Dec 10th, Dec 15th, and Jan 15th but some are earlier or later. (applied math masters tend to be earlier I think; in Nov). I suggest putting them all into a list or calendar. In addition, some schools won't let letter writers submit until all of your stuff is submitted so start applications early, even if you don't finish them immediately.

Senior Feb: Programs will slowly start sending out offers in early Feb and pick up in mid Feb, but don't fret until AT LEAST the beginning of March! Grad programs are just way too slow at getting out offers for it to be worth worrying until then (and even then, it's definitely not time to panic but mathematicians are frequently anxious people so I get it). Waitlists are slower to come out; usually starting in early March. Also note, there are many programs that don't actually send out replies to everyone unfortunately.

Senior late Feb-early April: prospective student days! They might be online in 2021 unfortunately but try to attend whatever form they're in if you can (only one of my visits during spring 2020 was online since the others happen to be very early and safely beat covid in the US). Be warned, it's very possible to get offers of admissions and to visit very last minute. I do not have advice for how to make that less stressful.

Senior April 15th: Common reply deadline. If you got your offer in the first round or two, this is probably your deadline to accept. In addition, this means more offers will likely come out shortly after once more people have declined. 

Senior summer: graduate. Send a completed, official transcript to your new institution. Check your new email account for stuff you're suppose to do. Some programs have some sort of program during the summer for in-coming students. Most places have graduate student training of some sort for a week or two before semester starts. 

Some common things to be asked for in applications

Not actually a thing asked for but many graduate schools have their own portal for which you will have to make an account to submit an application. A few use a common system that kinda sort shares a database of accounts? Some are fine and some massively suck.

Personal Statement/Statement of Purpose: Occasionally called something else and once in a while actually separate things; will usually have a prompt of wildly differing specificity. Sometimes, the prompts come from the department itself and sometimes from the university's graduate school. I suggest having one or two "base" essays then tweaking them for each school. Sometimes a word/page limit is specified but if it's not, around 2 pages/1000 words is pretty reasonable.

Transcript. Some accept unofficial but some require official but generally not an unsealed one. I ordered myself one official transcript and sent it to multiple schools instead of paying for them to be sent to each school during the application process.

Resume or CV: Most ask for either a CV or is fine with either, in which case I give them my CV. I sent more or less the same one everywhere.

Some other notes

Yes, ask for application waivers. Just be polite about it.

Your goals for your essays are primarily to show that you're interested in math and math research and are capable of like…. writing things that make sense

Do not start out an essay with either "I loved math since I was little" or "I actually didn't like math when I was young" or any variations of those. (I had one essay that started with a mildly humourous anecdote from undergrad combinatorics and another that talked about how my undergrad department has greatly affected me).

You should 100% expect to get a tuition waiver and living stipend as part of a TA fellowship (or more rarely, an research fellowship) as part of your offer of acceptance for a math PhD program (pure or applied). Health insurance is also frequently part of the package. This is not true of masters programs unfortunately.

How schools do waitlists depend wildly though most don't have super long ones like prestigious undergrads do. If you're still interested in a place you're waitlisted at, follow their instructions to confirm your placement on the waitlist then wait until April before following up again, expressing your continued interest and asking for an update. You might even want to wait until around the common deadline, April 15th. The number of people who declined before April is just really really low so nothing really happens until then.