#official games easier if we have stuff to check out in the meantime

[reel-fear]

👀👀👀 Hey Bendy fandom~

[purplesurveys]

718

If you lived in Bikini Bottom, would you befriend Spongebob or Plankton? Obviously Spongebob. I’m there to have a good time and catch jellyfish, not eat holographic meatloaf and make it my life’s goal to steal a secret formula. Do you have any bananas in your house right now? I think we still have some left. My dad bought a pack? a group? a bunch? of them so he can make banana cue and turon for my mom and sister while we’re all stuck at home for the meantime. Which overrated tattoo are you sick of seeing? Eh I don’t judge this easily since I assume tattoos mean a lot to people but where I’m from, line tattoos are pretty overused. They DO look nice and I get why they’ve been trending for a while, but yeah they’re evvvvvverywhere. Is it easy to distract you? Yes haha I have a rather quick attention span. Do you prefer to drink from glasses or mugs? Depends on the drink. I drink my water from a glass but I prefer my coffee in a mug, that sort of thing.

What was the last thing you taught a younger kid? I don’t feel confident teaching kids just yet, huhu. It usually works the other way around: when I’m with kids, they teach me how to play their toys or whatever game they’re playing on their parents’ phone/iPad. Are the clocks in your house mostly digital or analog? We only have one analog clock. We mostly tell the time from our phones. How long have you had your television(s)? Answered this before but we have two TVs that are 12 years old and two others that were bought within the last decade. Do you like watching movies made with CGI or do you prefer hand-drawn ones? I don’t care. As long as the end product is done well I can enjoy the movie. Where did your parents buy their car(s)? I know for sure the two family cars were bought directly from the official dealers. I think mine was a secondhand one. Do you know why your grandparents chose your mother's name? No. I think they just liked the name. That makes me want to ask my grandma though. What is your favourite kind of soup? Miso is the only one I really like. Have you ever made your own musical instrument? Nope. What do you think of Leighton Meester's singing voice? I only know one song of hers and I reeeeeally loved that when it came out, but I don’t think it’s enough for me to have an opinion for her music altogether. I definitely don’t hate her voice though. Do you think you'd do well at teaching the English language to a foreigner? Yeah, it’s my other everyday language and I’m a little bit more fluent in it than I am in Filipino. How long have your neighbours lived there? About the same time as us, I think. We all moved in at sort of the same time when the village was newly developed. Is it weird to hear your name in movies or TV shows? It’s not a very common name so it does feel a bit weird to hear, yes. It’s weirder if I have to refer to the character in third person cause I never liked saying my own name :/ Why do so many people seem to hate the Jonas Brothers? Am assuming this refers to the Jonas Brothers pre-reunion because I’m sure no one hates them and their new music now lmao. I think, simply put, it was because they were teenagers then, and pre-teen and teenage girls was their main fanbase? Most people liked to shit on that category of celebrities, even today – case in point, Justin Bieber, 5SOS, One Direction haha. What is a store you like that is exclusive to your country? Fully Booked! It’s the most complete, up-to-date, and chic bookstore brand we have. The Fully Booked branch in BGC in particular is a partnership with Starbucks, so you can immediately walk over there to get a coffee and read after buying a book heh. If you attend school, what time do you usually get home after? I always have extracurriculars like org stuff, meetings, or fieldwork after my academic schedule so more often than not I’ll get home by 9 or 10 PM, which leaves me feeling exhausted as fuck at the end of the day. When was the last time you really needed to just let loose? Like two weeks ago? I was bored out of my mind being stuck at home so I chugged a lot of soju that I asked my dad to buy so I can at least be drunk while being bored lol. Have you ever been blackmailed? Kinda. There was a time when I didn’t talk to my sister and didn’t really feel well enough to reconcile with her yet, but my mom threatened to go to our class guidance counselor and expose me and ‘the kind of older sister I am’ if I didn’t make amends with my sister immediately.

This might sound sarcastic but thanks, survey, for reminding me what kind of mom my mother actually was during the years that were the most critical to my development lmao. I always need reminders like this because despite how our relationship has ‘improved’ now that I’m older, I shouldn’t forget the trauma she caused me and the fact that I had always planned to detach myself from her as much as possible once I’m fully independent. I can’t disappoint my younger self by keeping her in my life as if nothing happened.

Do you suffer from Restless Leg Syndrome? No. I keep forgetting what that means. Would you rather have novels based on your life or a series of comic books? Novels, so I’d be more interested to read it. Have you written a resume before, either for yourself or someone else? I did a resumé when I applied for my internship. Did you know that they plan on releasing a movie based on The Smurfs? This survey is sooooooo old hah they’ve made a bunch of films on it already. Do you ever wonder what it would be like to live underwater? Not really. Mostly I’ve just wondered what it would be like to be a creature from the deep sea, where it’s totally dark and most of the animals there look prehistoric as fuck lol. Have you ever worked in a bakery? If not, would you like to? No but this question reminded me of Harry Styles, aw :’) ANYWAY if I did I’d probably take up a job in the office, since I can neither bake nor deal with people on a regular basis even if one argues that bakeries aren’t really particular spots for angry Karens or Barbaras. What is your favourite thing about snow? I like that we don’t get them because it’s bound to make my first encounter with snow in the future magical as fuck. Is there a big personality difference between you and your sibling(s)? Yeah. I tend to adapt to new environments way better than they do and I’m definitely the most extroverted of the three in all aspects.  Do you enjoy decorating things with stickers? Hahahah yes, it’s an uncontrollable urge. I keep my stickers to just my laptop case these days, but back then I used to put stickers on my phone case, my ID case, clipboard, wallet, etc. Did you lose anything recently? Did you end up finding it? I lose my hair tie every now and then; my hair’s a bit short for a ponytail now so my hair tie gradually slips out my hair with me barely noticing it, so it always ends up in random places around the house. I do end up finding it after a while but it gets frustrating whenever I realize it had fallen off again. What colour oven mitts do you have? We don’t really use the oven so we barely use the ones we have. I don’t even know the color of it.

Why do you/don't you watch award shows? Because there are sooo many commercials in the middle of it, some presenters are awkward as fuck and I’d rather save myself from the secondhand cringe, and most of the time the choices for the winners are undeserving and end up pissing everyone off. It’s always easier to just wait a few hours and check the results on Google; and besides, the only fun parts are seeing what everyone is wearing and who attends to begin with hah. What do you think of Ellen DeGeneres as the new judge on American Idol? God this was a lifetime ago. I think I mostly didn’t mind it but I never did get over the replacement of the OGs Randy, Simon, and Paula. Do you ever do the exercises featured in some magazines? No. Have you ever watched What The Buck? What do you think of it? I don’t think I’ve heard of that. How long ago did you switch from cable to satellite, if you did? We didn’t make a ‘switch,’ per se. We had cable in our old home but when we moved to our current house in 2008, having extra channels wasn’t really the priority as moving already entailed a whole lot of expenses to begin with. That meant we only had free TV for a while which was extremely fucking boring, but eventually my dad got us satellite in like 2011 or 2012. When was the last time you partnered up with someone to complete something? I decided to partner up with Andrew for my undergraduate thesis in like August last year. Do you consider Lady GaGa's appearance artistic, or just plain weird? Artistic. What do you usually do when you have trouble sleeping? I put a lengthy YouTube video on so I can fall asleep to the background noise. At least that’s what I do these days - I always thought I needed complete silence to fall asleep, but apparently that’s not the absolute case. What was the last thing you used scissors for? I opened a sachet of 3-in-1 coffee.

Have you ever used some kind of food as a facial mask? Nah I always just use Korean sheet masks. How many USB cords do you have lying around? I personally don’t have any but I do have a hard drive. Are you satisfied with your social life (or lack thereof)? I’m very satisfied with it and I’m glad I got to open up in college. Do you know anybody whose initials spell something? Sure. What is your favourite flavour of Kool-Aid? I’ve never had Kool-Aid. Is there a specific food you think NEEDS to be at Christmas dinner? My grandma’s steak. Would you be able to re-string a guitar? I wouldn’t even know where to buy guitar strings. What TV show do you just assume you wouldn't like? How I Met Your Mother, just because their fans love to make fun of and compare their oh-so-great show to Friends so much when I’ve never seen a single Friends fan make fun of HIMYM like ????? Why the one-sided, unsolicited hate??? I was always planning to watch the show and appreciate Friends and HIMYM at the same time but because the fans are so pathetic I just stopped wanting to watch it altogether. Do your friends have more money than you? Seems unfair to pit ourselves against one another when we’re all still depending on our parents’ money lmao. Who always has the power to make you feel intimidated? Ate Frances has always had a very strong personality. Do you have more bread or cheese in your house? Bread. What was the last movie trailer you saw? Not sure. I don’t really like trailers since most of them give away too much of the plots already. Did you purchase any meat product when you were at the store last? My dad did. Have you ever been told that you have chubby cheeks? Well I don’t, so no I’m not usually told this lol. Do you know how to properly use a saw? Nope. Isn't it a shame that what Kanye West did at the VMA's overshadowed what was supposed to be a night dedicated to Michael Jackson? Hahahaha not really, I found it hilarious and so so stupid. There were a billion other tributes to MJ that year that went smoothly so it doesn’t really matter to me if the 2009 VMAs will always be known as the Imma-let-you-finish VMAs.

[genovera942vbucks-blog]

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[newstfionline]

This Is What It’s Like to Come to the United States as a Refugee

Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic, Jan 29, 2017

This is what it’s like to be a refugee.

Thousands of miles away, people haggle over policy details, about whether you are a risk and a burden, or an asset full of potential, a victim, or a potential tool of foreign policy, but really they are talking about you, and the days of your life and how you will live them.

They don’t know you. They don’t know the days of your life that you have already lived, and the stuff of your mind and the strength in your hands. To them, you are an abstraction, colored by their fear and their hate, or by their heartrending idealism.

They do not see your parents, waiting in line for hours at the American embassy in Moscow, stamping their feet in the cold, holding their documents, practicing for their interview. They do not know that your mother never wanted to leave this city, because she was born here and bore children here, and has friends and family here, and has removed the tonsils of hundreds of children. She has performed delicate surgeries that have made the deaf hear again, and she knows she could have restored Beethoven’s hearing in half an hour, a thought that brings her the kind of satisfaction that can only come to someone who knows what symphonies and concertos her children heard when they swam in her belly as she sat swimming in the sound spilling from the walls of the grand old hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

They don’t know that she was happy here, even though she had never wanted to be a doctor. Even though her red diploma, the mark of a perfectionist student, even her flawless French couldn’t get her into the university that trained translators, because her papers and her face said she was Jewish, even though her grandparents had Russified their Jewish last name, and her parents gave her the name of an old Russian princess who was the first Russian saint. These people knew that Jews were being persecuted in the Soviet Union, kept out of schools and jobs for a religion most of them had abandoned generations ago but that had become a blood type that resigned you to second-class status.

But they didn’t know that my mother didn’t want to leave because this was still her home and her country, that the thing that changed her mind was so ludicrous as to be completely possible, that it was because the rumors of Soviet police giving out names and addresses of Jews to people who wanted to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the Chistianization of Russia by having a pogrom.

These rumors found her in the summer of 1988, alone in the Russian countryside with a 6-year-old and an infant, remembering her grandmother, a pediatrician, who had survived a pogrom herself, but not before she had been forced to watch the Cossacks tie her parents to a wagon and drag them to death, which made her youngest sister go raving mad till the end of her days.

They didn’t know that it was then that she realized her husband, who had gone to the one school that took Jews, where on his first day of class, a student looked around at all the Jewish faces in the auditorium, and joked, “Now they’re going to turn on the gas,” had been right. Her husband, who had been cleared to go on a business trip to a Warsaw Pact country but was told at the last minute he couldn’t go because his boss would have to explain to his own boss why, out of 500 employees, the only person he could find to go on the trip was someone with a Jewish last name. That summer was when she realized it. That no matter how much they assimilated, no matter how many family members fought and died for the country, it would never be enough; that this was no kind of place to raise their daughters, one of whom wasn’t allowed to eat with the rest of her first-grade class because her teacher didn’t like Jews.

The officials at the embassy saw their paperwork and their affidavits and their fingerprints. They saw their faces and heard their answers to their questions and they scrutinized their lives, because they were still the citizens of America’s number one enemy, which had the ability to turn all 50 states into as many mushroom clouds, which spied on them assiduously, and fought them in bloody proxy wars in Vietnam and Angola and Central America.

They had to be careful and they were, and my parents had to wait and they did, for two years, trying to learn some English in the meantime and teach their first-grader a bit too, though the words she learned were “elephant” and “apple.” Those words wouldn’t be much help when she ended up in summer camp surrounded by chirping American children whom she didn’t understand, and who didn’t understand her but only made fun of her crude, Soviet-made glasses.

The people who processed their applications, the people who protested and called their congressmen on their behalf in Washington, those people couldn’t see the visits from friends, cognac bottle in tow, who started to come by their apartment every night just to sit in their small kitchen strung with cloth diapers, just to get as much of my parents before they disappeared into America forever. Those people in America couldn’t have known what that morning at the Moscow airport was like, the grown men sobbing like children, my toddler sister saddled with a heavy backpack because every piece of luggage counted, zigzagging to passport control and my grandfather calling out “be happy!” and choking on his tears because he would never see his seed again.

They couldn’t have seen it and I didn’t see much of it either, because I was floating somewhere above it all, not fully understanding what was going on except that I probably wouldn’t see my best friend, my grandmother Emma, again, and I was clutching the mineral collection she gave me in a blue cardboard box. They didn’t know that the collection had once belonged to my grandfather, a chemist but more importantly to his bosses, he was a Jew who had to be pushed out of his lab, his research stolen, but who came back to the lab at night and broke every piece of glass in it with his hands.

We were probably an abstraction to the flight attendants on the plane, another set of droplets in the torrent escaping the Soviet Union, another family huddling under blankets under the April snow on the tarmac at a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland, another rambunctious toddler running up and down the aisles of the plane, trying vainly to recruit the people trying to sleep around her into a game of catch with a little red rubber ball.

And to most people watching the refugee crisis unfold, the refugees detained and turned back at airports across the country are likely abstractions, too. They do not see what brought them there or the bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine they had to navigate to be deemed safe and responsible refugees.

I look at them and I see us, sitting in that strangely lit room with the Immigration and Naturalization Service officers who processed us and to whom, I’m sure, we were an abstraction, and who didn’t tell us that the way we transliterated our last name was stupid and that people would forever after think it began with lowercase L and not an uppercase I. But I think about that room and the refugee cards they filled out, cards we still have to this day, and what would have happened if we too had been turned back.

Where would we have gone? We were people without a home, without a country. We had been stripped of our Soviet citizenship, we had sold everything to pay the four steep fines for having four citizenships stripped from us, and we certainly didn’t have enough money left over for four plane tickets back, back to a country we no longer belonged to and wouldn’t have us. After all that paperwork and waiting, where would we go?

And I think now of all the things that are not abstractions, of all the real things that grew out of that moment when the INS agents waved us through instead of turning us around, when we got into the car of family friends waiting for us, and drove into the bright, tropical greenery of suburban Washington on that hot April day.

There are people who think we should’ve been vetted better and harder, who tell me on social media that my family should never have been allowed in, who want to keep out those who are just like us, even if they have different names and faces and ethnicities and stories.

These people do not see that, if maybe I am a worthless journalist, my father’s work building databases for the Social Security Administration makes sure they get their very non-abstract checks on time, that he has made going to disability court easier and smoother, that he has helped the U.S. government find deadbeat dads and make them provide for their kids, and that, for him, paying his taxes is a moment of civic pride. They do not see my mother, who spent eight years retraining as a physician in the United States, years for which she is grateful because how could she have known how much more advanced medicine was here? They do not see that her work is not an abstraction, that here, she has done crucial research on diagnosing breast and ovarian and cervical cancer, that the hundreds of medical students she has taught and the dozens of young doctors she has mentored are real, physical things that resonate in the world, that her youngest daughter is weeks away from becoming a doctor herself, a doctor who wants to do the unglamorous, soul-crushing work of healing the sickest patients in a hospital because their blood has curdled with cancer. They do not see that even having to write this is a heartbreaking exercise.

These people were born here to people who were born here, and they tell themselves that they are different, and that their ancestors’ path to this country was different and better than ours. They are not wrong. For the most part, their path was easier. For the most part, their path consisted of getting on a ship and surviving the journey--from England, from Germany, from Ireland, from Italy, from Poland. And if they got here, for the most part, they could stay.

They did not go to embassies, they did not get visas, for those did not exist. They did not spend years being shaken like a dusty rug by bureaucrats worried that you might be a papist Irish spy. They scraped together some money, got on ships, and abandoned whatever chaotic and hungry and poor reality they came from. Most were not vetted, not extremely, not at all. But they do not see it, because their family lore is an abstraction too, and these ancestors, who were once tangible humans, have become their own abstractions of patriotism that makes everyone different an abstraction, because abstractions are not human, and cannot suffer. But abstractions have a way of coalescing into symbols, into piles of shoes and toddlers dead on the beach, symbols that will haunt your good name, no matter how much you rant in self-righteous justification. They will hang over you, for everyone to see, finally.