#turned off notifs and then fully forgot this account existed

[cashewbenoit]

forgot i had tumblr for a bit. hi y’all

[sweetcherrybmb]

Toto Wolff with wife grumpy!reader because she had too much work to do and everyone was pressuring her. (she's an accountant) With both her boys (Toto and their son, Jack) everything is better. Fluff and maybe a little suggestive. Thanks!! :))

a/n: ooooh, i like the concept, but it took me a little while to figure out how to write it tho... she did end up being more on the overwhelmed and frustrated side, rather than grumpy, but i hope you'll enjoy!! :)

also i pulled out my german knowledge for this one and confirmed it with my translator (mom), so i hope no germans or austrians get mad at me ~~~///(^v^)\\\~~~

(FEEDBACK IS GREATLY APPRECIATED!!)

NUMBERS AND COMFORT // TW \\ one-shot

pairing: toto wolff x grumpy!wife!reader

description: based on the request above!

word count: 1320 words

warnings: none, a little suggestive (pls tell me if i need to add something)

Papers on paper on papers... You could barely see over the copious amounts of documents littering your desk. Monthly spending records, receipts, bank statements... as well as all the other things. That usually meant you would be busy and occupied, something that you greatly welcomed at your job, but today seemed unusually overwhelming.

It seemed that today, all things that could go wrong... went wrong. One of your colleagues lost two crucial documents from the beginning of the month, setting your monthly report back at least two days. The bank also seemed to have lost those same documents as they couldn't find any record of there ever being transactions that time of month.

Your boss decided that today of all days, he will come in to bother you about the same report you didn't have all the documents for, as well as dumping some more work on your back, because... why not.

Oh! And let's not forget that the paperwork that needed to be done by your colleague for all of the salaries to arrive on time was stalled because she forgot to do it before going on vacation, setting payday a week back and adding even more paperwork to the ever-growing pile on your desk.

Your head fell into your hands, a heavy sigh leaving your lips. Your third cup of coffee sat empty next to your notebook. With shaky hands, you lifted your phone from the small side table that it usually sat at, having not checked in on it in hours.

' 15 missed calls from ˝SCHATZI˝ '

You sighed again, looking at the screen. The notification stung your eyes, not only by its brightness but its contents. He was probably worried, excessively so.

I looked around the office, seeing that the pile dwindled slightly, having finished calculating the pay first. The report was missing the data from the first two weeks. But, you stood up, put on your coat, and grabbed your bag. Without a word, you left the company building and made your way towards your car.

Sitting down and starting the car felt weird, as if you weren't doing it by your own will. The ride home was silent, having turned off the radio the moment it started playing. Tears welled up in your eyes, the exhaustion from the day finally catching up to you.

Parking the car in your driveway, you quickly got out and went to the door. You searched for your keys, but to no avail. A pair of footsteps quickly approached the door and your husband's face soon appeared in the doorway.

You pushed past him and quickly pulled off your heels and coat, dropping them on the floor. You could feel his eyes following you as you moved to the kitchen.

He was worried. It was evident in the way he looked at you and immediately followed after you. He saw you at the kitchen counter, head in hands, sighing and rubbing your temples.

You both heard the quick patter of feet on the tiles of your home, knowing fully well who it was.

˝Is mutti back?˝ Jack's small voice asked from the door into the kitchen. When he saw you, his face immediately lit up. ˝MAMA!˝ he ran to you, hugging you and you groaned. You loved your son, but the force of him slamming into you and the already existing headache made you nauseous. He started rambling and you saw from the corner of your eye, Toto shaking his head.

˝Jackie, please... be a little quieter...˝ you said, but he didn't seem to hear, continuing his rant. ˝Jack...˝ you said again, but once again he continued. Your were getting more and more frustrated by the second, something Toto picked up on rather quickly. He moved closer to the two of you, pulling Jack away slightly and lifting him up to sit on the counter.

˝Ok, Jack, das reicht, mutti hat Kopfschmerzen und hatte einen sehr harten Arbeitstag. Wie wäre es, wenn du ihr einen kleinen Kuss gibst und sie ruhen lässt, hm? Du kannst ihr später von deinem Tag erzählen. (Ok, Jack, that's enough, mom has a headache and has had a very hard day at work. How about you give her a little kiss and let her rest, hm? You can tell her about your day later.)˝ Toto told him and he nodded, stretching his arms towards you. You moved closer and Jack took your face in his small hands, giving you a kiss on the forehead. You giggled and kissed his cheek back and the moment you put him down on the ground, he scurried off to play.

You turned to Toto and wrapped your arms around his neck, placing your face on his chest. He wrapped his arms around your waist and kissed the top of your head.

˝Thank you...˝ you mumbled, tired and in pain. He smiled down at you, pulling away slightly.

˝There is nothing to thank me for. How about you go shower and change, I'll make something to eat. Hm?˝he asked and you smiled, tears welling up in your eyes. ˝What are the tears for, hm, shatzi (honey)? What's wrong?˝ he moved away some hair from your face, gently wiping the tears away.

˝It's just... too much. The work and the incompetent people I work with... UGH! They are all so insufferable!˝ you groan and bury your face in his chest.

˝It'll pass, meine liebe (my love), now go and get ready for dinner.˝ he said with a final kiss to your forehead and a light smack to your butt as you left, making you giggle. As he prepared dinner, you showered and changed, already feeling better.

You dropped by Jack's room, seeing him playing on the floor.

˝Jackie, coming down for dinner?˝ he lifted his head and nodded, starting to pick up his toys. ˝Leave the cleaning up for later, come now.˝ you open your arms and he runs into them, giggling. You lift him up and go downstairs.

In the kitchen, you're welcomed by a sight. Toto with your small, strawberry print apron cooking something that smelled divine, your handwritten cookbook opened in front of him. He heard you and Jack giggle and turned around.

˝What's so funny, eh?˝ he asks, putting his hands on his hips, which only makes you and jack giggle even more. You set your son down and turn him towards you.

˝Go and turn on the tv and find something to watch, I'm gonna stay and help dad with dinner.˝ with a small 'ok' he ran of to the living room. ˝You look cute in that apron, where did you find it?˝ you giggle, smoothing it down on his chest, resting your hands there.

˝In better spirits, I see?˝ he asks and you nod, hugging him. ˝Go and set the table, I'll be done here soon.˝ he pushes you back and you smile.

Now that everyone was gathered at the table and eating, you finally felt at peace. No annoying coworkers, no piles of paperwork. Just you, your son and husband, and a relatively good dinner save the few burnt pieces of onion.

After dinner, you all lay on the sofa, watching something on the tv. Jack lay on Toto's left, almost asleep, and you on his right. Toto's hand was on your hip, tracing small circles in your exposed skin. Neither of you paid any attention to the tv, stealing kisses from each other. His hand slowly moved higher, his kisses getting more passionate.

˝Toto...˝ you whined as his hand moved lower to your ass, giving it a gentle squeeze.

˝What, schatzi?˝he whispered into the kiss.

˝Not here...˝ you whispered back.

˝Hmm... I'll put Jack to bed...˝ he rose to his feet, picking up your son along with him, and you followed suit. ˝And you get ready in the bedroom...˝ he said as he pulled you in for another passionate kiss, squeezing your ass harder. As you kissed, all that was heard was a low 'eeewww' from Jack.

You quietly laughed and made your way to the bedroom, sending one last wink in Toto's direction.

TAGS

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[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 62

When I left the alt. school, I took with me three books unintentionally from the school – which turned out being great for me, and it probably didn't hurt the school too much (in any case I went back and returned them a year later). The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Painted Bird, and Native Son. In a way, I look back at these three books as having a very big impact on who I am, and I suppose it's in part because I think these books are fantastic and in part because books in general were replacing contact with other people. But a lot of my later insight was built off the ideas of the books I read for these years of my life They are hard to put into words. They effected my psychologically.

I was taken to go get my GED – so at least I would have that. I figured it would be easy enough. They in later years set up the tests a lot harder with mandatory classes you had to take for about four months, but when I got my GED it was definitely easy. I arrived early at the LCSC college, was taken down long confusing downstairs twisty college hallways. Most of the rooms were empty and silent. I wondered what schools did with all these empty rooms and facilities. I suppose they all serve a function and may not always  be empty, but they were that morning. I was put into the room they had mistakenly thought I was supposed to go to – and then twenty minutes in they realized I was not there for the courses. I was there to test out and I was in the wrong room. So I was lead into a room where I now had fifteen minutes to finish mathematics testing that I should have had all that other time I wasted in the other room for. Fortunately, I finished and passed it. Not with flying colors mind you, but it got finished. The rest of the tests were essentially basic grammar and being able to assess information that you read tests. I made a day of it, and I got out of there passing. Getting my GED wasn't ideal of course as opposed to a high school diploma, but given the circumstances, I still felt as though I had achieved something. I had at least – some filed away fact about the legitimacy of my basic abilities, and something to show for twelve years of getting up at ungodly hours of the morning to go to school five days a week.

I worried about fighting with my dad. We didn't fight, at least not that fall from what I remember, but I felt especially vulnerable given my new found set of circumstances that basically left me stranded with no future. I no longer had school to go to, or any friends to turn to. The idea of going out and becoming a musician on my own now felt a bit silly. I had to sort of face up to the fact that some of my younger teenage dreams didn't seem quite the same to me as they once had. It felt as though something had come and taken everything away from me. I felt very distant a lot of the time. I felt very alone. In a sense I enjoyed it. At best it had that pleasant tingly feeling of being in a quiet house that has been full of people for several days, and they just left, and now you are alone and you can hear the ticking of the clock and your own heartbeat and everything in the fridge is yours. I guess I was emotionally exhausted. I didn't know who I was really. I mean, I did know to an extent who I was, but I didn't at the same time. This was the first time I think I consciously realized that we can be more than one person when we are by ourselves, if we are with a significant other, coworkers, friends, a grocery store, in a position of authority, with our parents individually and together. I am particularly divided in this regard. There is no telling who I am actually. It can be a little frightening and confusing for me to this day. Identities are very fleeting, but seem very real and unshifting in the ever present moment.

Because of the fact that I was afraid of the emotional violence towards me from my father, I flirted with the idea of moving to my mom's. Allison and David would be left sure, but my mom worked a lot at the nursing home, these really long shifts that nurses sometimes work that are sixteen hours with a small break. I guess there are times when watching over the patients is relatively easy – like you can sit down and stuff, but still – who wants to be at work that long? My mother has/and does volunteer to take absurd amounts of hours whenever she can. She will go several months without a day off at these understaffed facilities. She didn't get paid all that well at the nursing homes she's worked at, but she worked so much that she managed to have money. And when she wasn't working, she was of course doting on her boyfriend Danny. She ended up getting this very cheap rundown apartment on the outskirts of town in some old buildings that were built in the seventies that occasionally got the cops called. It was for the most part quiet. I didn't mind the apartment or the occasional noises of the neighbors, in fact I rather welcomed the sound of people running water. I didn't feel so out of touch or alone. I don't know. The sound of people doing something in the next apartment has always given me this strange tingly sense of comfort.

I would be alone all the time in this apartment when I visited, sometimes for nights on end. There was no internet. We did have about forty channels of cable, most of them totally boring, but seeing as I was raised without television I found it really a step up for me to have it going. I sometimes would watch the History channel when there was history, or I would watch the travel channel or ghost hunting shows. I took a strange comfort in listening to insane religious infomercials in the middle of the night. I surely cannot be the only one that thinks there is something perfectly insane about television. Like, TV rapidly changes the dialogue or the premise for your thoughts. It subconsciously has recreated the thinking patterns of modern man – it's an altered image of our own creating that has taken the reigns and decided to recreate us. The media and it's effect fascinates me. I am not even per say going about that thought on the preconceived notion that television is bad and we should all be doing something else (though we probably should). I am just fascinated about the underlying psychology of it and how mindless it is. It made me feel extremely comfortable and unsettled and mysteriously empty at the same time. I like that madness and I do not.

It was a one bedroom and the bedroom was filled to the top with my mother's boxes – and it would never in my entire time with that place, ever be something you could call a proper bedroom, though people did manage to fit a mattress in there. My mother would sleep on the couch when she was home. She set up a bunk bed in the corner of the living room where I would generally sleep – and Allison and David when they came over. She always blasted the television so loud – and I found that rather frustrating to sleep through. On a good night she would turn it to old movies. So randomly in the night I would hear that old screamy noise from the intense moments of old movies. I would listen to Clark Gable or Bette Davis professing their love, or hear Shirley Temple hear once again that her parent had died and the innocent sobbing that came with that. I rather like old movies and could sleep any old time I wanted now, so it was okay for the most part. But she would also watch Lord of the Rings, and though I sort of like Lord of the Rings okay, it could get a little obnoxious. You would listen to Gimley's lines over and over. How many times did I wake up to Soromon and Gandalf the Grey having it out? She would set it on repeat. I would eventually sneak out of bed and try to turn it off, but as soon as I tried that she would wake up and be cantankerous about it.

I didn't exactly live at my mom's at this point, but I stayed there about half the week most of the time. My father had the internet while my mom did not. My mother didn't even know what the internet was fully, so I could not convince her to spend her money on it. I was mostly divided for this reason. I had to keep up with Sarah and I simply had to tend to my MySpace account. Just thinking of all those MySpace notifications gave me this strong incentive to never want to leave the computer. Having this time to myself though held a lot of value for me as well. It gave me sense of childlike peace I had almost forgot about for the years I had spent in school, living in delirious anger or despair about boys or longing for some big dream of the future. I had forgotten how to enjoy the small details. And in that I had lost my ability to really achieve anything since everything that ends up being big starts out being pretty small. I remember spending hours watching Bob Ross, just like I had when I had been four. I remember Jenni telling me that I was likely going to waste my time when I left school, and maybe she was more right than not, but I had to argue that I needed this time. Or I would listen to Neil Young, who was a new and permanent fixture of my musical existence. I would listen to Down By the River sometimes three or four times in a row. I connected with his guitar style very deeply.

I went to the nursing home with my mom on a couple of occasions. It was a very weird experience. Personal aspects about who my mother actually is to me aside, her working in the kind of jobs that she does really gave me this strong understanding of our society as a whole. Because she worked with the feeble, the mentally disabled, the unstable and the dysfunctional folks that we pay not to see. This is what we do in modern society. We hide it away. Just like we hide from death and decay in most everything we do. It's not something I particularly like to think about either, but we do it to the point of being dishonest with ourselves. We are afraid of it happening to us. I know that European sometimes saw the elderly differently. They were seen as examples of God cursing the wicked, or sometimes those with schizophrenia were seen to be possessed by God, or Lucifer himself. Nazi's would likely have done away with a society that cared for the unwanted and elderly by killing them in many cases had they won World War 2.

I got used to a lot of the elderly patients in the home. The atmosphere in the morning was very strange. These old people were unlike anything I was used to. It fascinated me that they all used to be highschoolers just like I had not long ago been. They had all had lives. And this was the end. One of them would be walking around the room. It would take him forty minutes to make one round. Some of them didn't move or blink anymore. They all seemed highly aware of me though. They all stared at me intently. Their eyes were gleaming with fascination. One old man named Olly who was senile would like his lips sadistically with this mad glint in his eyes as he looked at me. It was the most perverted look I have ever received – but I let it pass realizing his mind was gone. I am sure the teenage Olly would have been horrified by old man Olly's behavior towards women.

There was also an old man named Lou. He had had a stroke that had turned him from a fully functional elderly man who still chopped and brought in his own wood to a sort of vegetable. He would begin speaking randomly in this loud clear voice that was alarming in the quiet room, but it would soon fizzle out into the most insane gibberish I have ever heard. It was language and it was not at the same time. I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it. It always degraded from gibberish into this weird buzzing noise that didn't sound even human. He would be silent then for five minutes before starting up again. I asked my mom about it, and she didn't seem as curious about what he was trying to say. Maybe I am more curious than most, and she had probably seen a lot of old folks come and go and she was pretty used to it.

Allison sometimes went too, but we always went on separate days. I don't know that the facility really wanted my mother's entire family coming in. Allison made friends with this old woman named Raquel. She didn't understand English, but it didn't particularly matter because she didn't understand very much. Her family did come and see her frequently which was good to see. She was a very sweet lady – though very far gone mentally. She would giggle and clap her hands in delight when Allison even used one or two Spanish words. It was also very easy to make her cry. She was afraid of spoons and nobody knew why. Getting her to eat was a challenge.

The old lady that latched onto me was this ninety five year old ex school teacher from I imagine the thirties through seventies named Jenny. It was amazing to look at her and know she had been around for so long. She had been born before world war one. She had been alive when pictures were black and white, and people danced to Al Bowlly and Glen Miller and stuff like that. I was told that she had been a very strict teacher in her day, and she had been a perfectionist. She first came up to me because she wanted me to straighten things in the room. She had lost most of her clarity and could no longer reason very well or speak very much, but she still knew when something was wrinkled or crooked. She was too old to fix these things herself and they must have constantly been eating at her that she no longer had control to do anything about it. So she came up to me and pointed to the corner of the table. The table cloth that was set up was slightly wrinkled. I went over and straightened it. She then started pointing to other tables, to random things in the room that were ever so slightly askew. If it was reasonable, I would attempt it. Occasionally she would point to someone's shirt, or to something hanging up on the ceiling and I would have to gesture that I couldn't do it.

The one thing I ever heard her say was she started calling this one other older woman who was there fat. It was a bit alarming. Jenny was of course too old to scold. The woman in question was this very obese woman who could no longer stand. She wasn't as old as the others were, but she had nobody to care for her and was eventually taken to this home which I imagine was very hard. Jenny would look at this other woman with this bitterness in her eyes, and she would sort of croak, FAT! And she would point at her as though she expected I might be able to do something about it or I would agree with her. I felt a little sheepish and embarrassed. It amused me though to realize that she had probably been that way her entire life. I imagine she had had this prejudice when she was a capable young school teacher. I stated earlier that identities are fleeting, but at the same time can really stick to our core perceptions of the world. It also was amusing to me, because I generally came in wearing a hoodie, and for that reason I could use my hands in my pockets to stretch the hoodie over my own belly. It seemed that in Jenny's mind, as long as there were no wrinkles in the clothing, and you couldn't see the fat, that therefore meant that there was no fat.

Lastly, there was this quiet mysterious woman who always sat in the corner. I never had any dealings with her directly. She was incredibly tiny. I guess she wasn't that old. She was in her early sixties, however, she had drank her mind away. She had once been a San Francisco hippie, well read with a liberal arts degree. But she couldn't put down the alcohol, and it took her mind away. What was really so shocking about her was that she had this flowing beautiful straight shiny hair without a single bit of gray in it. It looked honestly straight from an ad in a magazine. It would have been striking in a crowd of random people my age, let alone, on this vacant old lady in the nursing home. As far as I know, the only person who ever visited with woman was her ex husband, who would come in sometimes baring flowers.

Honestly, my mother was one of the nicer nurses. I never saw any mistreatment of the older folks who lived here, but there was an impatience in the eyes of most of the orderly. Allison eventually had to stop going because she got openly mad at one nurse who was aggressively and angrily trying to make Raquel eat from the spoon that she was afraid of. She started yelling at Raquel which made Raquel cry and throw herself on the ground. The woman was even angrier then, and she kept shouting at Raquel even though it was clear that Raquel didn't understand and had obviously not chosen this for herself. My mother came over and smoothed it over, but Allison ended up getting in this nurse's grill and it was unsaid after that, but my mom stopped bringing us.

I don't know why at this point my mom was dating Danny still. He was completely degrading. The situation was degrading. I didn't particularly care at this point, but it was degrading to watch. She would sometimes come home drunk, and it just seemed sad. She seemed uncertain if he even loved her or liked her at all. He would do the thing where he pushed her away and insinuate that they were no longer a couple, but then when she gave him space, he would call her up in the middle of the night accusing her of cheating on him. He was still cheating on her when he could get away with it. I sort of wanted to punch him in the face. He was still calling her stupid and gaslighting  her. And yet, their meaningless relationship went on and on. I remember once she came to pick Allison and David up on Friday after school to come to her house for the weekend. We went to the store to get our cheap ass dollar store food and cheap ass TV dinners and maybe some cheap ass dollar menu McDonald's (if we were lucky [gross]), and maybe a carton of cheap ass ice cream, and he drove by her house, noticed that the motorcycle helmet he bought her was no longer by her door and accused her of going out on a night ride with some other dude she didn't even know. He kept calling her and demanding she tell him the truth. I felt incensed enough to yell in the background while she was on the phone to confirm that yes, we were with her – it was Friday and that is what we all did on Fridays and in any case it was none of his business. He then accused all of us of being liars.

Soon after this, we were driving her car to go get Allison and David one night. It was getting to be winter  yet again and it got dark early. It was pitch black and probably not even eight pm yet. About four miles out of town with all of us in the car, the vehicle broke down in a very inconvenient place. There was nowhere we could legally park where we wouldn't get towed. We were not strong enough to push the car anywhere. My mother didn't have money to pay for someone to tow the vehicle. We were left in this conundrum. We had no one else to call except for Danny. He was amused and mean spirited about it over the phone. He seemed to want to use this as an opportunity to berate my mother on how worthless and stupid she was, which of course pissed me off, but furthermore was not helpful in any way. In an attempt to maybe bypass having to pay a towing company, my mother decided to push the car into gulch on the side of the road. It wasn't that deep, and she figured it would be cheaper to pay to have it towed out of that one area than it would to pay the money it would take to bring it all the way to the place where they take cars, which was quite a ways away. When Danny came to pick us up, he called my mother stupid for having done this. She then began talking in her pathetic baby talk voice, saying she had made a stupid mistake, and she should have not done that. Which Danny then told her was also a stupid idea. Basically, nothing she could have done was right. She apologized for calling him to have us pick us up, which he then humbly told us all was not a problem since he was 'a nice guy'. But then he just continued to berate her about any of the options. It got to the point where she was cornered and no matter which option she chose, she was stupid for it. He had never been quite so open about his psychological abuse around me before this. I had tried to hold my tongue initially. We all just wanted to get home, come what may – but it was getting to the point where I definitely couldn't listen to this anymore, and I was confused in a very technical way of what he was even trying to say logically. So I was like '..So, like, she couldn't just turn the car back on and continue driving. She had few options given the situation. She had those two options pretty much. There were not any better ones. What is it you think she should have done? I don't know what you are trying to say and I don't appreciate how many times you have called her stupid.' He got really annoyed then and sort of backed off. He low key accused us all of 'ganging up on him'. After this, I don't know that I ever had any personal contact with Danny at all, though my mother continued to see him for a time.

My mother ended up having a bunch of legal troubles for her driving. She had driven for years without insurance.  She didn't drive horribly, but she wasn't always a decent driver either. It started one night while driving back to Lewiston and there was this sting operation in Lewiston that night, about a month after my mother's vehicle had ended up getting towed regardless. We actually got pulled over for going two miles over the speed limit. It was more or less some excuse to pull everyone over. People were getting pulled over left and right and searched. There were a bunch of state police driving about. She not only didn't have proof of insurance on her, but she also didn't have her license on her at the time. My mother seems to not understand cops very well. She started telling the cop about how she was divorced and had to find work that she could barely feed us with on the weekends, and how she worked in nursing homes and had two older daughters and grandchildren and on and on.

The cop looked at her blankly and  bored, with no interest in her life story. I was a bit embarrassed for her actually since he wasn't going to let her off on the basis of anything related to her life as it was. He stated that he would have thrown her in jail if she hadn't had me, David and Allison with her. He wrote her up heavily. He then demanded that I get out of the car to be searched. I don't know that I would have minded on the account that I had nothing on me – though, on looking back. I don't trust that he might have slipped something on me. It would have been highly unlikely, but you never know. Fortunately for me, my mother started getting mad and telling him he was not allowed to search me. I was her daughter and he needed to leave me alone. He was caught off guard, his attitude softened and he complied. So we had to take a taxi home. Which ended up being really awful, because when we were nearly at the apartment, she realized she had left the apartment key and her wallet in her car that she needed to pay the taxi, so we ended up driving all the way back to the car. It costed sixty or seventy dollars.

She ended up driving anyway, and getting pulled over three times. The cop who kept pulling her over liked her car, and wanted her to sell it to him and kept asking every time, so she stood out like a sore thumb when she was commuting. Her fines were enormous. Then she got a  DUI from her drives home from the bar. Which I actually did understand since driving drunk is legitimately awful and dangerous. She eventually started walking home or getting rides which was good I guess. She tried to fight the DUI given she wasn't that high over the legal limit. In her fantastical silly vision of the world, she took this fighting back against her DUI as some kind of courtroom drama where she was going to change history by proving to the courts that the cops were corrupt for collecting money from DUI's and she was innocent and not even drunk. Which didn't work out. All told, I believe she was pulled over in one year period about ten times. Eventually, she got her license back and was insured. But it was a time consuming costly ordeal to say the least. I was in the car with her about six times when it happened, so I started wondering if I was bad luck.

When we weren't getting pulled over, or she was not working, we would sometimes drive up these strange roads that paralleled the Washington side of the Snake River till the sun would go down. In this really hard to describe way, my mother and I have some core similarities even though we function and express ourselves differently. It's not in how we talk (I don't see a lot of my behaviors being all that similar to hers), but I think in an inner self kind of way – like that part of us that exists before there are words to describe it. Like, I can tell that when she looks into the distance at a sunset, she gets that same sparkly delusional romanticism about life that I do. She has the same needs to express herself and live on a certain vibration that is hard for people to understand, feels suppressed by the world – much like I do. And I feel this wasn't something she raised me to be. We didn't do much talking growing up. Like, there is some kind of inner delusional traits that are similar enough to mention. It must be genetic. So even though I know there are elements to my mother that make her a truly awful person – I can't help but feel that kinship. I know what it's like to be one of our kind.

During these mini road trips, she would always want to listen to this Eagles Greatest Hits tape on the tape deck of the van she was driving (she avoided driving her white Camaro now at all costs). I would sing along even though I have never  been quite sure how to feel about the Eagles. On one hand, there is something incredibly cheesy about them. On the other hand, I associate them with a certain love I have for the area I grew up and all the good times I have had with my mother. I hate the culture as well as all the limitations of growing up where I did, but there is a certain love I have for the mountains and greenery of northern Idaho and the dry eastern Washington deserts, the dingy gas stations, the quiet streets at night, the rivers. The sky looks different somehow in every area you are in. I don't know why. Both of us were terrible singers, but it almost made it even funner and I will admit that I never tried to sing well in these situations. One time, skip to years later, we were singing You're So Vain by Carly Simon which was on the radio and for some reason I had a tape recorder in the car with us, and we decided to tape record ourselves singing, just the two of us. So we drove around just singing our hearts out, and we eventually ended up in some strange dead end part of Clarkston. We stopped at an empty church parking lot to listen back to our singing, and though we knew it was going to be bad, neither of us even imagined just how much worse it was than even our lowest of expectation. We both shrieked, and decided to never tell anyone what we had created. This is the first time I have ever mentioned it to anyone as a matter of fact.

I still spent a good deal of time at my father's however. Allison and I would share a bed to stay warm in the winter nights, and we would often talk till midnight or later. I ended up finding The Kink's album, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, and I adored that album, and grew over time to absolutely fucking adore The Kinks as well. It's unnecessary to make this some kind of contest since they are both decent, but The Kinks were so much better than what they ever got credit for. They were theatrical, experimental, I felt that they stayed decent a lot longer than any of the solo Beatles did – or the Rolling Stones. This isn't to say that the Rolling Stones and the Beatles don't deserve their due, but – had the Kinks not been banned from America for inciting a riot I feel like they would be remember with a lot more clarity for much more than just 'You Really Got Me'.

I would space off a lot and a part of me felt like I was almost living a double life. One side of me was here in the present, eating saltines, feeling poor, dirty, futureless, postmodern without prospects, lost and defining myself only by the past and if I let myself think about it – which I did everything I could not to – completely and totally unlovable and pointless in a very fundamental way where every breath I took seemed totally wasted. But there was this other version of me that lived in the 60's. I liked listening to older music, to Bob Dylan and others. I would reminisce about Woodstock when I most certainly was never there in any fashion. I would imagine a world where the late 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's had never happened at all. I tried to experience what living in that new reality of the 60's must have been like. I suppose I grasped the spirit of it to a certain extent. Though in reality obviously, I was never there, and I was/am very much a person from the age I was born in, whether I like it or no.

Winter was very cold that year I remember. My sister's friend's grandfather Harvey, who was mentally challenged and lived at the end of town found this cattle dog outside his house that winter. She was starving and sick. She seemed to have been dropped off by someone to die. Her leg was broken. Harvey had a problem with animals in the town swarming his home since he left food out frequently for some of the cats, and I believe he was afraid of dealing with this poor dog, so he ignored her and refused to feed her – probably taking on a false sense of harshness he gathered from the truckers down at the diner downtown who often bragged of taking unwanted kittens, putting them in a bag, tying that back to a brick and throwing that bag into the icy river. Harvey I suppose really just didn't know how to feel, or what to do in a number of different situations, this being a tragic example. My father didn't like the idea of that poor docile dog dying out there at the end of town, so he volunteered to take her in, and for a time we had a pet dog.

She was a very sweet girl. She was a little skittish, and you could tell that she was afraid of men, who had likely abused her. She never tired of being pet. Her leg was really messed up. It looked as though it had been broken, and had grown wrong, and wasn't very usable. She had a swollen bump on her chest that didn't look good. We tried to wash her, but she just wasn't well enough for a lot of that. And she smelled too bad to be in the house with us. We set up a bed for her in the back room. We gave her an electric blanket to lay in. I named her Pegasus. She didn't resemble the flying elegant mythological horse in any way – in a great many ways, she was the bitter opposite of mythology. A suffering old dog. I tried to pet her and visit her as often as I could. At some point though she stopped getting up. She stopped eating food. Obviously, dogs are natural gluttons so this gave us the strong indication that something was very wrong with her. She began to smell worse and worse. I pet her anyway. It sort of broke my heart. Someone had known she was sick and had decided to dump her to die alone. She was too old to be anyone's exciting new pet. She also didn't smell too good. But she needed to be cared about just as much as any social creature.

Obviously, we had to take her to the animal shelter eventually. I knew it was the right thing to do. She obviously had cancer. She was old, and her leg being broken as it was would be a major challenge. Her body was shutting down, hence the smell. And still, she was so sweet. I sat in the back seat with her, and pet her the entire trip to the animal shelter. She looked lovingly up to me for much of the time, with this glazed over look. I truly believed that dogs feel love. She cared more about being given affection than she cared about food or even her own freedom. When we got to the animal shelter she couldn't walk and this woman who worked at the pound had to grab her and carry her in. I pet her one last time. She looked scared, though I could tell that the people at the animal shelter felt badly for her, since she was such a sweetheart. Honestly, I am fairly confident they put her down. As I waited for my father to make some kind of of final contribution to her welfare, maybe giving the shelter a few weeks worth of food money, I sat in the area with all the caged up cats. There were so many of them. Some of them hissed at me, many looked at my inquisitive and bored. This one cat in particular was yowling for me desperately. Purring and cherishing every spare second of attention and contact that could be had. I felt so bad for all these animals. I know there are a lot of differences between human being's cognitive awareness and animals, but it was easy to tell all of these animals felt abandoned. I imagine many of them never found homes. I also imagine it would be very hard to work in one of these places, being put into a situation where the most financial and humane thing to do would be to put them all down. It really irks me to no end when people get animals and don't take care of them. I hate it when people don't get their cats neutered and spayed. Ignoring all the animals in the wild we ignore as they go extinct, or the slaughterhouses or whathaveyou, we aren't even good to our own pets. Between abandoned pet dogs and cats that people simple , puppy mills, and so on, we bring these creatures into the world that they cannot survive or thrive in on their own, and they suffer. Call me crazy, but I honestly believe in some wild reforms in pet ownership.

That Christmas was probably the best Christmas I ever had. I had professed that all I wanted for Christmas was paints, canvases and brushes. For whatever reason, possibly guilt from the years my father had primarily bought gifts for girlfriends, he spent close to three or four hundred dollars on Christmas just for me. We went to Michael's and he bought me brushes, every color of high quality acrylic paint I would ever need, several different sizes of canvases. He also bought me some art books, for inspiration. They were these strange little books that presented different kinds of Art. One was simply called The Art Book, and the other was 20th Century Art Book. There was a House book, a Face book (of photographed people). It was from these two little books that I would flip through and study for hours that I got some grasp of what it meant to fill a canvas with pure expression. It was to date I think, easily my favorite Christmas besides a few I experienced as a child because I believed in Santa and all that.

We had a perfect Christmas dinner, and my father had thought to get me Blue Velvet. He didn't know very much about David Lynch, but he knew enough to know that David Lynch was something I would really like. And he was correct. He didn't want Allison and David watching Blue Velvet, so he made them close their eyes when Dennis Hopper's character was being a disgusting pervert. Call me weird, but as long as you have good communication with your children, and given they are eight or older, I am not that strict about what children watch. Obviously not just pure out of context snuff films or porn for the most part. Though I am not apposed to strong violence or sex within context of the story. And i imagine it is possible to put context into what you are watching. For instance, you could show when Saddam Hussein was being hung in context to showing what capital punishment looks like. If you want to eat meat, you should watch the full reality of what the animal goes through. It’s painful, but life was never meant to be jolly.

Raising children into being aware adults, I think it's important for them to grasp complex concepts, moral dilemmas and realities of our depravity and fragility mentally and physically. Media can be a great way to show children this stuff - if put into context - i cannot stress enough. Obviously if your child shows strong levels of delusional behavior than perhaps it's not a good idea. If you child suffers from severe anxiety as well perhaps take baby steps. I mean, it’s individual with each case, but more or less i think you should always present the challenge as best you can.I think earlier than eight a child is more or less in strictly monkey-see monkey-do mode, and it's not useful or desirable to confuse them about what is appropriate when they are still learning how to engage with the world as an individual in a fundamental fashion. My father was trying to be decent by telling Allison and David to shut their eyes, but what I thought was funny was the fact that the disturbing Frank Booth scenes were even worse if you close your eyes and simply listen to his lines. God what a fucked up character.

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[ponyregrets]

can you do the instagram one on the prompts list for bellarke if ya feel like it thank you

I sent Brit a bunch of messages on Instagram to see how it worked because I am a PROFESSIONAL who DOES RESEARCH and DOES NOT UNDERSTAND INSTAGRAM also I forgot what the actual prompt was so it’s a little different

bls_bblake liked your post.

Clarke stares at the notification, nestled in among her others, ordinary and unremarkable, and tells herself that it’s not what she thinks. It’s a completely innocuous username that could be anyone. It’s not going to be Bellamy. There’s no way it’s Bellamy. She hasn’t even talked to him since they broke up, and he wouldn’t possibly be liking her Instagram posts.

Although, if he was going to like a picture, that one makes sense. It’s almost four years old, from back when they were dating, and it’s of one of his books, a few passages of Latin that she particularly liked and got a nice, artistic shot of. If he somehow found it, he probably would like it.

The picture on the bls_bblake account is just a mug with a map of the world on it, which is not really helpful in terms of his identity. Part of her feels stupid for even clicking through to the actual account; after all, she runs an aesthetic blog and gets lots of random likes from accounts she’s never seen before. That doesn’t mean any of them are her ex-boyfriend.

But there it is, in stark black and white, right below his username: Bellamy Blake History teacher at Boston Latin School. Follow for more history content.

And there he is in the second row of pictures too, posing in a graveyard she thinks is somewhere on the Freedom Trail. She’s clicking into the picture before she’s fully processed it, eyes roving greedily over his face. It’s only been three years, so he doesn’t look that different, but she can see how he’s aged, grown into his looks, grown more comfortable with himself.

bls_bblake Hope everyone is spending their summer doing the important things, like visiting one of the many historic sites in the city. This stuff is on the AP exam, guys!

Clarke and Bellamy broke up for one very simple reason: he got into grad school in Connecticut, and she got into grad school in California, and they decided that trying to maintain a long distance relationship while they were starting on new jobs and new careers was just not at all feasible. It was probably the right decision, and Clarke wouldn’t say she regretted it, but she wishes she hadn’t taken the cold-turkey approach she did to the breakup.They could have stayed in touch. But he’s never been a social media person, wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram back then, and every time she thought about texting him, she talked herself out of it. She told herself that if she missed him as much as she did, it wouldn’t be safe, to just talk to him. She’d get over him faster if they just never interacted again.

Given the erratic beat of her heart and the way her hand is trembling a little on her phone, it didn’t work at all.

Clarke checks back to her own account, giving it a critical once-over. This isn’t her personal account, and she doesn’t appear in any of the pictures. Bellamy knew it existed, back in the day, but she’s not convinced he’d remember the username, if he ever knew it.

Still, if he looked at the profile, it’s right there: Follow my personal account @clarkegriffin. He might know it’s her, or he might have just found the picture doing some weird search for Latin books, and he liked it without doing any follow-up on the account that posted it.

He wouldn’t have liked it, right? If he knew it was her, he would have said something.

If he goes to her personal account, he’ll see that she’s in Boston too. Not that that means anything. But–she is. And he is. And she could be talking to him.

She switches accounts to her personal blog and navigates her way back to Bellamy’s profile, looking it over again before she bites the bullet and opens up the message box.

clarkegriffin: Did you know photographilia was my aesthetic side blog, or just a lucky coincidence?Also, hi, Bellamy

She’s not sure what exact response she’s hoping for, really, but it feels weirder to not acknowledge him. She knows now, she can’t not know, and it’s going to bother her, if she doesn’t say anything.

She’s planning to turn off her phone and do something else, but before she can, his icon pops up to indicate he’s typing, and she’s frozen again, rooted to the spot as she waits for the response.

It’s been three years. It shouldn’t be like this.

bls_bblake: I thought that book looked really familiarHi, ClarkeI was just looking for some dorky stuff to make my kids stop following me, I had no idea it was you

clarkegriffin: Have you considered not giving your students your Instagram username?And also not having an Instagram that actually seems to be centered around being a teacherThese are good steps you can take so students won’t follow you

bls_bblake: I should have known I should come to you for the inside tips on InstagramIt’s this thing my principal is into for some reasonShe thinks that if the teachers have a social media presence we’ll be more approachableAnd I thought I’d do better on Instagram than Twitter

clarkegriffin: Does that really work?

bls_bblake: ApparentlyA bunch of them follow meAnd sometimes they send me homework questions on hereWhich is really inconvenient, but I guess it’s better than them not asking

clarkegriffin: Well, let me know if you need any other pictures of Latin booksI think I have a few more

bls_bblake: ThanksHow are you doing?Still in California?

clarkegriffin: Cambridge, actuallySo I guess we’re neighbors

bls_bblake: Wait, really?That’s one hell of a coincidence

He’s not wrong. They were both living in DC when they dated, Clarke recently out of college and Bellamy just finishing up himself, having started late because he was taking care of his sister, and they’d been together for two years when it ended. Clarke applied for schools back in California because her dad was sick and she wanted to be close to home, and Bellamy had just gone wherever would give him the best financial aid. Clarke had thought about staying on the west coast, but she found she actually preferred it out here, and once she was done with school and her dad was in better health, she wanted to come back.

She’d always assumed he’d go back to DC, when she thought about it. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might be in New England. That he might be here.

clarkegriffin: Yeah, I couldn’t believe itHow long?

bls_bblake: A yearI started right after I finished grad schoolYou must have just graduated up in May, right?And then moved here?

clarkegriffin: I’m working at the MFA, yeahStarted in June, so I’m finally starting to feel like I’m settling in

bls_bblake: Cool, that’s goodI like it here

clarkegriffin: Yeah, me too

She worries her lip, trying to figure out where to go from here. Can she just ask if he wants to hang out? It doesn’t feel like it should be such a huge deal. They were friends, they liked each other even before the dating thing. And then–well, he’s still the best relationship she’s ever had, and nothing ever went wrong. They just couldn’t make it work living apart. And now they’re living together again.

clarkegriffin: I haven’t gotten to much of the historical stuff yetAny suggestions?

bls_bblake: I was going to check out the Tea Party Museum this weekendI haven’t been beforeIt would probably be more fun with company

clarkegriffin: I work Tuesday to Saturday, but I’m free on SundayIf that works for you

bls_bblake: YeahWe could grab lunch first, maybe? Catch up?

clarkegriffin: It’s a date

And, to her profound relief, it really, definitely is.

[gipstyles-blog]

It seems like everywhere you look these days, every link you click, every photo that’s posted, all serve as reminders that you don’t have enough, and therefore, you are not enough. Keeping up with the Jones’ is nothing new, but the societal effects of this approach to life seem to have intensified and accelerated over the decades, particularly with social media. Here’s the story of how I came to focus on appreciation over accumulation.

In 2009, I was waiting tables, not exactly killing it financially, but one night I remember in particular that a couple sat down in my section and the woman got a baked potato as her entree. I thought to myself “Damn, at least I’m not that broke.” We take pride not just in what we have, then, but in how it compares to other people.

The next morning my smug satisfaction was rudely interrupted when I woke up to a text notification from my bank. My balance of $0.00 was lower than what I agreed I would keep in there. My years of living as a quasi-adult (it’s when you have bills and responsibilities but you’re still kind of an idiot) had caught up to me. I was broke. I was worse than baked-potato-broke.

I’m not going to sell you some story of radical transformation or how I realized that being poor was awesome. It isn’t. But this moment was life-changing for me. I found myself a few days later on the treadmill at the gym, literally and figuratively, repeating to myself over and over again “I need more money. I need to make more money, like right now. I’m not going to make it out here, I need more money.” I did need money but it also occurred to me then how ridiculous it was that I thought money would solve all my problems. That I would suddenly be happy if I was successful, that if I could just come up with some plan to throw myself into, all would be well. In short, money only solves one problem; the money problem. There were at least 5 other cylinders I needed to be firing on if I wished to have a successful and fulfilling life.

https://gipstyles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-to-Live-a-Good-Christian-Life.mp4

What I did do was start writing things down (which costs nothing). Every time a valuable thought popped into my head, and I thought it could benefit someone else (or me later when I forgot it) I wrote it down. I can say with absolute surety that there wasn’t one thought that popped into my head that I didn’t jot down on my phone for the better part of ten years. And I did begin to turn my life around. I got back on my feet financially, married the woman of my dreams, competed in a bodybuilding show, had kids, bought a house, and built up a social presence where I reach over 1 million followers every day. It turns out that self-esteem doesn’t come from having a lot of money. Instead, developing high self-esteem can help you earn more because you start to feel like a person that deserves to be financially secure. You put in the work, why wouldn’t you reap the reward?

It is my mission now to share those thoughts I believe are indispensable for anyone trying to cultivate a more positive outlook in a time when overwhelming negativity seems to be rewarded, both with attention and money.

“Happy Is The New Rich.”

Greed tells you you’ll never have enough even though you already have more than you’ll ever need. I’m not saying money is bad, and I can’t stand when people say that money is the root of all evil. Money is nice to have and at the very least, it gives you more options. What I am saying though when I say “happy is the new rich” is that nothing outside of you should determine how you feel about yourself inside. Not the number in the bank account, not the number on the scale, not your number of followers, etc. I’ve known plenty of broke people that were very happy, and I’ve known plenty of people with more money than they knew what to do with who was miserable. I’ve had the time of my life laughing on a beach with a bottle of water, but I also know a man who bled to death on marble floors in a swanky New York apartment after drinking vodka for 3 weeks straight. Money is definitely necessary, but a sponge can only hold so much water. After a certain financial saturation point, more money doesn’t equal more happiness. If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you only need money for the bottom row.

“Action without thought creates havoc.”

Thought without action creates anxiety. Make thought and action equal partners while cutting talk completely out of the deal.”

If you look around, you see a whole lot of people telling you what they’re going to do, while not doing much of anything. People don’t have a motivation problem. They have a follow-through problem. It’s easy to get all jacked up on the thought of doing something good for yourself, but if you’re not careful, you’ll get too much satisfaction from the dopamine hit you get when you tell yourself you’re going to the gym, and you’ll never actually make it there.

“God is not a painkiller.”

This is something I used to hear my old friend Jack say all the time, and people get the meaning messed up quite often. The way I took it is this; God is not a painkiller, because pain equals growth, and God is not a growth killer. There are plenty of painkillers out there that will temporarily relieve your discomfort, but as long as you rely on them to cope with tragedy or triumph, you’ll never fully go inside for the answers, and thus the growth, you’re looking for. If you’re using vices or void filling behaviors to deal with your problems, you’ll find yourself in deep trouble sooner than later. I always think of the plant from The Rocky Horror Picture show. It starts off all cute in the beginning, but as he feeds it more and more, it grows bigger and bigger, hence it needs to eat more and more until it totally runs his life. The same thing happens when you feed the void. Starve the void, feel the pain, get the lesson, and move on.

“Don’t get a tattoo to cover up a bruise.”

I wrote this after a friend of mine committed suicide. I’ve heard suicide referred to as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The thing is though when you’re clinically depressed, it doesn’t feel temporary, and it seems the only way out is on the other side. I’m not claiming to have the cure for suicide, but it did occur to me that it would be silly to get a tattoo to cover up a bruise.

“Marriage is not the end of the search for love.”

It’s the end of the search for the person to love. The search for different ways to love that person has just begun.”

So many people see marriage as the end of the good life as if meeting strangers off the internet based on location is such a treat. Like any muscle though, love has to be built up and taken care of. It used to be that your friends gave you a hard time when you tried to leave your spouse, now they give you a hard time if you try to stay with them. In the age of disposable everything, it’s even harder to work at a relationship. I try not to take or give marital advice, but there was one piece of advice that I was given that I give to anybody who will listen, and that is “Don’t punish your spouse.” If your spouse left a candle burning and went to bed, what would you do? Would you blow it out or go wake them up and ask them why they were trying to murder the entire family? Yeah, I used to do the latter. Just blow it out.

“Lust makes you pretend problems don’t exist, love lets you accept that they do.”

Lust is one of the most powerful drugs in the world. I’ve seen many people paint red flags green for the sake of satisfying the most carnal urge. No doubt, we were programmed to pass down our genes and keep the human race alive, sometimes at our own peril, but I’ve disregarded some pretty gnarly warning signs of my own in my dating years, and I’ve seen others do the same.  My wife is not a perfect person, but she tries hard to be better every day, and so do I. My love for her allows me to accept her defects, knowing that she’s aware of them and working on them. Me pointing her flaws out to her over and over again does absolutely nothing (except start a fight). She’s doing the best she can with the tools she has. If I really want to help her, I can try and give her new tools.

“Procrastination is stillborn perfectionism.”

The two questions I get asked the most are “How do I get in shape?” and “How do I build my Instagram account?” and my answer is always the same, start now and don’t stop until you’re satisfied. Then enjoy that phase for a little bit, and get back to work. There is no substitute for consistency. No program you can buy and no cream you can rub on your body to make up for decades of neglect. The majority of people today are like kids furiously brushing their teeth before dentist appointments, trying to make up for months, or years, of neglect. Start, don’t stop, and then keep going. Perfectionism is knowing something isn’t going to be good enough before you’ve even begun, and procrastination is putting off starting because you know it isn’t going to be good enough. They’re both paralyzing, and they can both be cured by one thing; action. Get. Going. Now.

7 Lessons for Living a Good Life It seems like everywhere you look these days, every link you click, every photo that’s posted, all serve as reminders that you don’t have enough, and therefore, you are not enough.