#which is a large reason why I don’t have a facebook account

[olivieblake]

a reminder that I don’t have a facebook account

[wakeupthemembersofbylernation]

why do you think byler is less popular than mlvn on instagram?

on tiktok, tumblr, twitter and pretty much all other platforms byler is the more popular ship, but for some reason mlvns is more popular on instagram.

This is a good question! I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer, but if I were to take a stab at it, maybe it has something to do with the age demographic/type of fan on each platform?

Tumblr is very gay platform, and it’s also a platform for theorizing, so it makes sense that Byler is more popular here. Mlvn just kinda exists right now. There’s not much to theorize about. Like if you really believe that the monologue fixed everything and Mike and El will live happily ever after, then okay. It makes sense why a lot of them believe Mlvn will get married young and have children, cause where else is for them to go? All the other ships have unfinished business, even Jopper, the ship that’s probably in the best place after S4. They still have to figure out how to work together as a couple with a blended family.

Byler is inherently exciting to Tumblr cause it’s all about theorizing and anticipation. And it’s queer. Age demographic-wise, it seems like Byler Tumblr is all over the map too: from millennials who’ve been through this before with other ships that turned out to be queerbait to Gen Z adults my age to younger Zoomers who are truly excited about a ship becoming canon for the first time. There’s probably some of Gen Alpha here too, as well as people from Gen X. This shows that Byler is exciting and appeals to a wide range of folks.

With TikTok, it’s a younger skewing platform, and fandom-wise, there’s an emphasis on edits as well as Byler theorizing. And honestly, Season 4 genuinely didn’t give Mlvns that much to work with when it comes to edits. I mean, Will is in most of the shots. And Mlvn theories don’t seem that exciting. The GA already sees Mlvn endgame as the foregone conclusion, and he monologued to her. What else is there to theorize about? Since TikTok is a newer platform, it seems like there’s just less Mlvn-loyalists making content there, and Byler shippers have just taken it over. This is in large part due to Stranger Things as a whole exploding in popularity during summer 2022 and a lot of people switching sides to Byler during that time. There was a lot of content to create. I also think to some extent angsty edits perform better. And Byler obviously has a lot of angst.

Twitter honestly seems like the biggest war zone to me, which is why I stay away from ST Twitter for the most part. There’s just a lot of petty fights and arguments. Clearly we have a strong presence there, as evidenced by us causing the whole Byler script fiasco in august 2022. Mlvns there seem to be the most toxic, and I’ve noticed they always have Regina George tendencies (a lot of them have PFPs of Millie, Regina George, Barbie, or Olivia Rodrigo for some reason). I don’t know if it’s true that there are more Bylers than Mlvns on Twitter, but if that is true, that’s once again because Byler is just more exciting lol.

I think Instagram is a weird creature overall. It’s older than TikTok, so the fandom presence was likely established in 2016 when Mlvn mania began. It’s not really algorithmically based in the same way (with clear trending topics), so I think it’s easier for people to just follow and interact with accounts they support. I’ve noticed that a lot of the Mlvn accounts are Fillie accounts or Fillie-adjacent accounts often run by young girls (but not always- there are older fans too).

They tend to overly romanticize Mlvn and genuinely see it as the height of romance, even denying that they have any problems whatsoever. And they tend to bombard ST comment sections with extremely overzealous pro-Mlvn stuff, sometimes bordering on bizarre. Maybe part of this is due to IG basically being Facebook for younger millennials/older Zoomers? I think it’s a substantially more normie and less queer space than Tumblr. It’s also picture-based, so Mlvns often post screenshots from the show and pictures of Finn and Millie.

And obviously reddit is pro-Mlvn to an extreme too, with Bylers basically been exiled to the Byler subreddit. But there it’s largely middle-aged men who can’t fathom their favorite nerdy 80s nostalgia show becoming “woke” and gay.

[jodilin65]

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2018 Giving a few Facebook friends till the end of the year to interact with me. If they don’t I’m deleting them. I don’t know why but I’m very picky about that. I don’t add people to my friend list for decoration. There’s gotta be some interaction even if it’s only once a month or so.

Are the Twenties ignoring me or something? I asked them about the uptick in commercial planes and if they knew anything about it but they’ve completely blown me off. They would interact with me occasionally but lately, there’s been nothing. Mr. Twenties claims he’s not using Facebook because of privacy issues. Yet he seems to be on playing games. I have a feeling he has me blocked from his posts but oh well. His account, his choice.

At the end of the year, I will be doing friend list housekeeping and deleting a few deadbeats. Kim and Eileen from Massachusetts will likely be going and so will Sandra, an older PB lady in Tennessee that I never hear from anymore either there or on Facebook. I’ll have to look and see who else is worthy of being deleted but I don’t have many friends there to begin with. For some reason, I’m extremely picky about who I add there and I currently only have 22 people added. I’ve become more into keeping people I know and “reality” separate from other sites like PB, Twitter, etc. To me, Facebook is reality or at least it should be; real names, real people, so I’m not going to be sharing journals and stuff like that there anymore.

So what’s with the strange loud motor? In the mornings lately, I’ve been hearing what sounds like large utility trucks entering the park. Yesterday I heard the steady drone of what sounded like something running that wasn’t too close but that was probably pretty loud. I have no idea what it could’ve been but I’m dreading the next project I can’t drown out with sound machines. I still say they’re going to pave the roads if they don’t tear them up again for some shit that got fucked up somehow. Or to replace something with newer stuff.

I want the new MacBook Air. Maybe someday. It would help if the US would get with the times and not cost its people so much in medical expenses. The water tank’s pressure valve is leaking now, too. Starting to think that going to Hawaii one more time and getting a decent bed that won’t sag in a few months is just a dream.

Yesterday was a wonderfully calm day with sufficient energy. Why can’t it always be like that or at least 75% of the time? Now I don’t know what the hell to think anymore. Tom thinks I was just anxious on Monday because it was the start of the week when he’s going to be out for five days in a row. But then why do I sometimes get anxious when we’re hanging out together on weekends? We know the medication was responsible for the problems I had when I first went on 75s and when she tried me on 88s. That’s a no-brainer. But maybe the random anxiety really is due to my lady hormones still fluctuating unless I’ve got something else going on with me I don’t know about which seems unlikely. Too soon to say whether or not the Liothyronine or magnesium supplements are helping. Skin is still pretty dry so that may not be a good sign but then I am older and I do live in a climate that’s damn near close to being the desert.

I seriously wonder when it’s going to rain again. We’ve only had a few days of rain in about half a year. It could make up for lost time in a month or so, though. I love the rain and how it keeps things quieter but I don’t want the roof to get any worse before we leave.

Nothing from Norma so I’m guessing she either didn’t get a chance to talk to Tammy or she learned that Tammy’s just being her usual hypochondriac self. Maybe she feels uncomfortable saying anything negative about Tammy so she’s chosen to say nothing at all. Well, I’m not going to say anything more. I’ve got to live my own life and worry about my own problems.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2018 Yesterday was Kate Jackson’s 70th birthday. Jaclyn Smith is a few years older.

Tom said several people are quitting at work and going to work at some other warehouse but doesn’t know what the pay is. The thing is that they were already making a lot less than he makes. It would really be nice if he could get a job working graves because it would make doing things in the daytime easier, like going to appointments, but I can’t believe any other place would start him off at $19 an hour. But if it was third shift then being an American company wouldn’t matter. It would suck if he couldn’t get as many days off but at least he wouldn’t have to take days off for appointments.

The water was off yesterday although I went to bed right before they turned it off. The fucking water is going off again on Thursday. Damn, am I sick of this place! I hate to think of being here another 5-6 years. I can just imagine all the projects I’ll be in for. Never lived anywhere before where I dreaded the possibility of them working in the road or cutting trees down with their thunderously loud saws and wood chippers. I also can’t believe all the planes here. There have definitely been way more commercial planes. Early yesterday morning it was one after another and I’ve heard several since I’ve been up. There’s no getting peace here even at night.

I wish noise was the worst of my problems but unfortunately I was very anxious yesterday. It was almost to the point where I dreaded the idea of him leaving for work. Stopping the Amberen again after reading that they recommend stopping after 90 days and then if you have symptoms doing another 90 days. It’s a mega longshot but there is a very very slim chance that it could be contributing to my anxiety even though I wouldn’t think a blend of vitamins and minerals would do that. I suppose anything is possible even though I doubt it has anything to do with it. So far today I’m calm but it’s a little early in my day. That’s usually a midday thing so I’m still about 3 hours away from any potential trouble. Going to be taking my magnesium, vitamin D and multivitamin in a few minutes. If I get unusually anxious I may stop the magnesium. A few people did say it actually wound them up. Can’t say if the Lio had anything to do with it or not. Looking at my notes, it seems I’ve had 5 anxious days out of the last 15. As I may have said before, I’m beginning to think that if I was meant to fix this then I wouldn’t have had it for so long to begin with.

The glasses came today and I’m still not sure if progressives are right for me. I hate how you have to look through a specific spot in the lens in order to see certain things. Sometimes I wonder if I should go back to traditional bifocals even though I would lose mid-range that way. They’re awfully loose too, so they’ll have to be tightened. The round raspberry frames look better on me than the rectangular purple frames but the purples are only for the computer anyway.

Norma replied saying she hopes Tammy and I work things out, sisterhood is important, her sister left her and her brother, etc. She said she’ll keep my message between us and hasn’t spoken with Tammy recently but will call tomorrow (today) to see what she can find out.

I would still think that if she was really dying, Norma and I would’ve been notified. Plus, Tammy’s been on Facebook pretty much daily. If you were dying, would you really be on Facebook every day?

I think I’m still a bit too nice, too caring, and too forgiving. Meaning that I know I should simply ignore Tammy regardless of biology if Norma confirms she’s not dying after she calls her today. Saying you want to die, are thinking about dying, feel like you’re dying, or think you might die at a specific time is one thing. Saying you “won’t be around long” is another. That’s low. That’s just really low. That’d be great for her and the girls if she wasn’t checking out anytime soon but I’m definitely done with her, without guilt or shame, if I learn she lied about dying.

Plus there’s all the other drama I could do without. I’ve had it with the she said/he said game, and I’m not going to defend or explain myself to anyone either.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2018 I guess I better get caught up here before I get too behind.

Tom worked from home yesterday on and off for about 11 hours and made a couple of hundred extra bucks which never hurts. I may have more appointments but he’s been costing us more medical-wise, as I love to bust him about.

We both took our first magnesium supplement yesterday. He noticed no effects but it may have made me a little drowsy. I’m tired today as well but only because I was up a long time and only slept 6 hours.

Went to Walgreens yesterday morning where I got some M&M’s and pork rinds which I pigged out on and ended up having heartburn and nausea at the end of my day. If I get it again today I’m going to wonder if it’s the magnesium. Took it for the second time a couple of hours ago. Still way too soon to say whether or not it’s going to help me with anxiety. I’m taking every preventive measure I can think of. I’ve tapped, I’ve taken my multivitamin, my vitamin D, and my Amberen. I’ll probably take that last one every other day instead of every day. I still don’t think it made me anxious but I have to try to find out what’s what and I can’t do that if I do too much at once.

Took my 5th dose of Liothyronine and I’m nervous about that approaching one-week marker. There are actually a few milestones I have to hope I get through. First one is a week.

At Walgreens, I also got some soda and colorful gems that you stick on whatever. I used the purple ones to stick on the little green spot of light on my laptop power cord. It’s amazing how such a teeny tiny spot can give off so much light and be so damn bright. It’s literally like having a night light in here. My alarm clock is much worse, though.

Saturday I decided to take a chance and sleep without the earbuds since my appointments aren’t right around the corner. Sure enough, traffic woke me up.

We ordered a narrow shower curtain that’s 36x72 for the master bathroom shower because I would still like to have that shower as an option if I want to shower when he’s asleep like right now. We’re going to remove the leaky glass door but not get rid of it. We’ll put it back on when we leave. That is, assuming I really survive to get out of here someday! The shower curtain has a beach scene on it with ocean, sand, and sky.

I also ordered another bronze figurine, this one doing a yoga pose. They call it a pigeon pose. This one is a little different than my other bronze ladies. The others are completely nude and in sensual or casual poses. This one has a painted body suit.

Last night the planes were amazingly quiet but I’m sure that around 6am the commercials will be zooming by one after another. I never did get a reply from them either. I sent a message to the Sacramento Airport.

Last night I had a dream Tammy and I were working on our computers side by side. We were both on Facebook. Only our “computers” were these large touch screens on the wall. I saw Tammy tap a button to add me as a friend. I accepted and wrote, “Hello, bitch,” with a smile emoji.”

It was after this that I finally decided to do something I’ve been debating on… Go to Norma and beg her to keep my message between us. If she betrays me I will simply delete her. No words, no confrontation, no nothing. I’ll just delete her. I filled her in on the situation and hopefully she can give me some concrete information as to what’s really going on with Tammy.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2018 “Implying that you’re dying simply because you’re pissed is low. Like really low.”

That’s what I posted publicly on Facebook wondering if the drama queen might see it and come to her own defense, giving me an idea of whether or not there’s any truth to her implications. But there’s no evidence she’s seen it or been to my blog.

I was also hoping that if she didn’t, maybe Norma would ask whom I was talking about and I could get some information from her. I thought about sending her a private message and begging her to keep our chat between us but I know she won’t. She’s always favored Tammy over me and while that in itself is fine, I know she can’t be trusted. She proved that 30 years ago in Springfield when she automatically assumed I was behind the prank phone calls she was getting and went to Ruth about it. I swear I have no recollection of ever calling her but it was a small city, so if I ever did call her, I dialed randomly and got her by accident. This happened to Andy a couple of times with a couple of people. Norma did apologize for the false accusation and admitted she should have gone to me but I still wouldn’t trust her with a secret.

Tom needs to invent a browser toolbar with drop-down menus with links to pages on the same site. I want to bookmark all my blogs on Blogger but that would take up a lot of the bookmark toolbar space.

Went down to the lake to give the ducks the old bread and felt warm, a bit weak in the legs, and my heart raced a bit as well. My vitals were fairly decent, though, after I got back and relaxed a bit. Might have happened even without the Lio since it’s happened before and is common in women my age.

Now I’m still a bit warm, slightly light-headed, and tired. The biggest thing is not getting anxious. I’ll make my special Sleepytime brew at around midnight.

They’re going to be turning off the fucking water for 6 hours on Monday. I’ll be asleep through most of it. I had a feeling about this too, before Tom told me he got a message about it. He said a few days ago he saw a major pipe burst by the gate. They capped it off temporarily.

We’re going to be dropping our eye insurance plan at the end of the year because of the way they restrict when we can get exams. Rather than pay them to tell us when to go, we’ll just pay for it ourselves and go when we want to.

Last night I had a dream I spotted Linda Ronstadt in some restaurant. I was eating alone and she was three or four tables away, also eating alone. I thought of going up to her but I didn’t want to bother her. Seeing that she was almost finished and would leave before I did, I decided I would say hello on her way out. Yet when she got up and walked past me, I had a big mouthful of food and couldn’t chew and swallow it fast enough to say anything. So off she went without a word from me.

Then I had this dream that I was in this strange jail. There was a lake that was pretty wavy for a lake in which we swam in. We also had these really weird gadgets that I guess were phones. I don’t know why I was there or for how long but it was weird. Stacey might have been in the dream as well.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2018 I was so exhausted yesterday that I fell asleep early and got up a little early. Felt a bit wound up toward the end of my day yesterday as well. My schedule’s definitely been rolling slower and I think it’s mostly due to how exhausted I’ve been getting. So many days I’m too tired to stay up my usual 16 to 18 hours. I see both Dr. A and Dr. O on the 17th of December and right now my schedule is ideal for my morning appointment with Dr. A but if it backs up too much more it will make Dr. O really hard.

I’m back to tapping more and having more Sleepytime tea for whatever good it may do me, and we even ordered Triple Calm Magnesium capsules from Amazon that a friend on Prosebox recommended. There are some scary reviews but most look promising. I don’t know if it will help with my particular kind of anxiety because I don’t even know exactly what it is. Is it generalized anxiety or does it fit into some other category? Tom still thinks a lot of it could be on my hormones and not the meds, which I’ve survived my second dose of. Tom wants to try them for leg cramps that sometimes wake him up.

77% of the reviews are 5-star while 4% are 1-star. Some said it made their palpitations worse and kept them up at night. The more desperate I get, though, the more I’m willing to risk potential side effects.

So far, I have more energy today and I’m still fairly calm but like I said yesterday, anxiety tends to be a mid-day thing so that’s when I’ll have my Sleepytime tea as a preemptive measure.

Worked out on the Bowflex for 10 minutes and the treadmill for a half-hour. If my energy levels and hips will let me, I’ll add a half hour a day until I’m walking two hours a day. That way I burn a little over 400 calories.

Even though the Amberen is an unlikely culprit because this particular kind of anxiety didn’t start until about 5 months after I started it, I’m going to back off of it for a while and see how I do. I’ve had a little more in the way of hot flashes lately but not too much lightheadedness. That was the biggest thing it seemed to help the most with.

The only good news is that Tom gets to work Saturday which gives us a couple of hundred extra dollars but he gets to do it from home. He’ll be working from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. instead of his usual hours.

Last night’s dream may have been a glimpse into another dimension since I lived at home with an older sister and younger brother. We lived with our single mom who looked a lot like Vera Farmiga, Mrs. Bates on Bates Motel. We were trying to talk her into going on some game show and making big bucks because she was really smart and was able to answer all the questions they asked their contestants.

The layout of the house was pretty clear. Some of it, anyway. I don’t know how old I was but to one side of my room was a bathroom in which my mom’s room was off the other side. To the other side of me was my sister’s room and my brother was across the hall.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2018 Well, I’ve got shitty news and I’ve got good news. The shitty news is that I was both anxious and depressed during the last half of my day yesterday. First half started off a little tired and a little light-headed but that improved.

The good news is that I’ve survived my first dose of Liothyronine. But one dose is far from enough to tell me anything either way. All I can say is that it’s very unlikely I’ll ever have an allergic reaction to the stuff. The next milestone will be getting through a week, then six weeks, then over two months. If I can get over two months without incident, that would be great. It would be beyond great, however, if it could help stop the anxiety.

Yesterday’s surprising and disappointing bout of anxiety has me more confused than ever as to what could be the cause. The thought of never being able to figure it out and never being able to do anything about it is, to me, a very real and scary possibility. I’m trying not to go there in my mind but it both does and doesn’t make sense for it to be the Levothyroxine. My T4 isn’t elevated right now so it can’t be that. Could my lady hormones still be out of whack despite being virtually menopausal? Could some of it simply be my way of reacting to stress these days?

I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think anymore. All I know is that I find myself entertaining some very dark thoughts way too often at times and if the anxiety doesn’t stop soon, who knows how many more years I can take of this shit before I seriously consider acting on them? I don’t want it to come to that but I don’t want to live to suffer so much of the time either.

No anxiety yet today but for some strange reason, it tends to get me in the middle of my day. I’m just tired today because I’ve been sleeping shitty for a few days now. Until I can get good sleep, I’m not going to have much energy. I have a feeling that even if I was never anxious again, I would still be fatigued a lot of the time. I’ll still take that over anxiety, the anxiety is the absolute worst.

I’ve been itchy a lot lately and I’m having serious doubts about ever finding my LS in remission. Even if I did, though, the past always comes back to haunt me. Sooner or later it will return.

On his next birthday, we’ll be able to start checking every month to see how much money he could get if he retired at that moment. I’m sure the only thing we could afford would be those $300 studios back up in Oregon.

Crazy Lisa was in my dreams last night. I was writing her letters by hand. We were talking one day and she told me she was selling them online. Apparently, selling postal letters had become a big thing since they had become less common.

My dream self loved this idea and was all excited to start selling letters too, even though I wasn’t getting any, LOL. So she was about to sign me up on a site I could sell them through, which needed my credit card info. I decided to wait and see which credit card of ours Tom thought would be the best one to use so I asked her to just give me a site tour until he got home.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2018 Worked a little on the dollhouse but might need his help with the wiring. I’m sorry I got this kit. It’s way too much work and it’s actually kind of boring. Every time I think I’m almost done, there’s more to do.

Next time we replace half of the fish’s water I’m going to remove the wasted castle and plants. He’s shown no interest in any of it and it would make it easier for me to suck shit off the bottom.

We’re also going to keep the rats on the bottom of their cage and close the upstairs because of how hard it’s gotten for them to walk.

I’m not feeling as bad as expected today but I am a little tired. I was a little light-headed earlier as well but that’s cleared up and I’m perking up a bit. I didn’t sleep all that great because I kept waking up.

I wish to hell I was oblivious to climate or liked cold weather and snow. Canada would be a great place to retire as long as the cost of living was reasonable. They have mobile home parks for older people too, and Universal Health Care. It’s a liberal country that takes care of its own. What’s not to like about it?

A cold climate would definitely make for a quieter place to live as I wouldn’t have to hear the loud obnoxious sounds of landscaping every single fucking day nor would there be as many motorcycles. They may keep making vehicles louder despite the technology we have these days but it would be a lot quieter overall. I just can’t see myself suffering through such cold and snow all over again, though. I really want to be in a tropical climate even if it means more motorcycles, more noise in general, the risk of hurricanes, and also losing a good chunk of our money to medical expenses. If we go somewhere where it’s significantly cheaper to live, like Florida, maybe that will help balance out the medical costs that will increase as we continue to age. I don’t know, though. We have to pay a grand for his MRI and now a grand for his steroid shot. We’re not going to get a place 2k cheaper per month because not even this place is that much.

When the time comes, he is going to switch to a more expensive insurance plan that will take a little more money out of his paychecks but that covers more.

Random thought of the day: I was remembering when I was shown a private girls’ school close to home when I was 16 before my mother gave me up to the state. Although there may have been much more freedom there than Valleyhead ever had and I would later come to wish I had chosen the damn place since I would end up with no choice in the end, what kid wants to voluntarily leave home to live with strangers no matter how unhappy their home life may be? Huh? Tell me. What kid? Did they really think I was going to come out that day and say, “Oh wow, this is cool! I like it! I want to live here so bad even though I don’t know a damn person in this place. I want to leave my home and all that’s familiar to me even if my mother’s an abusive bitch who doesn’t do my mood and self-esteem the least bit of good. I’ll be happier in a house full of strangers where I don’t have much of my belongings and nothing is familiar to me. So exciting!”

Well, guess what, Dureen? The daughter you were so sure was crazy was really normal after all.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2018 Yesterday I was exhausted all day and a bit depressed as well because of it. Today I had enough energy to go for a walk and I feel pretty good overall. I’m just enjoying it while I can because I know it won’t last.

Last night my mind raced with all kinds of questions and possibilities. I thought of all the stories pertaining to near-death experiences that I’ve heard over the years describing tales of visiting both good places and bad. Well, I still don’t know if I believe in any kind of an afterlife, but if there is such a thing as Heaven and Hell, I wonder if there are different versions of these places because different people have told different stories of both places. That is unless they’re just that…stories. Or maybe they’re hallucinations or dreams that they truly believe are real.

When you consider those who believe you automatically go to hell if you don’t accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior, this makes me wonder about some things. If this is true, how could I get myself to accept something I don’t even know if I believe in? This is just a story people tell and not anything I can verify as true or not. I can’t make myself believe what I don’t know. And what about babies who die before they’re old enough to be told these stories and possibly turned into believers? Do they automatically go to hell?

Lately, I find myself questioning what my behavior may achieve in the end if there is any such afterlife where our actions are judged. I worry I may “pay” for it in the end if there is an afterlife and I continue to ignore my family. But at the same time, I know I should follow my heart and my head whenever I feel it’s best to do so and just be myself for there are no guarantees I’m going to be judged for anything even if there is an afterlife.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2018 Woke up with this horrible pain in the center of my back but it’s better now. I’d say it’s time I stop the HIIT routines. I’m too old and heavy for those. I’d rather just do basic cardio, work my core, and play around on the Bowflex every now and then. I just wish I had the energy to do it more regularly!

I also woke up very tired. I was up a long time last night unable to sleep because I had been caught up on sleep the day before. I was up for about 19 hours and slept for about 9. I’ve been very tired ever since. I wonder if I overdid the tacrolimus, if I had a huge sugar crash from the cheesecake I ate, or if it’s something else. I’m just sick of feeling so blah so often. Even if I had a good story idea (though I don’t), I’m still too tired for too many days to do things like NaNoWriMo next month, especially with a hard word count of 50k.

We ordered the glasses today so they’ll be here within two weeks.

We used the new fish tank vacuum hose to siphon out half of the betta’s water and replaced it with filtered water. I aimed the temperature checker at the stream of water coming out of the faucet to make sure it was within the ballpark of what it’s supposed to be before I filtered it and Tom added conditioning drops.

I’m still stressed out over the upcoming Liothyronine experiment and going back and forth in my mind between reaching out to Tammy and the girls and not. I still don’t know what to make of her cryptic message. I’m just not sure what the right thing to do would be. I don’t want to come off like I don’t care at all but if they don’t care about me, then why bother? If they’d rather not hear from me then I should respect their wishes, but is that what they really want? I just don’t know what they would prefer. Hell, I don’t even know what I would prefer. We may have our differences and Tammy has certainly been both directly and indirectly responsible for causing me a lot of grief in life but I don’t want her to suffer or die. I realize, though, that if she is really dying and not just hyping things up because she’s pissed or wants attention she can’t otherwise ask for, for some reason, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Tammy has never been dumb but she isn’t bright either and I wonder if something’s been wrong with her brain these last few years. She’s always had a habit of seeming forgetful or not able to grasp quite what I’m saying almost in the way Andy has, though not nearly as bad. Yet these last few years I’ve noticed it more. It’s like no matter how many times I explained certain things to her like what I really meant when I said I didn’t want any drama, she still doesn’t get it. Is she just not understanding? Or is she just determined to make a situation what she wants it to be? I suppose both age and stress along with the health issues themselves could mess with her mind and the way her brain functions.

I realize this may be selfish of me but if the end is near, I feel like I’m less obligated to attend her funeral and have to deal with her kids. I would be ready with some excuse if it came to that, and truthfully, we really do need to watch our money since we have to pay so much in medical expenses as we age and continue to acquire more health issues. I feel I have enough of my own health issues right now to be taking off on my own, assuming Tom would be unable to accompany me. So yeah, I’m torn between being compassionate and selfish.

For once I got to have weird and funny dreams.

In one dream I was sleeping in a king-size bed between Palma and her husband of all people and they had a newborn baby in a nearby crib. We were all settling in for the night and I dreaded being woken up because I knew the damn kid wasn’t going to remain quiet all night.

Then I got up since I wasn’t ready to sleep anyway and was moving about the house which seemed to be in the form of a circle. Picture a circular hallway. Later, I was commanding Alexa to turn off certain lights before returning to bed. As I climbed over Palma and slipped in under the covers between the two, Palma was still awake if only barely and asked what I was doing. I said something about turning the lights off.

In the next dream, I was going down a slide in a park somewhere over and over again. A guy in his twenties who was noticeably taller than me but skin and bones was calling out lewd and perverted comments to me. Not only was I confused at why he would say such things to someone decades older and on the heavy side, but I was also getting pissed. So after I hit the ground I walked over to him and asked, “How much do I weigh?”

He looked at me with confusion. Just like I look younger than my age, I look lighter than I am. So again I asked him how much I weighed and he shrugged and said, “I don’t know, 120 maybe?”

I grabbed his wrist painfully and said through bared teeth, “152 pounds of pure steel, fat and fury. I suggest you think twice before calling out whatever to whoever.” Then I turned and walked off leaving him stoned behind me.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2018 What the hell did I just read???

I accidentally messaged Tammy on Facebook about my medication changes and all that, then said I was sorry for hitting her name by mistake. She said that’s okay, she’s in crisis too.

I asked what she was talking about and she said, “We haven’t spoken because you stated that you didn’t want any drama. No problem. I won’t be around for long.”

She misunderstood what I meant when I said I didn’t want any drama. I was upset with her kids calling me out on my own posts. That’s what I meant about the drama.

“Don’t reach out to my daughters either. I have one dealing with breast cancer and one with a bleeding ulcer and a hole in her stomach. This family loves and supports each other unconditionally. We still have your messages about family drama and being deleted by you.”

Wrong again, sis. I deleted you, but your selfish, narcissistic kids deleted me. Their choice. I’m just respecting their wishes.

As far as I knew, though, we’d moved on past this shit. I wished Sarah a happy birthday in our family group message and both she and Tammy thanked me for saying hello to everyone. I don’t know why she’s bringing this up now. Some of what she said didn’t make sense and she would only hint at some things.

I told her to please not say she won’t be around much longer and that we know she will be because she’s tough. They once told her she would die from cervical cancer but she didn’t.

“Guess again, Jodi,” she said.

Guess what???

Okay, so she’s well aware of the dream premonitions I’ve had throughout the years and my concerns for when she’s 62. Well, that’s less than a year from now and she’s hinting at something bad. Something very bad. But because she’s not exactly spelling anything out specifically, I’m going to assume she’s just having a rough time and try not to worry. Even I feel like I’m not going to be around much longer at times. Hell, I wonder if I’ll survive the upcoming meds experiment! bites nails fearfully Seriously, I hope this is just her usual exaggerations. She’s been a hypochondriac all her life. Until and if she ever says otherwise in a way I can be sure isn’t some kind of twisted joke out of spite or for attention, I’m not going to read much into it. Even Tom said not to bother overthinking that one. I think if she were literally dying and was given a terminal prognosis, I would’ve been notified. I’ll not contact her again unless I do hear more from her.

As for her kids…last time I’ll say this: I’m sorry if anything I ever said or did hurt them which was never my intention, I’ve already apologized, and I still have a right to post what I want without being called out on it just like they do.

Meanwhile, will Lisa ever apologize for wrongly calling me a liar and going ballistic on me over a simple misunderstanding she had with someone who was bordering on dementia before they died when she could’ve politely and kindly asked me about it in a civilized manner? Apparently not and apparently this family does not love and support each other unconditionally, but that’s okay. I’m done bickering over petty shit that happened years ago, so yeah, I don’t want any drama. I have enough going on in my own life right now that needs to be dealt with. Besides, it’s okay to hurt me as far as they’re concerned. My feelings don’t matter.

If any of Tammy’s kids have what I’m told they have, I’m sorry. Really, I am. But while these things may suck to have to deal with and be very scary, they can be taken care of. 50 years ago, maybe not.

There’s more I could say to Tammy and her kids right now but I won’t for reasons I just stated. Also, if this is one of those rare times that she’s not playing things up, I don’t want her to go out of this world with us fighting.

For a while, I’ve had a feeling about that 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s thing. Larry died in his 50s. Parents died in their 80s. Been having feelings about Tammy dying in her 60s and me in my 70s. If I’m right, then technically I shouldn’t be too worried about my own health, but I was wrong about Tom’s mom dying at 87 or whatever the fuck it was. She’s 95 now. So yeah, I do worry at times about not living long enough to get out of this state someday be it because I throw in the towel because we can’t figure out how to stop my anxiety or because I’m surprised by something sneaking up on me be it a heart attack, stroke, cancer or whatever.

Later…

Three out of three appointments are now out of the way and I can now enjoy being appointment-free for 2 months… As long as there are no issues with the Liothyronine, of course. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of thinking I have longer than I actually do before the next appointment.

Felt great today and we both had our eye exams. Same doctor for the last 4 years or so. She has the same assistant too.

His vision hasn’t changed much but I’m more farsighted this year. I figured as much. I’ve noticed that I’ve been having trouble when using my phone and laptop.

According to the test I took on a site that sells glasses, I don’t have a round face like I thought I did but a pear-shaped face instead. My pupil distance is 53, which is on the small side. I’ve got a dark pink round frame picked out for my progressive/transition lenses and a purple rectangular pair for my mid-range lenses that I’ll use for my laptop. Tomorrow we’ll add in the prescription numbers and order. The pink pair is 14 g and the purple pair is 17 g.

She said my OH is stable and it doesn’t look like I’ll ever have to worry about getting glaucoma. His eyes were dilated but I opted out of that this year. Next year she’s going to take pictures of the inside of my eyes so she can make sure the optic nerve is still healthy.

We stopped at McDonald’s on the way out where I got chicken strips and he got burgers.

No bounding pulse today. It was pretty consistent yesterday and I’m still not sure why. Tom thinks it’s just stress. Well, then why didn’t I have this problem when I’d be stressing in the past? Different time, different situation, he said. I guess he has a point there.

Walmart now delivers in our town so we’re expecting a delivery in the morning. Like other stores, they don’t always have everything but they are cheaper and I do like their site better even if it’s not perfect. They also have a better selection than Raley’s and Safeway.

We were kind of pissed to get a bill for a grand for the steroid injection he had in his ear. I find it awfully hard to believe it cost that much. Actually more when you consider the part that the insurance paid.

As for Tammy… I still don’t know what to think. Despite having definite health issues, she is a hypochondriac and I would think I would have been told if she was really dying. I think she knew damn well what I met when I said I didn’t want any drama, too. This may sound funny, but if she’s hyping things up and is still alive in a year I’m going to be pissed. Implying that you’re dying when you’re not just because you’re pissed or you want attention is low. I mean really low.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2018 Managed to get through yesterday without feeling anxious and I’m doing okay today as well. Not great, but okay. Even when I’m not actually anxious I’m still stressed out and worried about the upcoming experiment and sometimes just worrying about being anxious can be bad enough. However, my bounding pulse is more noticeable today than anxiety. Definitely gotta ask my PCP about that in December. It’s getting old.

The experiment may start on Wednesday or Thursday instead of Friday because of a slight change in his schedule. He may work at home on Saturday night.

It really does seem like my whole problem has lied within my T4. This is what I’ve suspected all along too. It would explain why I go hyper while having hypo numbers, though my T4 was never actually hypo. I’ve always had a normal T4. It really does seem like my body feels best as long as my T4 remains at the very lower end of normal. I don’t understand why my pituitary gland keeps screaming for more but I’m hoping that the T3 (Liothyronine) will shut it the hell up since the louder it screams the more of a risk there is of enlarging my thyroid.

Charlotte R was in my dreams last night. Since people have shown up in my dreams twice that I remember right after they died, I checked the obits but she’s still alive. She would be very old now in her mid to late 80s.

In the dream, my mother was alive and I was with both of them and maybe some others in my childhood home. I don’t know if I was younger but my mother and Charlotte seemed like they were maybe in their 50s or 60s.

I came down the stairs dressed in pajamas and Charlotte looked at me funny and said something about suggesting a different style of pajamas or something like that.

“They’re only PJs,” I told her, with a dismissive wave of my hand.

Then she was looking from the living room into the kitchen but instead of a dining table being there, there were cabinets and shelves with some kind of boxes and containers.

“What the heck was that?” she asked and walked toward the boxes. Even though I didn’t see any mice, she decided one was trapped inside one of the boxes. Then she said, “Well, that mouse wants out,” and she started to adjust the boxes so it could get out.

“No, it doesn’t,” I assured her. “I know rats and mice may look similar but their behavior is different. I could tell you all the differences but that’d take too long and probably bore you. But I can assure you that mouse definitely does not want out.”

Speaking of mice, when I went into my main office in the living room and connected to the large monitor, I still experienced mouse jumping. Was hoping the upgrade would stop the jerking motion but I really can’t stand it in there anyway because of the loud daily landscaping that’s much easier to hear in there. My God, though, how many fucking times a week can you mow the same blades of grass and how many times can you blow the same fucking leaves?

Even trash day is a big production here. As horrible as Phoenix was, they drove up, dumped the trash, and then they were gone. But now it’s like they take forever, and as Tom said, they drive around aimlessly for no apparent reason.

We’re going to be ordering groceries from Prime Now to try it out sometime soon. It’s supposed to be same-day delivery.

Still waiting on the rat pillowcase from China. I guess it hasn’t cleared Customs yet. It was in San Francisco last I knew.

Wondering when I’m ever going to stop spotting. Really hope I get an even longer break before the next period!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2018 Reapplying the Return to Sender spell today and started praying to a God I don’t know exists or if it even gives a shit about me if it does. So far I’m oddly and wonderfully calm. I don’t know what to think at this point. I really don’t. I truly don’t understand why it’s so erratic. Why do I go hyper with hypo numbers? Again I wonder if there could be something else wrong with me that we don’t know about but that’s hard to believe with all the tests I’ve had done. Tom doesn’t think anything else is wrong either.

Someone recommended acupuncture, saying that her husband has OCD, PTSD and anxiety and it worked wonders for him after just 4 sessions. I doubt our insurance covers that but if I knew it would work, we would pay for it.

Aly said it didn’t do her dad any good for his back, but a Fitbit pal swears by it and goes monthly for help with anxiety and panic attacks.

The paramedics were at the stroke house again yesterday. I saw Virginia meet them. I guess it couldn’t have been too serious cuz they were here a while.

Because I stupidly removed the earbuds thinking I was getting up sooner than I did, traffic woke me up twice. Still slept better and feel more refreshed though not exactly bursting with energy, and the best thing is that I don’t remember a single dream from last night. Skin’s better too, so it was probably just a lotion thing. Regardless of Amy’s recommendations, Curél is still what my skin likes best.

Unfortunately, Aly’s current boyfriend, Cam, joined Ask and reached out to me with a question about whether or not I believe in witches. I answered politely and asked him a question in return but hesitated to get too involved. Knowing Aly’s fondness for nutjobs, I don’t want to become a potential target when the two of them break up in a few months. I can already tell he’s the type who would gladly in happily troll someone if he was pissed enough. He may not be crazy per se but he seems a little high on himself and controlling based on some of his answers and his bio which states he bends people to his will whether they like it or not. WeaknessSeeker is his username. I mean, come on. What does that alone tell you? Aly describes him as having a type-A personality.

Other than one leg still being sore, my bounding HR annoying me again, and the usual annoyances from landscaping, traffic and planes, not much else is going on at the moment.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2018 So much for thinking that only the nights bring out the depression in me because I’m pretty down right now. Yesterday I felt good but today I’ve got a lot of fatigue and my legs are sore as hell from the HIIT routine I did. I started to feel traces of anxiety and I even got a little teary-eyed because the upcoming Liothyronine experiment has me stressed out.

I’m just afraid of my worst fears being realized in the end where I’m stuck with this for life and we can never figure out what it is or how to fix it. That’s my worst fear right now. In some ways, this fear is greater than death itself, which has always been one of my greatest fears. I’m worried that because I floated up to where I was just bubbling underneath the surface of anxiety today it could mean I’m in for an anxious day tomorrow. Especially if the problem is the medication itself because now I’m taking it more often even if it’s a lower dose.

Sometimes I wonder if I should take the time to draft an “it’s a bust” message to Dr. O in hopes of jinxing things into working out in the end and not needing it, thus having it end up being a waste of time. But somehow I doubt that that will make a difference. If the problem is the medication itself, it’s not going away any time soon. If something up there is cursing me, it may never go away.

If this shit does go away I would need a good six months, preferably a year, before I could finally let out a long sigh of relief and declare victory over this demon. A few months isn’t enough when life has had a way of yanking the carpet out from under my feet when things run smoothly for a few weeks/months.

My hair and skin are dry, appetite is down, but that’s the least of my concerns right now. Keeping a daily log on Google Docs for my doc.

Last night’s dreams were long and disturbing. Well, one of them was.

In one dream I had lunch with Kathleen and the dentist was with us. Probably just a spam dream.

In another dream, I pulled out a clump of hair. Could be a sign that the Liothyronine is going to cause hair loss like the Levothyroxine initially did.

The kind of long, detailed dream like the last one I had is the kind that makes me wonder if it could have been a glimpse into another dimension. It was actually a series of continuing dreams. The first one started with us back in Arizona and living in a rural area. The house didn’t look anything like the house we had in Maricopa, though.

We were hanging outside when a woman drove up in a silver medium-size car and informed me that I was on unsupervised probation for the same shit I was supposedly vindicated for nearly 19 years ago. So we talked to this middle-aged lady with blonde shoulder-length hair. I guess I emailed something to the black bitch or was thinking about something I had emailed her a while back. I’m not sure which. But I guess I did something because, on another day in another dream, the same woman returned, also while we were outside. She informed me that they “found a partial email” I sent and therefore I would have to report.

I remained silent until she was getting back inside her car, turned to Tom and said, “There’s no fucking way they could have found anything.”

But I knew deep down I was guilty of something and wondered if I should keep that to myself or not. I also wondered what I should do if the police drove up if I failed to report, which I assumed would eventually happen, or if I should just go to the damn PO that I assumed would still be Scott.

Initially, I decided to remain stubborn, determined not to let history repeat itself. I was not going to be told what to do, where to do it, and when to do it.

Then one evening, just as the sun had almost completely set, I was home alone, nervous and paranoid as hell. I realized that it would be very hard to hide with all the windows we had and since we had no garage, we couldn’t hide Tom’s car when he was home. There was no way we could constantly hide in the dark at night without making a sound either.

Things aren’t what they were nearly 20 years ago, I thought to myself. You’re going to have to abandon your online life completely if you want to go underground.

Then I heard a vehicle approaching and saw headlights shining, though I couldn’t see who it was.

At this point, I woke up, fell back asleep and the dream continued yet again where Tom and I were out somewhere and I was expressing my concerns. He didn’t seem worried, though.

Next thing I know we’re at the probation office. I guess we decided to just deal with it after all. I sat in a waiting area and observed some woman and a guy behind the counter. I thought wow, if that’s Scott, he lost some weight and grew a little hair on his head. We figured the reason he always wore a cap in real life was that he was going bald.

Then we were finally led into a room and I realized the guy wasn’t Scott because he was too tall and his voice was different.

We all took seats, them on what looked like a twin bed, me on a chair, and briefly joked about something. Suddenly, I had a rat on my lap but no one seemed to notice or mind. I hoped it wouldn’t get too fidgety or take a dump during the meeting.

Then the guy went on to read some journal excerpts I’d written about my supposed polycythemia vera that I sent the black bitch and thought to myself, so the first email address I guessed from memory really did go through and really was the correct one.

I don’t know if I admitted sending the email or denied it because the dream ended at that point and didn’t continue on in another dream.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2018 It was with mixed emotions that I returned to my endocrinologist yesterday. She looked the best I’ve ever seen her and I like her hair longer (bet she’ll cut it by our next visit) even though she may have put on a few pounds, and while she may be one of the smartest doctors I’ve ever known, I would have preferred never to have to see her again on account of the on-and-off anxiety I’ve suffered for over 4 years now. Just when I think it’s gone for good (along with my period) back it comes with a vengeance!

I ended up leaving her office not so much feeling relieved but definitely feeling both nervous and hopeful. I don’t know how confident she is that the new regimen will help and I didn’t think to ask. All she said was that she hoped it would help since she’s been surprised by others who have responded better to Liothyronine. She said that due to the anxiety I’ve had she had been hesitant to try me on it. She wouldn’t want to try me on Armour because it’s too much, she said. I’ve heard that because it’s pig thyroid it’s not as consistent as the synthetic version.

I am to drop to 50 micrograms for one week and then add 5 micrograms of the Liothyronine which should put me where I was on 75s. Yes, I’m nervous about it, but as I told her, I’ve gotten pretty desperate and I need to try whatever I can possibly try. I guess that if worse comes to worst I’ll have to take just 50 micrograms of Levothyroxine only and leave it at that. I would be so devastated if I started having problems on that but as far as I remember, I didn’t have problems the last time I was on 50s. If I could just go more than 6 months without anxiety, then I could begin to think maybe we’ve figured out and solved the problem.

Levo is T4, Lio is T3. Funny that yet again that very unlucky number 4 is connected to the Levo, a drug that’s made me feel so horrible. I’m still nervous as hell, though, cuz they both list similar side effects. It’s scary because the anxiety and racing/booming heart it can cause is so awful and terrifying. It’s not like I might get a headache or gassy or something like that.

Oh, fuck! I just read that a single dose of Lio can reach its max effect in just 24 hours since it’s so powerful and can even cause cardiac arrest. Great. Just great.

Okay, so Tom and I did more research. It should only be risky if you’re in a coma or something and receiving it intravenously. It also seems to be a short-acting drug which is a bit comforting to know so it wouldn’t take weeks or even months to recover like when she tried me on 88s.

He suspects Doc O thinks the low thyroid is causing my anxiety and that Levo isn’t treating it properly. Not sure if I agree, though. I mean the 88s definitely caused anxiety and panic attacks. Definitely. But could the “stabbers” be the low thyroid? But then why didn’t I have the same problem before I was diagnosed?

As I also told her, I’m doing better overall than I was in 2014-2015, but why this comes and goes when my numbers have never shown me to be hyper, we have no idea. I didn’t seem to have anything wrong with my pituitary or adrenal glands when she checked them way back when, so I’m still thinking that the main culprit is probably what I’ve always suspected, something about the medication itself. It’s too extreme for perimenopause and I can’t believe I would just up and become this way for no reason and so late in life. So if it’s not the meds, then maybe it is something else related to the thyroid.

Anyway, I went to the lab right after I saw her which was on the main floor of the building. Despite the horrible traffic to and from the place at least it has a lab in the building.

When I first entered the Endocrinology Department, it was actually kind of dead. In the past, it was usually crowded. I was checked in by a beautiful young woman with perfect teeth who was so friendly for such a good-looking woman. Usually, women that pretty are snobs.

I was taken in by a nurse who seemed kind of bored, mechanically going through the motions of her job.

BP and HR were slightly high.

The doctor opened the door slowly when she came in, so she knew Tom was there. Did she spot us from an office on the way in or did the nurse tell her I wasn’t alone?

I told her of the symptoms I’ve been having, including the bounding pulse but she didn’t seem worried. She listened to my heart, felt my thyroid, and checked my hands for tremors. My lungs were tight enough afterward that I needed a hit off my inhaler but that was probably due to stress.

What was strange was the doctor’s overall demeanor. I can’t really put a finger on it and describe exactly how she was acting. It wasn’t anything she said although she did seem to talk less and listen more this time around. I swear in her message to me she said she wanted to see me to go over “all the issues” with Liothyronine. Yet the only thing she really said about the stuff was that it can cause the same problems Levothyroxine can cause when it’s too much.

The way she moved and the expression on her face makes me think of anything from amusement to being uncomfortable with me to having a thing for me. Could it be that she was thinking of Peter and perhaps a bit embarrassed? I don’t know what to think or make of the airs she gave off but if I didn’t know any better I would wonder if she was into me in some way or at least liked what she saw yesterday. I can’t believe the last one is the case, though. The last time I saw her I sensed both discomfort and impatience coming from her. She was very businesslike and didn’t even crack a smile that I recall. Again, it’s very hard to subscribe but she was totally different this time. As good as I am with words, I can’t quite put my finger on this one or find the correct words to describe it. It’s times like that that I wish Aly could’ve been a fly on the wall just long enough to observe the scene and give me her opinion. She’s extremely intuitive and smart. I’d like to think I am as well at times but I’m stumped on this one. It’s not important as long as she helps me. I’m just naturally curious. I also have a gut feeling saying she reads my blog. Maybe not regularly but enough to get a general sense of what’s up with me.

She was complaining about the new computer system they just got. Yeah, change sucks. It’s frustrating as there are always problems and new things to learn. They changed the portal, too. Not sure if it’s better or not.

I’m to return to the lab and see her in a couple of months. In fact, I see her the same day I see Dr. A. It’d be great to get them both over with on the same day.

In case I didn’t already say so, I absolutely love my new White Water Fairy. She really does look like she’s kneeling in water! You can also see the finely detailed painted purple flowers on part of her dress better in person than online. Love her long auburn hair too.

We went to the Goodwill before my appointment yesterday but didn’t find anything interesting there. We also picked up “Butterboy,” as I’m calling our butterfly betta, a pastel-colored castle hideaway but he doesn’t seem interested in it. So $14 wasted unless you want to consider it a cute decoration.

With yet ANOTHER project (by Bob & Virginia) I worry about being woken up too soon this week. As is usually the case, this obviously isn’t just a day or two kinda job. I can hear vehicle doors slamming which sound like doors in apartments, and some pounding. No saying for sure that the sound machines will override it.

Furthermore, on top of the usual landscaping and traffic, that fucking car came and went 2-3 times today. Enough that it may as well just live here. God, I hope that doesn’t become a regular thing again! Love how I haven’t heard that obnoxious mutt, though.

Amazed at how fat my outdoor potted cactus has gotten!

Oh, here are my lab results. Results are as shitty as expected. T3 & T4 are normal and I’m just on the edge of menopausal. However, my TSH is 27! I showed her all the skips I charted on Google Docs on my phone so she wasn’t surprised.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2018 We got a beautiful blue male butterfly betta at Petco yesterday. He seems much healthier and much more alert and curious than Flaky did. He’s a very nimble swimmer and this time around we went with no gravel at all and wish we’d done that from the get-go. They definitely seem to like this better because the bottom is smooth for them to rest on and there’s no worrying about their delicate fins being dragged along the rough gravel or torn. He does have his leaf hammock and a few artificial plants, though. We may eventually add a hideaway as long as he lives. After losing the other one in just a week, we want to make sure this one fares well. As it was, one of the many betta fish at the store was dead.

Flaky was beautiful but this one’s even more beautiful and twice as expensive. Like with Flaky he has a dark blue-black head with a royal blue body and the tips of his fins, unlike Flaky’s, are white. No hints of green or red hues like Flaky had, though. He’s more of a vivid electric blue. Within a day he was swimming up for the flakes of food I would drop in for him. He’s not nearly as shy as Flaky started off to be. He’s got his bubble game on, so I’d say he’s definitely happy.

Backing up to last Thursday and Friday. I felt absolutely horrible those days. I was wound up, my heart raced, I felt weak and lightheaded, and I would get winded rather easily despite being in decent shape. I still sometimes get that strange humming sensation in my head too.

I went out walking both days to make sure I got some sun exposure but still felt awful.

Took my nail polish off and let my nails clear up and they have cleared up nicely. They just have the ridges they’ve always had. Putting on the last of my designer falsies tomorrow but then no more. They’re just too much of a pain in the ass as cool as they look. So, dark metallic green with silver accents then it’s back to regular polish.

I’ve been taking my medication every other day and definitely stressed out about tomorrow’s appointment with Dr. O. I worry that there are no options for me but that’s what I thought with my LS even though, strangely enough, I’ve been waking up itchy the last few days. I hope using the Tacrolimus once a day is enough! Even more so, I hope I do go into remission.

Friday I was horribly tired but part of that may have been cuz I was hung-over from taking a Zyrtec the night before.

I’m just tired of feeling like shit half the time or more! I struggle way too much of the time both physically and emotionally and it’s just not right. Never knowing what you’re in for each day is no way to live. As I’ve always said, this is absolutely not normal for me. I’m desperate enough to try any alternative but I’m also scared at the same time as I still do have a medication phobia. Worst case scenario, I stick to what I’m on and just lower my dose. At first I was thinking that I couldn’t turn these 75s into 50s since the pill cutter cuts pills in half, but then I realized that after I cut them in half I could take a cut half and cut that in half as well, and then dump the other half of that half, duh. That will amount to about 56 micrograms.

I forgot to mention that Amy said they never got the info regarding the biopsy I had done with Sutter after signing a form for a release of info. My first thought was, now why oh why does that not surprise me in the least? Figured Alyssa would give me a hard time with that. I let her have it on Facebook for it too, not that I expect she’ll ever see the message. If she does, she certainly isn’t going to say anything about it or react in any way.

Anyway, I’m nervous about my appointment tomorrow. I know what a talker she is and I’m worried she’s not going to let me get much of a word in edgewise even though I have several things to share with her and ask her. I’m even more worried that there are no alternatives for me and that I’m going to continue to suffer most of the time indefinitely if not for the rest of my life. I’m feeling hopeless enough to seriously start thinking about ending it all at the end of the year or thereabouts. I’ve had enough! Tom feels confident that suffering forever won’t be the case and says it’s only logical that I would eventually get better but after 4+ years it’s hard for me to be as optimistic. This is the last thing I can think of to try to help myself. So if no other drug helps and cutting back doesn’t help, then what’s left for me?

I’m also getting tired of how everything I eat is a problem for me. If it isn’t something that’s got too much cholesterol, sugar or sodium, then it makes me have a gassy or upset stomach in some kind of way. I’ve been trying to have more fiber to keep regular. Oh, I’m regular all right. Too regular. So just what can I eat that isn’t going to be a problem in some way?

Maybe I ought to try partial fasting since it’s not as bad for you as a lot of people think. I’ll verify it with the doctor tomorrow but it’s actually good for you. Sort of like a detox for the body. It should only be bad for your metabolism if you do it too long. Furthermore, Tom told me he just read about a study they did on type 2 diabetes. In the experiment, they had some people fast every other day and some fast for 3 days a week. They no longer needed medication afterward!

Tom decided that rather than pay $600 to get a hearing aid that only they can control and that he can’t set up and adjust on his own, he’s going to get these things called Hearphones for $500 on Amazon that he can tweak himself at any time. In fact, they’re coming today. They’re crossovers that will hopefully help with distortion. He says they may even help me in noisy situations. If I’m in a noisy store or restaurant, it can be hard to hear him. I hear him, I just don’t always understand what he’s saying but he does talk softly.

Yesterday morning we went to Sam’s Club before we got the betta and for $20 I decided to get this kids’ chemistry kit where you make your own perfume, lip gloss and bath bombs. Making the perfume was simple enough but the shitty instructions caused me to screw up the lip gloss. Not only that but the roller ball in the bottles doesn’t work well. I hate that when roller balls get stuck!

Haven’t attempted the bath bombs yet.

We updated my computer from Sierra to Mojave and so far it seems to help with the mouse jumping. When hooked up to my large monitor, it was causing a herky-jerky motion of the mouse. It could still start up at some point but so far so good.

“You’ve already shared that dog pic,” someone said on my LR Ask account.

Andy? Hmm… Aly says it’s not her and if she’s telling the truth could it be that German-speaking nurse in Serbia? But Tatiana usually asks me questions in German, if she does, and that doesn’t seem like something she would say. But Andy definitely would.

The thing is that I already shared the dog pic on my DI account. Not LR. So it’s someone who’s aware of both accounts. To my knowledge, this could only be Andy, Aly or Tatiana. I just didn’t think Andy would remember my LR account or even his login to his own original Ask account. He either logged into his first account where he would probably still be following LR and noticed I was using it again, or he remembers that account. He may also have been following it from his second Ask account, though, now that I think of it.

Last night I had this dream some tough guy and his girlfriend and I were talking and I was telling him he was going to hit the wrong woman someday. Someone like me.

“I fight back,” I said.

Then a little while later I was walking through some neighborhood with very short streets. The same guy rounded a corner and startled me and after I said I almost kicked the crap out of him for it until I realized who it was, I asked what he was doing.

“Turning the water off,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“So they’ll refuse to fix it.”

I knew this meant that someone was going to be working on the pipes in the area the following day and he didn’t want them doing that for some reason.

Then I was walking down a flight of stairs outdoors at night with two women that I was either working for or living with. They said something about getting railings put up since it could be dangerous going up and down the stairs in the dark.

Then I was talking to a guy about taking a bus somewhere because Tom would be unable to drive me somewhere I needed to be the next day and transferring buses along the way.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2018 Really like the last perfume sample I got by Jean Paul Gaultier. It’s the best one yet.

I did some research and it seems like what I have may be called a bounding pulse. There can be many reasons for it but it definitely seems like my main problem is sodium. The more I have, the more my blood pressure spikes and the more I feel and notice the pulse in the side of my neck. I don’t know why my body is reacting this way lately to sodium but I guess it’s just age.

My appointment yesterday went well. Amy can see the improvement and there’s a chance it may be curable after all. I don’t want to get my hopes up but there was a study done where a handful of people used Tacrolimus for 10 months and went into remission. The thing is that Amy doesn’t know when the study was done and how long the participants remained in remission. She said if I don’t hear from her in 2 weeks to call her for more info. She’s going to check into it for me.

For now, she recommends moisturizing cream as opposed to lotion. I didn’t know there was a difference between the two but I guess lotion has more alcohol in it and can be more drying. She gave me a goodie bag with all kinds of samples. I have like 4-5 different products and a total of 20 samples to try.

She checked the red spot on my shoulder and didn’t think it looked suspicious. I told her about the one my PCP froze with liquid nitrogen. She said if it becomes a problem she can freeze it off but doesn’t think it’s any big deal. She looked at the sprinkling of “zits” on my upper arm which is very hard to see but I can feel. It’s that actinic keratosis. This is similar to what I had on my back but I don’t think they’ll become the same problem that will need a blast of liquid nitrogen. She wasn’t worried about it. The itchy red bumps I get under my arms, however, are also LS, as LS prefers areas that get moist. She said I can use the Tacrolimus there when I get irritation.

I also asked her about the scars on my forearm from my stupid days and she said that if they were raised and reddish they could probably do something about them but since they’re flat and white, probably not. She said there’s a place that does laser procedures but it costs thousands and isn’t guaranteed. So I’ll pass!

I go back for a follow-up in June.

I continue to worry about Tom and the kidney pain he’s been having and the way he’s neglecting to get a PCP. Somehow it’s all my fault, too. At least that’s the way he makes me feel, saying all my appointments and research I asked him to do wears him out even though he says he wants me to take care of all my appointments. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do. Take care of things so I can cut back the appointments. I don’t have to see Amy or my ENT until June and my next dental check-up isn’t until March. Meanwhile, I don’t expect the eye exam to spawn any additional appointments but I can’t say for sure about Dr. O. Believe me, I’m a lot sicker of all these problems and appointments than he is!

He says it’s important that he works to support us and I understand that he needs to work since I can’t supplement our income but as I reminded him, he can’t work if he’s in the hospital or dead because he let things get out of hand. So I told him that if I stop asking about how he feels, it isn’t that I stopped caring or worrying but because it seems to bother him when I do ask. I will start doing my own research, which I usually do anyway and had only asked him in case he came up with additional info, but it’s not my fault if something’s wrong with him and I don’t think he should use my appointments or anything else as an excuse to neglect his health.

Most of the soreness in my boobs is gone but I’m still spotting. :( Still getting that strange “humming” or vibrating sensation in my head at times, too.

Looking forward to this cute white pond fairy with really long auburn hair on Saturday. We also got things in preparation for whatever new fish we end up getting this weekend which could be a betta, tetras or both. There is actually a type of tetra that can live with bettas just fine. I really like the GloFish. Our 3-gallon tank would be a little small for the bigger ones but Danios would be fine if we found some we liked.

The Brita water filter pitcher arrived and I wish I’d gotten it a long time ago! It makes the tap water almost completely tasteless like our bottled water. I think I’m going to use it in the Keurig and the fish tank along with a special chemical you add to make the water even safer for fish, but I will continue to drink bottled water and use that for the plants and rats as well. After doing some research, I found that filtered water should be fine for fish. Besides, the tank has its own filter as well. He printed out a screen to keep them from getting sucked into the bottom of it and we also ordered a new heater.

I had some weird dreams last night. In one of the dreams, a character from one of my stories was driving us to the center of this town that displayed a large number each year, though I’m not sure what the number represented. I said to “Michelle,” “Look, the number is always the same number of years we’ve been together.”

Then I had a dream that I was browsing through a store and I noticed the same particular fabric with the same colors and design on yet another style of clothing. I had seen it on purses and other apparel and this time it was on a sundress.

Then I was driving somewhere and I was absolutely terrified.

Then Tom and I got into some silly argument over abortion. More like a debate but either way he seemed to be against it even though he is pro-choice like I am. I said something to the effect of us using birth control rather than following instinct.

In the last dream, Scott and Tom were present and we were heading somewhere. Tom walked out the door of some large room and Scott was about to follow when he told me to pull my panties up. I was wearing nothing but a pair of plain white panties as if that was perfectly normal and was struggling to pull them up even though they didn’t seem to want to budge, haha.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2018 I’ve had a definite rough night and it has nothing to do with anxiety, fatigue, or anything like that. Instead, we lost Flaky.

When I got up I noticed his “tail” caught in the filter. I immediately ran and unplugged the filter and thought he would be okay. However, he struggled to rise from the floor of the tank. All he could do was sort of slither along the bottom. I thought he was a bit injured and perhaps a bit in shock as well but would eventually recover.

With him in the kitchen, I returned to the bedroom where my laptop was and heard this strange knocking sound I’ve never heard before. My immediate thought was that it was some kind of nocturnal animal underneath the house. A skunk, a possum, a raccoon… I didn’t think much of it. A few minutes later I heard it again but still didn’t think much of it. Then I went back into the kitchen to find him gone.

Although I always try to be a realist in that I look for scientific proof and evidence in things and try not to assume anything based on wishful thinking, I thought of the knocking and wondered if it could possibly be his way of saying goodbye. I’m not sure if there’s an afterlife but it was definitely a weird coincidence and I haven’t heard the knocking again since. I would think there’s some kind of logical explanation for it but I’ll just have to wait and see if I hear it again.

Then Tom got up who didn’t get home until after I crashed yesterday. He told me he was sure he didn’t die because he got caught in the filter but because he was having trouble swimming and that’s why he got caught in the filter. He thinks something was wrong with him when he got home. He was acting sick and like he was having trouble swimming.

So with sadness, since Flaky had adjusted well and seemed like a very bright, alert and friendly little guy who would swim right up to me when I would put my fingertips in the water, I flushed him down the toilet and said goodbye.

Then I took a shower and we went for a walk. Now, when I got up I wasn’t having any bleeding and thought my period might have been over as of yesterday even though that’s not what my still sore boobies were telling me. Sure enough, after we went walking, mixing in a bit of running, it ended up causing me to flow like a river. It’s beyond frustrating and disappointing but it is just my shit luck and now I realize that not only does this reset the one-year clock I was within 6 weeks of hitting, but that I’m anything but menopausal. I may not be for several years to come. Although unlikely, it really is possible to get a period every so often throughout most of your 50s. I did read that no one in their 60s has ever had periods so that’s good.

I also realize this still leaves my hormones wide open to affecting my moods. I still believe the medication is the main culprit and I always have but now I realize that some of the anxiety could be attributed to that. I just hope it’s a little longer before my next period, and yes, there will be a next one. I know better now. So I have resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to be in the perimenopause stage for quite some time to come even though I just read that the average woman in the U.S. has her final period at age 52 and I’m still 52.

That isn’t it. Oh no, there’s been quite a bit of action today. I nearly burned the fucking house down. I don’t know why I did something so stupid but I took the filter and heater out of the tank, forgetting to unplug them first, and placed them on a towel because they were wet. Then I dumped the 3-gallon tank and suddenly I could smell burning plastic. That was when I looked and saw smoke coming from the heater which I immediately yanked out of the plug and doused with water in the sink. My lungs are a bit tight now. Glad I have an inhaler but I shouldn’t need it!

I am seriously beginning to wonder if something is trying to stop us from having fish. And then I had this crazy thought about our beloved long gone but never forgotten Tinkerbell, and it’s not the first time I’ve had this thought either. We’ve had such shitty luck with pets overall since coming to this state 11 years ago that a part of me wonders if there is an afterlife and if she is there saying, “Oh no, I was the queen. No pets allowed that are even remotely as good as I was!”

Tinkerboy was a good rat and Sugar was an outstanding one but then he had a stroke. And now this friendly little fish is gone. What, was Tinkerbell up there thinking he was too friendly to be our pet that he must be replaced with a timid fish that always runs and hides whenever we walk in the room? Again, I’ve always tried to be a realist, logical and base things on science and don’t see how an afterlife or reincarnation is very plausible. But every now and then some weird things happen that make me wonder. I mean, I’m proof that people can have dream premonitions yet there’s no explanation for knowing the unknown, is there?

I wonder why my dreams didn’t warn me about Flaky but I certainly don’t see everything coming my way. I did have a dream my parents were alive and we were hanging out with Caroll Spinney. Anyway, in the dream, I asked him to do his Big Bird voice for my parents and he did. Yet my parents didn’t seem the least bit fazed.

I learned something interesting about Ask. I was a naughty girl and anonymously said something I knew would annoy Aly as a prank. Even though it was just one thing, she blocked me. I didn’t think you could block anonymous questions but then why wouldn’t you be able to when you now need to have an account, after all? I don’t know why it let me “heart” some of her answers but she never received any of my questions even though I never got a message saying that I’ve been blocked. So I’m just assuming that’s what happened even though the site is notorious for glitches. This was the Dusty Illusions account that I used mostly with Andy.

I then realized he probably did harass me as well only I never saw the questions cuz I had him blocked. This is only if Aly blocked me. If she did, then you can apparently still ask questions; they just won’t be visible to whom you’re asking.

So I decided to delete the Dusty account and reactivate Lady Rainbow and I also unblocked Andy because I’m curious to see what happens. I don’t think he remembers that account but we’ll see. I won’t ask Aly anything with my name showing so that if he’s watching her, it won’t flag his attention.

Since I couldn’t tell Aly I’m switching accounts because I sent her a nasty question and she blocked me, I told her it was because that account not only is less associated with Andy but is also plugged into an email address that still exists, and this is the truth. Dusty Illusions is connected to my old MyOpera email which is no good since the site went down 8 years ago and it won’t let me change it.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2018 Here we go again with my “gift” that I don’t exactly feel grateful for or see as a gift. I’m 52 years old, hadn’t had a period in nearly 11 months, and was pretty sure I’d hit menopause. On September 29th, I dreamed I told Stacey that I was so pissed to find I had a period starting after going nearly a year. Although the dream gave me a bad feeling and I knew deep down it meant something, I tried to push it out of my mind. But then a couple of days ago I noticed I started feeling a bit PMSy. Can you guess what happened yesterday? Yeah, you guessed it. Now the dream is an official premonition. rolls eyes This is just one of many negative dream premonitions I’ve had over the years.

I said to Tom, “Why can’t I ever see good stuff coming in my dreams?” I just got an adorable kitty figurine from Amazon that I randomly spotted when browsing the site. Now why couldn’t I have dreamed of spotting a cute little kitty figurine, then spotting one for real as I did? LOL

So I went 6 or 7 months before a period, then 10.5 months, so maybe next time I’ll go 14-15 months.

I don’t think it means anything but I also dreamed that someone asked if I was scared and my dream self automatically knew I had terminal cancer. I just said, “yup” in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

Not the kind of dream a person like me wants to have (or even non-psychics) but I really don’t think it means anything.

Really getting sick of the “insufficient energy” messages I’ve been getting and how some sites run snail-slow because of it. Or maybe it’s connected to the monitor. I know I’m getting tired of the mouse jumping that I’m contemplating doing away with the monitor altogether as much as it helps me see better.

I showed Aly, who was diagnosed with severe anemia years ago, a picture of my cloudy, whitish unpolished nails and she said that that’s what hers look like. She said symptoms include pain on the left side of the breast, pale skin, feeling cold to the point of having chills, weakness and sudden fatigue. But many things can cause fatigue and I get cold easily.

She said she’s never seen ridges as bad as mine and asked if it could be a health issue but as far as I know it’s just how I am. Maybe I’ll go with unpolished nails to Dr. O and see what she thinks.

Interestingly enough, I read that low iron can cause anxiety. So they’re either not testing my iron like we think they are or it’s recently become a problem if there’s a connection at all. It could just be all the polish and remover but why now? It’s not like I recently started polishing my nails. I always have polish on my nails. Always.

In Bleederville, I’m still between spots and a light flow and my tits are still a bit sore. Wouldn’t be surprised if the dam burst into a full flow in a day or two.

Had some neck knockers in my sleep and I’m definitely feeling fatigued right now but that’s probably the period. Bleeders are iron suckers. Some things make sense now…the intense hunger I had for a few days, my weight up a few pounds, getting stuck when I was 155. That usually doesn’t happen until I hit down at 152-153. I’m 155 right now and I haven’t gone. I don’t want to either after yesterday’s butt explosion. Yeah, I may have hemorrhoids if it isn’t my LS that caused the bleeding when I took a dump yesterday. My shit has been hard lately which can cause hemorrhoids. I think it was more likely that than the LS.

Just went, actually, but my ass remained gratefully intact.

The buzzing sensation in my head gets annoying but my BP hasn’t been high lately and I’ve been monitoring it closely.

My schedule better not back up anymore because now I’m on for 5 AM Dr. O day. I don’t want to deal with her after being up 12 or more hours. If it keeps slowing down as it has been I just might make Dr. A after all.

My shower is no longer usable as water leaks out from under the door so much that I may as well shower with it open. I think the plastic guard underneath came loose but I can still freshen up in there cuz water doesn’t hit the door when I do that like it does when I shower. No problem. I can just use Tom’s shower. One of the things I like about my 2-in-1 Pantene is that while it makes my hair a little less manageable, it stays cleaner longer so I don’t always have to wash it every day.

Later…

We installed the prism window cling in the laundry room and it looks great. Maybe in a few years, for variety, I’ll get this blue floral design that will make it look like a stained glass window.

The Hawaiian course is “hatching” but still in beta and not all the lessons or sounds are there. I guess I should wait a while.

I sent one final message assuring Nissan that I would never contact her again after this unless I was contacted but that I think it’s pretty sad that some people harbor so much hate, resentment and animosity in their hearts over such petty nonsense from decades ago. I was young, for God’s sake, and I think it’s safe to say she was guilty of similar things. I mean come on, does she really think I don’t think she was behind some of those prank phone calls any more than I think Maliheh wasn’t behind the ones I got in South Deerfield?

I noticed she went and hid her friend list as small as it was and next, she’ll probably block me but I don’t care. No account is sacred to me. Especially if we haven’t paid them anything.

I know everyone is different and we all have a right to be how we are but it just seems like such an extreme reaction to what happened. Yet people can be so hateful and unforgiving for the dumbest of things. Again, where’s all this forgiveness the world preaches? No one seems to actually act on it but hey, sometimes I wish I was just as unforgiving.

Went to Walgreens yesterday morning and I got a pair of small “diamond” barrettes. They’re too small to hold all my hair but if I want to put the sides back they’re good for that.

I also got blue nail polish by Vinylux which is an expensive but great brand of high-quality polish. It lasts longer than most polishes though you still need two coats. At first, I didn’t like it because it’s such a dark shade of blue that’s almost navy and even looks black in dim lighting but it’s kind of growing on me.

Flaky really seems to be avoiding his brightly colored gravel so after finding things online suggesting they really do get stressed by bright colors, I removed the neon gravel. This kicked up a lot of debris and I really think I should change all of his water every week instead of just half of it.

Skipped my meds today and the day before yesterday. I’m a little fatigued and lightheaded but feeling better than I felt earlier. I just want to get all my fucking appointments over with!

It almost depresses me to think how long Tom has before he retires. I always loved spending most of my time alone but now I definitely don’t care for it. Hell, I’d love to go back to the days when I didn’t feel the way I feel so much of the time now, wishing he wasn’t around so damn often like when he was unemployed, never having appointments or needing medication.

The shower door in the master bedroom which is a piece of shit is leaking. That’s the one with the door that opens outward. The water guard on the bottom is bent so we’ll have to replace it again. I know this place isn’t as old as some of the places I’ve lived in but damn am I sick of old places! Please tell me our next place will be built in this millennium! Seriously, it’s no real big deal because I can still freshen up there and take showers in the bigger shower which I prefer anyway.

I wonder if they ever had the Oktoberfest concert they were supposed to have yesterday? I hope they got it out of their system while I slept because I hate it when I have to listen to the bass-thumping when I’m awake and be forced to drown it out with the sound machine or something. I absolutely hate it when others force their activities on me!

Not sure if I mentioned the adorable rat pillowcase I ordered from China with a picture of a rat on it eating a candy bar. I have one of those gel cushions on my desk chair and I think I’ll use it there.

Tom uploaded OSX’s latest operating system, Mojave, and he’ll use it for a week to test it out. If there are no problems we’ll load it onto my computer.

I had a dream I was jogging through the park at night. I was just coming around by the RVs and heading to Oak Lake. As I went to turn onto OL, I looked out the front gate at some strange bluish light just beyond.

Then all of a sudden I had this shopping cart at my side. I don’t know what was in it but this strange woman who morphed into Kathleen was curious about its contents and started sifting through the items. I asked what she was looking for and she said, “I should get some serious favors for all these questions.”

“Just tell me what you want done and I’ll do it,” I told her.

Then I was in the hall of an apartment building and could hear her arguing with some guy. One of the apartment’s doors was open and I knew it was Kathleen’s place. I stepped into the apartment and didn’t see anyone. Then I stepped back out into the hall where a black woman was passing through with an amused expression on her face which I knew was on account of the bickering. I stopped her and said, “I’m deaf in one ear and can’t tell the direction of sound. Can you tell me where those voices are coming from?”

She pointed upward and then walked on.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2018 Flaky, as I’ve been calling the betta because of the way he prefers flakes to pellets, now has some artificial plants and a leaf hammock in his tank. So far he seems unimpressed with all of it. He probably just needs time to get used to it. It seemed to take him a while to get used to his brightly colored gravel. I guess bright colors can stress some fish out. I probably should have gotten neutral-colored gravel since that is what they’re used to in the wild, after all.

He warmed up to me rather quickly. He doesn’t seem to mind it at all when I stick my hand in the tank. He was actually more afraid of the damn plants than of me, LOL.

I also got my new kitty figurine and I totally love it! Very cute, realistic, and life-size. They’re typically intended for gardens but I don’t want to throw something so beautiful outdoors to be spoiled by the elements. It’s just too adorable to eventually end up dirty and faded by the sunlight. The next one I want to get is a playful Jack Russell Terrier.

I also got the final round of bamboos to complete the organizer. I got 10 stalks and I’m not sure what they are. The rings are further apart than on the lotuses but they’re closer than on the regular bamboos. The leaves sort of resemble that of the lotus but are placed a little further down the stems.

Last week was the first week I was on nights and didn’t get woken up while sleeping during the daytime. Slept with a bamboo on the headboard shelf and I wonder if it helped safeguard my sleep. Really wish they could safeguard me from anxiety! Was borderline yesterday and so far I’m okay today. I skipped yesterday but not today.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2018 We got the betta set up in the new tank and he’s definitely happier there. He’s been making bubble nests in the top corner of the tank. According to what I looked up, it has to do with breeding. Well, he isn’t getting a girlfriend!

The artificial plants going in the betta’s tank will be here tomorrow. For now, he has colorful gravel with a mix of pink, blue and green.

The filter is gentle enough so that the farthest corner of his tank is almost still and the heater keeps him at about 78 degrees.

I continue to have random BP spikes and I sometimes get this strange vibration in my head. This “humming” sensation of sorts. Worst of all, I was surprisingly anxious yesterday and well past the amount of time it usually lasts after taking my meds. Totally dismayed too, of course, and feeling hopeless where that’s concerned. Unless my endo can work some kind of miracle, I may literally be forced off the medication my body otherwise needs. Again I find myself wondering if there’s something up there and if it deliberately gave me a disease in which it knew damn well I couldn’t handle the medication to treat it with. It’s a scary thought to think something up there could do that to me but I still say it’s unlikely there’s anything up there at all. I really hope not! Either way, I really thought it would be a while before the next bout of anxiety. Really, I’m just SICK of this fucking game! Sick of trying to figure it out year after year and getting nowhere. Do I literally have to die to stop it?

Anyway, I’ve skipped today but also surprisingly, I’m still slightly wound up. Went out for a half-hour walk and now I’m doing the laundry as Tom sleeps.

Aly sure is becoming angrier these days, mostly due to political shit going on and corrupt politicians. I understand her anger but nothing is going to change the twisted world we live in and make it fair. I realize it’s pointless to get angry over things that can’t be changed. I don’t like them but I accept them.

I slept better last time around and I think this is the first week I ever slept during the daytime without traffic waking me up. Really wish I discovered these sleeping earbuds half a decade ago! They may not have existed then, though. Watch, now traffic will get even louder. Seriously, I still wake up enough on my own but as I said, I slept better. Didn’t even have to take anything. I was so tired. I fell asleep a little earlier and slept longer.

When I got up to pee, though, in the middle of my sleep, I swear my boobs felt sore as if they were watery like they would get before periods and I automatically remembered the dream where I was telling Stacey I got a period after nearly a year.

I had a dream that Liz was working in some kind of cafe that was possibly in an apartment building Tom and I was living in. One time I went there for coffee and asked if I could keep the mug for a while until I finished my coffee. Liz nodded and I left. A few hours later I headed down a long corridor and could see Liz sitting behind the counter at the end of it. She had her hair curly. I reached into our apartment that was off the corridor and grabbed the mug as well as a necklace I might have wanted to give her.

In another dream, Tom seemed kind of down in this place we were living in that was laid out differently than where we live here. I asked if he was okay and he said something about a money problem and held up a small piece of paper. For some reason, we were without a physical address for a few months which he referred to as a “drop-off.”

“Whenever there’s a drop-off,” he said, “there are always problems.”

In the next dream or possible dimension, I was living in yet another place that also didn’t look anything like any place I ever lived in before and was very small. I had the back door off the kitchen open when a teenage boy with dark hair and eyes suddenly appeared at the screen door. He asked if I could write and said something about winning money for it or being paid or something like that.

I told him I was a writer and let him in. He had a much younger sibling with him and I didn’t want the nosy brat messing with my devices which its brother didn’t seem to care to watch. So I picked up my phone and a tablet and placed them out of reach. Then I was in the living room talking to the guy when I realized there was no writing job or contest and that he was definitely up to no good. My dream mind reeled with the best way to get out of the situation and I told him I had something interesting to show him in the backyard. Not sure how that dream ended.

The only other dream I remember was looking up my lab results online.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2018 Jean Paul Gaultier is going to be the next perfume sample I receive. I’ve heard of him before but I don’t know that I’ve ever had his perfume.

Had some real rain for the first time in months. There was even some thunder. At one point it was so loud I would have had trouble hearing my show if I were watching TV. I know whose TV I won’t be hearing much of tonight! Probably won’t be much flying either. That’s okay. I would much rather the sound of the rain.

A few nights ago I heard about a dozen gunshots. They came from the East. Pretty sure that’s what it was anyway. The last two shots sounded farther and farther away as if the person shooting was running or in a moving vehicle.

I dreamed about some sort of family reunion where we got together with members of his family. Mary and his mother were there only he didn’t seem too happy about it while I was for some reason.

Nissan’s lack of a reply - and I know she’s been around because she changed her profile picture on one of her accounts - is a classic reminder of the hatred and grudges so many people harbor within their hearts decades after the fact and over silly things, too.

I realize that even though I didn’t do a damn thing wrong to my cousins, say I had sent them a message saying I was sorry and wished them well and hoped to hear from them and all that; I never would have. In reality, I can just imagine all the lies they’ve been told that they believe and I have no doubt that others probably pulled various pranks on them that they automatically assumed I was behind.

Either way, the point is that I don’t understand all this preaching of forgiveness when very few people are willing to actually do it. It amazes and saddens me just how many people will remain angry for little to no reason decade after decade. But I would also be lying if I said I didn’t wish I was more like most people in that respect because then I wouldn’t bother to reach out to people who are just going to ignore me in the end. Or turn on me at some point. I wish I could’ve had it in me to not give Kathleen my number but I didn’t want to seem rude and I knew she wouldn’t call anyway.

A few days ago I started having more burning and itching similar to the kind I would have when not treating myself with anything. Not a severe burning sensation that almost makes you feel like you’ve been cut like the steroids gave me, but just general inflammation and itchiness. So I skipped a dose and the irritation backed off.

I’m both eager and nervous about my upcoming appointment with Dr. O. When I’m feeling my worst I’m willing to try anything new to stop that feeling from returning. But once it comes down to actually trying something, if I do, I’m going to be terrified, of course. Well, I can at least get more info and then decide what to do from there. Worst case scenario, I will have to skip the stuff I’m on periodically as the anxiety kicks up. It’s really too bad I can’t stand it when it does because I may be able to get some weight off if I could.

For now, I’m hoping I don’t get depressed now that I’m pretty much on nights. We’ll see if the full spectrum light helps, though I’m not flaring right now and my TSH should be too high for me to have anxiety from the medication for another month or so.

Was watching this Barbie hack on YouTube and it showed a woman dipping the hair of an old Barbie with knotted hair into fabric softener to make it easy to brush. So I went and tried that on one of my BFF dolls and it improved it a little but definitely didn’t make it easy. Her hair is pretty gnarled and tattered. I just threw it in a ponytail because it looks shabby and I’m not going to keep this doll forever anyway. Her joints are way too loose. Hey, she’s a Goodwill doll. That’s where she came from and that’s where she’ll eventually return to.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2018 The “bad guy” who dares to support his disabled wife in the oh-so-independent US that the government doesn’t give a shit about and who isn’t really “disabled” if others don’t get it or can’t see it, like with someone in a wheelchair, let his forgetful wife forget to do his ear. LOL, he’s been throwing peroxide and alcohol in it to break down the wax in preparation for his appointment tomorrow with the hearing aid people.

I don’t like the fact that I’ve been having more itching and burning lately even though it’s not like the kind of burning the steroids gave me, and Tom says it looks like it’s healing nicely down there when he checked the other day. It’s a good thing I have the Tucks and the Aquaphor and that Amy is only a week away.

Although it was a bit warm, I went out walking earlier for about 25 minutes. Did some strength training exercises on the Bowflex too, and worked my core and arms.

We ordered our new betta a square fish tank with a filter that’s 10 x 10 x 10. We’re adding a heater to it as well as some artificial plants and colorful gravel. He doesn’t seem to like his pellets as much so we’re getting flakes instead. He also seems to be a really shy guy, too. I wonder if he’ll always be this way. His alertness is cute in the way he follows my movements with his eyes as I move about the place.

I’m also getting a bottle opener to make it easier to open tough caps, an adorable 2019 rat calendar and another kitty figurine. This one is a single standing orange tabby looking upward.

During the last order we made we forgot to get the decorative window cling I picked out for the laundry room window. We grabbed it this time around, though.

Norma posted how upset she was about 1600 immigrants being denied help in Texas and how no one will help the children and Tammy was like, how are we supposed to handle an amazing number of illegal immigrants? Yes, she feels bad for the kids and it’s not their fault but their parents’ who should have come here legally.

Tom and I both agree that children should not be abused in the way they’ve been pulled out of houses and thrown into tents in the desert. However, something’s got to be done. I understand people not wanting to spend so much money on a wall and I understand that it isn’t going to keep everybody out but if it will slow the flow of moochers then it may be worth the money. I would still love it if we could take a giant knife, cut Mexico away from the US, pick it up and plop it down on the other side of the world. The middle of the Arctic would be nice. There’s just too damn many of them and they’re burdening the shit out of our resources.

Tom’s co-worker, the Indian woman named Pawandeep, recently vacationed in London. She brought back a bunch of keychains with the word London on it and Tom brought one home, not that we’ll ever use it. It was still a very nice thought. It’s hanging on one of the kitchen cabinet knobs right now.

Wondering if I’m starting to get another precancerous lesion on my shoulder where the arm and shoulder meet. Thanks, Mom, for making me sit on the beach all damn day every summer until you decided you no longer wanted to be a mother to me, even if I know you didn’t know this would happen and would’ve taken measures to prevent it if you could have.

It’s too small to say for sure what it is, but it’s definitely suspicious and similar to the other one I had on my back. It is kind of reddish and has a similar feel to the other one, almost like a bubble. When you press on it, it sort of seems like it’s filled with air. It could still be a wart or a mole. We’ll see where it ends up as time goes on.

Speaking of cancer, when I was looking at my conditions on the new medical portal, I was surprised to see polycythemia vera listed as one of them. That’s a blood cancer. I don’t see how having a couple of very slightly elevated red blood cell count readings constitutes having that condition, but even if I did, it’s so slow-growing that it would take 25 years to kill me, anyway. After having a couple of high readings, I did have a couple of normal readings, and I would be willing to bet that my next round of lab work will be normal as well. I’m sure the white cell count will be slightly elevated, though, as always.

I had a dream that I was seeing my GYN and she had a friend with her in the room. At one point the GYN asked her, ��Want to get together tonight?”

“Nah,” the girl said, and then I left, realizing I didn’t have another appointment scheduled with her and wondered if that was a good thing or not.

[writerobscura]

Read full post under the cut:

October is my favorite month for many reasons. One, I’m Polish. Two, I’m a Halloween fanatic. Three, autumn is glorious—I could go on.

I’ve tapped out 29 chapters of the TL&TO, and I’m still having fun with it. I think that might be a new record. Only nine chapters are edited to capacity (I won’t touch them again), but what a great high it is to keep creative focus and stay on a production track.

My numbers (included are numbers from syndicated platforms):

Bear House: 213 re-subscribed, with 194 returning every update. Tapas: 47 Subscribers with 8 returning every update. Archive of Our Own: 6 Bookmarks with 12 returning every update. Pixiv: 7 Bookmarks with 7 returning every update.

Bear House: Back in August, I purged most subscribers to ascertain who actually reads, as opposed to bot accounts skirting WordPress security and ninja bloggers seeking hits with comments and ‘likes, ‘ none of which are visible on my posts. Engagement with the work (and not the site itself) is my goal for this web serial, and many subscribers attached to Femitokon weren’t reading TL&TO.

Overall, I was highly satisfied with how many people came back. Since redesigning the site with the ‘Fictioneer’ theme, which looks and feels like an eReader (readers can choose text size, line width, fonts, etc.), I’ve been getting about 1-2 new subscribers a month.

I don’t promote much on the other platforms. I announce chapter updates on Insta, Tumblr, and Facebook with a Linktree link, and I tap out the occasional post at the Tapas Forums. I’m not happy with the Tapas numbers because most are clearly reciprocity subs from other writers who are not interested in reading my series.

I couldn’t understand why they would do this until I learned that Tapas doesn’t allow creators to earn ‘ink’ until they reach a certain number of subscribers + likes. Ouch. I continue posting there because I sub to a few series and read when possible – but it’s no longer my priority.

My impetus for syndicating at Tapas when I began writing TL&TO was the opportunity to purchase promotional space from them for my series. I planned to get about fifteen chapters in before ‘advertising,’ but Tapas did away with this feature about four months into my posting there.

AO3 completely caught me off guard. My fanfic always did well there because it’s AO3, but posting original work and expecting readers is like watching hair grow – or so I thought. Femitokon bombed there – ZILCH – no readers, but TL&TO boasts twelve regular readers, and my Kudos counts are ridiculously high for what is an original work. The AO3.gay mirror brings a large percentage of those numbers, and I hope it keeps growing.

Pixiv, like AO3, is a haven for fanfic and fan art, so my expectations remain grounded. I’m chuffed that seven English-reading users return every update, though, like many Tapas readers my story attracts, they’re the sort that doesn’t ‘HEART’ chapters as proof they’ve read it.

Bear House gets much more traffic with the Fictioneer theme, and my focus in the future is promoting TL&TO there over the syndicated platforms. Comments and conversations are private by choice of the commenter (I love that!), and reader engagement has so far been positive for me.

I still get the occasional ‘If you make this into a comic, I will read it.’ Ugh. My comics days are over because too much attention from strangers brings out the worst in me.

Would I be open to it? Sure, but would I take part in promoting it? NOPE. I learned my lesson from the past – too much attention brings out my toxic side. If you’re an artist who wants to turn TL&TO into something sequential, have at it. Just mention my name in passing, and keep me credited as the writer – anyone gives you crap about it, direct them here.

[bills-bible-basics]

Facebook: Is It Possibly Broken? https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/facebook-is-it-possibly-broken/ Around the middle of 2022, I began to seriously wonder if Facebook may be broken. Yes, literally broken. I mean, think about it. Facebook has gotten so big -- around two billion users, from what I have read -- that maybe its worldwide network of servers, bots and algorithms can no longer handle the load. Is it possible that there are simply way too many users, even though Facebook relies upon a global network of CDNs? Now, obviously, I don't know this for a fact, and it is just a theory on my part, but I suspect that maybe this user overload is in large part the reason why so many errors have been made in recent months. I am talking about all of the false positives with Facebook's security system. In other words, I am referring to the forced log offs, the forced lockouts, having to jump through Facebook's security hoops so many times, having to change our passwords so many times, seeing our posts frequently removed, etc. I know for a fact -- because my FB friends have told me so, and because I have experienced it many times myself -- that people are getting locked out, and logged off, of their accounts for the stupidest reasons. Furthermore, their posts are being removed when they have done absolutely nothing wrong. They haven't posted anything inappropriate. And that includes myself as well. In other words, we have NOT violated Facebook's "Community Standards" in any way, as far as I can tell. It makes absolutely no sense that these things are happening so much, and so frequently, unless there is some kind of ongoing systemic failure going on with Facebook. Folks, I just don't believe that Facebook's head honchos are so stupid, that they would continue to harass us that much. Think about it. They are already under tremendous pressure from the U.S. government, and from other entities, due to their multiple security gaffs, their apparent discrimination against Conservatives and Christians, etc. So why would they go out of their way, and do anything to further infuriate their user base? From what I have read, people are already leaving Facebook in droves, because they are fed up with it. So again, is it possible that there are some serious technical issues going on which have little or nothing to do with discrimination against us? I don't know how many of my related posts you have seen, but as I have already made really clear a number of times already, after almost nine years of virtual peace on Facebook, with near zero harassment, it became a real nightmare for me as of early October, 2019. The problems and harassment by Facebook techs got so bad, that I finally deleted my account in June of 2022, only to return 3.5 months later in September of 2022. Of course, now I just run a timeline, and no page or group, so things have been a lot more peaceful. However, sadly, it appears that I am STILL being shadow banned, and hardly anyone is seeing my daily posts. I actually make hundreds of posts each month. I wonder how many of them you actually see in your news feed. As I mentioned a minute ago, up until I opened my new Facebook account in September of 2022, I was being forced logged off and forced locked out of my account dozens of times. I was also forced to jump through Facebook's security hoops and change my password dozens of times over the course of three months. In May of 2022 alone, I was forced to upload my personal ID six times, which is why I finally got fed up and left in June of that same year. As if that is not enough, prior to shutting down my old account, literally hundreds of my posts were being removed. So, yes, as I have stated before, it seems like it may have been intentional harassment due to my Christian faith. But I am beginning to believe that it is that, and even more. Technically, it just seems to me that something is seriously screwed up, and the Facebook staff just don't have a handle on it yet, whatever it is. I could be wrong, but that is my suspicion. What do YOU think? Let us know. By the way, you might want to read this article: "Why I Am Fed Up With Facebook": https://www.billkochman.com/Articles/fed-up-facebook.html Thanks! https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/index.php/facebook-is-it-possibly-broken/?feed_id=213960&Facebook%3A%20Is%20It%20Possibly%20Broken%3F

[nickgerlich]

Breaking The Law

It’s always easy to blame the big guy for all your problems. Walmart knows this. Amazon knows this. Heck, even Dollar General is accused of destroying small-town mom-and-pops. Blame someone else for things that you can no longer control.

And now 33 state attorneys general have sued Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging that “Meta’s products have harmed minors and contributed to a mental health crisis in the United States.” Those are serious charges, and while the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, they might just have a chance with this one.In effect, they have likened Meta unto a drug dealer that peddles addictive social media content.

And children being children are easy victims, which explains why they are historically a protected class. There are child labor laws. Our society provides for free public education through age 18. More importantly, the courts have decided that children lack adult reasoning and judgment, and that is precisely what these cases are about.

Evidence is mounting that excessive use of social media by children—whom we will define as younger than 18—can have serious effects on self-esteem and mental health. Furthermore, the cases allege that Meta provides an infinite feed of content that is easily digested, one post after another, like a chain smoker firing up cancer sticks.

It’s just that I have a hard time blaming Meta, even though they may very well deliver addictive content. That content could be just as addictive for adults. But speaking of adults, where are they in all of this? If their kids are becoming addicted, who aided and abetted it?I’ll wait.I get it. Parents, and now attorneys general, are upset that our children are addicted to the crack cocaine that social media can be. But who bought the phone? Who pays for the cellular access? Who allows children to carry and use these devices? Basically, who is in charge here?

I am very familiar with that old aphorism about the cobbler’s children having no shoes. But this Digital Marketing prof’s kids not only had shoes, but also smartphones, and at an early age. Both opened social media accounts too under my tutelage. And you know what? They turned out just fine, both working now in the field of Digital Marketing. Along the way, they had a lot of guidance, instruction, and oversight.

Essentially, these cases mean that some parents cannot control their own kids, yet they provide them with the tools to access the thing they have come to loathe.

All of which raises another question: Why didn’t the attorneys general sue SnapChat or TikTok? That’s pretty easy. Meta has the deepest pockets, and chasing TikTok across the ocean would probably prove futile. They have other ways of dealing with them, like trying to completely block them in their states.

But we are talking about children, and they are granted special dispensations. It is easy to point fingers at Meta in this case, because children are deemed defenseless and vulnerable. That is sacrosanct.

It is uncertain exactly what these lawsuits hope to gain in terms of damages. These are not class action suits (although there have been some individual cases filed by parents), like the kind you would file against a company for defective products with identifiable victims. While evidence of mental health issues is growing, that evidence is in very general terms.

About the best they could hope to achieve would be to clamp down on Meta for violating consumer protection statutes, and then levy large fines. Presumably, Meta must inform users of the risks of using their social media offerings.

Still, I must put a lot of responsibility on the parents. If you do not want your kids to become addicted to nicotine, then don’t buy them the cigarettes laced with it. I’m not buying the argument. Social media platforms require devices and internet access, things that the parents should have sovereignty over.

The sad part is that Meta will have to spend millions defending itself, and if it is indeed found guilty, then pay fines. I’m pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg in his wildest nightmare never could have seen any of this coming. And here we are, almost 20 years since the launch of Facebook.

It all kind of makes me wonder if a do-over would be better in the end.

Dr “Glad Mine Turned Out OK” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[purplesurveys]

1668

i went on my first hike yesterday and my whole body is in pain :)

When was the last time you wore a full face of makeup? Does it count if I just put foundation all over my face and dabbed concealer on a few acne scars...? That’s all I ever do anyway, lol. Last March.

Do you own an iPad? I guess we do, yeah, but 1) I haven’t used it since 2017 and even at that point it was no longer eligible for like a million software updates, and 2) I also haven’t seen it since then lol. I’m not even sure the old-school charger for it is still being sold so I have no clue if we’ll ever get to turn it back on again.

Who was the last non-relative woman you spoke to in person? That would be Keina, one of the few girls who were part of our hiking group. She was actually one of the guides and was kind enough to stay behind the rest of the team and be with me the whole descent because I was trailing BADLY behind, lol. What’s the most hours you’ve worked in a week? Anywhere between 72-75 hours. Worst job deliverable I had to have been on and I’d rather forget about that account and everything I did for them that week.

Do you believe in karma? Not in the ~religious sense and not for every single situation but sometimes it can be satisfying to think that some people have it coming for them.

What temperature is your thermostat currently set to? I can’t think of any middle-class Filipino family that would have a thermostat.

What’s a topic you’ve drastically changed your opinion on? Hiking. Before yesterday I thought it was something I could enjoy...total 180º now. I get why there’s a crowd for it, but it’s just not for me. After completing it I felt nothing but misery and the itchiness to go home. Are you a kind, thoughtful person? I always try to be.

Do you know anyone who has a PhD? Besides my college professors, no.

Who were you dating in July 2010? Or were you single? I was 12 and dating wasn’t even on my mind then.

How do you feel when you’re the center of attention? Largely uncomfortable and when it happens I always proactively try to switch the topic or attention to someone else.

Would you rather be a nurse or a mechanical engineer? I guess nurse, because I did consider taking up med at one point in life.

Do you like Starbucks chai lattes, or do you think they’re too sweet? I’ve never tried a chai latte; I don’t even know what it is lol.

Are you and your SO facebook official? I don’t have one.

Do you know how to set a formal table setting for a 3+ course dinner? No but my dad probably would. I’d get the tutorial from him instead. Are you in a good mood today? I feel super well-rested (15 HOURS after that hike; passed out as soon as I got home and took a shower, and now it’s 7 AM the following day) but I think it’d be a stretch to call it a good mood. My body feels like it went through war and I’m not very fond of the idea of having to go outside twice today considering how much discomfort I’m in at the moment. Do you know anyone who works as a lawyer? My fave aunt is one. I’m pretty sure a bunch of my relatives on my maternal grandfather’s side are lawyers too. Which would bother you more: being told you’re not likable or being told you’re not sensible? Not likeable. I can survive not caring what people think of me in certain aspects, like how I work; but if I’m told there isn’t one single likeable reason about me then I feel like that’s just inviting the gates of anxiety to crash down on me. It’s like, people won’t like me anyway so why go out of the house anymore? Do my closest friends even like me or just to pretend to? and thinking of those things 24/7 lol.

Do you have a difficult time relating to other’s emotions? Sometimes. I can’t always be able to read everyone.

How many bedrooms does your house have? We have four.

What was the last electronic item you bought? A smart watch for my dad.

Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? No.

When you were 15, what did you want to grow up to be? A journalist.

Did you ever achieve that? I went to journalism school but was quick to be disillusioned. I ended up going down a slightly different path that still lets me apply my journalism learnings, which is a career in PR.

Have you ever had a dream in which you died? Once or twice. Way, way back when I was depressed.

Have you bought a bag of potato chips in the past week? No. The older I get the more I realize I dislike super processed junk food lol, so it’s been a while since I got chips for myself. 

Does the thought of having wrinkles when you’re older upset you? It probably wouldn’t upset me once they start showing up at the age of like 60, but if I find some on me at this point in my life then it would, yeah. How often do you buy a new phone? Depends on how fast I break it.

Would you rather live in an apartment in the city, or a cabin in the woods? City. Yesterday’s hike also made me realize how much I prefer to be in the city. Do you use Snapchat? Ahahahaha seriously? I haven’t used Snapchat since the beginning of college.

Have you ever driven or ridden on a motorcycle? Nopes. Scooter yeah, but not a motorcycle.

Do you know anyone who’s struggling with addiction? I don’t.

Are any other members of your household home right now? Everyone but my dad, yeah. What was your first job? And how long did you work there? Began as a PR associate. I’m still with the same company, just moved up twice now since starting.

What was your favorite school subject when you were in middle school? English/Language.

[first-digi-add]

Importance of Google Reviews and How can I do When it’s Disappearing?

As a small business owner, I get excited when I get that email notification exclaiming that our great new customer has given us a 5-star review on our Google business profile page. It's a great feeling for our Digital Marketing Company to know that we've done a great job and that our customers loved our services and want to tell everyone how great our business is. If you don't receive online reviews for your business, don't be afraid to ask customers to leave an honest review on your Google business profile page.

Can I Retrieve the Missing Google My Business Reviews?

Unfortunately, once Google removed a review from their Google business profile page, it was gone forever. There is no way to get it back. Instead of worrying about missing reviews, concentrate on getting new 5-star reviews! 

Small and medium-sized businesses heavily rely on Google My Business reviews to promote their brand and attract new customers. Your customers want to express how great your products and services are to them.

But if you received a five-star review, only to find it missing a few weeks later, don't worry. Disappearing reviews can be a drag on your business, after all, no one likes their hard-earned reviews disappearing.

 Reasons a Google Company Profile Review may be Missing

While Google doesn't describe every aspect of its spam detection algorithm, it does provide specific guidelines for Google review content. If a Google review was removed from your business page, ask yourself the following questions to determine why the review was removed from your Google business profile. Google will remove reviews that violate its review content guidelines.

1. Did the Review Include a Phone Number?

A phone number in the review is a big trigger for potential spam. It is not necessary to have a phone number in a review.

2. Was the Review Published Elsewhere on the Internet?

If the same review appears on Facebook, Yelp, or a "testimonials" page on your website, the duplicate review on your Google My Business page may be removed. Isn't it great when your customers love you SO much they want to tell everyone how great you are?!?! Here's the downside: Unless the customer writes unique reviews on each review website, they may risk multiple reviews being removed, not just on Google Business Profile.

3. Is the Reviewer an Admin of your Google My Business Account or Google+ Page?

If an administrator of the company's Google accounts writes a review, Google could consider it a conflict of interest. Generally, the person who manages your Google My Business account is not a customer. He is likely to be an employee or a service provider. Feedback must be left by customers.

4. Check if the Reviewer Removed their Reviews

Your customers can remove their reviews from Google My Business at their discretion. As a brand, you need to work harder to make sure your customers keep their words and their comments about your page.

5. Did you Suddenly See a Huge Influx of reviews?

It is pretty normal for large-scale brands to have a few new reviews every week. But if you're a small or medium-sized business that receives hundreds or thousands of reviews in a significantly short period of time, that can set off Google's spam alerts.

6. Receive Google Reviews from the Same IP Address

Many businesses offer free WiFi for their customers and encourage them to post reviews on Google for their business. Google notes that if a customer is connected to the same IP address from which the Google listing is managed, reviews are often not displayed.

7 . Copy and Paste the Reviews

Your Google reviews may be leaked if you are just copying and pasting or having someone copy and paste from a third-party website or other profiles.

 8. A Sudden Spike in Google My Business Reviews.

Some people do Google review campaigns to increase their Google My Business reviews and I know many people who still do this and don't recommend it.

 How can you Retrieve Missing Reviews that have been Filtered Out by Google?

In most cases, Google does not reset reviews. But if you have genuine Google reviews filtered by Google, you can request to have the reviews reinstated by submitting a reason in the Google Business Profile forum. 

When you submit a request, please be sure to include the following details, if possible, along with why you're writing for Google.

How many Google reviews have disappeared?

The date they stayed.

The names of the customers who left comments.

Screenshots of missing reviews

I hope you have clearly understood why your Google business reviews are not showing up. Thanks for your time. If you found this article helpful, please comment "yes" in the comments section below.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Privacy Without Monopoly, EU edition

Tech monopoly apologists insist that there’s something exceptional about tech that makes it so concentrated: “network effects” (when a product gets better because more people use it, like a social media service).

They’re wrong.

Tech is concentrated because the Big Tech companies buy up or crush their nascent competitors — think of Facebook’s predatory acquisition of Instagram, which Zuckerberg admitted (in writing!) was driven by a desire to recapture the users who were leaving FB in droves.

Google’s scale is driven by acquisitions — Search and Gmail are Google’s only successful in-house products. Everything else, from Android to Youtube to their entire ad-tech stack, was once a standalone business that Google captured.

Monopolies extract monopoly rents — like those delivered by Googbook’s crooked ad-tech marketplaces, or Apple/Google’s 30% app shakedown — and use them to maintain their monopolies. Google gives Apple billions every year so it will be the default Ios and Safari search.

These are the same tactics that every monopolist uses — high-stakes moneyball that creates a “kill-zone” around the monopolist’s line of business that only a fool would try to enter. Tech DOES have network effects, but that’s not what’s behind tech monopolies.

We see monopolies in industries from bookselling to eyeglasses, accounting to cheerleading uniforms, pro wrestling to energy, beer to health insurance. These monopolies all follow Big Tech’s template of mobilizing monopoly rents to buy or crush all competition.

The differences between the anticompetitive tactics that monopolized these industries are largely cosmetic — swap out a few details and you might well be describing how John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil monopolized the oil markets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Big Tech does have network effects, but these are actually a tool that can be used to dismantle monopolies, as well as maintaining them. Network effects are double-edged swords: if a service gets more valuable as users join, it also gets less valuable as users leave.

If you want to understand the anticompetitive structure of the tech industry, you’d be better off analyzing switching costs, not network effects. Switching costs are the things you have to give up when you leave a service behind.

If your customers, community, family members or annotated photos and other memories are locked up in Facebook’s walled garden (or if you’ve got money sunk in proprietary media or apps on Apple’s, etc), then the switching cost is losing access to all of that.

Here’s where tech really is different: tech has intrinsically low switching costs. Latent in all digital technology is the capacity to interoperate, to plug a new service into an old one, to run an old app inside a simulator (“runtime”).

There’s no good technical reason you can’t leave Facebook but take your treasured photos with you — and continue to exchange messages with the people you left behind.

True, Facebook has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep its switching costs high, deploying technical countermeasures to block interoperability. But these aren’t particularly effective. Lots of people have figured out how to reverse-engineer FB and plug new things into it.

Power Ventures created an app that aggregated your FB feed with feeds from rival services, giving you a single dashboard. NYU’s Ad Observer scraps the political ads FB shows you for analysis to check whether FB is enforcing its own paid political disinformation rules.

And there’s a whole constellation of third-party Whatsapp clients that add features FB has decided Whatsapp users don’t deserve, like the ability to block read-receipts or run multiple accounts on the same device.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

Most of these are technical successes, but they’re often legal failures. FB has used the monopoly rents it extracted to secure radical new laws and new interpretations of existing laws to make these tactics illegal.

Power Ventures was sued into oblivion. Ad Observer is fighting for its life. The Whatsapp mods are still going strong, but that may be down to the jurisdictions where they thrive — sub-Saharan Africa — where FB has less legal muscle.

With low switching costs, much of FB’s monopoly protection evaporates. Lots of people hate FB, and FB knows it. You’re on FB because your friends are there. Your friends are there because you’re there. You’ve taken each other hostage, and FB benefits.

With low switching costs, you could leave FB — but not your friends. The kill zone disappears. All we need is interoperability.

Enter the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, proposed regulations to force interop on the biggest Big Tech players.

The EU has recognized that mandating interop can reduce switching costs, and reducing switching costs can weaken monopoly power.

Some critics (like me!) of the EU proposals say they don’t go far enough, asking for “full interop” for rival services.

Against these calls for broader interop come warnings about the privacy implications of forcing FB to open up its servers to rivals. It’s hard enough to keep FB from abusing its users’ privacy, how will we keep track of a constellation of services that can access user data?

Last Feb, Bennett Cyphers and I published “Privacy Without Monopoly,” for EFF, describing how interoperability can enhance privacy.

Interop means that users can choose services that have better privacy policies than Facebook or other incumbent platforms.

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

But in theory, it means that users could choose worse services — services that have worse privacy policies, services that might be able to grab your friends’ data along with your own (say, the pictures you took of them and brought with you, or their private messages to you).

That’s why, in our paper, we say that interop mandates have to be backstopped by privacy rules — democratically accountable rules from lawmakers or regulators, not self-serving “privacy” limitations set by the Big Tech companies themselves.

For example, Facebook aggressively imports your address books when you sign up, to connect you to the people you know (this isn’t always a good experience — say, if your stalker has you in their address book and automatically gets “friended” with you).

If you try to take your address book with you when you quit, FB claims your contact list isn’t “yours” — it belongs to your contacts. To protect their privacy, FB has to block you from exporting the data — making it it much harder to establish social ties on a new service.

It’s not obvious who that contact info “belongs to” (if “belong to” is even the right way to talk about private information that implicates multiple people!).

But what is obvious is that Facebook can’t be trusted to make that call.

Not only has Facebook repeatedly disqualified itself from being trusted to defend its users’ privacy, but it also has a hopeless conflict of interest, because privacy claims can be used to raise switching costs and shore up its monopoly.

In our paper, Bennett and I say that these thorny questions should be resolved democratically, not in a corporate boardroom.

Now, as it happens, there’s a region where 500M people are protected by a broad, democratically enacted privacy law: Europe, home of the GDPR.

Today, in a new appendix to “Privacy Without Monopoly,” EFF has published “The GDPR, Privacy and Monopoly,” my analysis of how the GDPR makes interoperability safer from a privacy perspective.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/gdpr-privacy-and-monopoly

Working with EFF’s Christoph Schmon and Bennett Cyphers, we develop a detailed analysis of the GDPR, and describe how the GDPR provides a lawful framework for resolving thorny questions about consent and blended title to data.

The GDPR itself seeks to promote interoperability; it’s right there in Recital 68: “data controllers should be encouraged to develop interoperable formats that enable data portability.” But loopholes in the rules have allowed dominant companies to stymie interop.

For years, Europeans have had the “right” to port their data, but nowhere to port that data to. The DMA closes the loopholes and dismantles the hurdles that kept switching costs high.

The GDPR’s consent/security/minimization framework sets out the parameters for any interoperability, meaning we don’t have to trust Facebook (or Google, or Amazon, or Apple) to decide when interop must be blocked “to defend users’ privacy” (and also shareholders’ profits).

Big Tech platforms already have consent mechanisms (and must continue to build them) to create the legal basis for processing user data. An interoperable FB could be a consent conduit, letting your friends decide when and whether you can take their data to a new service.

And the GDPR (not a tech executive) also determines when a new service meets the privacy standards needed for interop. It governs how that new service must handle user data, and it gives users a way to punish companies that break the rules.

Today, if you leave Facebook, your friends might not even notice. But in a world where FB is a consent conduit to manage your departure and resettlement, all your friends get signals about your departure — perhaps prompting them to consider whether they should go, too.

Far from prohibiting interop, the GDPR enables it, by creating an explicit privacy framework that is consistent across all services, both the old monopolies and the new co-ops, startups, public utilities, and other alternatives that interop would make possible.

Monopolies distort the world in two ways. The most obvious harm is to competition, choking out or buying out every alternative, so you have to live by whatever rules the monopolist sets.

But the other kind of harm is even worse: monopolists can use their political power to get away with terrible abuses.

Ad-tech concentration produced monopoly rents that blocked or weakened privacy law for decades, allowing for a grotesque degree of commercial surveillance.

We don’t want competition in surveillance.

Opening space for interop poses a legitimate risk of creating a contest to see who can violate your human rights most efficiently.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw

Yet, it’s obvious that monopolists themselves shouldn’t get to decide where they should be subjected to competition and where they should be subjected to regulation. That’s a job for democratic institutions, not autocratic board-rooms.

Adding privacy regulation (strong privacy regulation, with a private right of action allowing users to sue companies for breaking the rules) to interop is how we resolve this conundrum, how we make sure we’re banning surveillance, rather than “democratizing” it.

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

Lol i find it so funny that your rant about the Queen fandom in general not taking Brian’s words and role in Freddie’s life as seriously as they would with other people got someone so mad that they instantaneously prove your point 🤣 the Queen fandom is big and it’s a no brainer that people do belittle/have bad faith takes about Brian a lot of the time, you can see it on Quora, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube comments. Tumblr only accounts for a tiny part of the Queen fandom (and most of us are relatively young compared to other fans), and you are only one person. i love that they imply your one blog and your handful of posts with the notes they get paint a comprehensive picture of the opinions of millions of Queen fans around the world lmao because I WISH

Lol my main gripe was the accusatory nature of the ask with the implication that I was targeting some one person’s post when I specified that I was speaking generally because, as you say, you can find really mean-spirited takes undermining Brian and Freddie’s friendship basically on any site where Queen is discussed. I have found, in both my experience and while observing others’ blogs, that people get mighty pressed whenever someone actually draws attention to how callously people treat Brian and his emotions about Freddie. Maybe it’s a guilty conscience, I don’t know, but I would like to remind people that I borderline disliked Brian in my very early days of the fandom lol, and what brought me back was seeing how he actually talks about Freddie. I was like, “ok…I have mixed feelings on this guy, but I can’t deny that he loves Freddie.” I bring this up because if my salty 2018-2019 ass was able to see that, then there’s no reason why other people can’t. Brian has worn his heart on his sleeve about Freddie so many times and yet the mountain of quotes from him are ignored or dismissed by large chunks of the fandom, often while they act like Roger and/or John were super close to Freddie but Brian wasn’t.

And they were close to Freddie! But the point is that people will do something like cite Freddie and John sharing a microphone during “Liar” as evidence of their close friendship, but go “*seen yesterday*” at something like Brian literally choking up and saying he loves Freddie. That’s the attitude which I think is unfair, disrespectful, and dishonest. It’s like nothing he says is ever good enough or taken seriously

Also can you imagine if my blog were representative of the whole fandom lol

[tundrainafrica]

Title: A Tale of Two Slaves (4/17)

Summary:  “Soulmates don’t exist. Fate doesn’t exist. Everything is a choice.” At that moment, Levi could only watch as she made the choice for him.“

Reincarnation AU. Levi remembers everything from their past life. Hange doesn’t.

Note: Feedback is very much appreciated!

Other Chapters: 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Link to cross-postings: AO3

As it turned out, Hange’s thesis wasn’t just about jumping.

But it would be nice to do it about flying. She had mentioned, echoing that same sentiment in those numerous interviews he had read.

A case study on the changes of an athletes body and muscle composition from preseason to postseason.  

Levi only found out exactly what Hange and Moblit were doing for their final thesis as she ran through it with him over coffee the morning after they met in the lab. He had to admit, he had forgotten whether or not Moblit had explained that same thing to him which was probably just easily overshadowed by the pages and pages of waivers that had been laid out in front of him.

Hange had a different approach to the documentation. She had the same waivers that needed to be signed but had completely understood that no one would have that same drive to read the whole thing and consider the nuances and implications of every bullet point. She had just asked him to check everything and sign or she would not be able to work with him.

Compensation. Injury Insurance. Transportation Subsidy. Meal Subsidy

Levi quickly complied. In fact, he probably would have complied even without the benefits that came with participating in the study. He was already half way through mindlessly checking the boxes by the time Hange had mentioned those parts after all.

“Everything is funded.” Hange had explained. He knew their university was particularly well off. Being an athlete he had been a beneficiary multiple times of free branded shoes, gym bags jackets, meals and even gadgets with championship wins

The generous funding she had received to conduct the research was particularly seen in the well equipped sports facility where Hange was to conduct said research.

Cardiovascular endurance, strength power, speed, power etc. He listed the physical fitness components she wanted to study, the logistics of switching partners and starting anew completely forgotten.

It had been less than 24 hours since he visited her office and it was as if Hange wasn’t as deep into her research as Moblit had made it out to be.

She’s been cooped up in the lab lately, watching track and field videos.

She’s already been talking to Elijah, they did a few tests.

There was truth to what Moblit had told him. Hange did admit to having already the preliminary data needed for her case study but as Hange had shown him soon after they started talking, she had no problem just scrapping her data or giving it to Moblit and starting again from scratch.

As Levi soon found out, she was too passionate about her research to consider the preliminary data wasted work.

Levi had found that last part out after their talk in the lab after she had casually mentioned her lurker Instagram account on top of her blatant refusal to use Facebook and Twitter since too many social media sites were just too much to manage. He could not resist the urge to check the accounts she followed and just as he expected, they were all famous athletes from all different fields, the one thing common about all athletes being the almost inhuman height and airtime they achieved.

Nanaba Briete her friend and the subject of her high school thesis, was a volleyball player. Elijah Miller was a horizontal jumper. Moblit pointed out as well, her data for both players was too comprehensive beyond what was expected from someone of her level of study.

Levi soon realized with her YouTube and Instagram lurker activity, she probably was a stan and for some reason, he was one of the objects of her stanning activity. Levi had seen those types of people on Twitter and Instagram. They had weird voting conglomerations, used some sort of weird language and interacted incessantly with any post on the object of their stanning activity  Hange was not vocal in particular, her Instagram profile and YouTube channels both empty.  He only had to go through the profiles she followed to see that she left likes in most if not all pictures. Among those she had liked were profiles that reposted pictures of his jumps.

Liked by Wingsoffreedom132 and thousands of others.

Levi soon realized after hours going through most if not all the accounts she followed that just like the average stan, Hange spammed the like button like crazy

Looking deep into the comments of one of his jumps that year, he had found a comment from her. A pair of wings and a heart next to it.

How long has she been following him?

Did she have those dreams too?

“Why?”

“Why what?” Hange asked.

“Why me?” Levi continued.

“I told you before. You're amazing. Your forms are all perfect, your body composition is good and that crazy fast improvement  from no name player to rookie of the year?" Hange seemed too sure of herself and glimmer of hope that somehow she had any inkling of their connection in Levi's dreams dissipated. She started to rattle off numbers relating to Levi’s height differentials and vertical leap every year since high school, Levi had to note that there was some truth to what she was saying.

High jumping events had suddenly become much easier for Levi when he moved to the city for college. He had attributed it to the more frequent training that came with the more competitive environment of collegiate sports. It was an ironic turn of events though since that was also around the same time he had started experiencing those painful mornings after dreaming things he could barely member. He chose not to mention that just yet. The connection was just too illogical to be a causation or even correlation issue. It might have even just been an irrelevant coincidence.

Levi continued to listen as she explained schedules and outlines for meet ups. There was preliminary data gathering, multiple tests to be done on weekends in a sports facility a little farther away from the school. There were a few more documents that needed to be answered and submitted similar to what Moblit had sent. It would be time consuming, inconvenient. The prospect of Hange being there made it somewhat bearable.

So bearable, that Levi had found himself arriving at the train station Saturday morning one hour earlier than they agreed upon. They were going to the sports facility for preliminary data gathering. To his pleasant surprise, Hange was already there waiting.

“I hope you don’t mind the shitty schedule,” Hange said in greeting. She was staring at the duffel bag Levi had slung over his shoulder.

Levi had to stay overnight. With the sports facilities being shared among multiple researchers and multiple athletes, Hange found the most she could secure for a last minute booking was an early morning slot, offering instead to provide lodging to Levi for a night so he wouldn’t have to take a taxi late night and early morning when the trains were already closed.

“As long as there’s a place to stay.” It’s still better than commuting at 3am.

“Let’s drop your stuff first.”

The sports facility was a 15 minute train ride and as Levi exited the station, he was greeted by a large building that stretched out a fair number of meters in both directions. Was that the sports facility?

That wasn’t their destination though. Hange guided him through a few alleys and out into a main street where a quaint mid rise condominium was located right to their left.  

“My condo only has one bedroom so I hope you won’t mind staying on the couch. It has a pull out bed though so you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable.”

Somehow Levi had expected a hotel. “Wait, I’m staying in your place?��

The area Hange lived in turned out to be only 15 minutes away by train but oddly enough, it was Levi’s first time there. He found himself just gazing at nothing in particular but whatever was in front of him at that moment as they walked through the streets. They were going to have brunch in a nearby cafe, Hange had clarified. He found himself particularly entertained by the crowds, the grey pavement and the tall buildings that lined his view all making up the urban jungle of the center of town.

The university and the surrounding town where Levi spent a good chunk of his five years was located in a quieter part of the city which Levi had gotten accustomed to pretty fast when he moved there. He never left that area unless necessary for competitions or for schoolwork. Consequently, he was not completely used to the bustle at the center of the city,

They had settled into a diner in a small part or town with Hange offering to pay for the lunch. As soon as they had given their orders, Hange slid a document to him with the words “personal data sheet” written in bold on the top. “In the final output, you will remain anonymous, Erwin just requested we keep the basic data on everyone we study.” Hange explained.

Levi scanned the document before looking up at Hange again. By the way she had looked at him, Levi was sure she could have answered some of it for him. “Why don’t you answer it for me.“ He challenged.

“It’s your data Levi so I---”

“I wanna see how much about me you know.” Levi answered with a no-nonsense tone.

Hange turned red as she pulled the form back towards herself. She scribbled a few things on the paper. “Where do you live?”

Levi gave his city and province.

“I knew that much.” Hange admitted. “Exact address?”

Levi answered it briefly, spelling it out when needed.  “How many siblings do I have? What are their names?”

“Trick question. You’re an only child.” Hange said, looking up from the data sheet.

“The number question isn’t a trick question. You can answer with zero.” Levi continued. He did not need to make an effort to keep his tone playful. He was amused already. “And how do you know about my family?”

“Interviews.” Hange answered briefly.

Levi smiled. “I know you’re an only child too.”

“How did you know that?” Hange asked.

“Interviews.” Levi could see she had relaxed, a small smile creeping up her lips.

“So you’re researching me too.” She asked.

“You started it.”

“Which city am I actually from?” Hange challenged.

“You grew up here…” Levi answered. He sat up a little straighter. Seeing the amused smile on Hange's face, Levi felt it was a good time for other questions. His mind raced as he articulated one of his passing thoughts as he read through her articles.  “Which brings up the question, if you live so near campus, why do you live in your own condo?” The public transport here isn’t shit either. Levi noted to himself. She had little excuse to live alone and from the looks of her place, she seemed to come from a well off family who could at least afford a place like that.  

“I wanted freedom.”

                           A Tale of Two Slaves

The gym was huge. It was also so complete, the coverage so comprehensive that Levi was almost inspired to take up all the sports offered. They had indoor basketball courts, tennis courts and a complete track and field set.

The important part Hange pointed out as they entered though were the devices that could measure things like speed, weight, pulse, all necessary for her study. One of the more boring parts of the tour but surprising none the least.

Levi found himself particularly fixated on the fact that Hange was greeting everyone in the job like a regular.

"Hey, you weren't at the gym this morning."

"Had to pick up my friend here. He'll be helping me with my thesis."

Levi felt a tap on his back, brief and light. Maybe hesitant? Levi could not help but entertain the passing thought that if he were Moblit or maybe anyone else, she probably would have had her arm around his shoulders. He had seen her make that gesture towards Moblit and Elijah after all.

As Hange walked towards the desk and made conversation with what looked to be the receptionist, Levi watched her from behind. At first she had seemed too nerdy and too geeky that he had expected her to be lanky under the sweaters and the white coats she wore.

That day, she was in shorts and a blouse and Levi could not help but notice how her body curved underneath her clothes, and as he focused on her legs, he could make out the subtle muscle cuts on her legs. Hange's physique was definitely more toned than average and Levi pondered Hange's own physical fitness.

Her vertical. Her endurance. Her strength. The same things she had mentioned wanting to study about him.

As Hange gave him a tour though, Levi decided that it could wait until later.

                               A Tale of Two Slaves

That morning, with only less than a minute to drop his bag and could only afford a glance of her room.

As he arrived back there late in the afternoon  after a long tour of the gym, he had to stop himself from making a face. The fastidious side of him was silently judging Hange.

It was obvious in the way Hange had prepared the bed and the way that most tables and furniture had space for a visitor to sit or rest that Hange had at least cleaned in anticipation.

But she's a horrible cleaner.

The sofa bed was prepared but the sheets were wrinkled. The trashcan was overflowing, a disturbing sign that Hange did not segregate her trash. The dining table was empty but a display table at the corner of the room took the brunt of what Levi guessed the dining table used to carry.

There were jackets messily folded on the display table and Levi recognized her schoolbag particularly by the keychain he had returned only a few days ago.

“Make yourself at home.” Hange dropped a few towels on the sofa bed before making her way to her own bedroom. “You can use the shower in the powder room. Also, what do you want for dinner?”

“Anything.” Levi answered. He was still bothered by the state of the room to demand much of anything. The food was free, the accommodation was free, he felt guilty just complaining internally.

Hange seemed unbothered by the shitty state of her “cleaned up room.” In fact she had seemed proud as she toured him around her house. As Levi watched Hange with her goofy smile as she played with her phone in between bites of the pizza they had ordered, he could not help but feel guilty for having harbored such negative thoughts when Hange seemed more relaxed than he had seen her in a while.

“What are you watching?” Levi asked, an attempt at conversation more than anything. There were things he had wanted to ask her, yet at that moment, he felt would seem too intrusive.

Hange turned her phone to him. The video Hange had been looking at was that figure skater glided to the rink and jumped into the air, rotating quickly.

“I didn’t know you liked figure skating.” Levi said, his eyes focused on the heart on the side, to see it filled over. Hange liked the video.

“I like a lot of sports. I definitely would have wanted to try skating as a kid. Maybe gymnastics or even track."

Levi tried to imagine Hange in a tutu or a leotard, having to hold back a snort as he did. “You never looked like the type to wear a dress.”

“I wouldn’t. But I’m pretty sure you know how fun it would be to be able to launch yourself up in the air like that. You’ve done it multiple times.”

Levi thought back to the interviews he had read, the answers she had made even since grade school. I want to see how people can fly . “Why didn’t you take a sport as a kid?”

The smile she had given him after was wry, a little sullen and Levi knew he must have hit something sensitive inside her. “Because my parents didn’t allow me. If I take gymnastics, I’d break my neck. If I take skating, I’d break my spine. If I take track and field, I’d break my knees." She explained in an almost mocking town." They never ran out of excuses when it came to sports. But when it came to academics, they were always shipping me off to some new competition.”

I wanted freedom. That afternoon in the cafe, Hange had answered it so casually, he had brushed it off as they continued to fill out the data sheets. As he listened to Hange explain her situation right there, Levi could not help but recall a twinge of sadness in Hange’s voice as she had said the word “freedom.”

“Don’t get me wrong, academics can be fun.” Hange said.  “But I don’t think it’s ever going to beat the adrenaline rush of jumping or sprinting.”

“And that’s why you’re going to the gym a lot now.”

“I’m in college. My parents can’t stop me now. But yeah, my childhood is done. I don’t think I’ll ever get to your level, even when I train everyday.”

Levi had heard people say that before. The body of a child is flexible, the bones and muscles can still be easily molded. By the time people grow to be adults, their body is set and sure, they could probably jump or run along a track casually, collegiate competition and professional competitions were out of the question for most if not all people who start a sport as an adult.

"Maybe I can teach you?"

                                    A Tale of Two Slaves

The Hange in Levi’s dreams was able to fly. She was the one who would be screaming as they glided through the air in those contraptions. She had the ability to launch herself up in the air, to flip, to spin, just like the athletes in the videos she constantly followed.

Hange wasn't at all out of shape either. In fact as he saw her in gym clothes and as he watched her do a few rounds around the empty track, he had to note that her form was good. Her physique and the cuts in her muscles were also well defined. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Hange who was watching him do rounds of jumps as she took notes was the same Hange in his dreams.

The bar Hange had set for him was clearable with little to no effort. After clearing a few rounds, enough for Hange to be satisfied with the preliminary data, he took the stopwatch from her hands and guided her to the place he had positioned himself a while ago. He opted to adjust it a few centimeters lower, at a height he had seen less skilled jumpers back in high school clear with no problems.

He spent a few minutes going  through the basics with her, particularly the method of softening a landing, having seen teammates from long ago get injured from that in particular.

“You’ve seen me jump countless times. I’m sure you can do it.” Levi assured. He knew that that last part was for himself more than anything. It pained him to see her nervous. Her face was a far cry from the Hange he knew.

She should know how to do it right?

Keeping the bar at its minimum and going through that landing with Hange a few times had turned out to be a good decision. It was in the way Hange had run to the bar, through the way her eyes went wild as she ran and as she landed right next to the bar that had fallen did Levi realize though, that Hange was terrified.

Terrified yet determined. Hange went back to her starting point and prepared herself for it a few more times.

“You don’t have that bounce in your step when you take off.” Levi bounced on the balls of his feet a few times for emphasis.

Hange gave him a quick nod before readying herself to run again. Levi could see she was tired. As Hange went through the motions pre jump, Levi could feel his heart beat faster. It took him a split second longer to realize why. Hange’s motions were wild and unsynchronized.

Levi did not say anything for fear of distracting her and possibly causing injury. He found himself running towards her instead. He was too late though. By the time he had arrived by the bars, she had fallen on it. One side of the bar flailed up in the air as Hange landed and she let out a loud gasp of surprise.

“Hey, you okay?” Levi asked, as he crouched next to her. He had kept his voice soft for fear of her hearing the panic in it.

Hange was lying face up on the mat, her light brown eyes looking longingly above her.

They had started training in the stadium at four in the morning, hours before the sun was scheduled to rise. It was only when Levi saw how unnaturally light Hange’s eyes were did he realized the ceiling above them was glass, and the sun had risen enough for the light to reflect on it.

“Must be nice to fly huh?” Hange voiced out before sitting back up again. “I’m fine but I think I bruised my shoulder.” She reached out for her right shoulder with her left hand and winced.

Having been jumping almost his whole life, Levi had forgotten for a while, how difficult the mechanics would be to pick up for the average adult. While gazing at Hange who had bent her head back and continued to watch the sunrise from the glass ceiling, Levi continued to reflect on it. If it were any other person, he probably would have even removed the bar as he thought them the mechanics.

The game changer in those particular circumstances was that it was Hange he was teaching, the subject of his dreams, the one who was flying with him from tree to tree in the forest. The one who was smiling and doing backflips, provoking him to chase her. For the life of him, Levi could not believe that she was not able to clear that jump.

                                   A Tale of Two Slaves

The sullen mood of a while ago quickly dissipated to something a little more bearable when Levi suggested they play on the trampolines adjacent to the track.

It had felt ridiculous at first. As Hange continued to gaze upward, mumbling about wanting to fly and as Levi himself dealt with the disappointment of what just happened, it had seemed like a logical suggestion.

It was the most mindless way he could come up with to get both of them flying and jumping and maybe, get them both cheered up in the process. They only had to bounce a few times for it to be exciting. After a few bounces, Hange started to laugh, she started to scream in excitement.

The same excited scream he had heard so many times before in his dreams. Levi found himself staring at Hange as she jumped. The spark in her eye was brighter than it had ever been. Her cheeks were starting to flush from what could have been excitement or exhaustion. After what could have been a few more minutes of jumping, Hange landed on her ass and let out a loud laugh in between gasps.

“Something tells me you haven’t done this before.” Levi said as he settled on the floor of the trampoline next to her.

“Parents didn’t allow me.They said I’d break my ankle.” Hange answered, after she had gotten control of her ragged breathing. She was sweaty and flushed but she looked carefree.

That was the Hange Levi was familiar with. Before Levi even noticed it, he had brought out his hand and lightly touched her on the side of her arm. Oddly enough, she did not resist the light and quick squeeze he had given her. As Levi looked closely at her, he guessed she probably didn’t notice or didn’t care. He quickly let go of her arm, a few seconds after he had noticed the odd action. Before that, he had allowed himself a few seconds to process the  warmth of her skin and the up and down movement that came with her heavy breathing. It was oddly calming and assuring.

She's real. She's alive. She's warm and she's breathing.

Soon after that, they were kicked out of the gym.  Actually, no one had kicked them out. The Sunday gym goers though had taken up their territory on the track as they started their warmups. Levi and Hange soon realized their time was up. The rude awakening to that reality had felt like they were being kicked out anyway.

It also turned out the giant trampoline Levi suggested they played on was only for the children's use. One reason, Hange had never bothered to touch it even when she did frequent the gym.

Hange had sleepily explained that part to him as she sprawled herself on the sofa of her condominium that afternoon. The early morning in the gym had left her exhausted. She fell asleep soon after and Levi could not help but notice the smile on her face as she slept. He wondered if she usually smiled in her sleep.

Levi settled himself on one of the chairs around the dining table in a good position to watch her, busying himself by going through all the Instagram profiles Hange had followed, following them using his own account. Some of the videos were in slow motion and Levi found himself in that same blackhole as Hange had been in many times before, begrudgingly agreeing that Hange was right.

The slow motion videos in particular showed the detail. The way the legs make a slight bounce before launching up, the slight movements the body made as it is suspended in the air. Levi knew there was a lot of body coordination involved in getting the highest vertical possible. Seeing the body work together, the miniscule movements all cooperating to get the jumper spinning, flipping or twisting was oddly satisfying. Levi was distracted, so distracted the only thing that could break it was the vibration of his phone accompanying the banner on top.

Coach Greg.

Levi was once again pulled out of his blackhole. Of course he’d have to train. He had missed multiple trainings the past week due to the wound in his knee. He had also missed yesterday morning’s training having to meet Hange. Their season was starting in a few weeks and he was their best chance at a championship that year. Levi wasn’t too surprised that their coach was more than ready to run through drills with him on a Sunday night.

After a few minutes of digging through Hange’s unit, Levi managed to unearth a pile of post-its and a pen. Thank you for letting me stay over. Gotta run. He wrote. He kept it short and simple, knowing he would probably end up chatting with her soon anyway. He stuck it on the dining table, slung his overnight bag over his shoulder and silently left the room.

As he took the train back to campus, Levi continued on his little blackhole. A video was just released, taken in a tournament in Russia just a few days back.

Quad Queen Alexandra Trusova.

Levi did not know his way around figure skating jumps but he found himself watching it in slow motion anyway. The sped up version was surprising but the slow motion version that followed was mesmerizing. Levi counted four spins in the air, noting both the slight bounce before the jump and the bounce that followed the landing.

As Levi refreshed the video on his phone, he could not help but notice that Hange’s name still wasn’t among those who had liked the photo. Was she still asleep?

He could only imagine the smile she makes as she watches videos. He clicked the paper airplane icon below the videos, scrolled through the users and clicked send on Wingsoffreedom132. He made sure to add a wings emoji and a heart emoji, the way Hange had done in a few of the videos.

Somehow, after doing that, it became easier to imagine that goofy smile a little more vividly.

[mordoriscalling]

Stay or Sail Away (1/6)

Here comes part one the modern AU fake dating Geraskier fic that I talked about in this post. I’d like to post each part daily. Tagging @geraskier-trashh as requested! :D

***

It’s not that Jaskier has any problem finding someone, thank you very much. It’s just that he’s busy. Busy with concerts and composing, meeting fans at various events, travelling, internet dramas involving Valdo (it’s always fucking Valdo). There’s no time for a relationship, only for occasional one night stands that sometimes that leave him heartbroken because he actually manages to fall in love with someone in the span of a few hours. It’s fine, though. Heartbreak inspires him like little else.

Jaskier's never complained about lack of bed partners, when he seeks them out. He’s charming, after all. Still, the moment he hears “commitment”, he flees. It’s just not his way. Or perhaps he’s never found anyone fascinating enough to commit to; it takes a lot to keep his attention.  He wasn’t even looking for someone like that. Not until recently.

His troubles began a week ago, during a phone call with his mum. She reminded him of his father’s 65th birthday party and asked if he would bring anyone with him. This was followed by a series of questions about his love life because, as his mum put it, “you’re 35, Julian darling, and you’re always working so hard! I worry you’ll end up alone”. In order to placate her, Jaskier might’ve lied a little tiny bit about some things. As a result, because of all the twists and turns of the conversation, he made his mother believe he had a fiancé.

A fucking fiancé.

Wanda Pankratz was ecstatic, wishing to know everything about her son’s relationship, but he dodged all the further questions by saying that she would meet his love soon enough. She left it at that but, of course, told half the family about it, if the texts and calls from his sisters and aunts were anything to go by.

Hence, The Post.

It’s a bit pathetic and desperate, Jaskier can freely admit, but he has no other choice. His personal guard Zoltan almost pissed himself laughing when Jaskier asked him to pretend to be his fiancé, and not one of his friends knows anyone who would want to do this. Not even his agent Triss could help him out.

It all drove Jaskier to log on his anonymous Facebook account (he is a pretty big name in the UK; better be safe than sorry) and post in one of the big London groups.

“I need urgent help from someone who’d be willing to act as my fiancé during a family party on February the 24th. The only thing I expect is the ability to sing praises of our love and to compliment my aunts. It’ll take around 4 hours and then we end our relationship. Age from 35 to 40. It’d be great if you knew something about the sea because I intend to introduce you as a sailor who’s never home and afterwards, you die. Can anybody help?”

Since yesterday, the post has got more than a thousand reactions (mostly the laughing one and likes) and hundreds of comments. Many people tagged their friends as a joke, which is not helpful, but Jaskier still scrolls down and down, trying not to let his hope die. Nobody seems to think his request is for real and he’s received no serious offers so far. Then, one of the newest comment threads catches his attention.

Lambert Rivia:    Geralt Rivia Destiny!

                              Geralt Rivia Fuck off

                              Yennefer Vengeberg Omg 😂 Cirilla Vengeberg-Rivia Eskel Rivia you must see this!

                              Cirilla Vengeberg-Rivia Yesssss!! This is perfect! ❤️

                              Eskel Rvia Do it Geralt

                              Geralt Rivia No.

Intrigued, Jaskier decides to check out these people’s profiles. Lambert Rivia is a handsome red-haired man who wears some kind of black military suit in his profile picture. Looking at his bio, Jaskier already knows why Lambert didn’t volunteer himself – he’s in a relationship. Eskel Rivia is blond, even more handsome than Lambert despite facial scars, and also has a photo in a black suit, together with a white cap on his head. There’s no information on Eskel’s relationship status and Jaskier is intrigued indeed. Yennefer Vengeberg is a terrifyingly beautiful woman who, judging how professional her profile picture appears, must work in some serious profession. Cirilla Vengerberg-Rivia is a lovely teenage girl with white-blond hair. Jaskier reckons she’s the daughter of Yennefer and one of the Rivia guys.

He left the poor Geralt’s profile as the last to look at, but now that Jaskier has seen the rest, he checks this one too.

His jaw fucking drops.

Geralt Rivia is a ridiculously handsome man. His face seems practically unreal because, surely, people as beautiful as Geralt don’t actually exist? The man’s long white hair (which makes no sense considering his apparent age), as well as his brown-almost-golden eyes, only add to his otherwordly, stunning appearance. Double stunning in that black military suit he’s wearing in his profile picture, just like Lambert and Eskel. The suit looks familiar and Jaskier has a nagging feeling he really should know what kind of army it is. Google helps him out and he quickly puts two to two – Geralt, Eskel and Lambert serve for the Royal Navy.

He bursts out laughing.

This is too good.

He wonders what he should to about this. Now that he knows about Geralt’s existence, he can’t really miss the chance of meeting him, however slim. His gut feeling tells him not to let the opportunity slip and well, who is Jaskier not to listen?

When he’s in the middle of debating what to write to the man, his phone pings. There’s a new messenger notification... with Geralt’s name. With a racing heart, Jaskier opens the message.

FEB THE 18TH AT 06:14 PM Hey. Everyone’s telling me to message you and won’t leave me alone. Is your request for real? Please say no

Jaskier chuckles and replies:

Hi! I’m sorry they’re bothering you and I’m also sorry to say that my request is very much for real. I’d be forever grateful if you helped me 😁

To this, Geralt responds with:

They really won’t stop until I agree They think it’s so fucking funny

Jaskier purses his lips, already suspecting this isn’t likely to work out. He'll have to face his loving mum and admit that he lied to her about fucking having a fiancé. She’s going to be so disappointed. At the very prospect, bad mood overtakes him, but he still types what he hopes to be a cheerful answer.

Damn, so sorry mate I won’t push you but, again, I’d totally owe you one if you agree  ☺️

What would I get?

Jaskier tries to reason with his hope to calm the fuck down and replies:

Money, or a favour of some sort, I have many connections Could be free tickets to my concerts  Even my company for the night 😏 Just whatever you want I really need help

Fuck

For a minute or two, the three dots next to Geralt’s photo disappear, and Jaskier’s hope plummets in a  dramatic fashion. Then, more messages from Geralt show up in the chat.

Free tickets seem fine My daughter loves going to concerts She’d like free tickets but I never heard of you

Jaskier starts begging any god out there that Cirilla is Geralt’s daughter. Teenagers make up a large part of his audience (which is great, actually; teenage kids are amazing these days). If she’s a fan, the free tickets are a major bargaining chip.

Well, Julian AP isn’t my stage name I don’t use it on fb

What is it? Your stage name

I’d rather not say here And you must promise me you won’t tell anyone about it too Well, anyone but your daughter

Ok

 Can you call me? It’s better to talk about this on the phone anyway

Fine.

Jaskier sends Geralt his number and waits for the call. In other circumstances, he’d congratulate himself on getting a man like that to call him so easily, but he’s too anxious. His hands itch for his guitar but he doesn’t get up from his bed. He begins smoothing his hair out with his palms, praying in his mind that Geralt hasn’t changed his mind.

After the agonizing wait of six minutes, there’s an incoming call. Jaskier takes a deep breath and picks up.

“Hello,” says a gravelly baritone voice so pleasant that it sends shivers down Jaskier’s spine.

“Uhm, h-hi, Geralt,” he replies a bit breathlessly, “so, my name’s Julian Alfred Pankratz but I’m known to many as Jaskier.”

There’s a beat of silence. “Jaskier?” Geralt repeats, “the one who sings Her Sweet Kiss?”

Jaskier beams, his chest swelling with pride. “The very same.”

“Fuck,” Geralt growls, “Ciri wants to blast this song whenever we drive somewhere.”

Jaskier laughs. “She would love free tickets to my concerts, wouldn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

Geralt says no more. Jaskier has to swallow down to sop his throat from constricting. “So?” he asks, “Can you do this for me?”

The silence on the other side is deafening and Jaskier doesn’t even breathe until Geralt finally speaks up. “Fine,” he grunts, his tone indicating it’s anything but fine.

Air leaves Jaskier’s lungs in a whoosh, replaced by a flood of such sheer relief that he may as well cry. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” he babbles, heady with joy, “Gosh, you’re my saviour!”

“Just don’t tell anyone about this,” Geralt grumbles.

“Not a soul, Geralt, not a soul.”

“Send me the details about when and where and let’s get this over w–”

“No, wait!” Jaskier cuts in, “My family’s very perceptive, they’ll know it’s a ruse. We should plan everything carefully.”

“You’re making me regret this,” Gerlt growls.

“I’m sorry!” Jaskier hastens to say. “Just... at least tell me a bit about yourself?”

Geralt lets out an irritated sigh. “I’m forty, serve for the Royal Navy with my brothers. Eskel’s the nice one and Lambert’s the prick. My ex-wife Yennefer works for the government.” Jaskier actually shudders at this one because he already can picture it. Yennefer seems exactly powerful like that. “We have a daughter,” Geralt goes on, his tone softening, “Ciri. She’s fourteen. We live in London but I’m away often.”

“Oh, lovely,” Jaskier says with a wide smile because, really, this man’s love for his daughter is so clear and endearing, “this is something we can start with.”

“Just make everything up about our relationship and send it to me. I’ll play along.”

“Thank you,” he breathes out, still amazed at his luck. Jaskier is almost high on the success of his ingenious scheme and his obligations are therefore non-existent, so nothing stops him from teasing Geralt. “Though, to be completely honest," he says cheekily, "you don’t strike me as the type to sing praises of our love and compliment my aunts.”

“Hmm,” Geralt replies. It doesn’t sound like a negation. “Yen says I’m not that bad if I try.”

The fondness with which he said Yennefer’s name is a cold bucket of water poured on his enthusiasm. “O-oh, ok,” he stutters out, thrown off-track, “So, uhm, would you be willing to try for me?”

For a moment, Geralt says nothing, then answers, “If you give Ciri an autograph.”

Jaskier laughs out loud. “Not a problem at all! Whatever she wants.” He pauses. “Whatever you want,” he adds more seriously.  

Geralt only hmms, in a way that Jaskier’s prone-to-romanticism mind would almost call warm. Silence falls between them but it doesn’t feel awkward somehow. “Have to go,” Geralt says.

“Okay,” Jaskier replies quietly, “Thank you again. I’ll text you, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

After Geralt hangs up, Jaskier huffs out a shaky breath. Deep down, he already knows.

This is going to mess him up.

TBC

Part 2

[rotationalsymmetry]

Thinking about the twitter "villain of the week" phenomenon and call outs that turn into dogpiles. Imagine you're with your family or some other large group for a holiday dinner. Everyone's eaten and you're back in the kitchen washing dishes, with someone else drying. Suddenly, the person drying the dishes notices you missed a spot on one of the plates. Now, people who aren't assholes (and even quite a lot of assholes for that matter) will just be "oh, you missed a spot" and hand it back to you to clean up. Because missing a spot when you're washing dishes is normal and no big deal. So you say "oops" or something and fix it and all's good. But maybe it doesn't go like that. Maybe they go "tsk, (your name) is being so irresponsible, they can't even do something as simple as washing a plate" and then suddenly your entire family show up with a list of everything you've ever done wrong since age 5. That would be utter bullshit, right? That would be emphatically not accountability, right? That would be your family deciding to make your life miserable just so they could feel superior or whatever, right? (That would be abuse, or at least something very close to abuse, since y'know it's important to name things what they are.) (I mean...a lot of people do the "let's talk about 20 different things you've done wrong at one go" thing without it being abuse per se...but it sure as fuck isn't functional.) (And no, the degree of the offense doesn't really affect things. If you, say, abandoned your terminally ill spouse to run off with the affair partner you'd been cheating on them with for the entirety of your marriage, that would be really bad, and it still wouldn't make sense for your family to all get together to tell you what a terrible person you are while bringing up things you did ages ago and so on. The focus should always be on making it better, not on painting the offender as a shitty person. No matter how big the offense. Figuring out who's going to take care of the ill spouse, not determining the exact level of assholery of the abandoning spouse and whether everyone should have known from one thing they said 15 years ago, right? There can be consequences, like not inviting especially nasty people to future events, without engagement.)

So, at one point I joined this one group on Facebook, when I was relatively new to social media. I mean, I'd been on FB for ages, but I'd just been following what my friends posted, I hadn't joined any groups specifically to engage with people that I didn't already know over shared interests. (A very different FB experience.) This group was nominally about being bisexual, but an awful lot of the posts (several a week) involved someone innocuously equating genitals to gender, or some other language thing that ignores the existence of trans people. (This was before I ID'd as nonbinary, but on a personal level that sort of thing still doesn't bug me. I recognize it bugs other people, and it is reasonable for people who do care about this to want other people to alter the language they use.) I'm not talking blatantly hostile stuff like calling trans women men. I'm talking the things that people who grew up being told there's boys and girls and you can tell which is which by looking at them, just do because they haven't yet adjusted their worldview yet. Intent isn't the same as impact, but there is a difference between an innocent mistake and outright hostility. And there'd be literally dozens of people making the exact same callout. And because there were so many responses, everybody in the group would see the post, because that's how FB's algorithm works. And then this would happen again the next day and a couple days after that. And I (being new to this sort of thing) was just like, wtf? Wouldn't it make more sense to set things up so that the mods have to approve posts so they can quietly shut those down and privately tell the posters what rewrites they have to make? Or at least shut down those posts as soon as a mod catches them, or make one callout and shut down replies so it doesn't turn into this snowball that you can't miss? If the problem is this is hurtful to trans people, why intensify that hurt by making sure every trans person in the group ends up seeing the post?

I eventually left.

I imagine people had good intentions, or at least thought they did. That "educating people" this way was the important thing. But thing is, mostly it teaches people that that behavior is OK, that behavior that recall I've already explicitly described as verbal abuse or at least as something very close to verbal abuse, and that's a terrible lesson. This is not how decent human beings interact with other human beings. In similar groups I've also seen one person make a brief call out and the called out person say "oh, I didn't realize, I'll (edit the post, or whatever)" and that's it, and that's entirely different, you know? A single low-key call out, not the entire group piling on. Which is why I don't really like the term "call out culture", because sometimes people have cultures around making call-outs that are actually healthy and reasonable and not abusive, that are much healthier than the cultural default of "if you bring it up, you're the one making trouble," and it really should be normalized for people to do small low-key "hey, you missed a spot" checks without it turning into "I don't have a racist bone in my body". If the person doing the dishes goes "I am a perfect dish-washer and therefore that plate is clean, and how dare you say I don't know how to wash dishes right", that's also a problem. But I do think we should have a way to distinguish between normalizing saying "you missed a spot" about social justice language, and normalizing everybody within a mile radius jumping on and amplifying the message and bringing the person's past behavior into it and also literally telling the person who missed a spot that they're a terrible person.

Especially since, y'know, follow the money? Social media companies financially benefit from those pile-ons. They encourage them. It's in their business model. It's "engagement." If you're cynical about corporations in general or social media companies in particular (and if you're on tumblr, you probably are)...then part of that should be recognizing when social media companies are manipulating people into being more assholeish than they would be on their own. Even when, especially when, it's done in the name of social justice.

[jodilin65]

Tom’s giving plasma now. Hopefully anyway. They won’t take him if they see leftover bruising from the last draw, and he’s been having trouble getting his arms to clear completely. He’s been gone a while now, so I’m guessing they took him.

I’m trying to make a point of getting 10 minutes of sunlight every day that I’m available during daylight hours. I didn’t get up until 8 this morning, so by the time I was fully awake nearly two hours later, I went out and it was beautiful. The sun still hurts my eyes at times and I guess it’s because I spend so much time indoors. That’s part of why I’m making a point of getting out there when I can. I’m definitely going to add two vitamin Ds a week rather than three because I can tell my TSH is rising. My energy levels are still better, but I definitely want to keep out of those double digits.

Spectrum was next door again yesterday and Ray still hasn’t gone back to blasting the TV. Who knows if that’ll change when I’m staying up in the evening when sound travels better and he’s more likely to open a window? Maybe he was busy doing something else in another room at that time but still wanted to hear whatever was playing so he cranked it up. We have the same house model and his TV is in the same place ours is which means the only way you can see it is if you’re actually in the living room. Hopefully, it won’t override the MLV or be noticeable in other rooms to the point where I need to talk to him. You just never know how people may react, but I do know my temper. I still shouldn’t have to listen to anyone else’s TV, music, or anything in my home just like they shouldn’t have to hear any of my shit in theirs.

Still sorting drawers and cabinets in the kitchen and closet and making progress. The negative to a small place is that while it may be good for the electric bill, it’s not good for finding things because you have to have so much stuff packed in tightly. In a bigger house, there’s room to spread it out, although I still forget where things are a lot because my short-term memory is going to hell. Nonetheless, I’m doing my best to organize things.

I have all things painting gathered in a large, clear plastic bin but there are other hobby-related items to organize as well, like diamond painting and drawing. I now have the latch-hook rug and cross-stitching stuff as well, though I don’t see myself taking the cross-stitching too seriously. As for the latch-hooking, I don’t know yet.

I’ve been toying with the idea of dedicating a Facebook profile that wouldn’t be in my real name to journals and other things. I already have an account that I’m slowly adding old journals to and the reason the idea kind of appeals to me is that while I wouldn’t be able to see my visitors there, I could easily share pictures and even my tweets there. On the other blogging sites, this is a real pain in the ass and I have space limits on me as well. I wouldn’t give up the blogging sites, though. I’d just share the link to it. I decided it’s okay to share links that don’t involve my main Facebook account. I’m very picky about who I add on my main account. I prefer to keep that for people I’ve actually met or cyber friends that go way back in time. I mean pre-Citrus Heights time.

I still long for a friend like Aly but I realized this is never gonna happen. There will never be another Aly again. It still would have been nice if there could have been someone with similar traits. Tinkerbella isn’t Tinkerbell, but she’s similar. She’s smart, playful, loving, and affectionate.

Understandably, we all want some attraction to those we’re intimate with but whenever it comes to friends, I’ve never given a shit what they look like. I would value a 300-pound blimp full of acne who was honest, real, intelligent, and accepting over a gorgeous person who lied and was judgmental. Honesty and intelligence are what I value most on top of acceptance. They don’t have to be a rocket scientist because no one knows it all. It’s just that smarter people tend to be more reasonable.

Only stupid people like Andy would think I could possibly have some reason to lie about my sleep disorder, for example. What compounded his stupidity was that he should have known better after knowing me all my life. It wasn’t just me, though. He thinks everybody is lying about everything. But smarter people are usually smart enough to be able to tell these kinds of things and also able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, even if they’ve never been in those shoes themselves. They just seem to be better at being able to rationalize and understand things even if they’ve never experienced them. So Aly was smart enough to realize A, there couldn’t be any good reason why someone would make up something so bizarre to begin with, and B, no one would want to live with such a thing. It didn’t take her God knows how much time to finally “hit her like a bell in the night” that no one wants to get up at 3 in the morning.

Actually, it’s getting up around 6 in the evening I hate most because while I may get more peace that way, by the time the sun is up and stores are open, I’m getting tired.

I like smart people. They’re observant, they catch on quicker, they tend to retain what they learn, and are just more open and accepting in general. I would love to have a special friend like that where we share what’s going on in each other’s lives nearly every day and have some interests in common, especially writing. But I just don’t see it being meant to be. I wasn’t kidding when I said that Aly losing her life wasn’t just a punishment for her, but for those who cared about her as well. There’s been an empty void in my life but you can’t make people be what they aren’t or hunt for a specific person and expect them to want a relationship or friendship and like the same things you do in the way you can hunt for a specific item of clothing. There’s just no ordering up a second Aly-like friend. I’ve found that most things that happen aren’t planned. If she’s out there (a he would be fine, although I still prefer a she) I haven’t met her yet and if I have I don’t know it.

I made a promise to myself that if I ever meet this special friend, as long as she’s honest, not overly emotional/dramatic, doesn’t use me as Mary did, and isn’t hurting anyone, I’ll never judge her and will be a good listener when she wants while also giving her space when she wants. If she wants me to keep her out of my journal, I will do that as well. People seem to be all over the place as far as that’s concerned. Some don’t care if you write that they’re crazy mass murderers, others only want you to write good things, and some don’t want you to even mention the most mundane of things.

Unfortunately, Aly was a little less open with her life than I was but one of the things I really liked - for reasons I can’t understand – was that she really came to know me well through our talks and my journals, and she really got me too. I really liked her curiosity and how she cared enough to pay attention and learn things about both my past and present.

It really does seem like so much of life is unplanned. I never planned Tom, but even though I have been attracted to more women than men, his award-winning personality drew me in like a drug. Not that he was ever ugly or just there in the looks department. He’s always had nice eyes. The face is what I notice most. I’d rather a nice face on a less-than-perfect body than a perfect body with a boring or ugly face.

Here we go again with the barking. What happened to being able to go weeks at a time without hearing the fucking thing? It’s been a daily occurrence again. Still better to have a few bursts of that that only last a minute or less than TVs that go on for hours, but still. I guess I’m just a real peace junkie.

A dog I’ve never heard before was making this horrible squeaking sound the other day and the honker’s mutt was howling. I feel bad for the poor thing because he’s been out more and more and therefore it’s got to be lonely. Before, when he went out with his girlfriend, the other dog was still with it. So the thing is spending an awful lot of time alone.

In real life, Nane never had kids. She got pregnant at 39, lost the baby, and didn’t want to try again. But in the dream I had last night, I was thinking that her son was 8 years old when we last talked and would now be 12.

Then I had a nightmare that woke me up for a few minutes. A guy kidnapped me and was trying to pin me down on his bed. I was able to punch him hard enough in the head to knock him out. Then I wasted precious time trying to decide if I should carry on with the attack to ensure I got away or if I should just run.

I made the wrong decision and chose to run. I sprung up off of the bed, out of the bedroom, and down a flight of stairs, hoping to hell the door was unlocked at the bottom because he was already up and chasing me. I was able to get out the door and into the dark of night. I seemed to have run from a building that had a row of apartments in a secluded foresty area. The nightmare ended with me screaming and pounding on doors, hoping someone would be up and able to help me as the maniac closed in on me.

[bluescreening]

Internet Safety

Yeah, I know, you’ve all sat through the talks at school telling you never to tell strangers your credit card details or whatever. But it has come to my attention that there are a worrying number of people who don’t know the actual practical things you can do to stay safe and secure while on the web. These tips cover invasions of privacy from anybody including big companies and hackers. It’s probably worthwhile to give ‘em a go.

Personal Safety

Password Safety - Use a different password for every website. I’m not kidding. If you think you’ll struggle to remember that many, you have two options. Firstly, you can use a password manager such as OnePassword, which is probably the safest option. If you’re like me and can’t quite bring yourself to trust one (there’s no reason not to, it just doesn’t sit right with me) you can use variations on a password for unimportant sites, and then come up with secure ones for sites you share more personal info with. 

Have I Been Pwned? - This is a website which tells you if your email has been involved in a data breach. Don’t worry if you have been pwned - you have different passwords for everything, remember! Just be aware of what data has been leaked, and change a password or two if necessary. Sign up for their email notifications to stay on top of recent breaches.

ProtonVPN - A VPN, if you don’t know, stands for virtual private network. Picture all the different connections between devices in a network, linked through WiFi or cables, as highways. VPNs section off a lane for your own private use, so nobody can see what you’re sending or receiving. It’s unlikely that anyone will be looking on your home network, but on public WiFi networks it’s important to prevent anyone seeing anything they shouldn’t - it’s not hard to packet sniff! You can also use them to bypass school and workplace website blocking, and access sites blocked in your country. Obviously ProtonVPN isn’t the only one, but I’d recommend em as they encrypt everything and have some pretty beefy systems in place to prevent tracking. It’s available on all devices for free.

ProtonMail - Yes, yes, more ProtonStuff, but this is a really good one. I’ll get onto why Google tracking you is a bad thing later, but if you want to break out of Google’s ecosystem, ProtonMail is a good alternative to GMail. It encrypts all your emails, which means nobody intercepting the email will know what it says. That means it’s great for private matters that you want to keep secret or avoid Google telling people about, like banking and stuff. It’s also a bit more customisable than GMail.

Social Media Checkup - Do you know exactly how much someone can find out about you, just by looking at your social media? Facebook is a special offender for that one (I don’t even have an account there anymore - and dear lord was deleting it a struggle) but Insta, Snapchat, Twitter and yes, even Tumblr, might provide a creep more info than you bargained for. Think about how much you want to make public, or how much the app has on you at all. There are plenty of tutorials on how to adjust your settings.

HTTPS Everywhere - A very handy extension that forces websites to encrypt all your data as you send it back and forth.

Avoiding Tracking

Why? - I know it might seem weird that a large company, or even the government, might want to keep track of little old you. Sure, they can target you with relevant ads, but whatever, you use an ad-blocker anyway. That is, until you realise that behind the scenes, on almost every website you visit, data-brokers are collecting info on you and what you do online, and building a profile of you. It’s not anonymous. And it can be used for anything from determining your creditworthiness and insurance premiums to detailed surveillance. Yeah. With all the protests going on lately, it would make sense to keep these people from learning about you for your own safety and your future.

DuckDuckGo - Start by using this search engine instead of Google, and installing the Privacy Essentials extension. It’s a good search engine, for one thing. For another, it prevents tracking and lets you know whose schemes you’ve foiled, you meddling kid. It gives each site you visit a privacy rating, and lets you know how much it’s increased that by. For example, Tumblr usually receives a D, but DuckDuckGo has blocked some trackers and improved it to a B. It has also informed me that trackers have been found and dealt with on over 50% of the websites I visit. Google is unsurprisingly the main culprit.

Alternative Browsers - There are lots of things you can use instead of Chrome, and many of them work really well! I recommend Firefox, since it’s almost exactly like Chrome but open-source, and it also protects you from trackers and has lots of fun extensions. There are some other good PC ones too like Opera and Vivaldi, but I haven’t used them before so I wouldn’t know how good they are. DuckDuckGo has its own mobile browser which is currently my main one.

Adblockers - You can’t get targeted ads if you don’t get ads! You can choose who to show ads for too, so if you want to support a certain site you can whitelist them. Try UBlock Origin, or Adblock Plus. Install ‘em as extensions for whatever browser you’re using.

Privacy Checkup - Go through your Google account with a fine-toothed comb and check what is being tracked about you. Pause your YouTube history, your Maps history, your Google Assistant history. Clear what you can. Check Amazon too. Also, never ever use Cortana or Siri or Alexa or anything like that. Ever. No matter how cool having a robot assistant is.

And that should be that! I’ll try to keep updating this post with new tips as I find them, but this is everything I do for the minute to ensure I’m protected online. 

UPDATE #1 (9/8/20): I started using Vivaldi and goddammit is it brilliant!!! Extreme customisation, it's chromium-based so you have all your fancy Chrome extensions and it has a lovely mobile app too. My current browser setup on both desktop and mobile is Vivaldi with Firefox as a backup, both with DuckDuckGo and adblockers.

[bills-bible-basics]

Facebook: Is It Possibly Broken? https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/facebook-is-it-possibly-broken/ Around the middle of 2022, I began to seriously wonder if Facebook may be broken. Yes, literally broken. I mean, think about it. Facebook has gotten so big -- around two billion users, from what I have read -- that maybe its worldwide network of servers, bots and algorithms can no longer handle the load. Is it possible that there are simply way too many users, even though Facebook relies upon a global network of CDNs? Now, obviously, I don't know this for a fact, and it is just a theory on my part, but I suspect that maybe this user overload is in large part the reason why so many errors have been made in recent months. I am talking about all of the false positives with Facebook's security system. In other words, I am referring to the forced log offs, the forced lockouts, having to jump through Facebook's security hoops so many times, having to change our passwords so many times, seeing our posts frequently removed, etc. I know for a fact -- because my FB friends have told me so, and because I have experienced it many times myself -- that people are getting locked out, and logged off, of their accounts for the stupidest reasons. Furthermore, their posts are being removed when they have done absolutely nothing wrong. They haven't posted anything inappropriate. And that includes myself as well. In other words, we have NOT violated Facebook's "Community Standards" in any way, as far as I can tell. It makes absolutely no sense that these things are happening so much, and so frequently, unless there is some kind of ongoing systemic failure going on with Facebook. Folks, I just don't believe that Facebook's head honchos are so stupid, that they would continue to harass us that much. Think about it. They are already under tremendous pressure from the U.S. government, and from other entities, due to their multiple security gaffs, their apparent discrimination against Conservatives and Christians, etc. So why would they go out of their way, and do anything to further infuriate their user base? From what I have read, people are already leaving Facebook in droves, because they are fed up with it. So again, is it possible that there are some serious technical issues going on which have little or nothing to do with discrimination against us? I don't know how many of my related posts you have seen, but as I have already made really clear a number of times already, after almost nine years of virtual peace on Facebook, with near zero harassment, it became a real nightmare for me as of early October, 2019. The problems and harassment by Facebook techs got so bad, that I finally deleted my account in June of 2022, only to return 3.5 months later in September of 2022. Of course, now I just run a timeline, and no page or group, so things have been a lot more peaceful. However, sadly, it appears that I am STILL being shadow banned, and hardly anyone is seeing my daily posts. I actually make hundreds of posts each month. I wonder how many of them you actually see in your news feed. As I mentioned a minute ago, up until I opened my new Facebook account in September of 2022, I was being forced logged off and forced locked out of my account dozens of times. I was also forced to jump through Facebook's security hoops and change my password dozens of times over the course of three months. In May of 2022 alone, I was forced to upload my personal ID six times, which is why I finally got fed up and left in June of that same year. As if that is not enough, prior to shutting down my old account, literally hundreds of my posts were being removed. So, yes, as I have stated before, it seems like it may have been intentional harassment due to my Christian faith. But I am beginning to believe that it is that, and even more. Technically, it just seems to me that something is seriously screwed up, and the Facebook staff just don't have a handle on it yet, whatever it is. I could be wrong, but that is my suspicion. What do YOU think? Let us know. By the way, you might want to read this article: "Why I Am Fed Up With Facebook": https://www.billkochman.com/Articles/fed-up-facebook.html Thanks! https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/index.php/facebook-is-it-possibly-broken/?feed_id=170523&Facebook%3A%20Is%20It%20Possibly%20Broken%3F