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chicago-geniza · 3 years

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well i intended to go for a nice evening walk, ended up having a panic attack, ordering a couple of cocktails at the bougie bar, joining a jam session with a bunch of old hippies on the logan green (one of them gave me a handpainted wooden medallion which seems to be carved out of tree bark, strung on a length of yarn???), met a crustpunk train-hopping dude in town for the month (& his dog, in a leather-studded harness) who's lived in 45/50 states & a 44 yr old guy everyone called "the wizard" wearing a tattered, patch-covered robe who shares most of my parents' conspiracy theories & considers himself a latter-day prophet, he bought us sorbet & ice cream, wound up hanging out with them & staying up all night at their indescribably eclectic, cluttered, blood-spattered (!!!) apartment, belonging to 44 yr old guy's art curator father & decorated accordingly, smoking m*th & listening to music & talking (or rather listening to them rant/rave/recount stories from their incredibly wild lives), i gave them advice on applying for unemployment & medicaid & how to appear compliant enough w/ carceral psychiatric intervention so they won't section you without actually submitting to forced medication or institutionalization, especially if they assign you a case worker & do regular "wellness checks." also how to pass off certain aspects of behavioral dysregulation as executive dysfunction, get them to pay for an adhd evaluation, get an adderall IR scrip, sell the 30 mg pills (cite body weight, high doses of other psych meds as reason for higher dose; look sincere; play to systemic biases toward cis white men, unfortunately), & use the cash to buy m*th, if they'd prefer to keep doing that. you can also pass positive psychotic symptoms--agitation etc.--off as severe anxiety, especially if you have a history of trauma, & they will give you benzodiazepines. it is in their best interest to keep you docile, i.e. tranquilized, particularly if your past convictions & involuntary institutionalizations revolve around a pattern of aggressive behavior, & that's On The Record/there's a paper trail. (e.g. one dude got arrested trying to keep cars away from an injured bird on the road, some genre of raptor i think (???) by threatening them with a shopping cart, not hitting them, but like, running at them as if to collide then feinting at the last minute so they'd swerve out of the way. not the safest or most effective maneuver, lotta reckless endangerment, but the motivation was admirable. probably put the fear of god into some drivers, though. he doesn't seem to have, like, impulse control.) it's a lot easier & you have fewer run-ins with the cops if you game the system & appear cooperative. they gave me this coat, which "just showed up in their apartment one day," like i did. 44 yr old guy walked me back to apartment, stole a street sign & tore down a real estate sign en route, lori lightfoot did indeed take down the pride flag in front of her house on july 1st & replace it with an appropriately patriotic american flag, i walked past the idling plainclothes cop car & another marked police vehicle with their Mayoral Guarding Detail inside at like 4.30 am smoking a menthol cigarette (not inhaling), high on m*th, draped in a neon anime jacket, in the company of a visibly insane, unshaven & unshorn middle-aged man in a technicolor patchwork trenchcoat, holding a lit cigarette in one hand & an upside-down traffic cone in the other, which he was using as an ad hoc amplifier for a noise track playing on my phone. he was also carrying the stolen real estate banner &, inexplicably, a stack of mail. i gave him my old backup phone (no SIM card & doesn't hold a charge long, ancient, but still works), since neither he nor the other dude have phones (cops took them), also one hybrid edible for each of them, as a thanks for the m*th & the kindness. their hearts are in the right place but they have some fucked-up beliefs about "reverse racism" being real, while also saying in the same breath that you can tell our country is irredeemable by the way it continues to

treat black people. we were discussing medical weed for seizures on medicaid & 44 yr old guy mentioned one of his close friends, a black epileptic woman, whose seizures were frequent & severe enough they prevented her from working. then he added, in apparent bemusement, they she hadn't spoken to him in some time, & he wondered why. a little while later he relayed their last conversation & i was like "my dude, i can say with 100% certainty she is not talking to you because you said some *appallingly*, jaw-droppingly racist shit & did not even realize it was racist." then i, comma, a white person, explained to this man that he literally thought of their exchange as, like, an abstract argument over insignificant ideas, a theoretical exercise, & therefore considered it simply a smug gotcha to "counter" hotep theories about egyptian origin by claiming that "if that's true, american slavery & the oppression of black people in america are divine retribution for the enslavement of the jews in ancient egypt, an eye for an eye & a deserved punishment." like, first of all, what the actual fuck, if i were that woman i would also never speak to you again, second of all there's the collapse of historical time & mythical time, history & exegesis, an assumption that rests on spurious claims of biblical literalism (zionist colonization logic, btw! him: what's exegesis? what's zionism? me: never mind, not the point. exegesis is the interpretation of religious texts in a religious CONtext, in this case what you would likely call the hebrew bible.)--but most importantly it is 100% irrelevant to this discussion whether or not black americans are Actually Factually descendended from ancient egypt! you just told this woman to her face that the ancestry she claims, of which she's proud, is the reason & justification for SLAVERY & BLACK SUFFERING--not only that, but that if it WERE true, than black people would DESRVE to suffer, by DIVINE DECREE. you are trying to force her to abdicate her claim on this heritage by putting her in a position where she'd be forced to concede complicity in her people's historical & present-day persecution, oppression, & essentially the existence of structural racism. & using The Figural Jew as a rhetorical cudgel to bludgeon her into this corner. what a despicable thing to say. like, he hadn't considered it from her perspective at all, & once he groked why the comment itself was, like, unforgivable (idk, maybe she's more forgiving; she has a virtue-name), i started socratic-method-ing him through why it was particularly unforgivable for *him* to say to *her*--the individual is not responsible for the systems from they benefit, but they are imbricated in them, they are implicated when they actively perpetuate & uphold them, even with speech acts. & finally gave the same "there is no such thing as reverse racism because racism is not an individual act, it is an institutional, systemic phenomenon, & it is an ideology, one which individual acts can bear out or be in accordance with, & to which individuals can subscribe (this bearing it out in their behavior, in their institutional roles, in their interpersonal interactions--here i gave & solicited examples of each) or be subject (also gave & solicited examples). m*th makes me very good at Explaining clearly & he was surprisingly receptive--like, it was astonishing that it had not occurred to him??? but it hadn't, the same way it hadn't occurred to my mother, & she interpreted it as "reverse racist" when their next-door neighbor called her the "white devil" for disputing their property line, & i had to be like "ok but if you called in a random third party to mediate in lily-white [city], oregon, where white supremacists openly drive down the street in pickup trucks with swastika armbands, whose side do you think they would take, statistically speaking, in your property dispute. that's why racism is systemic & institutional, & your rude neighbor calling you a name over a disagreement does not constitute 'reverse racism,' because 'reverse racism' by definition cannot

exist." now this dude wants to like, read books, so i gotta get him some entry-level Intro To Racism primers??? how did i end up here, but better me than his black epileptic (ex-)friend, i guess??? jesus christ. both of these guys have the most chaotic, reactionary politics in a potpourri with these deep commitments to abolition & mutual aid & a kind of proto-anarchist consciousness, none of which would be called by those names, but all of which is borne out in practice & in the politics of everyday life. they remind me a LOT of my parents. i'm loath to imagine how they'd internalize my stepdad's rambling, street-preacher-style libertarian lectures. probably go out & buy guns & invest in gold on the stock market & double down on the conviction that free speech is being curtailed & individual rights are in jeopardy because you can no longer unleash a barrage of harassment against some guy on the street because you think he looked at you funny. these claustrophobic convictions, like the space to express oneself is getting smaller & smaller every day, *other people* are taking it away from you, suffocating you on all sides with their offense demanding your silence, they are *making* the walls close in--when in fact it's more like a holodeck. you're a member of the Hegemonic Group, afforded the privilege of the default, so you don't question the vast verdant expanse that is your domain--ah, Free Speech, the sun never sets on the empire of ~uncensored expression, you can say whatever you want whenever you want without facing consequences because you control all the organs that mete out consequences & you have also determined that those groups who might be adversely affected by your words--emotionally OR materially--are not, well...of consequence. but of course the vast verdant domain is an illusion, photons & forcefields, held together by the all-encompassing TOTALITY of the dominant group's hegemony, power, etc. once that power begins to redistribute throughout the system--however unevenly, however incrementally, however slowly--as even the smallest pieces are appropriated by those deemed inconsequential, who have endured years of systemic, material, institutional violence that allowed the dominant group to become dominant & retain its dominant position--once those 'inconsequential' groups speak up & say "actually, these words bear an indelible imprint of the violence enacted upon us, these words are the legacy of that violence, these words are a tacit endorsement of the ideology behind that violence, which classifies us as subhuman, & even if *you* can't hear those echoes, the words broadcast on two historical frequencies, so now that we're able to broadcast on a frequency *you* can hear, we request you find other language, & consider the implications of the words you've been using for years." well--once The Subaltern Speaks, the dominant group loses its 'innocence,' & becomes aware the vast verdant expanse of language is an illusion of infinite space, aware of the four holodeck walls pressing in behind the simulacrum of the horizon, & suddenly "what one can say without negative consequences"--largely social, sometimes, rarely, if social media goes viral, professional--feels much more claustrophobic. so they get angry. & some of them are just bigots, obviously, but some of them--like my parents, &, even, this weirdly well-intentioned m*thhead who said one of the most shockingly racist things i've heard in my life & *honestly didn't understand why it was racist*, is really riled up about free speech & individual rights, hates the government, hates "FANG" (facebook amazon netflix google) & has a bunch of dystopian conspiracy theories about data harvesting & personal information that only miss the mark in that they get too nefariously biopolitical (billionaires want to put microchips in everybody for surveillance to monitor our movements & sell us more stuff; they don't need to, they already use our phone location & browsing habits to generate the algorithm & sell the information to ad companies lol, it's digital& cast a

single illuminati figure in the role of comic book villain, controlling the operation behind the scenes like an evil puppetmaster (classic conspiracy fare; again, we gotta take that energy, that suspicion, the understanding that they are being taken advantage of & tricked, the idea that power & capital & resources are concentrated among a very small number of people, however it's not an individual wealthy villain with a desire for world domination who wants to turn Free Americans into microchipped drones, it's a *class* of people--or rather several classes, but *who those people are as individuals does not matter*. if you guillotined bill gates, another billionaire would take his place. bill gates qua bill gates is not the problem. it is classes of people who control the means of production & own property & profit enormously from exploiting the labor of a desperate, rapidly increasing underclass, i.e. from the system as it is. therefore it is in their interest to maintain the status quo, because it serves them. 'the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.' the middle class gradually ceases to exist. if you want to compound it by race, consider the GI bill as an example - you learn about it as the leg up that enabled thousands of WWII vets to buy houses, enabling them to enter the middle class. hundreds of thousands of third-gen middle class white americans still reap the structural, socioeconomic benefits of their grandparents' initial upward mobility, including,, very tangibly, those selfsame houses, which can be inherited & then rented out as a second property if the children or grandchildren accrue enough money to buy their own properties. but only about 100 black vets got approved for homeownership loans, despite the staggering numbers of black soldiers who enlisted & applied through the GI bill. anyway! the impulses are there, & they're only being funneled into conspiracy thinking because that makes intuitive sense on a narrative level. these guys have a high school education; so does my stepdad. their reading habits are...eclectic, sporadic, pretty much dictated by occasional recommendations & like, little free libraries around the neighborhood. it's both interesting & frustrating to see like - hey, here are these people, we agree on a lot of things, they're earnest & open & want to learn & would give their neighbor the shirt off their backs as a matter of principle. they'd give a *stranger* the shirt off their backs; they'd share whatever they had. even what chores there are in their collective--they live with two other guys--(dumpster diving, walking the dog, tidying up the apartment) are allocated by ability & inclination. they made advance plans to look after the dog & their roommate with War PTSD on the 4th of july if the fireworks upset them, jokingly called the dog an emotional support animal. you give them the tools, the reading, talk to them like normal people with a stake in society--like, imagine a society that would have a stake in people like you instead of criminalizing you & consigning you to the margins! that's already *political imagination* because anyone who occupies a marginalized position will have their existence politicized, whether they want this or not, so better to become a self-aware, self-reflexive political subject, no?--talk *with* them because tbh i am them, i'm just better at situational masking & also i am very very afraid of cops so i only damage property in groups during planned political actions (not spontaneously, because i feel a flash of rage at my neighborhood gentrifying, & simply do not have a superego, so i tear down the real estate sign for the fancy new apartment complex in a fit of pique, because in this house we believe that spontaneity can & should be developed into class consciousness, again, the seeds of which are there in the initial trigger for the spontaneous reaction, i.e. anger at gentrification. not opposed to a little direct action, but they're just gonna put up a new sign tomorrow, it doesn't advance your agenda or hinder the gentrifiers' progress. now, if

you sabotaged the construction site for the new apartment buildings & painted a few potent symbols + graffiti'd a pithy, written statement expressing your opposition to gentrification generally & these apartments specifically? in a prominent place, large font, eye level, visible & legible from oh, a block away? maybe as a member of a collective, your neighbors, perhaps? & you could sign it "[neighborhood] or [block] residents" to pack more of a punch, the power of a crowd speaking in unison to say "not OUR home, you predatory developers"? that's no longer spontaneous, impulsive, affective violence, & it's also no longer an individual--acting alone leaves you vulnerable. again--i didn't just *intuit* that he tore the sign down because he was mad about gentrification, i asked, in a genuinely curious tone, not at all accusatory, no hint of reprimand or censure, just...interested, "why did you do that?" & he was like "it made me fucking mad." & i was like "what about it made you mad? the apartments? how come?" & he thought about it for a minute & explained. i'm not sure *he* necessarily made the conscious connection until prompted. idk, i know people talk a lot about the fact that breitbart & drudge report are free while NYT & "all the news fit to print" is paywalled, & q-pilled covid hoax sites are free while "reputable" pandemic coverage & public health guidelines & explanations of mRNA vaccines for a lay audience are paywalled & that's true but also We Live In A Society & if you talk to the wingnuts who AREN'T that way because of any far-right ideology, a lot of them are just...autodidacts without much formal education but a lot of raw intelligence that leads to analyzing The Big Picture & trying to deduce a pattern, find a framework that explains why the world is the way it is, profoundly frustrated, deeply aware of American society's, universalized & figured as the world's, exceptional unfairness & cruelty, & *that can be redirected* with reading, discussion, prompting critical thought, introducing community connections, & perhaps most importantly for this genre of person, getting them to see patterns at work in terms of systems & structures rather than individuals, letting go of American individualism's explanatory power & belief in its liberatory potential (see: the sort of ad hoc libertarianism that goes hand-in-glove with much conspiracy thinking, both stemming from 1) mistrusting the government, & 2) ultimate freedom of the individual as the most sacred value, therefore it is what all enemies want to take away), outlining positive, actionable goals rather than just ambient suspicion & anger at authority, & figuring out how those goals can be accomplished more effectively by an organized collective (but this will ultimately benefit the individual). If the world isn't run by a shadowy cabal, if you begin to understand the structures responsible & how they manifest even on the scale of your block (e.g.!!! predatory developers buying up properties during a pandemic, tearing down affordable housing to build expensive condos on the lot, or giving old buildings a "spit and polish" so they can double the rent, pricing all the current residents out, not to mention all the little local businesses, almost all mexican & run by the mexican families who live here, that give our block its culture & will get pushed out by boutique coffee shops & the like, catering to a more affluent & almost certainly whiter clientele)--you can, in fact, change the world, something both of them repeatedly referred to as their purpose on earth. it may not be as a maverick figure, one against an army, but strength in numbers is an aphorism for a reason.

anyway! thse guys were also really weird about jews, in the philosemitic way conspiracy theorists of a certain stripe often are. the itinerant vagabond guy gave me one of his drawings; it's really lovely. i'm going to give them "are prisons obsolete?" & "the wretched of the earth" & some david graeber. 44 yr old guy has this idea that society is atomized & people aren't connected to each other & have lost the willingness or the ability to communicate with each other, also that the overreach of authority has driven some people to violence, & that makes the world feel unsafe to everyone else. he feels guilty because he is acutely aware that language, when wielded adroitly & intentionally, always has the capacity to manipulate; he is afraid of succumbing to the temptation, because he senses the coercive power of language within himself. the other guy was mostly quiet but said 44 yr old guy is one of the best friends he's ever had. he thinks animals are able to sense emotions and to heal, & he thinks they can mediate between people who have become too isolated, who have forgotten humans' innate ability to forge connections, approach others as social creatures seeking to bond instead of mistrustful, apprehensive, rejecting overtures of friendship because they expect subterfuge, or propriety has evolved to deem such overtures inappropriate outside of strictly delineated, artificially orchestrated contexts. deviation from the norm is not permitted. & back again to policing. they have an idea called "the omega family," omega for the end, a group of like-minded people who come together, who encounter each other serendipitously (predicted through auspicious auguries & recognized on sight through a constellation of signs & wonders, because of course we are all psychotic here, it was nice to just be psychotic & discuss these things like they were normal lol), & serve as catalysts to each other's "personal truth." anyway this is why i don't go out when i'm crazy, i always end up in situations like this, see also: the last time i did m*th, in a pizza hut bathroom in tallinn with an art student from glascow named muhammad ali (he went by ali), the son of white muslim converts--we thought it was c*ke but it got lost in translation & that's how i figured out i had adhd. later i got [redacted] by a filmmaker from kazan & he gave me his business card afterward for some reason, which was extremely funny. thankfully these dudes were better behaved. one of them even gave a speech about how men shouldn't rape people??? & also how our society shouldn't construct women as universal victims because in doing so it makes victimhood almost compulsory & shoehorns women into a victim role as part & parcel of womanhood? i was like yes my dude you are almost there, read the essay "abject feminism." (i did not tell them i was trans bc i wasn't sure how that would shake down, to be honest; couldn't get a read on it. did tell them i was gay & they respected it, though one did say he dated a lesbian once, & i explained that many men feel compelled to interject with an anecdote relating an exception to the rule or insist that they will he the exception to the rule, & it's really just bad manners, not even getting into the bad politics. he took it on the chin & talked about how the girl in question came home to find her partner dead of an overdose & his wife had just died of MS, so their relationship was more about grief & comfort than sexual attraction. i was like that's really, really sad, & it's wonderful that you were able to be there for each other at a time of such staggering loss, & i am a person who totally understands what you mean to communicate, but if a lesbian tells you they're a lesbian & you reply that you once dated a lesbian & they get offended & instead of responding with contrition or correction you elaborate on the tragic backstory of the relationship as though that explains the circumstances in which a self-proclaimed lesbian would date a cis man, other lesbians *will* deck you, or at the very least not take you, an unwashed white guy in

his 40s who isn't neurotypical & sits way too close for social convention in a way that could easily be construed as a come-on, in good faith.) tl;dr made some new friends, did some good drügs (i much prefer smoking m*th to snorting it, basically like purer, more potent adderall, & as such will not be doing it again for a LONG time, because i enjoy it FAR too much; slices through the brain fog & the chronic fatigue & the joint/bone pain, makes me able to pay attention, follow the thread of a conversation, actually be *interested* & want to ask *questions* & expand, build, encourage my interlocutor to elaborate, place more kal-toh pieces until the conversation shimmers into a three-dimensional shape, instead of being listless & exhausted & disengaged & *bored* all the time, so obviously i would get addicted immediately if given the opportunity, & i've known this forever lol)--now going to hydrate, refill pill case, write some emails, & meet C at the beach! not how i expected to reboot my brain, but it works! also putting them on limited facebook view because i try to keep some groups of people in my life quarantined from each other & that includes 1) my relatives & my academic ~colleagues (ne'er the twain shall meet), 2) my exes & my family, 3) my relatives, colleagues, & uh. a couple of lovely, but extremely psychotic dudes with very long criminal records i met while doing hard drugs

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rapeculturerealities · 3 years

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In the Supreme Court’s first ruling on abortion since the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court on Tuesday reinstated a federal requirement that women seeking to end their pregnancies using medications pick up a pill in person from a hospital or medical office.

The court’s brief order was unsigned, and the three more liberal justices dissented. The only member of the majority to offer an explanation was Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who said the ruling was a limited one that deferred to the views of experts.

The question, he wrote, was not whether the requirement imposed “an undue burden on a woman’s right to an abortion as a general matter.” Instead, he wrote, it was whether a federal judge should have second-guessed the Food and Drug Administration’s determination “because of the court’s own evaluation of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“Here as in related contexts concerning government responses to the pandemic,” the chief justice wrote, quoting an earlier opinion, “my view is that courts owe significant deference to the politically accountable entities with the ‘background, competence and expertise to assess public health.’”

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said the majority was grievously wrong.

“This country’s laws have long singled out abortions for more onerous treatment than other medical procedures that carry similar or greater risks,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Like many of those laws, maintaining the F.D.A.’s in-person requirements” for picking up the drug “during the pandemic not only treats abortion exceptionally, it imposes an unnecessary, irrational and unjustifiable undue burden on women seeking to exercise their right to choose.”

She suggested that the next administration should revisit the issue.

“One can only hope that the government will reconsider and exhibit greater care and empathy for women seeking some measure of control over their health and reproductive lives in these unsettling times,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

Julia Kaye, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court had taken an extraordinary step.

“The court’s ruling rejects science, compassion and decades of legal precedent in service of the Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda,” she said in a statement. “It is mind-boggling that the Trump administration’s top priority on its way out the door is to needlessly endanger even more people during this dark pandemic winter — and chilling that the Supreme Court allowed it.”

Judge Theodore D. Chuang, of the Federal District Court in Maryland, had blocked the requirement in light of the coronavirus pandemic, saying that a needless trip to a medical facility during a health crisis very likely imposed an undue burden on the constitutional right to abortion.

The case concerned a restriction on medication abortions, which are permitted in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. About 60 percent of abortions performed in those weeks use two drugs rather than surgery.

The first drug, mifepristone, blocks the effects of progesterone, a hormone without which the lining of the uterus begins to break down. A second drug, misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, induces contractions of the uterus that expel its contents.

The contested measure requires women to appear in person to pick up the mifepristone and to sign a form, even when they had already consulted with their doctors remotely. The women can then take the drug when and where they choose. There is no requirement that women pick up misoprostol in person, and it is available at retail and mail-order pharmacies.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other groups, all represented by the A.C.L.U., sued to suspend the requirement that women make a trip to obtain the first drug in light of the pandemic. There was no good reason, the groups said, to require a visit when the drug could be delivered or mailed.

Judge Chuang blocked the measure in July, saying that requiring pregnant women, many of them poor, to travel to obtain the drug imposed needless risk and delay, particularly given that the pandemic had forced many clinics to reduce their hours.

He imposed a nationwide injunction, reasoning that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has more than 60,000 members practicing in all 50 states and that its membership includes some 90 percent of the nation’s obstetricians and gynecologists.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., refused to stay Judge Chuang’s injunction while an appeal moved forward. The Trump administration, which often seeks Supreme Court intervention on an emergency basis when it loses in the lower courts, asked the justices in August to stay the injunction.

In October, in its first encounter with the case, the Supreme Court issued an unusual order returning the case to Judge Chuang, saying that “a more comprehensive record would aid this court’s review” and instructing him to rule within 40 days. In the meantime, the disputed requirement remained suspended.

Judge Chuang issued a second opinion on Dec. 9, again blocking the requirement. The “health risk has only gotten worse,” he wrote.

The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court. Its brief focused mainly on data from Indiana and Nebraska, where state laws continued to require women to pick up the pills in person.

In those states, the administration told the justices, the number of abortions had increased compared to the previous year. That showed, the administration’s brief said, that the requirement did not amount to an unconstitutional burden on the right to abortion.

That argument, lawyers for the medical group wrote in response, “defies rudimentary principles of statistical analysis.” Many factors could account for the rise in the number of abortions in the two states during the pandemic, they wrote, including disruptions in access to contraceptives, unemployment and other circumstances “that have made unwanted pregnancy more likely and parenting less tenable for some.”

Justice Sotomayor was also unimpressed by the argument. “Reading the government’s statistically insignificant, cherry-picked data,” she wrote, “is no more informative than reading tea leaves.”

#abortion #reproductive justice #reproductive rights #supreme court #coney barrett #aboriton pill #health care

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

…

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

…

I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

#scott alexander #substack #book review #fredrik deboer #public schooling #long #read the whole thing

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amidst-thestcrs · 3 years

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8 Facts about my Muse(s).

Tagged by: Someone at Summer’s old blog 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️ Tagging: @feralspace-bitch / @speck-of-stardust, @fightan0therday, @tr0ubled-s0uls, @starrys0nder, @hiemaleyes, @implausiblynaive, @defactomatriarch, and anyone else interested!! (You guys totally don’t have to do this if you don’t want to either ofc!) 😌👌❤❤

Morti

1) Despite having “freedom” while living with Gary, Morti actually missed out on quite a bit of typical things that other kids genuinely experience around her age. This doesn’t really bother her until other people start making her feel like it’s a problem though. Gary always had a convenient excuse for everything: they didn’t have enough money to afford cable so they only had a dvd player; most of his family had either died or lived far away so they didn’t ever visit extended family; they lived too far away from signal towers to get wifi so they didn’t have internet; etc.. Due to this, I imagine she missed out on quite a lot of normal things and probably hasn’t even done something as simple as been in a car before.

2) Morti responds well to kindness and doesn’t comprehend mean or abrupt people as she doesn’t understand why someone would be that.

3) Her favorite animal is a frog! She adores frogs so much and used to adore the little pond by their house when she lived with Gary. He actually caught one for Morti as a pet which she still has and named Henry! It’s her most prized possession and best friend. ❤

4) I think if Morti wasn’t able to form a strong bond with the Smith family when/if she goes back home, Morti would 100% be willing to go back and live with Gary again if that ever became an option, even despite all the lies.

5) Despite living with Gary for most of her life, Morti was still a “Morty” underneath it all as she’s always had a fascination with space even as a kid. She owned many astronomy books and even Gary brought her home a telescope for her that she used all the time to see the stars at night.

6) Morti has no memory of the Smith family whatsoever. She doesn’t remember any of them and will always feel bad for this especially since she feels like she’s probably supposed to remember them.

7) I think she puts up with the name Morti cause she doesn’t think anyone really cares enough to call her otherwise, but if given the choice, Morti would much rather go by the name September/Ember as it’s the name she’s used to and the one that feels most like her to her.

8) The Ricks have given Morti a card to stick in her pocket when she goes off on her own in the citadel. It’s basically just a little business card of sorts that she’s suppose to hand out and get back that literally says, “Hi, I’m an identity confused Morticia/Morty (not September/Ember or any other weird shit she says) from dimension C-323. I’m not lost or abandoned, I’m just annoying but they’re looking for my Rick so don’t take me. Okay, now fuck off. Scram!”. As you can tell, she did not write this note herself.

Rick

1) Rick’s been alone most of his life. After his parents died in the crash, he never really had any friends and was never able to marry so no other family either. Really since they died he’s been on his own.

2) In truth, I imagine Doofus Rick really wanted/wants a family like how all the other Ricks have, but it just never happened for him. The Diane (or other versions of Rick’s ex-wife) in his universe just wasn’t interested in him and honestly just felt like he was beneath her-- something she actually admitted to his face when they were in college and he tried to ask her out. Mostly any other time he tried to ask someone out since has had the same result anyways.

3) Medical science has always been more his area of expertise than other kinds of science which is the main reason why he was able to cure cancer in his dimension among other forms of awful diseases. I think he’s well known in his universe as medical genius and hero, but really he just considers himself just a regular person, nothing special.

4) He probably owns way more books than he’ll ever read in his life, most old science books and such.

5) My Rick never got a Morty like in the tv show, I imagine he tried once and the council laughed in his face. Due to this, he instead simply tries his best to help any other Morty in need that he can.

6) Rick occasionally volunteers at the Morty Daycare Center when he has free time.

7) If it wasn’t for his lack of time, Rick would most likely get a pet to help out with how lonely his life can be at times but I think he genuinely worries about not being home a lot to be able to take care of it. If he was home more, I could totally see him getting a rescue from a shelter somewhere, but he doesn’t want to burden an animal with lack of human interaction.

8) Rick’s not as stupid as everyone believes him to be, he’s actually fairly smart and can hold conversations really well. The thing with him is just mainly anxiety that makes him extremely awkward. If he didn’t worry so much about what others thought of him he’d probably have the confidence of a regular Rick but still way nicer than a typical Rick.

Summer

1) It’s common knowledge to everyone at this point that Beth turned into an absolute disaster of a mother after Jerry died which is the main reason why Summer and Beth have such an explosive and abusive relationship. Pretty much everyone in their neighborhood, their extended family, and at Summer’s school knew about the bad blood between those two but everyone just stays quiet about it tbh, even after Summer started showing up to school with bruises. Everyone assumes these two have always hated each other, but something that isn’t really known by others is that Summer actually loved Beth a lot when she was very little despite the abuse her mother constantly took out on her. She was young and trusted the only adult in her life even if she didn’t love her back, this is something Beth sometimes brings up in arguments to either annoy Summer or in attempts to guilt trip her. Usually it’s something along the lines of “I remember when you used to love me! You thought the world of me back then!”.

2) One sure-fire way to get Summer to shut up/get under her skin is to tell her she’s exactly like her mother or even looks like her. Summer wants absolutely nothing to do with Beth and even though the two of them are very similar in looks, she does not want to be associated in any way to her mom. She heard Beth say too many times that the two of them were way too similar that even the notation of that coming from someone else, especially someone Summer considers close, will immediately struck her silent and it will bother her immensely.

3) Summer absolutely loves astrology and knows a lot on the different zodiac signs. She’ll sometimes even guess someone’s zodiac before even knowing it and will even point it out all the time just to mess with people-- for example: “That’s such a Gemini thing to do too, you really are one, huh?”.

4) Although Summer’s attitude is a big reason why it’s hard to get close to her, that’s not the main reason why. It’s actually Summer’s trust issues that prevent her from having close relationships with people outside of her inner circle. Summer is very particular about who she trusts and lets into her life. Her trust is very hard to earn and very easy to lose. If she feels her trust has been broken, she’s very quick to immediately discontinue a friendship/relationship with someone and back away. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” as the saying goes. Now with that said, it is possible to gain Summer’s trust back again depending on the person, but just know it’s gonna be ten times harder to gain back the second time than it already was the first time. So good luck!

5) Summer started smoking at the age of fourteen due to it being an appetite suppressant. Since Beth spent most, if not all, of her unemployment check on alcohol, there wasn’t really ever food in the house for them to eat, at least not food that was safe to consume. On the rare times they did have groceries, Beth would sometimes hide food when she was drunk then forget where she put it, eventually leading to it going molded. However instead of throwing any expired food away, she’d always save it and then serve it to herself and Summer at a later date. Due to this, Summer often had a lot of food poisoning growing up and got most of her meals from school or a friend’s house. Smoking helped her not feel hungry on times when food wasn’t available to her so she actually was a much heavier smoker as a teenager compared to now. Being out on her own now, Summer has cut back quite a bit, going from about a pack or so a day to smoking maybe four cigarettes a day. She doesn’t really smoke in her house much either, always goes outside when she wants to have a smoke.

6) Despite not being religious in the slightest, Summer went to church with Tricia ( @tr0ubled-s0uls ) on the occasional Sunday just to cause drama with her friend. The two of them would often talk/giggle really loud, take turns “coughing” while not-so-subtly stating “God’s not real”, and in general doing whatever to interrupt church service. The two of them would often find a way to leave early to go smoke out in the parking lot or bathrooms and would get breakfast after service. The main reason they’d do this is because Tricia’s dad often times forced her to attend his church services as he was a pastor. Needless to say, Tricia’s dad did not like Summer, for more reasons than just one.

7) Summer still visits Jerry’s grave from time to time and leaves fresh flowers on his tombstone. She’ll never admit it cause she thinks it sounds stupid, but sometimes she just vents to his graves or talks to him like he’s actually there even though she doesn’t believe in ghosts.

8) Speaking of which, Jerry is the one who actually named Summer! The only reason why she knows this is primarily because of her grandparents, but also because she has a vague memory of him proudly boosting about that when she was little. The reason why he named her was because shortly after Summer’s birth, the doctors asked Beth to hold her and feed her in attempts of bonding with her child but she wanted nothing to do with her. Instead Jerry did these things for Summer and when asked what she wanted to name her child she claimed she didn’t care. This in turn left the responsibility on Jerry in which he chose the name Summer because she was born during the summertime and he thought “Summer Elise Smith” sounded beautiful.

#Queue #Dash Games #Morti Headcanons #Doofus Rick Headcanons #Summer Headcanons #save #tw: alchohol mention #tw: abuse mention #tw: kidnap mention #tw: unhealthy coping mechanism

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lonelyhearteds-a · 4 years

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hi .

okay , ive literally been sitting on this for actual months now because i realize there are more important things going on in the world right now , but im at my own personal breaking point and i’ve realized that i need a space to get everything off my chest and this is as good as it gets since i can’t afford therapy so ,, here goes nothing .

tl;dr. tw : drugs , mentions of suicide , overall negativity

so , we’re gonna ignore january and february issues because honestly .... i don’t recognize those months as canon . anyways , i’ve been off of tumblr since the pandemic started in america in march . i lost my job , and i’ve had to use my personal time in order to keep getting something in my bank account , but i was making that + unemployment for a few weeks . everything was fine , truthfully and utterly i was making enough just off of unemployment despite the fact it took 3 weeks to even be processed . then everything hit the fan and it flew everywhere . my mom relapsed in mid-april and she relapsed hard , but me pretending it’s just her illnesses went about my business and decided to ignore it until it exploded in my face . i’m not going into too much detail about it , but with everything she’s done since april we’ve now got a really broken and fractured relationship . it’s taken me nearly fourteen years to realize the amount of sheer trauma she’s put me through ; mentally , physically and emotionally . then , we were almost evicted because she didn’t pay rent for two months - so i had to use my entire stimulus check just to catch up on rent and the mortgage payments . then , i went back to work in may just to process shipping orders . again , was fine for the most part , however i wasn’t making as much and what i had saved my mom found a way to guilt me to spend it . this went on all of may , living paycheck to paycheck . june week one came along and my mom overdosed . this was one of the worst experiences of my life ; it was re-opening week ( apparently clothing is essential during a pandemic ) , my mom was acting like she had no common sense ( destroying the house , not feeing the animals , not taking care of herself , LOSING MY CAT , locking the dogs in the car in 100 degree heat , calling me names i dont even want to repeat .. amongst other situations ), and i didn’t eat . for a week . i was sick to my stomach with stress and exhaustion , living off of literally 5 hours of sleep between friday and thursday when i finally got help from my family after begging them to help me send her to a psych ward for two weeks . she called me every single day and we’d argue every single day . when she was released , it was as if nothing’s changed . she said she was gonna change , but she hasn’t . she walks around with a rain cloud above her head and if i don’t give her money , she guilts me into doing it . so on so fourth . we argue almost everyday about something , whether it’s money or my attitude somehow making her life worse . i asked her one day if she’s ever going to be happy and she flat out told me no . there’s so much more going on with her but if i posted it all i might as well write a book . i’ve never wanted to kill myself more than i do everyday so far this month .

now , july , i’ve recognized i can’t keep living like this . my company has filed for bankruptcy and is closing more than 1200 stores and we don’t know which ones are closing and which ones are remaining opened yet , but if my store closes i have no money to fall back on until i find a new job . i have no money for groceries or pet food , and i don’t have enough to pay all of the bills . my mom over drafted one of my accounts and now i have to pay that back with my next paycheck which means i’m losing $110 automatically when i get paid next .

i’m honestly just exhausted ? like . i’m twenty-three years old and i literally have no will to live because of this woman and the shit she’s put me through . i was not planning on making it to my birthday this year and i was definitely not planning on making it to august . i don’t know . to be frank , i don’t have the energy to care about anything anymore and my anxiety keeps telling my some of my closest friends are over me when there’s no reason for me to even believe that . i’m seeing them all next year at different times and i know they’re excited to see me but i sat here the other day just questioning if that’s even real . i don’t have any friends in the town i live in ; i don’t go out and do things because of corona and if i do , my mom forces herself along . if i buy myself something i have to buy her something or it turns into an argument and an all around guilt trip .

i’m trying so hard to save enough so i can move out , but .. it’s almost impossible at this point . and i don’t know what to do . i work full time ; there is no reason i should have to consider getting another part time job just to survive . i shouldn’t have had to to parent my parent and sacrifice so much of my life . i shouldn’t be this mentally fucked up , but here i am , once again , crying over spilled tea .

anyways , if you read all the way through , i don’t know when i’m returning to tumblr , but when i do i am still going to be moving blogs . nonetheless , i’m on d*scord ( ♡ kezrah fan club president ♡#9812 ) and i’ve been doing more rp things on there if anyone wants to talk or do things again ( im always game for a welcomed distraction , even if it takes me a minute to reply ) ; i still , for the most part , have the same muses that are listed on my page . love u all loads nd loads .

#tldr #long post tw #overall negativity tw #idk what else to tag

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diarrheaofthekeyboard · 4 years

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Destroyed

10.4.2020

Day two of “The Crash” and there’s been no improvement as I start typing this. I went through this last year and it’s how I finally went to therapy (I originally wrote that as “ended up”. But that’s my inner failure dialog.) I can’t control my emotions. I’m hot all the time. And well, my ass hurts (I did go to the doctor and changed the cream I’m using. It hurts both more and less).

I can’t get out from this feeling of impending existential doom. It’s not anyone’s fault and I’m doing everything I can not to take it out on anyone. I want to cry but there’s no tears. I want to kill myself but that’s ridiculous. I want to write or sing or something but I’m embarrassed people will hear/see me do something that’s not perfect.

Part of this is the internet. I have mostly stopped posting on guitar forums. I unfollowed every politics related poster on Twitter. And I have been unfollowing the source posters of my Facebook friends. Though Facebook pisses me off because you can block any post you want but if it still thinks you want to see it, it’s going to show it to you.

I’m still reading everything like an addict. And it’s not just the phone. It’s when I’m on the computer too. I need to make an effort on my own behalf to keep a book with me at all times. Yeah, I might only get a page or two here and there and have to read it over later. But I can’t keep exposing myself to human stupidity for a significant portion of my day.

The guitar stuff is uber stupid. Taylor comes out with a new guitar and these cantankerous fucks who haven’t even seen one in person yet already hate it because of marketing, bracing, wood, you name it, they hate it. Heritage’s new owners commit to changing the line for the better and these assholes either want them to innovate in a way that’s outside of the brand or can’t get over that the headstock doesn’t look like a Gibson. And that’s just the on-topic bullshit stuff that’s been going on for years. Nevermind the thinly veiled politics. I’m just over it. There was a time when there was something to be learned in these places. That time has passed.

And just because it needs to be said, I have no sympathy. If he dies, he dies. And Pence had better die too, because he’s worse. While I’m at it, religion is just fairy tales told to teach us a lesson or mask political commentary. None of it happened and very few of those people actually lived. Certainly none of them lived as written. So if that’s your basis to vote for impending fascism, and that’s why you won’t wear a mask, or you’re just a “but my freedoms” idiot, you deserve to die too.

This is all Inner Critic. I hate myself but I hate you more. I actually do think those things and that’s the part of the Inner Critic that is me. But getting red in the face while typing it is not. At this point, I’m just at input overload. With that as my baseline, it’s no wonder I need peace like Frank Black. I sang that song last year when I was at my breaking point and it’s no wonder the first Catholics record has been on my mind the past week.

Then, last night I had an argument with my wife. Usually our arguments are about me not helping and I’ve made a concerted effort during my unemployment to do more of the daily chores. We’re not talking about huge things here, just daily stuff that needs to be done. I seem to like to do those things at 3am while she does things as they happen. Call that more of not wanting people to see me.

Yesterday, I was putting away the laundry and she didn’t like how I did it. So she took over and I went to read to our son, who closed the door to his room. She burst in, furious, and went off about how nobody was helping her. I told her I was helping and then she took over. Then I told the boy to wait 15 minutes and went downstairs to do the dishes. So that’s the setup.

I’m putting the clean dishes from the dishwasher away and my Inner Critic just starts going off. Fuck this, fuck that, fuck it let’s get divorced. Fuck that, let’s walk out on the freeway and get run over by a car. That’ll show her. I mouthed “STOP” as loud as I could while vocalizing nothing. A silent scream.

This because my wife, who has been trapped in the house for over a week due to asthma and bad air quality, is going stir crazy. As you can imagine, she apologized later, and I apologized as well. We agreed we aren’t mind readers and need feedback before things explode. That’s how we’ve made it nearly 15 years. That’s how we’ll get through the next 15. We held each other for a long time.

The thing that bothered her most about the exchange was it happened in front of our son. He hates conflict and just wants everyone to be happy. She has flashbacks to her father screaming at her, and apparently, he was intimidating and sometimes physical, though I don’t think he ever left a mark. That said, those are traumatizing memories and she doesn’t want to pass those kinds of things onto our son. If you’ve read anything here before, you know I don’t want to either. My parents probably still spanked me at his age. And there was lots of yelling all the time. But they never left a mark either.

So she was more worried about him seeing us fight than anything else. And in my mind, yes there were raised voices, but there was no screaming. There was no cursing. There were no threats. There was “I hear you and I want to resolve this with you”. We de-escalated, we hugged, she stripped and made the bed, I did the dishes, and I went back into the boy’s room to read to him again and put him to bed. We agreed that we do make an effort not to argue in front of him. We can’t hold it in and let it explode later when that’s supposed to be downtime for everyone. If he never sees us disagree about anything then he’ll not only have a false sense of who we are, but won’t have an example of how we resolved conflict with our loved ones as an example. Those things matter.

So the situation is resolved and I’m still beating myself up about nothing today. And the only thing I have is this is my version of stir crazy. But instead of getting micromanagey and taking it out on others, I lock myself in a small room with no natural light, and stew until my inner dialog turns on me. This is why walking has been such a help. And I haven’t been able to do it recently because it smells like smoke outside.

This afternoon, the AQI finally dropped into the moderate range. So we ran errands. And all of us kinda went crazy walking around Target. It was just good to get out of the house. We came back and the boy and I played whiffleball. We came back and my new neighbor accused me of leaving a note on his car about parking, which I didn’t do, nor do I care about. That got my temperature to rise. I wrote a new riff with my new partial capo, this time on the A side instead of the E side. Then I beat myself up because my timing wasn’t spot on with the metronome.

We ate dinner and I helped the boy get ready for bed. Part of that was it was his turn to read. He saw the word “sit”, guessed at what it was, and gave up. I told him to sound it out and he said “sat”. I said “no, but close, replace a with i” and he just flopped over and said he couldn’t do it. So I told him “ok, well, I’m disappointed you just gave up. Say goodnight to your mother and go to sleep if you won’t try.” He did, and on his way back up the stairs, he asked me if I was mad. I said no, but I was disappointed. To which he replied, “do you still love me?” I said, “of course I still love you. Nobody is perfect and you can’t know everything on the first try. I’m here to help you but you have to put in the effort too. Mommy and I will never stop loving you” That seemed agreeable to him. He went to his room, I picked Ralph Towner’s “Anthem” for him to listen to, and he fell asleep.

It’s really interesting to me how writing this has brought me a sense of calm. Not because it hasn’t in the now three months I’ve been writing. Because, like everything else, it took me so long to do it. I never wanted people to see any of this and only post it because of the anonymity of it all. Maybe someone will get something out of it. The simple act of getting it all out really does help. It’s not pretty, not well written, and just a document of triggers and the reactions of my negative inner dialog. If you read this and say “yo, this dude is fucking stupid” well that’s the point. It is all stupid. But it’s pent up stupidity that’s been trying to kill me for my entire life. I may not be able to prevent the Inner Critic from speaking, but I can slowly deflate and weaken him over time.

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sublimestarker · 5 years

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Starker smut - Trim my hedges

Peter Parker was loaded. Most of it was family money, inherited by his parents and his uncle, but he still managed to double that amount. He worked on apps, and sometimes invested in properties and stock, with his aunt’s permission. “You’re only 19, Peter live your life while you’re young” she’d say and if he had a penny for every time he heard it and rolled his eyes, he’d be even richer. But even she couldn’t deny that their luxurious lifestyle had it’s perks - a nice apartment in Queens and a vacation home in the Hamptons. They were currently there, the July sun shining on Peter’s Ray-Bans as he watched his aunt showing the new gardener around. He knew that the staff never stuck around for too long, so he opted for scrolling through his phone instead of watching the man. Peter was forced to meet him later, when May introduced them.

“Peter, this is our new gardener, Anthony Stark.”

“Please call me Tony.” He said and stretched his hand out to the younger man. Tony, in his tank top and his dirty gardening gloves shaking hands with Peter who was dressed in Gucci pants and had a new Rolex on his wrist was a sight.

“Alright boys, play nice.” May ordered, before going back in the house.

“Kid, you should go in too, I’m gonna trim the hedges and it will get pretty loud.”

“Don’t worry, I have these.” Peter fished out a pair of Airpods from his pocket, and placed them in his ears, his music on low volume, so that he stayed focused. He wanted to observe the gardener a bit more. That guy wasn’t May’s usual type - tall, blonde, with muscles and blue eyes, like the precious ones. Peter particularly missed Steve Rogers, or Captain America,as they called him and a guy who he just called Thor. He had fucked them both, leading to their unemployment, thanks to his aunt. He still remembers the vicious arguments they got in.

“If you didn’t want me to have sex with guys who are twice my age you shouldn’t bring them over.” Peter yelled as he saw that May had fired Steve. His nerves got the best of him and he knew it.

“I didn’t bring them over, I asked them to work for me. You should really think of who you’re seen with, your little hookups can lead to bad press.” May shouted back. He hadn’t seen her this angry with him since he gambled last year.

“Bad press? What is this the 60s. I can sleep with whomever I want and the paparazzi won’t bat an eyelash.”

“Though you should be free to do whatever you want with your body, I’m still the adult here, Peter. There should be some limits. I just want the best for you, I don’t want you to get hurt like last time.”

“We’re still on that. I told you it was just a one time thing.”

“Is that why you were cooped up crying in your room for months. Because of a one time thing. Look I don’t want another Bucky breaking your heart.”

“Don’t call him that. Only I can say that. To you and everyone else he’s James.”

“But he wasn’t, wasn’t he. He was Bucky to his wife and kids, wasn’t he.”

“Get out.”

“Peter I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep my boundaries.”

“I said get out.” He screamed, face red and tears welling up in his eyes. He even threw a framed picture at where May stood moments ago.

Peter was snapped out of that memory when he felt his gardener tapping him on the shoulder.

“You’re so deep in thoughts that you didn’t feel that the first few times, huh kid. Anyway, I need to mow the lawn, so I’d suggest you move.”

“You don’t make the suggestions here. If I wanted I could get you fired right here on the spot.”

“Nice try kid, but I know that your aunt’s the boss here. Plus what are you going to do after you fire me? Replace me with a blonde, blue eyed muscular jock.”

Peter clenched his fist in anger.

“May told you.”

“Yeah, she didn’t want me making the same mistakes as the previous gardeners. Though looking at your attitude, I’m sure she won’t have a problem.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Oh, I know everything about you. Because I was you. I was a rich brat, with lots of cash and lots of fuck buddies.”

“Anthony Stark, Tony Stark, my father used to know your father. Wait, the Wikipedia article said that you ran away from home one night and that you’ve been MIA ever since.”

“Yeah kid, I know what it says, I wrote it. The truth isn’t that glamorous or mysterious. One night my old man saw me sneaking in my boyfriend. He banished me, it was a different time then. And I’ve been on my own since then. I was 18 and on the street, it was literally rags to riches, but well riches to rags. I tried a lot of things. Took a few odd jobs, went to community college, even tried to get back into the family business after my dad passed. Well nothing worked and here I am, in what I’m convinced is my personal hell on earth.”

“Why did you take this job then? You knew what you were getting into.”

“Because it’s the only way I can get money.”

“You see that little garden over there - Steve planted marigolds for me when he was still here. They should bloom in a week. If you stay at your job until then, you’re free to leave and I’ll even give you an extra 10 k. But if i seduce you before that, you’ll have to work here, all summer, every year. Do we have a deal?”

“Sure kid. Just don’t go crying when you can’t afford to get a new Audi because I can keep it in my pants.”

The next day Peter set his plan in motion, thanking God that May had to go back to New York to handle some unexpected business. He was going simple - sunbathing while Tony was working. So he sat in his chaise lounge, Versace sunglasses on and a tiny pink thong. Better to leave somethings to the imagination. Plus skinny dipping in his pool was one of his other options.

Seeing that his gardener was coming, Peter rubbed some tanning lotion on his milky white skin, before saying seductively.

“Hey, can you help me with the back.”

“Sure kid.”

He spread the lotion down the younger man’s back, obeying every command to go lower.

Tony’s hands were millimeters from Peter’s ass, when the older man leaned in and whispered in his ear.

“Why don’t you get dressed before your neighbor comes over to greet you.”

“Neighbor? Wait someone’s coming over for the summer? Which house is it, the one on the left of the right?” Peter asked frantically as he covered himself with a towel. It couldn’t be, right. He wouldn’t come back here again.

“Right. Why?”

“Did you see who was there? Was it just a woman, or a man, or a couple with kids?”

“It was a couple. What don’t you know your neighbors? If it helps jog your memory, the man had a sleeve tattoo of a biomechanical arm, can’t miss it.”

“Bucky.”

“You do know them. So, what is Bucky some old guy, whose son you fucked or something?.”

“He’s my ex. And he absolutely mustn’t see me.”

As if on que, there was a ring on the doorbell.

“Please get it.”

“Kid you have to reap what you sew. I’m not bailing you out.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Get in the house before he can see you.” Peter flashed him a smile, before jogging into the house. Locking himself in his room, he peaked through the curtains to see what was going on. He could spot Bucky and Tony arguing, then his ex leaving. His gardener then climbed up the stairs and knocked on Peter’s door.

“Thank Tony. I owe you one.”

“Cash rules everything around me, kid. Now come on, give me the money, Parker.”

“How about a blowjob, it’s worth more than I could ever give you in cash.” Peter tried his luck.

“The money, now.” Tony said through his teeth, one hand gripping Peter’s throat.

“Yes daddy.” The younger man replied instinctively, and made a mental note of how Tony bit his lip at that. Peter grabbed a pen and his checkbook, writing a quick cheque to Tony.

“There’s an extra grand for your silence on everything that happened.”

“Pleasure working with you kid.”

Peter could see Bucky’s car driving away, thanks to someone telling Ms. Barnes exactly where her husband had been earlier.

A few days passed and Peter tried his best to seduce Tony. From skimpy outfits to touches that lingered on for more that they should have, nothing seemed to work. But he had some tricks up his sleeve.

Tony had almost forgotten about the younger man’s seduction attempts and didn’t think much before accepting his proposal of a movie night. He was lounging on the expensive white couch with Peter in gray sweatpants beside him. The movie was Beach rats, Pete’s pick of course. But when them first sex scene started on the screen, Tony noticed something unusual, Parker was moaning. Taking his eyes from the screen Stark noticed that not only was the younger man moaning, he was touching himself. He didn’t stop stroking his cock when he noticed the gaze on him, he even started thrusting faster.

“Peter that’s indecent exposure.”

“But I’m not exposing anything, Mr. Stark. There’s a perfectly good movie and you’re watching me. Seems like you want to sleep with me.”

“Fine, if that’s how you wanna play it, I’ll watch the movie.” Tony said as he glued his eyes to the tv. He was staying focused until

“Tony” a desperate breathy moan cane from Peter’s lips. Ignore it, your will is strong.

“Mr. Stark, please.”. He’s just some little bratty twink.

“Fuck me, Tony.” You could be his dad.

“Daddy”. With that Peter came, his eyes were closed and his cheeks were a rosy shade of pink. Tony still kept his eyes on the screen, but there was a bulge in his jeans. Peter didn’t miss that and quickly came up with a plan on how to work with that.

“Well I’ll have to do laundry now. Mind if I squeeze past?” He said and accidentally fell into Tony’s lap, grinding his hips, feeling the throbbing member beneath him.

“Wow, Mr. Stark, you’re packing. You know I usually don’t care about size, but damn I’m sure you.” Before he could finish his sentence, Tony pushed him away.

“Don’t touch me, kid.”. Well plan failed.

Tomorrow was Peter’s only chance to seduce Tony. It wasn’t about the money anymore, nor was it a matter of pride. The younger man was genuinely in love and that terrified him.

Maybe if Peter fucked Tony all these feelings would just disappear. He was determined to find out. That morning they didn’t even exchange words. Tony was working by the pool when Peter jumped in. He swam a lap, before tossing his swimming trunks by the other man. Then he decided to practice his backstroke, showing off his “technique”.

“Care to join me? You don’t need a swimsuit. Come on daddy.”

Tony just sighed and started stripping. Peter’s eyes sparked up with joy. He was winning. And more importantly he was going to be fucked in his pool. Looking his crush up and down, he bit his lip. For an old man Tony had a nice body. Toned abs, big biceps, that perfect v that drove the guys crazy and his dick. Peter couldn’t wait to have it in his mouth, running his tongue over the uncircumcised length.

“Earth to Parker.” Tony was right next to him, oh god, he was so hard for the older man. “You know this week I realized that you get flustered by me. You, Peter Parker the handsome rich boy who can have any guy, likes me, an old man.”

“You’re not that old.”

Tony took steps forward and Peter backwards, until his back hit a wall. Peter’s breath hitched and Tony leaned into him, their lips millimeters apart.

“Is it worth it, if you loose all the money.” Peter asked, clearly taunting the other man.

“Everything’s worth it for you, baby boy.”

Peter closed his eyes and pressed his soft lips against Tony. But instead of feeling lips, he felt a hand. Anthony had placed his large palm between them.

“Psych.”. He said, before exiting the pool and drying off with Peter’s towel. Peter shamelessly rutted his hips against that same towel before cuming with Tony’s name on his lips.

The next day the marigolds had bloomed. Peter picked one and placed it behind his ear, as a sigh of defeat.

When Tony arrived he wasn’t dressed in his usual gardening clothes, but instead he was in a rainbow crop top and booty shorts.

“Parker where’s my cheque. I’m dying to go to the bank like this.”

“Oh, I was prepared to give you cash.” Peter said, opening his Balenciaga fanny pack to reveal stacks of 100 dollar bills.

“I want a cheque. I want to have physical proof that Peter Parker couldn’t seduce me.”

“Fine.” Peter pouted, stomping his feet up to his bedroom, followed by Tony. When he wrote the cheque, he handed it to the older man.

“Oh, Peter, one more thing.”. Before Peter could say anything, Tony pressed his lips against his. The kiss was hungry and sloppy, all tongue and teeth clashing together. The older man almost ripped off the buttons of Peter’s shirt, playing with his nipples. Tony pulled down his lover’s pants.

“Going commando? I bet you were watch me work and play with yourself, wishing that I was touching your sensitive cock, huh baby.”

“Yes, daddy.”

“Well you don’t have to wish for it any more, cause it just came true.”. Tony palmed Peter’s erection, swirling the precum from his head to the base.

“Need to taste you, baby boy.”. With one bob of his head Tony could deepthroath Peter. His cock was sensitive, he was ready to come just from that.

“Daddy please.”

“Fuck, baby boy, you have to be needier than that. As much as I like having your pretty cock in my mouth, I want you. Get on your hands and knees for daddy.”

“Lube and condoms are in the bedside drawer.”

Tony kissed Peter reassuringly, then coated his fingers in lube. His finger slid in easily.

“Baby boy, did you play with yourself this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And who did you think about?”

“You, daddy.”

“You know that bad boys get punished. Count how many spanks I’m gonna give you.”

Tony’s hand struck Peter’s bottom, loving how the younger man’s hole tightened around him. After 5 spanks Peter was a mess. His ass was red and he was drooling on the pillow, begging for Tony’s cock inside of him.

“Just a but more, baby.” said the older man. He couldn’t take the teasing either. He had to have his baby boy, now. So he just added two fingers and scissored them, opening up Peter. As the younger man moaned, Tony opened the condom and lubed it up, before entering his lover.

“Fuck, baby boy, you’re so tight for me.”

“Daddy, you’re so big, you feel so good.”

“Beg for me, Peter.”

“Daddy, please harder. I need you, please.”

“Okay, baby.”. Tony bottomed out, causing Peter to let out an almost pornographic moan.

“Right there. I’m gonna cum.”

“Say my name.”

“Tony.”

“Try again, baby boy.”

“Mr.Stark.”

“I won’t let you cum if you’re wrong one more time.”

“Daddy.”

“That’s right, baby boy. Now come for me.”. Peter came, making a mess on his bedsheets. He rode it out quickly, cock softening.

“Help daddy come, Peter. Touch yourself.”

“But I’m still sensitive, it hurts.”

“Do you want me to feel good?”

“Yes daddy.”. Peter touching himself and let out a whimper, his hard cock already twitching in his hand. Tony wrapped his fist against him, causing him to groan out and slow his pace.

“Don’t stop ,baby, I’m almost there.”. Just as Tony came, he could feel Peter’s hole tightening, the boy had come again.

“You did so good, baby boy. I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you daddy. Can you help me wash off, all this cum is sticky.”

#starker #tony stark #peter parker #ironspider #iron man #spiderman #peter parker x tony stark #tony stark x peter parker #starker smut #smut #lemon

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tysonrunningfox · 5 years

Text

Ripped: Part 20

Hey so uhhhh, I feel like this took forever?

Ao3

00000

“I just don’t understand how you aren’t bored.” The first thing Hiccup hears is Astrid’s voice, on edge and at ease all at once, close enough to surround him entirely. When Astrid’s fingers drag softly through his hair, he doesn’t care about the hazy confusion of waking up somewhere other than his bed. He knows exactly where he is. “There are obvious problems in the league—“

“Problems like the Patriots being the greatest and Tom Brady reinventing the game every year he postpones retirement?” Snotlout snorts, slurring the edges of his words slightly. Drunk maybe, but Hiccup doesn’t care because of Astrid’s touch lingering under his ear. “Those aren’t problems from my side.”

“Ok, but you have to acknowledge that in a league of thirty-two teams, the fact that the competition is between one team and everyone else means that there’s something wrong.” She’s emphatic but quiet, one step below a whispered yell, and she twirls a lock of hair at the nape of his neck around her finger, her nail barely dragging across his scalp. He wishes he could fall back asleep before Snotlout’s reply, but he’s not fast enough.

“Or that the one team is just that fucking awesome.”

“That’s literally impossible.” Astrid’s hand grazes along the back of his neck and pauses to rub at the least pressing knot of muscle in his back. “The entire point of the draft and the salary cap is to keep the league competitive.”

“But that doesn’t apply, because Brady plays for less because he loves the game.”

“Is that another way to say that he married someone richer than he is and he’s a little bitch who cries when he loses?” Her fingers brush across Hiccup’s forehead before she drags fingernails through his hair again, absent-minded and sweeter for how habitual the motion is. His hip and lower back feel like he’s been sleeping for hours without moving and he gets the feeling that she’s been touching him this whole time.

His arm is asleep and his eyes feel sandy and dry, but he can’t remember the last time he was this comfortable.

“You think men can’t be emotional? That’s pretty sexist of you.”

There it is, time to wake up.

He yawns, stretching slowly with a wince and lifting his head off of Astrid’s lap, elbow on the couch cushion to hold him half upright. It takes a couple blinks to detangle his eyelashes and when he does, Snotlout is staring at him, pale but distinctly smug in the way he only gets when he’s winning arguments about sports.

And he’s in a hospital bed instead of on Hiccup’s dad’s chair at the apartment. His shoulder is wrapped in gauze and his eyes are morphine bleary instead of happy Saturday night drunk.

Right, the hospital.

“Morning sleeping beauty, are you done being a spaz?”

“I’m still breathing, aren’t I?” Hiccup looks at the window, trying to judge the time. It’s too bright to be morning, the sun peeking through dispersing clouds. Early afternoon, he’d guess, given he feels at least partially back on schedule.

“You were snoring,” Snotlout tells him, forever helpful, “and sleep-talking.”

“Oh,” he sits up, looking sheepishly over at Astrid, “what did I say?”

“Nothing coherent,” she shrugs, rolling her shoulders and folding one leg underneath her, probably stiff from being his pillow for however long he slept. Her blue eyes are bright, teasing above the worry, and the corner of her mouth twitches. “Emphatic though. You really meant whatever you were mumbling about.”

She’s too pretty to be here, smiling quietly at him and cocking her head while he sits up the rest of the way and rubs his face. His greasy, stubbly face with gritty tear streaks from crying. Apparently he got enough rest to be embarrassed that this is the condition of the head he rested on Astrid’s lap for hours, so that’s something.

He preferred being half-asleep, her hands in his hair while she and Snotlout argued in useless circles, like this was just a usual night in a world he wishes he lived in.

“How long was I out?” He stands up and twists slowly side to side, willing the deep stiffness in his lower back to fade and losing the argument.

“Long enough to watch the same football game one and a half times,” she glares at Snotlout, standing to take a sip of water from a second glass that appeared on the bedside table while Hiccup was sleeping.

“Hiccup, you should probably get this sore loser out of here before she starts being sexist again.” Snotlout rolls his eyes, hunkering down further in his pillows and Hiccup recognizes the painkiller grogginess in his face.

That’s how Hiccup must have looked in the hospital a decade ago, down a foot and wishing his dad would leave and let him sleep off the dizzy fog in his head, while his dad insisted on staying, gray-faced and worried.

There’s a short list of days in Hiccup’s life that transected reality and made it impossible for him to go back to living how he did before them. His leg. His parents divorce. His dad dying.

Meeting Astrid makes the list, and the anxious twist at the thought of trying to explain the gravity of that to her builds on the depth of the line being drawn right now. On the precipice of a relationship he’s never thought he’d be able to manage after what happened with his parents, he’s here hovering over someone recovering from a gunshot wound, too involved to let them sleep.

Like everyone with a complicated relationship with their parents, Hiccup has of course feared becoming his dad. He always thought it would have something to do with gaining an unfortunate appreciation for bagpipes or the law, and more than that, he always thought it was impossible as long as he kept generally failing. If he didn’t try, he couldn’t come up short.

But even five years of tax dodging unemployment couldn’t save him from becoming himself. Accidentally like his dad enough for it to hurt, but entirely lacking the easy to avoid roadmap of his father’s footsteps.

“You ok?” Astrid asks, hand twining more easily than he deserves with his.

“Yeah,” he lies, “I could use some fresh air, maybe—”

“Like that’s possible until you shower,” Snotlout rolls his eyes, “it smells like the locker room in here, and it’s not Mr. Sponge-bath’s fault.” He points at himself with his good arm and Hiccup takes a self-conscious step away from Astrid.

“Ok, then some not-hospital filtered air. Will you be—I mean, if I go home for a while—”

“If you don’t, I will call Sharon to kick you out.” Snotlout’s hand hovers over the nurse call button, “don’t test me, Haddock.”

00000

It’s bright enough outside that he checks the time, squinting at his phone screen in the sudden sunlight appearing from behind a cloud. A little past two, but that seems irrelevant, considering he’s not quite sure of the day.

“So, shower?” Astrid asks too brightly, her voice snapping him out of his head for the third time in the last hour.

“Huh?” He blinks at her, sure he must have heard wrong. “If my head was so greasy that you feel like you need a shower now, I apologize. Sincerely.”

“Not at all,” she wrinkles her nose, half-teasing and half looking at him like he’s crazy and he scratches the back of his neck.

“Right, and now that I drew your attention to all this,” he waves his hand in front of his face, “I’m assuming you’re not offering to join me.”

“Hiccup!” She smacks his arm, hard but not as hard as he knows she’s capable of, and he doesn’t know how he feels about the fact that she’s laughing. A real laugh, a relieved laugh. At him, absolutely, but not unkind.

“Wait, are you?”

“The concept of a shower was the only thing to get you out of that room in three days, so I reminded you,” she blushes even though her reasoning is sound, maybe because it’s embarrassing to be essentially propositioned by someone who probably looks like they’ve written off soap as a concept. “You seem a little out of it.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Do you need to go back in there and get yourself checked out? Maybe you concussed yourself sleeping on that shitty couch?” The worried lines between her eyebrows make him want to smooth them out, to assure her the way she did him when nothing but the difficult truth could.

“No, I guess it’s just that nearly losing Snotlout is somehow summing up every trauma I’ve spent the last decade avoiding.”

Great, that’ll ease her mind.

“Every trauma?” She smacks his arm again, sort of gentler, “you’ve been holding out on me, I thought I got your whole traumatic past on our midnight tour.”

“I know we said that wasn’t a date, but I was still following the first date rule of baggage dumping.” He snorts, “you know, get the dead dad thing out of the way so you subliminally didn’t worry about impressing a future father-in-law, but the missing leg would have been a lot. I wasn’t looking for pity.” He can say it because he knows Astrid would never give that to him.

He fell on her when he was at his lowest, most terrified point, and she was nothing but honest and solid, and that’s more comforting than he would have ever expected.

“Well, I would have had more warning when we found your old leg attached to a murder victim,” she nudges his elbow and starts walking, freeing his feet from the pavement they felt glued to. He thinks if she weren’t here, he’d walk right back to Snotlout’s room, compelled but entirely unable to help.

“Second out of three,” he sighs, back internally creaking like a cartoon door when he forces his gait even, “and there was the foot? With the Ryker letter approximation?”

“I haven’t thought about the note in forever,” she shakes her head, pausing to tap too many times at a crosswalk button, “not that I forgot it, I definitely didn’t forget it.” The light changes color and she starts walking again, pulling him away from the hospital in the only way he’d be grateful for. “But no, we’re talking about your trauma, not Grimborn.”

“The letter attached to the foot sent to my apartment isn’t exactly Grimborn, is it?” He understands the blurring line attached but tugs at it anyway, seeing where in the web of Astrid’s ever-fascinating mind it’s connected.

She sighs, shoving her hands deep in her pockets like having pockets is a novelty. Then she looks up at him, biting her lip and refusing to wince at what she’s about to say, facing the truth again like he trusted her to do when it mattered most.

“Snotlout’s really high.”

“That’d be the morphine for his gunshot wounds, plural, what did he say?”

There was a time where Hiccup would have been mortified to leave Snotlout alone with anyone he was interested in, in any capacity. Let alone Astrid, or someone he felt this way about. Except no, he’s never felt like this about anyone, and her Snotlout tolerance is only part of it.

A part that lets her fit into a life he wants but doesn’t understand how to have yet, sure, but only part of the reason he likes her so much.

“He told me about your dad,” she shrugs, sheepish, and he wants to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes. A sexy chin grab, she called it, mortified and adorable but he shuts that thought off before he can follow it to blood and police and complication.

“I already told you about my dad though,” he laughs, “back when you thought you’d get murdered on a tour with me, which, I guess geographically, we were both close—“

“This, he told me about this.” She stops and faces him, looking so much like she wants to shove him that he looks away, trying to be distracted. The Ripped Tavern is right there, drawing him in like a perpendicular source of gravity, but he can’t focus on it with Astrid staring twin blue lightning bolts into his face.

“My tendency to change the subject?”

“He told me about how it was when he moved in.” Her voice is as gentle as the grip on his arms isn’t. The grip tethering him rudely to present day Berk, the land of trauma wards and messes he has to figure out. The land tethered to Grimborn through mystery, one important and one ephemeral and endless, a mystery resort for fascination without commitment.

As much as people want to live on vacation, when life’s consequences follow, it gets less fun.

“He told me how you found Grimborn-ology.” Her hand slides up to his shoulder, bracing, a little uncomfortable, and worse because he knows how much he trusts her. How right she always is. “And how before, you hadn’t been leaving the house or…”

“I’d just moved here, ok?” He starts walking because he doesn’t know how to talk while standing still. Because the Ripped Tavern is an eighteen-fifties pub that makes him feel grounded and he wants to be closer to it when he says too much and untethers himself again. “When everything happened with my dad, I’d just moved here to this city that he gave his life trying to protect. It felt hostile, but going back to live with my mom would be letting the thing he died for go. And…Viggo Grimborn was the only thing that made it feel like anyone had lived in this city before my dad died in it.”

The words shed more weight from his shoulders than he thinks they will, but for once, feeling lighter is worse. Dizzy, even.

“And now someone obsessed with Viggo Grimborn keeps killing people.” Astrid makes the leap he’s glad not to be bold enough to and he sighs, resting his head on the wall of the tavern. It’s old brick, sturdy brick, the kind of brick that weathers things it shouldn’t have to. “Centered around you.”

The bass inside kicks up a notch and the ‘Happy Hour, 3-6’ sign to Hiccup’s left catches his eye when the wall vibrates like it shouldn’t.

“Did…did Heather renovate?”

“What?”

“These walls should be solid,” he grabs Astrid’s hand and presses it against the brick, “they shouldn’t move with bass like this unless someone drilled speakers into the walls. Hundred and fifty-year-old stone walls with some cheap Amazon speaker system crumbling the mortar…” He exhales, voice heavy and tired, “there was no building code, just organized chaos relying on intuition, and when you drill into that...”

“Do you trust me?” She asks, chin set stubbornly forward like no isn’t an answer, and it hurts that she doesn’t automatically know that.

“A frankly alarming amount.” His fingers curl around hers against the wall and she nods.

“Good, come on,” she grabs his wrist and drags him after her, explaining over her shoulder as she yanks him around the corner and through the pub’s front door, “we never finished our private tour.”

He freezes just inside, bending his knees to keep her from pulling him over. It works, barely, and she turns around, head cocking under a row of tee-shirts that say ‘Grimborn 1883-?’ in drippy, red lettering, hanging on a newly installed rack on a freshly whitewashed wall. “What’s wrong?”

“Look around,” he gestures with his free hand, “she painted—is that an Alexa? I was joking about the Amazon speakers—“

Astrid cuts him off with a palm pressed a little less than gently over his mouth and chin and she’s too close for him to be this desperate and floating. He bites his lip to keep from kissing her hand like an idiot or licking it so that she jerks back and he can complain about HGTV and how it’s destroying the city’s landmarks.

“You said you trusted me.” She doesn’t let go so he nods, “then let’s finish the tour.”

“Some of the rafters in here are probably American Chestnut, and they’re coated in enough latex paint to look like shiplap,” he says as soon as she takes her hand away, “it’s—“

“You said it was my tour,” she cuts him off, pointing at the side door, her hair bouncing on her shoulder with the motion, “I want to finish it.”

“You said if you knew it was your tour, you would have specified for me to wear the hat.”

“As much as I like the hat, you don’t need it.” She pulls him towards the side door again and he looks at the old wooden booths, buffed smooth and half re-finished. “Hiccup—“

“Just a second, ok?” He impulsively kisses her too casually on the forehead, stubble scraping over her temple, and stumbles with a right-footed hop up to the bar. He raps his knuckles on the newly smooth wood counter and the busboy looks up, startled that someone is interrupting him cleaning a tap, like that’s not an insult to the impoverished people who once depended on beer drippings for calories. “Do you have a pen? And a napkin?”

The busboy stutters something to the affirmative and hands Hiccup a napkin and a branded pen that he chews on for a second to think of his message before scrawling ‘Drilling through hundred fifty year old mortar to install smart speakers, very Orwellian of you’ and sliding the napkin back across the bar.

“Give this to Heather for me when she comes in, alright?”

“Who do I say it’s from?” The busboy frowns but tucks it into his apron anyway.

“Oh, she’ll know.” He pats the counter and turns around, walking with the only immediate purpose he has left to the side door of the bar where Astrid is waiting, thumbs tucked in her pockets, “so, finishing the tour?”

“Or starting a new one, either way,” she opens the door that he’s never opened in the daytime and a direct beam of sunshine streams through, cutting paint fumes the way it never could the tavern’s usual dust.

Hiccup steps outside and half-wonders where he is, because he’s definitely not standing in the creepy, ancient alley he’s started three tours a day in for the better part of five years.

The alley is idyllic in the early spring afternoon, cobblestones clean from what could be rain if he didn’t know about the crime scene cleanup. The usually weatherized lamp post is glimmering and the crowd of people gathering between quaint, ancient brick walls could be from a picture of the outskirts of a small European city just now being recognized by tourists.

Hiccup blinks twice, his eyes measuring automatic distances from the wall to the storm drain, facts about Mary Johnson flitting through his head.

He remembers the first time he saw this alley, at the end of his first Grimborn tour when he was lucky enough to be standing at the exact spot Mary Johnson was found, just how Astrid did on the tour she attempted when she was deciding whether to have him arrested or not. Both times, it was cold and damp and the alley had a foreboding cloud hovering above the ground Hiccup still sees blood when he looks at, and he struggles to put the two images together in his head.

This alley looks like it goes with the Ripped Tavern as it was, before Grimborn-ology got a hold of it. A place where people live, a street that gets them places.

“So, fourth site,” Astrid elbows a guy out of the way of the storm drain and stands on just the right spot, “what do you have to say about it?”

“Ok,” Hiccup rubs his hands together, trying to find his rhythm with the small but irritated group of people filtering past them and trying to stand on the drain with Astrid. Oh, not people, Grimborn tourists, a phrase which makes his stomach churn like he never thought possible. One jostles her and she glares, looking back at Hiccup to hurry up. “Right. Mary Johnson, the fourth site. She was a prostitute looking for—”

“I know that,” she cuts him off, “I know all about the investigation and her last bar tab and how her murder is what got Ryker off of the suspect list for good. I’m asking why you care about it.”

He snorts, “it was always quiet. Lonely almost, except not lonely, because under that light,” he points up at the incandescent bulb that so accurately mimics the gaslights of a hundred years ago in the dark and sees a slightly cheesy-looking, oversized eyesore, “it was like stepping into a bubble where everything was the same as it was when—”

“Are you doing a tour?” A woman in a sparkly new Ripped Tavern shirt interrupts him, jostling between him and Astrid. “I thought all the tours were at night, I wanted to do one, but with the murderer still on the loose…”

“It’s a private tour, actually,” Astrid turns to stand beside him.

“He’s doing a tour!” She calls out anyway and a plump older man with a well-loved copy of that idiotic Krogan book under his arm steps up beside her. “I told you I’d find a daytime tour.”

“Do you also do a nighttime tour?” The man asks, “I think I’d prefer it with the ambiance, but my wife is scared.”

“Usually, I do, but…” But Snotlout. But the murders. But the fact that somehow in the last few months, giving tours has turned from getting to talk about his favorite thing to deflecting insensitive people away from questions that make him check corners twice before turning around them.

“See? It’s not safe to be out at night,” the woman giggles, grabbing her probable husband’s arm and tilting the book under it to better show its cover.

There’s a silhouette of a man in a top hat, brandishing a long, wicked knife and sneaking up behind a buxom silhouette of a historically inaccurate prostitute at the end of a dark alley. Hiccup bets the dog-eared pages along the bulk of it, spaced into four conspicuous chunks, are about bodies he doesn’t ever want to describe again.

“The Krogan book,” Hiccup flicks the cover with one hand and grabs Astrid’s hand with the other, “not quality research, half the dates are wrong, and he doesn’t know the difference between a ritualistic Jewish slaughterhouse blade and a steak knife at the Outback steakhouse they tore down the old kosher slaughterhouse to build.”

“Well, I’m not paying to be insulted,” the man huffs, tapping on his book and opening his mouth to make a point Hiccup can’t bring himself to listen to.

“You’re not paying at all, because I’m not giving tours,” he clears his throat like he’s doing exactly that, getting most of the attention in the alley before continuing, “you know, the great miracle of the Viggo Grimborn case is that by documenting a volatile period a little better than normal—”

“Deputy Ryker’s documentation is shit,” someone else in the crowd tries to start another argument that Hiccup doesn’t care about.

“Just a second, I’m leaving, I just want to throw something out there for you all to think about.” He pauses and Astrid squeezes his hand, encouraging even though he doesn’t need it right now, “Maybe, if you all thought about Viggo Grimborn as a fascinating window to what life used to be like, instead of fixating on who died here and how disgusting it was, maybe, just maybe, someone wouldn’t be copying it now.”

“Let’s go,” Astrid tugs his arm, half jogging past the crowd of stupid book wavers and laughing when he stumbles after her. A couple people try and follow, yelling something about the tour leaving, and he pulls her sideways into the narrow alley he hasn’t used since the night he found Jennifer’s body by the storm drain.

Two turns to the right down familiar passageways that welcome them with a faint echo of footsteps and the cool relief of damp air and he feels like he can breathe again, maybe for the first time in weeks. Maybe longer.

He’d like to think that the tall brick walls were thanking him for defending their architectural honor, separate from blood. Really, it’s him thanking them for the quiet as he pauses at the next turn, pressing his hand to the solid, cool stone.

“I doubt that counts as the rest of a tour,” he lowers his voice when the first word echoes and Astrid shrugs, a tentative, almost smug smile pulling at the corner of her lips.

“It did what I wanted it to.”

“Which was?” He steps closer, just barely, cocking his head and pressing against the ghost of a boundary when his eyes dart to her lips.

“I have dealt with so many Grimborn-ologists in the last few months,” she pokes the center of his chest and looks so defiantly at him that he can’t help but lean in, “you’re not one.”

He stops short and frowns, “what?”

“You aren’t well-adjusted—”

“We’re doing this now, ok, odd choice, I thought you were trying to cheer me up—”

“I’m not,” she smiles, pressing her hand flat against his chest, “I’m trying to tell you the truth, which is that you aren’t one of those weirdos obsessed with Grimborn.”

“I’m confused as to how you came to that conclusion,” he shrugs, gesturing at the alleys around them, “considering how we met and half of what we talk about and where we are.”

“I deal with people trying to steal Grimborn artifacts from the archives every week, at least, more often lately. A Grimborn themed bar just painted over a hundred and seventy-year-old building, to make it more comfortable for tourists to take a watered down walk past places where people died horrible deaths. Someone so obsessed with Grimborn’s methods that they had to replicate them has been terrorizing the city for weeks and murder tourism has only gone up.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with me,” Hiccup chews his lip and she sighs, shoving him gently away and crossing her arms.

“Exactly.” She shakes her head, “you have an interest, sure, but it’s like you just said, you’re interested in how people lived, not how they died. And learning that you got into Grimborn because of how much your dad loved this city…”

“So, I spend five years giving tours and you’re saying I’m a fake Grimborn geek boy?” He wants to be irritated just as much as he wants to laugh, but the result of the combination is too flat to echo even in the narrow alley. “At least my hat is an actual antique—"

“I’m saying there’s nothing cruel or destructive about the way that you learn things.” She says it like a compliment, tucking her hair behind her ear and looking importantly at him, like she can beam the meaning into his brain if she stares hard enough.

He doesn’t know how much gets through, but the fact that she means it this much makes his chest ache.

“We finished your tour, what now?” It’s either the exact wrong question or the right one because her expression softens to something like worry and she shrugs.

“I’m thinking I should probably go get my phone so that I can ask Fish if his spare room is still available,” she looks around, trying to see daylight at the mouth of one of the alleys, “how do we get out of here?”

“Here,” he gestures for her to follow him around the next corner, “why do you need Fishlegs’s spare room?”

“Because the twins couch is getting old really quick,” she squints as the sun pours into the mouth of the alley, pausing just before she trips on the low gate at the end.

“What’s wrong with your place? I thought you were pretty determined to fight off the serial killer onslaught with the home team advantage.” He stumbles slightly over the gate and catches himself on her shoulder, not that she seems to notice.

“I still haven’t been back after what happened to Snotlout,” she crosses her arms again but it’s more like she’s hugging herself than keeping him out. “I know I should feel better now that he’s obviously going to be ok, but—”

“He was sh—hurt at your place?” Hiccup feels himself go pale and Astrid’s eyebrows furrow, concerned and determined.

“No one told you.”

“I guess location wasn’t important when they didn’t know if he’d make it.”

“Hey,” she rubs his arm through his jacket, “he’s going to be fine though.”

“He was almost the fourth victim, wasn’t he?”

Astrid was right about Grimborn being destructive.

“But he wasn’t,” she assures him, “and now it’s over, the copycat has four murders under his belt—”

“But Snotlout isn’t dead—”

“How would they know that?” She trusts him to keep up with her logic and he doesn’t want to let her down, so he nods for her to continue. “The last thing they saw looked pretty dismal for him and the news hasn’t said anything about it.”

“It’s a break from method, it’s—all those other slum murders in eighteen-eighty-three that people try to put the Grimborn name on to make it a more gruesome story, we know it doesn’t fit because the injury profile was different—”

She kisses him to shut him up, hands on both of his cheeks when she pulls back, “the other sites are in alleys, even today. The first is in an inhabited apartment building that’s not in an awful part of town anymore, a drive-by was probably the most Grimborn thing they could pull off.”

“I don’t want you to stay with Fishlegs,” he tugs her hands away from his face and squeezes them in his. “He doesn’t like me, remember?”

“I don’t care, because I like you, and you have enough going on with Snotlout, you don’t need me in your hair.”

“You like me now, sure, but after a couple weeks with that moustache?” His lame teasing gets a barely there twitch of a smile before she nods to herself.

“I should still get my phone.”

He could let her go alone, he knows that, it’s the middle of the afternoon and there’s nothing dangerous about it. Especially because it’s Astrid, so she’s right, the murders are over.

She’s been good enough to tell him the hard truths though, and she deserves the same.

“I know I’m the one who’s supposed to be giving you a tour right now, but I think if you stopped telling me what to do, I’d be back at the hospital annoying Snotlout and feeling even more helpless than I do now.”

“Come with me,” she suggests but something about his expression stops her, “if I don’t want to see it, you probably really don’t.”

“I just had the Ripped back alley spoiled for me by sociopathic murder tourists, let me enjoy the ‘All Safe’ wall another day.”

“The ‘Al, I. Safe’ wall,” she corrects and he chooses to cement the image of her courtyard wall behind her, stealing his hat and correcting his tour because she couldn’t stand him thinking he was right when she thought he wasn’t, into his head. He doesn’t think it’ll do much against another pressure-washed, professionally, historically scrubbed patch of the ground, but it’s nice for now.

“Maybe you’re the Grimborn-ologist,” he teases, taking her hand and attempting a step towards his apartment, but she refuses to move her feet, one eyebrow raised. “I’m just saying, you’re awfully smug about a post-murder message.”

“A murder that I don’t even think was connected, by the way,” she insists as she starts walking beside him. The alleys aren’t much quicker than the main roads from here, and they’re close to Gruff’s anyway, so he stays on the main road, crossing the street one intersection early to avoid the alcove that Astrid doesn’t mention either.

“You’re still on that?” He nudges her side and she rolls her eyes, bumping her shoulder on his.

This should feel like taking Astrid back to his place for the first time, and it does, but the butterflies in his stomach are tired, more than tired. Suffering from insomnia, actually, because they absolutely didn’t get any rest while he slept on her lap.

She seems to doubt him for a second when he drops her hand and fishes his keys out of his pockets, taking a step back and looking up at the apartments with wide eyes.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” she watches the key easily turn in the lock before continuing, “this is just a nice place, for a guy who couldn’t afford frozen yogurt.”

“It was my dad’s,” he steps back to let her go first up the stairs, “it was paid off when I inherited it.”

“That explains it,” she smiles over her shoulder at him and he stumbles, catching himself on the handrail. They’re too close on the tiny landing as he unlocks the front door but it’s not close enough.

Of course, his phone rings right as he’s swinging the door open, still on full blaring volume from the hospital when he was worried he’d fall asleep in the waiting room when someone needed to reach him.

“Shit, sorry,” he frowns at the Caller ID as they step into the living room and vaguely recognizes the number.

“Who is it?” Astrid looks over his shoulder her face lights up with recognition, “oh, that’s Ruffnut.”

“Oh,” he swallows hard, wondering how much Astrid knows about the last time he saw Ruffnut, “I should get this but um, make yourself at home?”

Snotlout always sounds like an adult saying that to people he brings home, but Hiccup feels like he’s about to have to scramble for an adult to take the important phone call. But he is the adult, and for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, he doesn’t want to run from that.

“Sure,” she nods, looking absently at the poster above the couch while he picks up the phone.

“Hey Ruff, what’s up?”

“Is Astrid there?”

“Uh, yeah, I didn’t realize she’d hired me as her secretary though, I definitely didn’t accept without seeing the benefits package.” He shrugs and Astrid holds out her hand for the phone, seemingly understanding what he’s hearing.

“I’ll negotiate for you if you hand the phone over,” Ruffnut sounds almost panicky enough to drown out the suggestion, “don’t worry, you’re in good hands, I know all her terms.”

“Is she asking for me?” Astrid reaches for his hand.

“Yeah,” he hands it over and Astrid holds it away from her ear for a second until Ruffnut is done with her evidently loud usual greeting. She listens for a second before sighing and sitting on the couch, hand over the receiving speaker for a second.

“Sorry, this might take a minute.”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” He sits on the other end of the couch to take off his shoes and watches out of the corner of his eye as Astrid does the same, punctuating Ruffnut’s chatter with a couple bored ‘uh-huh’ type sounds and rolling her eyes. She bites her lip when Ruffnut says something particularly objectionable and curls her feet underneath her on the couch, fingers of her free hand fiddling absently with the patch on the arm’s old leather.

The comfort he felt waking up in the hospital with Astrid and Snotlout’s gentle bickering above him hits again but harder, closer, purer without hospital antiseptic smells. He wants Astrid curled on his couch, mildly annoyed but flicking impossibly fond eyes at him when she catches him staring more than he’s ever wanted a Grimborn letter he practically bankrupted himself for. He barely stops himself from blurting that out as he jumps to his feet, hands curled into awkward fists at his sides.

“I’m going to go take that shower really quick, ok? Cool, see you in a minute.”

He shuts the bathroom door behind him and sighs, not entirely sure that wasn’t a worse thing to blurt.

#ripped #hiccstrid #modern au #serial killer tour guide au #this chapter is...honestly really cute

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atheistforhumanity · 5 years

Link

An Example of How Bill O’Reilly Ruined A Generation With Mass Manipulation

Now, you might be thinking, “who the fuck is Bill O’Reilly, and why do I care?” That’s a valid question. Lovable Bill, is the predecessor of Tucker Carlson. He was the shining star of Fox News for most of my life, and he captures the hearts of minds of my parents generation with low brow commentary, manipulative opinions, and dog whistle racism. Bill pretended to be a regular class working Joe that spoke up for the little guy. Tucker Carlson outed his gimmick years ago before he would take Bill’s place, and take on the same fake persona.

So, how did Bill O’Reilly ruin a generation? It’s pretty simple really. Bill O’Reilly was born into the upper class and eventually took a place as an opinion show host pretending to be news, that spouted populist rhetoric in a way that always redirected opinions and anger away from the real perpetrators. Bill is literally one the most dishonest people to ever be on mainstream media, and for over a decade he delivered alternative facts to fox viewers, down played anything anti-capatalist, anti-conservative, and anti-racist. His motto has always been “no spin,” but I’ve never seen him present the whole truth in an accurate way my whole life. Bill is a more well spoken Donald Trump, who uses people’s prejudices, preconceptions, and complete unwillingness to research anything to manipulate people’s minds for a capitalist agenda.

But how does he do this, Ryan? I wish you would be more specific instead of making accusations. Well, it happens that I just came across a band new article written on Bill’s blog, where he tries to continue the glory of yesteryear before he was fired for sexually harassing several women in the work place.

If you take two minutes to read the article linked above, you’ll see that Bill is arguing that bad parenting is the real cause of income inequality. His argument is quite literally, people aren’t raised right and that’s why they can’t succeed financially. He says specifically that it’s not capitalism's fault.

Before I address specifics, let me point out what is generally manipulative about this argument. Bill has touched on a topic that literally any generation of conservatives can get fired up about, and will have built in bias to agree with. Remember, conservatism is literally resistance to change and an affinity for tradition. This also means that every generation bitches and complains about how the next generation raises kids. Remember when your parents told you that you would go to hell for watching Elvis shake his hips? Remember when there were no changing tables in men’s bathrooms? Remember when kids in school used to play “beat the fag” and then they cried victim when we said that was wrong? Yea...

The point is that he’s using a prevalent belief that many different people(but mostly conservatives) can tap into for different (mostly) unspecified reasons. Then he is attributing that common cultural division as responsible for income inequality. We’ll come back to that.

Second, is that Bill makes a point that on some level makes sense, but doesn’t support his larger claim. Are there a lot of bad parents out there? Sure. Do they have a negative effect on the child’s life as he suggests? Of course. Now we could argue all day about what makes a bad parent exactly or the prevalence of bad parents, but it’s irrelevant, because Bill hasn’t given us any solid reason to accept that this alone (or at all) is the cause of income inequality! It’s an outrageously dishonest argument. That doesn’t matter though, because this is how Bill’s followers respond...

Okay, I was going to screen shot some positive responses to Bill tweeting this article but I didn’t see any. Let’s just move on.

Now, let’s take a look at the substance of Bill’s piece.

Education: “If a young child is not exposed to learning by age two, that innocent, helpless person is already at risk in a competitive society. If there are no books in the home, no awareness-building games, no fun dialogue with the parents, the child may not develop a curiosity about life.”

That’s interesting, Bill, because public education and programs like Pre-K are socialist inspired initiatives supplied by the government for the benefit of everyone. Head start programs were first installed by LBJ, but the Black Panthers had actually initiated similar programs in inner cities to feed children breakfast before school.

To say that capitalism has no role in this issue is delusional. Capitalism accepts and even encourages inequality. Betsy Devos is the champion of capitalist education, where attendance is not guaranteed and any difficult or low performing students can be weeded out to create the appearance of success, under no public oversight.

The fight is always the same, liberals want to increase educational funding and conservatives don’t. This is why red states have teacher strikes all over the country and Republicans are fighting against publicly funded college.

If access to education from an early age is so important then we cannot withhold education and then blame those stuck in the cycle of poverty for their own inequity.

Environment/Work Ethic:

Here’s an old and tired argument from the right. People are poor because they don’t work hard enough. But, Bill, how could that be? The average unemployment rate in America is between 3-4%, and the worst is in Alaska with 6.4%. Clearly most Americans are working, you’re always bragging about how great this economy is. Republicans tell people who need assistance to get jobs, but surprise they already have them! We know people aren’t struggling to live because they’re not working, because we have clear numbers that show people are working full-time, but not earning enough to pay basic bills. It’s crazy, it’s almost like the cost of living just keep rising, but the amount people get paid doesn’t. All of this is happening despite the fact that corporate profits have soared, but it never translates into better wages.

While Bill drones on in his article about derelict parents, he never once actually looks at income. He sure doesn’t mention that the amount people are paid is literally up to the people at the top of the economic latter. They can choose to pay workers more or they can stash away more profit in their bank accounts. Guess which one they choose? Despite the fact that we have clear data that shows those who choose how much to pay workers are raising their own profits, the rich like Bill O’Reilly continually berate people as lazy. The entire argument is completely disingenuous because workers are at the mercy of employers.

And if you’re thinking, why doesn’t everyone just get a better job, you’re not thinking that statement through. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many jobs in the market pay minimum wage or less, and that’s roughly 2.3%.(Nearly 2 million people) You think, great, people can just get a better job. No, not really, because a large number of jobs pay just above the minimum wage and are not included in this figure. Even most retail jobs pay $1 above minimum at least. Pew Research wondered this too, and in 2004 they found that roughly 30% of all hourly workers were making more than minimum wage (7.25 at the time) and less than $10. Guess what, nearly 59% of the entire US workforce are hourly workers, and a third of them are were making $10 or less. I make 13$ an hour, live with a roommate, and am just able to live with no savings in 2019. If I had a wife making the same amount, we would drowned trying to raise even two kids. That’s a travesty.

Roughly 35% of all jobs require a college degree, which is a significant debt due to increases in education and cost of living. Education is very important, but unfortunately most people who are born poor, historically, don’t get to go to college. What does capitalism say about this? Well, again, in a free market system there is no mechanism to correct the disadvantage people are born into, and generally no desire among conservatives to do so. Conservatism is stuck in the past where the poor and uneducated make perfect laborers, but labor as a staple job market is dead in the 21st century. Hence the push toward service jobs, which is all an uneducated person do.

The numbers tell the real story. People are working, but not being paid enough. The people controlling the pay are increasing their own pay. Cost of living is rising faster than worker pay. Funding for education has been stagnant and the cost of higher education rising. All this and I haven’t even gotten into the politics that effect this issue.

How did Bill O’Reilly destroy a generation? By feeding them ignorant, pandering garbage like this article every night for years. By completely ignoring the real facts of any issue and directing your attention to a manipulative hot button, tailored to the bias of conservatives.

The sad thing is that Bill is completely representative of everyone championed by the right wing. They are unintelligent, malicious, racist, greedy, and completely dishonest.

#liberal #economic inequality #civil rights #workers rights #Bill O'Reilly #right wing media #fox news #tucker carlson #minimum wage #corporate america #conservatives #republicans

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toshikosatos · 4 years

Text

where I’ve been

trigger warnings for mention of suicidal ideation, and very nonspecific mention of sexual intrusive thoughts. brief mention of fear of starting a fire and contamination fears. (there is also a link to an article which I provide warnings for later, but here’s an advance warning that the article at that link mentions pedophilia.)

alternative title: “OCD: It’s More Than Just Hand Washing! (And Yet I Am Also Singlehandedly Keeping the Body Shop in Business with My Frequent Purchases of Hand Cream in a Desperate Attempt to Undo that Self-Inflicted Damage, As Well.)”

2016 was when it really started to get bad.

there was no real, or at least good, reason for this. my friend had just flown across the Atlantic and moved in with me and my parents, and it was so nice living with a friend and having that constant companionship. I had just finished my first year back in school after deciding to go back and finish my degree following a four year gap, in which I’d bounced between part-time service industry jobs, unemployment, and periods of severe mental illness. it was hard, but I got through that first year. I was 25.

things that sucked, though: season 5 of Person of Interest was happening, and after a year of anticipation, I wound up really disappointed by it. I have a tendency to fixate really unhealthily on my current favourite media, pretty much invest my entire emotional wellbeing in it, and then get totally crushed when it winds up disappointing me in some way. I still feel this cycle happening and don’t quite know how to break out of it, but it was worse back then. and the fandom was also full of REALLY toxic drama at the time that I couldn’t see clearly enough to disengage myself from (although it did ultimately lead to me quitting Tumblr). it wound up really triggering what I now understand to be my OCD, but I didn’t get that back then.

but maybe I should have seen it. I remember weird little things that popped up when I was younger. I went through a time for a few days as a tween when I couldn’t stop flaring my nostrils, or focusing on my blinking, and getting increasingly stressed out by it. later in my teens, I got more anxious about checking all the lights in my house to make sure none of them were about to burst into flames before I went to bed. I also had a bedtime ritual where I’d look at the moon and wish for my loved ones’ wellbeing, and it got more and more ritualized, in this way where I couldn’t step away and go to bed until I felt I’d looked at the moon just Enough, or done certain physical gestures by the window enough times. then I did a school project on OCD at 17 and thought, oh, hey, a lot of this sounds familiar! it made me so aware of my compulsions, but I also started doing them more and getting more stressed out by them as a result, somehow. but a little while after finishing the project, things calmed down again.

these were the things I understood to be related to OCD. I didn’t know WHAT was happening to me when I couldn’t pull myself away from Twitter arguments at 25, couldn’t stop going over the same topics with friends and explaining how I felt and getting reassurance that my friends didn’t judge my opinions, or didn’t judge me for having had a different opinion in the past. I didn’t know why I was losing hours of my life to stress over The Discourse going on on my Twitter feed. I just thought, geez, my anxiety is a mess.

then I went back to school in the fall, and it got worse. one day I remembered something offensive I’d said to be ~edgy when I was 14. read: 11 years prior. I became overcome with anxiety for the next few days, convinced that if I ever told a friend about this, they’d disown me for being an awful person. finally, I told them, and they did not care one bit. they just started listing other 14 year olds they’d known who’d done the same kind of shit. I breathed a sigh of relief. for the time being.

then I wrote an essay that led me down a questionable Youtube rabbit hole. I wound up getting very triggered by a video I saw of something that probably should have been removed from Youtube, but I also convinced myself that I was a horrible person for having looked at it and not immediately looked away. I worried about this for about a month.

then in December 2016, it got much worse. I remembered something similarly inappropriate that I’d seen online when I was 15. again: 10 years earlier. I had looked the thing up out of morbid curiosity, thought it was inappropriate, and never looked at it again. now, 10 years later, I was suddenly overwhelmingly convinced that I was a HORRIBLE person for having looked at this, and that any of my friends would agree and would leave me forever if they knew. within a few days, it became so overwhelming I told a friend, and she did not care. I felt better, for a moment. but it came back. the fear always came back. reassurance from any one person was never enough. I always knew that some remaining friend WOULD hate me for one thing or another I’d done, and it WOULD be proof that I was a terrible person.

I didn’t see how it could get any worse until January 2017. somehow, it did. my thoughts were out of control. I triggered myself eight ways till Sunday, and that January and February was one of the hardest times of my entire life. I was never suicidal - I always knew I would never actually kill myself - but I imagined myself dead every single day, and thought about how much better off we’d all be if I’d never been born. (I remember feeling this way when I took the picture I included at the top of this post.) I felt like there was no point in me living anymore because I was such a horrible person, but that I HAD to keep living, so I was just stuck in a pointless existence, not allowed to feel fulfilled anymore. it was probably the lowest I’ve ever felt. it was the worst feeling. I was anxious and afraid, but that isolating fear made me deeply depressed, too.

but it was pretty early on in all this that I tried to google what I was feeling, and was led to this famous article by Rose Cartwright about pure O OCD. (MAJOR trigger warnings on that article: she talks in detail about sexual intrusive thoughts about pedophilia as well as sexual orientation). honestly, having a name for what I was going through didn’t make me feel much better, but at least I had some idea what was happening to me, now. and it was that knowledge that EVENTUALLY helped me to help myself. it gave me the language to use with the doctors I met, an understanding of how to explain what I was going through, which eventually helped me through evaluations and got me into an OCD treatment program in the fall of 2018. and it did show me that I wasn’t alone.

but there was a sense of, “how did I never realize what this was until now?” I’d referred to myself as having OCD tendencies for a long time. “OCD habits.” I didn’t think any of it was severe enough to actually call OCD. then I found out all the different ways OCD can manifest: intrusive thoughts about sexual topics, violence, morality. I’d had them all. even back in 2013, when I first started seeing a psychotherapist, I went through a phase where I couldn’t stop having a particular intrusive sexual thought that made me feel like a monster. I told my therapist about it, desperate. she reassured me that I wasn’t a freak, and I felt a whole lot better. but she never even used the term OCD. she just said it was strange that I was having these thoughts when I didn’t have a history of abuse. but that’s not strange: it’s just how OCD works sometimes. she didn’t Get It. (I have read that psychotherapists often don’t get it, because they’re quite focused on analyzing the reasons why you feel a certain way, and OCD sufferers already do that too much. we don’t need to analyze: we need to learn to live with our bad thoughts, and not act out compulsions in response to them.) so I went on not knowing until it got much, much worse. and that is why people really need to start building a better understanding of all the different things that OCD entails.

I have intrusive sexual thoughts. I worry CONSTANTLY about everything I’ve ever done wrong and that I’m a bad person, and every single day I fight the urge to seek reassurance from my friends that every single one of those things isn’t It, the thing that will finally make them realize that I’m a horrible person and leave me forever. I second guess every decision I make to the point that I wind up frozen by my own anxiety. I obsess over contamination and harm, too. I wash my hands too much because I’m afraid if I don’t, and then I touch something someone else will touch, I might contaminate them in some way, and that would make me a horrible person. it all comes down to “this will make me a horrible person.” all my other obsessions come back to morality, in the end. I had one doctor who evaluated me tell me I was wrong to connect my sexuality obsessions to my morality obsessions, but I think she was wrong. they are absolutely connected. it is ALL about this for me, in the end.

when I was cleaning my room last year, during my treatment, I got distracted by a notebook I wrote in when I was 12, and I found a page where I wrote, in 2003, “My obsessive compulsive habits are getting out of hand.” I didn’t even remember knowing the term when I was 12. I saw it that long ago, but it took me until I was 27 to get treated for it. there’s no such thing as too late, but when I read that, I wished I could have told my younger self to get help and why. I wished I could show my 17 year old self, or my 21 year old self, or my 25 year old self that page, and let her know, “this is what’s going on. this is what you need to tell a doctor you’re dealing with.” but maybe now I can help someone else figure that out, like Rose Cartwright has helped me with her OCD activism and writing.

my treatment ended a year ago, and I haven’t been using the tools they gave me very diligently since. I’ve been really struggling as a result, but executive dysfunction is a bitch. I hope I can start working on it again soon, because I already know what I need to do to feel better.

a book we used in therapy that I found incredibly helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Over-OCD-Second-Self-Help/dp/1462529704

Rose’s book: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0118ITJUY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

#comes back to tumblr to reblog gay terminator content and writes a personal essay about my mental illness instead #sure!#I don't know why I'm doing this exactly but here I am #if you don't want to click but are interested in resources that have helped me with my OCD feel free to message me #the workbook we used in therapy that helped me is called getting over ocd by jonathan s. abramowitz #gotta say it feels good that I've come so far that I can talk about it this openly now though #personal

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tanadrin · 5 years

Text

Reordberend

(part 15 of ?; start; previous; next)

“What do you believe in?”

Leofe had asked the question in a friendly enough way, a few days later when they were sitting together for the midday meal. Now even at noon the sky was no more than twilight, a heartwrenchingly clear gradient of color from dark to light in the direction of the hidden sun, the far side studded with stars. The Antarctic air was impossibly clear, a continent-sized whorl of dry winds cut off from the rest of the world by the circumpolar current. Katherine simply could not get used to it.

What had they been talking about? The sky, the weather, hopes for tomorrow. And Katherine had mentioned her family, how far from home she was. Somehow that had segued into faith. She still wasn’t sure what, exactly, the Dry Valleys People believed in. Then Leofe had asked her the question, and she found herself getting defensive. She remembered her parents, her teachers, the people who pressed her on what she really believed as an adolescent. She remembered the alienation she felt when she realized she wasn’t the same as the people she grew up with. That her desire to grow beyond the confines of the world as they had presented it to them meant that she would have to go. And in the going there would be no returning.

“It’s complicated,” was all she said at the time. But the question nagged at her. She didn’t know if she could have answered it in English, let alone in the tongue of the Valleys. But there was an answer. A hard, bright answer she felt within her, warming her during the cold and starry nights.

What did the people of the Valleys believe in? Well, that was a tough one. When she had first found the gospel-book she thought she knew. A peculiar people, setting out for desolate shores, carrying religious artifacts and ancient tongues with them--traditionalists, of a kind. After all, wasn’t that what her people had been? Secessionists, as politely called them back in civilization. Those who decided that the great ecumenical riot of culture and technology and fashion and whatnot wasn’t for them. There were lots of different kinds of secessionists, not just traditionalists. New religious movements, utopians of all stripes, ultra-individualists and ultra-collectivists, artists with ideas that couldn’t be realized safely or legally in any existing top-level jurisdiction, trillionaires who thought the law shouldn’t apply to them. The pattern was familiar: you found a big pile of money somewhere, either from your followers or from a rich patron, you bought some land, you renounced your basic and you got almost unlimited sovereignty over it in return.

But that still left some questions. Like the age of the Valleys settlements, for one. If the local chronology was correct, they were almost a hundred and fifty years old, older than any other settlement in Antarctica. That meant they weren’t technically secessionists, because there was nothing here to secede from a century and a half ago. A century and a half ago, the Antarctic coast had been even colder and the ice-free portion of the Valleys even smaller. The timeline made sense in other ways--that was after the abrogation of the Antarctic Treaties, when most of the countries that used to fund scientific outposts along the coasts had pulled back in the wake of the Collapse. Before the big multinationals moved into the Peninsula a generation later. You could’ve gotten a couple hundred people to the Dry Valleys unnoticed, maybe.

When she could, Katherine tried to get a better look at their books again. Their script presented difficulties for her. On more than one occasion, she found herself muttering irritably at an imagined picture of Dr. Wright. He could have warned her, of course; he could have said, “the Dry Valleys People speak Anglo-Saxon English; here’s a list of books to take with you.” She still would have lost them in the shipwreck, but maybe she would have remembered enough from them to get started. Heck, maybe some enterprising nerd had created a module for the language. Unlikely--a good module took a shitload of funding and years of work--but not impossible.

She had asked Dr. Gordon about John, after the meeting at the conference. If this guy was so famous, how come she’d never heard of him? Dr. Gordon had sighed, sighed in the way that usually indicated byzantine university politics, but eventually she’d given up the story.

“This was all well before my time, you have to understand,” she said. “I’m getting this secondhand and thirdhand from people who were around then, and some of this is basically School of Humanities mythology at this point. But the way I understand it, Dr. Wright was the last holdout of the old English department.

“Two hundred years ago, the School of English was one of the jewels in the crown of this university. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was still doing pretty well for itself, but, well, as much as we hate to admit it to ourselves, academia is subject to trends and fashions just like the rest of the world. And despite trying to keep up with the times, most of the things they studied were hopelessly outdated. Even back then, nobody took nonsense like postmodernism or critical theory seriously anymore. A lot of the the really interesting work was starting to get usurped by departments with more rigorous methods. The Digital Humanities school was just taking off, and there was lots of interesting work going on on the other side of campus with 20th century novelists and AI, but the English faculty stuck to its old methods. Close reading, wading through dense tomes of theory, writing long analytical essays. Things that, for very good reason, we don’t make students do anymore. The university naturally had an aversion to producing graduates who were unemployable as anything other than English professors; it felt that was unfair to its students. But the more they tried to pressure the English department to update its methods, the more recalcitrant the faculty became.

“By the time Dr. Wright was approaching retirement age, they were back to teaching dead languages. You couldn’t understand the whole history of English literature, they argued, without a grounding in foundational stuff. And that foundational stuff, that ancient British literature, well, you couldn’t understand that without the context of, oh, I don’t know, whatever the Vikings spoke I suppose. Dr. Wright was by all accounts an extremely smart person. He’d done some groundbreaking work in Austronesian and South American languages as a younger man, a real giant in his field. But eventually, for reasons nobody quite understood, he’d pivoted away from the frontiers of his field--not a big field to begin with, mind you--and retreated to ground as well trodden as, well, basic arithmetic. He moved to the English department and was teaching students thousand-year-old poetry. He said it was a natural extension of his earlier work, and the university itself was happy enough to keep someone with his stature on its faculty, but to be honest most people saw him as nothing more than a useless eccentric. Rather like the whole department.

“Well, eventually the decision was made to axe their funding. There were maybe four undergraduates left to the whole department, so this wasn’t exactly a wrench, but Dr. Wright proved a sticking point. He had tenure--it’s a system that doesn’t exist anymore, but it made him basically unfireable. He had no students, and no scheduled classes, and no funding, and no departmental library anymore, but he had a right to an office, and, well. He wouldn’t go. He came in every day just the same. And twice a week, he would find an empty lecture hall, and, he’d just… lecture to anybody who showed up. And a few people did. Some were genuinely curious. Some thought it had novelty value. I guess some were lost freshers. But he kept on that way for two or three years. It annoyed the hell out of the administration. It annoyed them so much they delayed an update to the rules on retirement for six months, just so Dr. Wright hit the mandatory retirement age and got booted out. The next semester, they abolished fixed retirrment ages altogether. Of course, they didn’t offer him his job back. The official story was that he was a beloved senior member of the faculty, and he kept his dining privileges and still got invited to all the university functions where they trot out the honored former members of staff. But after that he basically disappeared. No one has seen him on campus--or anywhere in Dublin, for that matter--since.”

So at first Katherine wondered if this wasn’t Dr. Wright’s cruel joke, a way to get back at the people who pissed him off all those years ago. Let’s send the grad student out into the wastelands without any linguistic advantage. But the longer she thought about it, the more she wondered if she wasn’t being unfair.

Because what would she have said, if Dr. Wright had come up to her at that conference and said, “Oh, I hear you’re going to visit Antarctica. Here’s a book on Old English, and a copy of the Gospels, you’ll need both.” Would she have come here if she thought these were just secessionists with a penchant for historical reenactment? Probably not.

And the fact of the matter was, they weren’t secessionists. Well, not secessionists like Katherine had ever read about. The thing about being a secessionist, whether reactionary or utopian, was that no matter how much you pretended you were doing something Different, no matter how much you tried to Cut Yourself Off from the rest of the world, everything you did, everything you professed, everything you built, existed as a counterargument to that world. The rest of the world was a great shadow hanging over your whole existence, an argument which you were trying to refute. No secessionist movement on record had lasted in its original form more than two generations, because either you eventually got tired of making that argument, an argument your children would never understand for lack of context, and you inevitably rejoined the world (though perhaps with a higher-than-average local incidence of fringe political beliefs), or the whole thing fell apart in dramatic fashion due to infighting, and somebody appealed for the special status of the enclave to be revoked.

Neither had happened here. The culture of the Valleys appeared to be stable. They were more like an ancient uncontacted people, uncurious about the outside world and existing on their own terms, than those who scrupulously attempted to refute it. They spoke a dead language, but on closer examination, there the resemblance to historical reenactors ceased. The climate was wrong--they lived more like a circumpolar people, because, well, they were. But Katherine noticed they weren’t dogmatic about their refusal of technology. They relied on genegineered bryoculture--the mosses thrived in the summertime, provided you supplemented them with a little water, and kept them from freezing. They hoarded small pieces of technology they scavenged from the wastes, laser firestarters and sonic knife sharpeners, and they used these to augment their own cottage industry.

But they were sharply conservative in other ways. They did not trade. They did not explore, beyond their own well-trodden region of Victoria Land. Their society was full of symbolism and ritual and verbal formulas, their conversations looping back and forth in ways that made Katherine suspect every one had occurred a thousand times, and was expected to occur a thousand times again. They were, in short, static. Stasis was, Katherine believed, the ultimate illusion for any society. Nothing lasts forever; eventually, you change or you die. Perhaps the Dry Valleys People knew this. Perhaps, if the world tried to force them to change, they would simply die. The idea made Katherine rather sick, but it would not be the first time in history that that had happened.

* * *

And what did they believe in, when you tried to peel all this back, and expose their heart? Leofe was cagey when Katherine asked her. Leofric was laconic enough to make his sister look positively effusive by contrast. The question died on her lips when she tried to ask some of the older men and women; they responded to the question as a mountain might answer a soft breeze. Which is to say they ignored her completely. They carried with them the tokens of a lost Christianity, but these didn’t seem to be related to their core beliefs. On the very rare occasions when they waxed metaphysical, Katherine heard them speak of the garsecg, the spear-sea, the fearsome cold ocean that girdled their world. Yet on their lips the word had deep resonances “ocean” never did; it was for them the road of death, beyond which all their foremothers and forefathers dwelt; and it was the road of their beginning, over which they had come for their deliverance. And it was the outer darkness, the darkness of the sky and the long Antarctic night, and the blackness behind the stars; and the dreamless sleep.

And even more rarely, in voices so quiet Katherine could not be sure of what they said, they spoke of dragons, the dragons that lived high on the ice, whose voice was thunder and in whose belly lived a terrible fire.

#tanadrin's fiction

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yooniegalaxy · 5 years

Text

Okay, so this is going to be fun. So the preface behind this is that V got a few asks about this and then I went and straight up threw in my two cents... and in return got these asks. Instead of fuming about it and just keyboard warrior-ing back at the person ( using person as a very loose term at this point ) I decided to take a step back and deal with this rationally.

Trigger Warnings // Abuse, Assault, R*pe and Predatory Men Mentions. Public Masturbation. I will tag appropriately.

I apologize, in advance, for the length. I also haven’t proofread this because at some point I just didn’t care enough to re-read. Yes, I did cite things. Don’t @ me about it.

Alright, so this is very bold of you to assume that you know anything about my culture as it is. There are more than just that one reason as to why Korean women/girls aren’t dating ( which is also very bold of you to assume ). There is a great divide in everything. South Korea is a very patriarchal society, so of course there are privileges to being a man. But that can literally be said any where in the world. The world is intrinsically male oriented, despite having various matriarchal societies.

If we are talking about Korean women in general, there are a lot of reasons why they don’t date aside from the inherent fear. It is literally the fact that everyone pays attention to their careers first. School is a very large part of Korean Society, as well as a lot of other Asian Countries. Education is the first and foremost for a lot people, which often pushes the bounds of women when do decide to date, if at all.

“It says so in an article“, is not a great defense, especially since the only article I could find about this was a CNN article ( feel free to read it here ). While well researched, it is under the lens of a University study for a “Gender and Culture“ class taught at Sejong University. They do go into statistics about economic strain and what percentage of age groups are single and may not be dating.

I pulled this from the article, “[a] growing number of South Koreans are shunning romantic relationships amid economic hardships and societal problems.“ This, in and of itself, counteracts your broad strokes claim. The fact of the matter is that you clearly don’t understand how expensive it is to date anyone or live in Korean society. Even going out with friends is awful, I find, because we are always drinking and heading to the next bar or the next and you’re no fun unless you go to all of the bars. If you ditch, you are literally called no fun and you can kiss your social life goodbye.

South Korean Culture is very much about group dynamics and it is social suicide not to hang out when asked unless you have a VERY good reason. This brings me to, “[t]he country's overall unemployment rate last year rose to its highest level in 17 years, at 3.8%. The youth unemployment rate was far higher, at 10.8% for those aged 15 to 29.” This is basically the fact of the matter, dating and socializing unless you are getting funded by your parents, is EXPENSIVE. Even when you are out of University and starting your first job, if you are even hired. If you aren’t, you will be working any form of shop job, construction, retail or food and service.

Side note: minimum wage in South Korea is 7530 won/hr, or like 6-ish USD, but not a lot of places even pay that. They pay under that.

Yes, in the light of a lot of Korean scandals and lot of word of mouth about x boyfriend or y abuse incident, many people are put off by the idea of dating. But I feel like this is the case everywhere and not just South Korea. You could even say that it is taken less lightly elsewhere in the world than it is in South Korea.

You also have to realize that this article is literally just talking about Korean Women dating Korean Men. There are a plenty of other races that live in South Korea that are ex-pats, are studying abroad or are teaching abroad ( as they don’t really like hiring people of Asian Heritage to teach English, especially ). A lot of South Koreans hire a lot of foreign specialists for jobs due to the high specializations in some fields. So Korean Women might not be dating Korean Men, but they are still dating.

This is not a “not all men” statement because I will never make that statement. “Not all men” is such a stupid statement because it is inherently bias.

Korean dating culture isn’t dead. People still date. People still count their relationships in days and have cute anniversaries. People are allowed not to feel safe. I don’t feel safe and I live in a country where I am allotted freedom and yet I still look over my shoulder because off the gender that I was born as.

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE AT THE DOOR.

Please don’t ignore the fact that you are generalizing a whole population to suit your own arguments and needs. You are literally doing yourself, and everyone you are generalizing, a disservice.

Honestly, no. Claiming you are right is actually a rather sad way to try and win an argument when someone hasn’t responded. My country isn’t “full of predators”. If anything all of my experiences in the United States ( and other countries though I will only give one example ) sort of tells me otherwise. I, personally, have a lot of stories of where I have felt unsafe in countries outside of Asia.

NEW YORK CITY ( tw: male public masturbation, aggression )

I was about nineteen at the time of this incident. I am, by no means, a person who is uneducated or idealistic in anyway. I was raised a realist, someone who wasn’t exactly sheltered from the storm, despite growing up in a traditional family. I made a lot of mistakes as a kid but I learned from.

In New York, I was with one other person. She was around my age and we were exploring the city together and I believe we were going to a conference at the time? I was studying Film at the time and she was a good friend of mine going to New York Film Academy. We hopped on the subway because literally the only way to get around the city unless you want to be stuck in traffic. What I experienced on the train was varying degrees of traumatic but I laugh about it now?

We were chased off the subway four or five stops before we actually wanted to get by a guy literally masturbating directly in view of us. There weren’t that many people on the subway car and he was making DIRECT eye contact with us while were talking about the film we were shooting for class. He was literally dirty talking at us and his advances became more bold until he literally chased us off the subway when we tried to leave.

He couldn’t have been more than I want to say thirty or forty and he was white male privilege. He was wearing a decently fitted suit with shined loafers so, clearly not just a homeless man on the street.

He chased us up to street leave with his dick out, ejaculating at our shoes as we tried to climb the stairs and told us we were ungrateful and deserved it. This happened on three separate occasions in a span of a week, different men.

I was much younger than most people that this happens to on a regular basis in the US. Tell me how “my country” as you call it is full of predators when this is what I was subjected to as a person that, at the time, is older than a solid chunk of the frequenters of this site.

Not only that but I have never felt the need to check my drink as much as I do in a western country as I do in an Asian one. I have been to frat parties and have been witness to college r*pe culture, to where I have been made witness to various friends being roofied because they don’t check their drinks. I was taught as a kid not to leave your drink lying around and if you did, you didn’t drink from it ( I should point out that I grew up both in Seoul and in Canada ).

I don’t feel safe in any country for the fact that I AM A WOMAN and not because of any racial bias that I might have. I don’t have the privilege of walking wherever I like without being cat called fully clothed, not showing any skin or figure. I constantly look over my shoulder when I see a shadow, this is not one country’s problem, it is every country.

Like I said, I was at work and would rather not get fired for interacting with someone that doesn’t take my priority because they wish to remain anonymous and not have educated argument. Rather you would like to anonymously bash a whole nation in which you are NOT apart of. Not that I particularly like my job, it kind of just pays the bills.

#yoon answers #ummm yeah #long post #anon

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jenivadiamonds · 5 years

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The Impact of Sudden Unemployment

Preface

The past seven years of my life have been a roller coaster of events that culminated at the development and successful launch of The Exponentials an online magazine and editorial that concerns itself with raising awareness on the issues surrounding unemployment and the impacts it has on the individual and the society at large. After being fired from my teaching job I have had for almost seven years, I became depressed and wallowed in misery, shame that came with what I saw as my downfall. It was during these hard times that my mum and siblings stuck with me and helped me build a career from scratch, and I found the most beautiful thing “love”. This story however would not be complete nor fair without the mention of the input of my now husband Chike Austin, a stranger turned best friend; confidant and business partner who pushed me to look outside the realms of teaching and helped me in building this business idea to what it is today. Am also appreciative of second chances, that brought my life together once again.

The Impact of Sudden Unemployment

“I have lost my job.” Saying this loud to my sick mum Tessy sounded so alien. I felt ashamed and concerned at the same time about the possibility of the hard times ahead. No matter how casual the statement may sound, its impacts on an individual are immense and far reaching. Thousands of individuals, not just in the United States but globally, lose their source of income every day; this trend is not a preserve of underdeveloped nations rather also hugely affects an alarmingly high number of people in developed economies too. According to Marinescu Ioana (17), “the impacts of not having a stable source of income for a long time can be quite devastating - especially for individuals who have families, since their inability to provide spells doom for those who are dependent on the fired individual”. Losing my job had come as a shock not just to me and my colleagues at work, but also to my mum, who knew how much I was dedicated to my professional life. Prior to this I had the perception that the loss of a job came because of bad luck and lack of commitment on the part of the employee; but having to go through it gave me a new perspective on the issue; I no longer felt callous toward unemployed individuals.

The news had evidently hit my mother way harder than it hit me; I felt guilty. “What are we going to do,” my mum stammered amidst the uncontrollable tears running down our faces since I first broke the news. I will get another job; two, if I have to I replied, trying to mask the uncertainty that all of a sudden seemed so real. She looked so lost, I realize the situation was more serious than I really had thought it was. The look on her face said a lot of the deep thoughts that must have been razing through her mind at the time. She became really sick immediately I finished my highschool. She was beautiful with long dark hair and also very healthy looking, until suddenly from what we thought was a little fever to so many years later of a deteriorating illness. At the time, my elder sister was finishing from college, so I had to work as a teacher in a local elementary school, took care of our mum and also went to adult night school, so that my sister wouldn’t have to drop out to help at home. We had gone through our share of arguments and fights but never for once had I seen the defeated look she had at this moment. It broke my heart to see the worries in her eyes. I saw the fear that everything might come crashing down at my feet, which was a scary thing to witness. I felt I understood am almost about to lose my mind just looking at my sick mother look defeated.

For over two years, the school I worked for has been laying off employees who were working in other locations that had been opened in various parts of the country as part of a long term-strategy to incorporate a lean workforce. This had been triggered by the decline in funds and incomes due to the economic crisis that was crippling the world economy. It was a little kept secret that the Education Ministry at the time was embezzling the money mapped out for developments and reconstruction, prior to the economic crisis and had even done worse under the new management that had taken over after the ousting of the previous management team. There had been hushed rumors among the workers that we all were in a sinking ship however none of us wished to resign just yet, hoping that things might turn around for the better and the downsizing would not affect the branch we were working in. When the downsizing at the office began with the firing of a few non-academic staffers, things began spiraling and going to work every day was like a game of Russian roulette. As I headed to work each morning, I kept wondering who would be let go that day or week. The impact of such a stressful work environment coupled with the uncertainty of whether you will be out of work tomorrow had taken a toll on the performance of the employees and within a few weeks there were reports of various complaints that had been filed by the parents and teachers as well.

Over the course of my working and adult life I had not any bank loan and this gave me a relief that I might have it a little easier than some of my colleagues. The in-home lesson job I had taken up at few of my pupils house, had also aided me in clearing the student loan that I had accumulated over my days in college. As such in comparison to how bad some of my colleagues had it, I would argue that I had it a little bit easier. Additionally, I was lucky to have helped my dad complete the payment of the mortgage that we had taken on the family house. As such, this meant that my immediate concern was to ensure that I took care of my personal needs, my mum’s medical bills and most of the time daily meals for me and my younger ones. However, this was made more complicated by the lack of any meaning full savings and this meant that I had to find a job quickly. Despite all these concerns now I knew that the supplies that were already in the house and the few hundred dollars that I still had in my account would at least give me the start I needed. I decided to take a week off to get my thoughts straightened out before deciding on the next best course of action not just for me but for my family. Thinking about it now, I realize this decision was made of the shock that I was in at the time which could not allow me to plan my thoughts. at the time it seemed the most logical and reasoned thing to do.

As the week progressed, I did almost nothing to salvage myself from the situation that I had found myself in, except the effort to link up with some of my old friends and relations contacts, some of whom I had not seen or talked to in over three years. It was at this time that I got an interesting email from a long time contact I had been in contact with during my carefree days as a caterer, baker and home delivery cook. Beyond these futile attempts at getting over my now regularly grumbled mood and constant state of depression, I maintained my status as a passive sore unemployed loser. As the weeks rolled by depression was becoming more and more of a reality as households needs and bills began to pile each day. Things had gone from bad to worse; I had been out looking for menial jobs with no success and it was no secret that also things were getting bad at the home front. I would regularly get home, so tired from walking around or sitting at a place with a childhood friend who also had been ousted from his high paying job only to lose all his money, house, and family. This was where I was headed, I kept telling myself.

During this period, my mum kept urging me to revive my freelance translating career, though I knew it could pay, I somehow succeeded in putting it off for a long time. This was undoubtedly one of the lowest points of my life. I had fallen from a level where I was able to provide a comfortable life for my family to where I was depending on a few scraps here and there. It was however through him that I was finally able to get a breakthrough soon to receive an urgent translation order with an attractive pay. This opened a lot of doors not just in terms of opportunities to finally earn some cash and raise myself from what was evidently going to be a story of personal destruction. With a high level of expertise and long-term experience coupled by the urge to get things right, soon enough I had more than a few referrals from various parts of the world. With the high quality of writings, and even though the freelancing gig could provide a temporary reprieve from the lack of a way to provide for the basic needs in the home front, I fully realized that it would not go for long.

Amid my adversities, I became acquainted with a client named Chike all the way from Africa. This client played an important role in my subsequent redemption from the low depths of life that I had resigned myself to. The name according to him was given to him by his grandmother based on the time he was born; which was the late evenings when the village goats were coming back from the grazing fields. Despite the huge and probably incomparable cultural and social circumstances and settings, which both of us had been born and raised, it was hard to imagine how he would have ended up being friends and playing a huge part in both of our futures. At first, he wanted a part of his novel to be translated and rectified in terms of subject verb agreements and all the rules of professional writing, (Carley, Micheal, and Phillipe Spapens), and I accepted his request for the same. After the first part was approved and the interest that the progress had raised in me, I was interested in asking him about the rest of the novel and whether it would need any type of help considering that the first part had been successfully published.

After several days of correspondence, managing and working together on the book, we ended up becoming very good online friends. Just like me, he too was once unemployed and had taken up the gig of writing opinion editorials for some of the little-known online magazines and newspapers. With a common interest on the writing and publishing field for income, we continued to talk about the differences that existed between both countries in terms of job opportunities and the quality of life for citizens in our respective countries (Marinescu, Ioana, and Roland Rathelot). I soon introduced him to my mum and family, through video calls that were later to become a norm for a long time and he too introduced me to his family. It was a surprise to both of us that indeed there were various fundamental similarities that were apparent between both nations and the similarity in challenges facing people from developed countries such as our great USA countries. The challenges faced, the concerns used by lack of job opportunities, the impacts that this phenomenon uses not just on the individual and their family but on the nation was also a topic that never failed to come up every time we conversed.

It was during these kinds of conversation that my perspective on work changed, Chike had a very interesting view of how work should be viewed especially in the current technological world. Technology has exponentially grown to a point where an individual does not need to be at a locale to be part of a workforce. This has fundamentally hanged the concept of the workplace and the work setting through enabling individuals to work form any given place if they have access to the internet and a personal computer. Chike encouraged me to look for opportunities from diverse industries and areas other than just sending my credentials and applications to companies working within the Educational industry alone. This helped me a lot in quitting the mentality that has been commonly characterized by the saying that ‘The man is for work, not work for the man.” It was during this journey of self-discovery that I came to realize and discover what I truly wanted out of life both in a personal level and at a professional level. It was also during this time that I felt that I had the inspiration to identify my goals in life and consequently developed the plan to do so.

While this seems like fate, it was during one of our long conversations on life in Nigeria and the United States that the idea of developing an online magazine and platform was born. At first, we intended that the site would cater for the professional unemployed individuals all over the world could post online jobs and share experiences was born. This however was just but an idea and we knew that making it a reality would not only be challenging but would require a substantial amount of financial backing, money which at the time we did not have. First, it would be important to do the necessary research and get all the legal documentation ready not just in the US but also back in Nigeria. While I was preparing myself in the US, I was surprised two-days later when Chike got in touch saying that his part in the Nigerian capital had been complete. It came as surprise only to learn that most if the regulations covering the use and ownership of most sites in the nation were not under any sort of regularized framework. While this was a shock it also was an advantage not just to us but it meant a lot more people in and around the nation would easily access the site. Chike, my soon to be business partner, planned and flew to the US and stayed with us for a few months before moving out to his own apartment.

Life was beginning to take a good shape, and I felt that I was finally doing something that was not only fulfilling but had the potential to really take off and earn me and my family a comfortable lifestyle. At this point my mum had started recovering, she had seen me through the worst part of my lowest points in life and now I could see a spark of light at the end of a long and dark tunnel. I soon visited the bank and after asking for loans from close friends and confidants, who still had trust in me, we were able to fully fund the development of an operational online magazine and editorial that also supported the posting of various jobs at a fee. Within a year from the date the site went live, traffic had grown substantially and soon we had to move from the garage office that we were occupying and rented a bigger office space. The journey to where we were at that time had been full of ups and downs but we had finally managed to capture a small but important piece of the online magazine market with significant income. Sometimes, I am surprised that I can still identify myself with my old self before I lost my job, despite the life changing experience I went through. However, I believe this can be attributed to the strong and sometimes commanding nature of the people who were able to guide and push me during the lowest points of life when I thought I would never again be able to provide for my family. The role of Chike and his family towards the successful redemption and bounce back cannot be understated; as I look at my family now, and the smiles they have I know we will be able to overcome anything together.

After two years of starting our business, Chike and I started dating. Although I knew I had a thing for him through all the years of being two unemployed online friends trying to make ends meet. A year after we went out the first time he proposed, and we later got married at the Notre Dame Catholic Church Houston, Texas. It was a glorious day in our lives, because I got to meet his mother, whole family and friends that flew in to be part of our beautiful day. Also if I must say, the life we are living now was of our own making. You have to get up and move on, life waits for no one. Do not procrastinate or feel defeated, you will get there, it might only take time. Our business is flourishing, so am grateful to God and the universe for bringing us together through unemployment. From my bad experience I got to be with someone I love and do something meaningful with my life again. According to (Margaret Linn, Richard Sandifer, Shayna Stein) on the article “Effects of unemployment on mental illness and physical health.” Our mental health has a lot to do with our emotional and physical health. We humans are relentless, we can do anything we set our minds to.

Work Cited

Carley, Michael, and Phillipe Spapens. “Sharing the world: sustainable living and global equity in the 21st century”. Routledge, 2017.

Edward Moore, Kennedy. “The challenges before us”. Am Psychol. 1984 Jan;39(1):62–66. American Public Health Association. Web. June 13, 2019.

Margaret W., Linn, and Richard, Sandifer. Shayna, Stein., “Effects of unemployment on mental and physical health”. 75, 502-506. NCBI (May 1985). American Journal of Public Health. Web. June 13, 2019. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646287/pdf/amjph00281-0056.pdf

Marinescu, Ioana, and Roland Rathelot. "Mismatch unemployment and the geography of job search." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 10.3 (2018): 42-70.

Marinescu, Ioana. "The general equilibrium impacts of unemployment insurance: Evidence from a large online job board." Journal of Public Economics 150 (2017): 14-29

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