#just to have them all go to class sick with the flu or covid or whatever without a mask and sneezing and coughing everywhere

[shrews-things]

Society if able bodied people were capable of considerate thought

[jmtorres]

i just saw a post about how we just have to "live with" covid and wanting more protections from our government is unreasonable because we'll never wipe it out, it jumps species and is in all sorts of animal populations (like, true ok) so why even try to

and apparently the argument was aimed at people (who I haven't seen in the wild) who are arguing we should still be in lockdown. and i have mixed feelings about the idea of extended lockdown or attenuating isolations; but my main feeling at this point is not that the government should keep us apart but that the government should be trying to make it safer for us to be together

things the government could/should be doing about covid:

we know that ventilation/air movement helps a shitton. we should be incentivizing upgrades to ventilation systems in all public buildings with shit like rebates or tax deductions, while phasing in eventual legal requirements. (and uh. it has occurred to me that the US might actually be doing this sideways by there's currently this decade enormous tax incentives in re energy efficient upgrades for slowing climate change and you know. energy efficient hvac does tend to improve ventilation. extra point to biden here.)

mandatory paid sick leave so workers aren't under social or economic pressure to work when sick

passing out RT-LAMP tests like metrix that actually work instead of the rapid antigen tests that have become less and less reliable as the virus mutates

i don't know how you'd write this law but like 95% or more of computer-based work can be done remotely and companies should not be allowed to force people to return to the office. I know there's people who want to be back in person and I'm not saying they should be forced to stay home but ffs I know of at least two people CLOSE to me who worked remotely before the pandemic and at some point their workplaces tried to tell them they weren't allowed to do that anymore despite the pre-existing contracts. stop canceling remote work for people that want, need, or prefer it.

for that matter, every college lecture that was an online class during covid should still be offered as an online class, there is no reason to force students into auditoriums in person. you got the communications infrastructure up and running, why are you tearing it down. give people the OPTION. it increases accessibility for everyone!

covid vaccine immunity lasts about four months. this should be well-publicized and everyone should be able to re-up for free every four months. "every year, like the flu vaccine" is demonstrably not often enough. actually "for free" isn't good enough start handing out $10 gift cards you will be shocked at how many people who are resistant to the idea of vaccines will fold for $10 a shot

are there already laws on the books about masks in medical settings that some medical professionals are blatantly ignoring because they forgot what best practices were before the plague and they're 'tired of masking'? if not, pass laws. if so, fucking enforce them

oh another incentives for upgrades phasing into legal requirements thing: brass doorknobs and railings over stainless steel or whatever. microbes do not survive on brass surfaces

i mean. i know this one sounds too extreme to a lot of people but. UBI.

most if not all of these measures will prevent or ameliorate other pandemics of different diseases that may arise in the future. and just. generally improve our health and quality of life for other reasons.

I haven't felt safe to go to a concert since 2020. Maybe if I knew a venue was legally required to have ventilation to a certain standard and that none of the ticket takers and ushers were on the job sick to avoid risking loss of paycheck or job, and knew a larger percentage of the crowd had up to date vaccinations--maybe if any or all that, I might ever feel comfortable going to a show again.

wouldn't it be nice if those of us who have been disabled, by covid or other conditions, had accessible remote options but also occasionally felt safe enough to interact with and participate in wider society?

one of the arguments on the post I saw was how isolation was massively psychologically damaging and various strata of society were affected in all sorts of ways, from undersocialized kids to increased depression in--well across the board, I think. and here's the thing: WE KNOW. PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS, LONG COVID OR OTHERWISE, KNOW ISOLATION SUCKS REAL BAD. because we, both for our own health and due to disability ostracism, are still isolating and isolated more than most.

what are you as individuals or societies, what are our governments, doing to help make it safe and accessible to rejoin you????

[javierpena-inatacvest]

Soup for Breakfast

Summary: Javi comes home to find that you caught the flu from your class at school, and wants to help you feel better.

Word count: 1.7K

Warnings: FLUFF. This is literally just pure fluff, as Javier Peña lives in my mind rent free as the biggest softie alive. Mentions of food/eating, mentions of death (but in a really wholesome way), reader being sick

Paring: Javier Peña x f!reader (no use of Y/N, reader is an elementary school teacher)

This can be read as a stand alone, or as a part of the Never Too Late Series!

A/N: I wrote this when I had COVID because I am convinced that if you told Javi that you were sick, he would literally go to the ends of the earth to help you feel better.

“Hey hermosa, I’m home.” Javi set his keys down on the entryway table and shed his dark gray suit jacket, flopping it over the edge of the kitchen counter. 

Silence. 

“Hermosa?” He questioned again, concern beginning to creep in his voice. 

Since you had started the school year, Javi came home every day looking forward to the image of you sitting at the kitchen table, projects and papers from your 3rd grade class spread across the oak surface. You’d smile and give him a big kiss, ready to share whatever crazy antics your class was up to that day. But when he stepped through the doorway, he noticed the usual construction paper, notebooks and crayons, but the seat where you always were was empty. 

“Hey baby, it’s me!” He tried one more time, hoping that you were in a room further down the hall and hadn’t heard him. No response. The silence sent Javi into fight or flight, now picking up his speed as he looked into other rooms to find them all empty. He paced back to the living room, trying to keep his composure, his past experience with missing persons not boding well for his current state. Taking a few more deep breaths before doing anything irrational, Javi went to sit down on the couch, until he heard a small grunt underneath him. 

“Please don’t sit on me.” You grumbled, nestled under a large pile of blankets.

“Hermosa, Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me.” Javi shot up, breathing heavily, placing his hand on his chest. You rolled over, shifting around in your blanket heap, head peeking out to look at Javi. “Baby, are you okay? What’s wrong?” Panic still lingering in his words, now realizing you were laying in a near lifeless heap on the couch. 

“No, I feel great. Isn’t this what everyone does when they feel good? Roll themselves into a giant blanket pile?” Your remark oozing with sarcasm and a hoarseness in your voice. “The flu has been going around my classroom and I think I got it.” You groaned, your body aching as you shifted yourself further out of your fabric cocoon. “You’d think by this point I’d have the immune system of a steel truck, but these kids are just never ending germ factories.” 

Javi quietly chuckled to himself as he knelt next to you, sweeping your hair out of your face and kissing your forehead. As he got closer, he could feel the heat radiating off you, your breaths heavy and labored as you fought to keep your eyelids open. He grazed the back of his large hand against your hairline, his deep brown puppy dog eyes growing more and more concerned.

 “Cariño, you look awful.” 

“Way to make a girl feel good.” 

“No, baby, that’s not what I meant, I-” he tried to quickly rebuttal. 

“Javi, I’m just joking. I know I look like a Gremlin someone just pulled out of a garbage can.” You both quietly laughed before you let out a deep cough, only adding to the effect of your disheveled state. “I started feeling gross this afternoon while the kids were at Art and Gym, so I already made sub plans for the rest of the week, just in case.” 

Javi leaned back down to kiss your head once again, knowing you really must have felt awful if you were willing to admit the fact you couldn’t fight your way through your sickness so you didn’t need to find a substitute teacher for your class. “Okay, hermosa. I think that’s a good idea.” He sat up to peek his head over the couch, starting at your kitchen. “Give me one second, okay?” 

You nodded, already back to being half asleep. Javi began rummaging through the fridge and cabinets, looking for any food that you would 1- eat, and 2- help you feel better. Grimacing at the low stock of items, he began frantically scribbling down a grocery list full of supplies. 

“Hey baby?” Javi had made his way back to the couch, squatting down next to you as he handed you a glass of water. 

“Mhmmmmhh?” You moaned, outstretching an almost limp arm to take the glass, sitting up as you took a few sips. 

“I’m gonna go to the grocery store to get some things. I promise I’ll be right back. Are you gonna be okay while I’m gone?” 

“Well I wasn’t planning on going very far anytime soon, I think I’ll be alright.” You half smiled at him, handing him back the now empty glass. 

“Okay. I love you.” He kissed you on the top of your head, his nose nestled in your hair before he pulled away, frantically gathering his keys and shutting the door behind him. 

“Love you too.” You mumbled, half coherent as you burrowed back down into your blankets. 

When Javi got to the store, he was a man on a mission. You would have thought someone had told him Pablo Escobar was inside at the rate he was moving through the aisles. Completely disregarding the list he had thrown together at the house, Javi had a shopping cart of supplies full enough to tend to the entirety of your 3rd grade class. The thought of seeing you sick and in pain absolutely wrecked him, wanting to do anything he could to help you feel better. He was so desperate, in fact, at one point while in the pharmacy section, he had thrown in a box of bandaids, just in case. 

When he returned back to the house, he was relieved to find you at least sitting in a semi-upright position watching TV, laughing to yourself at the ridiculous amount of groceries he had just set down on the kitchen counter. 

“I didn’t know we were planning on running a hospital out of our home.” You giggled as Javi unbagged the items. 

“I just wanted to make sure you had whatever you needed. I may have gone a little overboard.” He replied sheepishly as he continued to unpack a bag full of snacks. 

“It’s okay, it’s sweet. Thanks Dr. Peña.” 

“Of course.” He finished putting everything in its place before coming back over to you. “Here, drink this.” He passed another cup over to you. 

“Wow, you even got me the red Gatorade? You hate the red kind! You really do love me.” A soft smile crept across your face as you took a small sip. 

“Well I’m not the one who looks like they’re on their deathbed, Hermosa.” It took every ounce of strength in you to give him a playful shove. “I’m gonna make you some soup, okay?” 

“You didn’t need to go all the way to the store for soup, we have soup here.” You rolled your eyes, knowing how much it physically pained Javi to watch you eat Campbell's canned soup after having a taste of one of his mom’s recipes not too long ago. 

“I can already hear mi mamá yelling at me from the grave if I let you eat that shit, especially when you’re sick. I’m making you Caldo de Pollo so she doesn’t come back to haunt me. Had it every time I was sick. Swear it makes you feel better.” Your  heart was warming at the idea of Javi making one of his late mother’s recipes, thankful that Javi’s dad had given you some of them from her cookbook. 

“Thank you, Javi. You’re the best. I’d kiss your sweet face but I’m guessing you don’t want my germs.” 

“A quick one won’t hurt anyone, doctor’s orders.” He winked before planting a soft peck on your lips. 

As he got up, he went over to your entertainment center under the TV, pulling out 2 different VHS tapes. “Which one?” 

“You can’t pit two Harrison Ford classics against each other! Hmmmm, I do love Indiana Jones, but I think Star Wars is gonna have to be the winner today. 

“I had a feeling.” He smiled as he popped in the tape, the theme music blasting as he got to work in the kitchen. 

Javi had to admit, he wasn’t a terrible chef. It wasn’t until he met you that he actually felt a need to cook. In Colombia, he was either eating out or stealing whatever leftovers Steve and Connie had, and once he came home, his dad cooked, insisting he wanted to keep his wife’s habit alive and well, even after she was gone. After Javi had chopped up all of the vegetables, he tossed them into the pot to let them simmer with the already bubbling chicken and rice. Once the soup was done, he filled a bowl practically to the brim, bringing it over to you, only to be greeted by the sweet sounds of your soft snores, muffled under the blanket draped across your face. He laughed quietly to himself before putting your soup on the end table of the couch and shuffling himself underneath your blanket mountain so your head rested against his thigh as a pillow. He stroked the ends of your hair between his fingers in one hand, the other, rubbing up and down your back in soft, gentle circles. 

He let the end credits of the movie roll before turning off the TV and carefully unwrapping you from your blankets, scooping you up to carry you back to bed. As he laid you down, gently tucking you in under the covers, he heard you mumble something. 

“What was that, Hermosa?” Javi’s voice just above a whisper.

“I never ate your soup.” You muttered, eyes still closed, words barely coherent. 

“It’s okay. Go back to sleep, baby. You need to rest.” He sat on the edge of your bed next to you, planting a soft kiss on the top of your head. 

“Can I have it for breakfast tomorrow?” You grumbled, as you turned over on your pillow. 

Javi laughed to himself. “Of course hermosa. Nos vamos por la mañana con tu sopa. Espero que te sientas mejor pronto. Te amo con todo mí corazon, Osita.” (I’ll see you in the morning with your soup. I hope you feel better soon. I love you with my whole heart, little bear.) 

If you would have asked Javier Peña all those years ago if he would have ever made someone soup for breakfast, he would have laughed in your face. But now? Now, he would make a million bowls of soup for breakfast, if it meant he got to spend it with you. 

[thevioletcaptain]

So I've been quiet on here a lot longer than planned.

The reasons are many. The reasons are varied.

The reasons are mostly fucking horrible.

Under a cut because it's long. Check tags for content warnings.

First was the expected absence: my parents came to visit me in Los Angeles over my birthday, so I spent the first half of October showing them around whenever I wasn't working a shift at my shitty department store day-job, or in class at UCLA.

Then, almost immediately after they went back to Australia, I got a second job working as a personal assistant for a composer. This was (and is) an extremely fun and rewarding job, but meant having one more thing on my weekly schedule, which was an adjustment.

Given that until halfway through last year, I'd been out of work since I immigrated in 2019, it took a while for me to get used to having so many concurrent responsibilities, and I'd just started to get a handle on things when I got sick right before the holidays. I took many covid tests -- all negative -- and eventually determined that it was just last year's strain of flu, which I hadn't managed to find time to get the shot for due to the aforementioned super busy schedule. I'm almost positive it was thanks to a particular customer at the aforementioned shitty department store job who coughed hard enough in my direction for their germs to get through my n95.

Anyway, last year's flu was a monster, and I spent a week in bed with a fever, then several more weeks being utterly drained and with a horrendous cough to match. It took a full month for me to recover, and then in mid-January, almost as soon as I started to catch up on all the things that had fallen behind while I was sick, things got bad, then good, then worse, then better, then much, much, much worse.

Basically, it starts with my dad being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He'd told me in October when they came to see me, but the surgery was scheduled for the tail end of January.

The surgery happened on a Monday, and it was a complete success. They got it all in one go. No chemo or radiation or further treatment needed at all. I spoke to him on the phone after he woke up, and he was in good spirits. Happy to have been given the all clear by his doctors.

I told him to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds & Evil while he rested up at home, because I'm writing specs for both this year and wanted him to be able to read them and know what was going on. He's the one who got me into sci-fi and horror, after all.

He went home.

He was home for two days.

He started feeling a bit rough on the Thursday. Short of breath. No appetite. Mum took him back to the hospital, just to be safe.

Turns out he'd had a mild heart attack. They couldn't figure out why. The echocardiogram didn't show any issues with his heart.

Then over the next couple of days, his breathing got worse. They took a scan of his lungs, and found that they were extremely inflamed. They'd given him covid tests but they came back negative. We told them about a work accident he had about 20 years ago, where a switchboard he'd been working on exploded in his face, and he'd suffered from inhalation burns among other things.

They thought that maybe something during the prostate surgery had caused irritation in his already damaged lungs, which put stress on his heart and caused the mild heart attack. He's never had any issues with his lungs since that accident, but they thought that maybe he'd just adapted to the damage over the years without realizing.

They kept trying different treatments to help his lungs heal. Nothing seemed to work. His breathing kept getting worse. They had him on as much oxygen as possible without intubating him, but it wasn't enough, so over that weekend they decided that they'd need to move him to another hospital with a more specialized lung unit.

When they were preparing to do that on the Monday night, he crashed. Another heart attack. Bigger, this time. They intubated him. Sedated him. Called my mum and told her to come in right away because things looked so bad.

But then he rallied. By the morning, though he was still sedated and intubated, the doctors were confident that with the right treatment at the specialized lung unit at the other hospital, he'd be okay. He was still in a rough condition, but stable. They transferred him to the other hospital.

He was given another covid test. This one came back positive.

My mum and brother called me once it was a reasonable time in Los Angeles to let me know what was going on, and the next day my brother booked me a flight back to Australia. I had to leave for the airport about five hours after my ticket was booked.

I got to Melbourne on February 1st.

For the next two weeks, dad was intubated, sedated, and in an isolation room. Every few days, they scanned his lungs again, and they were slowly improving.

Finally, he stopped testing positive, and was moved to a regular room in the ICU. Then he healed enough for them to extubate him and wake him up.

On February 13th, he was conscious enough to squeeze my hand when we went in to see him. On February 14th, he was conscious and capable of talking enough to ask a nurse in his ward to bring him his phone, and called mum first thing in the morning to wish her a happy Valentines Day.

Two days later, on Friday 16th, his lungs looked good enough on scans that they felt it was safe to do an angiogram, which they wanted to do just to double check that there weren't any issues with his heart that they missed with the echo.

They did the test. They found massive blockages. 90% blockage in one artery; significant blockages in two others.

Even though he'd barely recovered from covid, the blockages were bad enough that they scheduled him for open heart surgery on Monday 19th. They said without surgery there was a 100% chance that the blockages would cause another massive heart attack that he would not survive. They said there was about a 20% chance that he'd have complications, but only about 4% that they'd be serious/life threatening.

Like before, the surgery went well. Triple bypass, in the end. We got a call late on Monday afternoon to say that he was in recovery and looking good. His heart was functioning perfectly. They'd bring him out of sedation that night. Keep him in the ICU one or two days just as the standard post-op procedure. He'd spend a week or so in a cardiac ward after that, then head to a physical rehab ward for a couple of weeks until he could build back the muscle mass he'd lost while sedated.

We went in to see him the next day. Tuesday 20th. His 66th birthday.

He was tired, but looked good. Color in his cheeks. He made a couple of jokes. We left after about 45 minutes because he was pretty worn out, and we wanted to let him get some rest.

But then after, that his breathing started to get bad again. By Wednesday morning, they'd switched out the oxygen prongs in his nose for a big, high-pressure mask again. They called to let us know they were going to intubate him again so he could rest while his lungs recovered a bit more.

They struggled to get the tube in.

His lungs were deteriorating badly. He kept getting worse. We couldn't go in to see him because they were working on him all day.

At 9pm we got a call to say that he was just getting worse. They had him on 100% oxygen. He just wasn't absorbing it. His entire body was under massive strain. They were doing everything they could, but he just wasn't improving.

They said we should go in right away.

We got there by 10pm. My brother and his wife arrived about the same time. We went in to see him. He didn't look good. He looked pale. But he was warm, and he'd come back from the brink before, and we were sure he could do it again. We stayed with him for about an hour, and left not long after 11pm. Went back to my brother's place because they live closer to the hospital.

We were there about half an hour before they called us again. Just after midnight. He was gone.

That was about a week and a half ago, now. It still doesn't feel real. He was only 66. He hadn't even retired yet. He was working full time up until the week before Christmas, and had planned on going back to work a few days a week after he'd recovered from surgery. He never had any heart trouble, or lung trouble. He was active. He was fine.

My wife Zel and her mom flew in a couple of days after it happened. I barely remember anything from the past two weeks. Everything just feels fake.

I've been trying to write something to say at the funeral, which we've finally been able to arrange for next week -- it was delayed because we had to wait for dad to be released by the coroner. I don't think I'll be able to do it.

Anyway. That's where I've been.

It'll probably be a little while longer before I'm around here much, let alone posting with any regularity, because I'll be in Australia helping my mum & and my brother sort everything out. I have no idea how long I'll be dealing with stuff, or when I'll be able to make words cooperate enough to post anything, but I'll be back eventually.

I'm trying to keep an eye on Discord (I'm violetmatter over there) so you can find me there if you want. But yeah, I just wanted to let you guys know why I've been so quiet.

[lotus-tower]

it’s not that there aren’t very real challenges and difficulties that come with covid mitigation

but at the core of it even the measures that require no imagination would be highly effective in driving down transmission, which would in return make other activities that are more difficult to mitigate infection risk for less risky

like we’re sitting here pretending we don’t understand the concept of ventilation or filtration, or that the idea of staying home when sick is weird and alien, or that it’s inconceivable that putting something on your face that filters air will reduce sickness. and we’re pretending that it’s normal for people to get sick at the hospital because hospitals are overflowing and have so many outbreaks happen in them. we’re acting like doing things outdoors or opening the windows is a concept that has never been seen before.

there are many ways we could transform society into one that respects disabled people and that values health and well-being over profit, but that’s honestly not even on the table at the moment. what we’re talking about is rejecting the use of ordinary tools and technologies that have literally been used for decades. I’ve heard about teachers and healthcare workers who purposefully go out of their way to turn off air filters that have been bought for them. repeatedly, every day. I’ve watched a video where a farmer wore an N95 to clean the chicken coop due to particles, but took it off to go to the store.

what’s happening right now isn’t just “people did the calculation and decided money is more important than people’s lives” in a pure rational way. because that’s not how capitalism works anyway. we all know by now that happy workers are more productive, some companies saw good results when going remote for the first time under lockdown, etc. but the goal is to control workers as a class, and to preserve the status quo.

obviously, long covid will cost more to the economy than updating ventilation will. obviously, children who are sick all the time won’t perform as well at school. obviously, reducing infection would reduce the burden on collapsing hospitals. prevention is always cheaper than attempted treatment. but these facts don’t mean anything. people are ideologically committed to covid denialism to such a degree that it’s pushed them to do utterly absurd things. they’re overcorrecting like crazy in order to try to get to the 2019 “normal” state.

people are trying to gaslight us into believing that we were always sick all the time, that measles is a normal winter illness like the flu, that PPE measures were like this before the pandemic. scientific research and facts aren’t going to convince these people.

and it’s just ridiculous because the situation at hand is literally one where improving air quality, a multipurpose measure with no downsides whatsoever, is a no-go specifically because it could reduce covid, whether that’s the stated goal or not, and they balk at the idea of accidentally reducing covid transmission.

meanwhile, private bioscience firms are trying to invent ridiculously complex long covid treatments with hundreds of millions of funds from rich sponsors. and that’s okay, because that’s a Thing. rich genius saviors are always okay. but opening the windows for free? for prevention? to prevent getting the untreatable illness to begin with? that’s weird and unfathomable

[invincible-selfxmade-punk]

TEACHER RANT

75% of our kids failed the last test we had.

So we have to contact the parents of every kid that failed, tell them the test score and tell them that we are sending the test home for them to retake and that they won't get credit for it unless the parents sign it.

And that's only half of it because for every single kid we do that for we have to fill out a data sheet on it which takes about a minute and a half each.

I teach 108 kids a day!

From 4:20 to 6:00 I'd done about 10 kids so far!!

I gave up and went home knowing I still have so much to do. We had about 15 kids out sick with either strep, flu, or covid today. For every kid that is out I have to cut out their notes and glue them into their notebooks for them --already filled out so they will have them.

I worked through lunch and finally managed to get the first three classes worth of kids done.

I've got kids that literally only show up once every 3 weeks. And yet we are expected to keep them completely updated on every single thing and have their work ready for them and get them ready to take test when they're never here long enough to absorb anything.

And those 75% of the kids that failed they had all of the answers in their notes. They were allowed to use their notes. We gave them the answers over and over probably three or four times each during note-taking. So either they were too busy talking to each other to take the notes to begin with. Or if they are some kind of special needs where we have to take the notes for them and glue them into their book they were too lazy to open up the book and look for the answer. Literally the answer to 98% of the questions were straightforward from the notes literally written word for word and yet most of the scores were in 30% range.

I have one class that only has nine kids in it. Nine kids that's all. But they are all so low level except for one girl. The one girl that is high level is just crazy. All she wants to do is run around pick on people get physical with people grab them pull their hair throw their things around. She's probably one of the few people that could actually do and understand the work but she just acts out all the time. One girl is one of the kids that only shows up once every 3 months and even then she has so many special needs she's pretty much not going to be able to do much of anything in class. And the others while they're medium to low level they are perfectly capable of taking notes and going back and finding the answers.

Aside from one kid who made a 68 the rest of them made in the 30s because they were too lazy to go back to their nose and look anything up and who gets in trouble for that? ME.

I am basically told I'm a shitty teacher, I have no classroom management skills, and I don't know what I'm doing if I cannot make six kids past their test.

Speaking of futility I don't know what it is about this year's set of kids that they have no memory for the smallest things.

When we got our library schedule I told every class Thursday is our library day. The next morning the first thing I heard;

"Are we going to the library today?"

"No, today is Tuesday we go on Thursday."

Next child in line coming in to class:

"Are we going to the library today?"

"No , today is Tuesday we go on Thursday."

Repeat from every single kid to walk into my classroom every single class all day. 108 kids!!!!And then the next day:

"MISS!!! Are we going to the library today?"

"No, today is Wednesday. We go on Thursday."

EVERY OTHER KID, EVERY CLASS, ALL DAY LONG FOR THE FIRST 4 MONTGS OF SCHOOL!!!

If something doesn't change I do not understand how these kids are going to be able to hold jobs or do or learn anything.

I just don't understand it. 85% of them are like this and it is really only the gifted and talented ones which are dwindling every single year that have even the most basic memory and recall ability much less critical thinking.

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

Workshopping an idea below the cut, feel free to ignore, im mostly organizing thoughts for therapy lol.

Warnings for mentions of medical neglect, self deprecation, illness/COVID, and related stuff.

When I had COVID, it went bad. Not just because I was sick, although that was certainly part of it. High fevers and constant exhaustion are misery-inducing, let alone the amount of missed classwork I had to work on from my bedroom. But that’s not what I remember about having COVID. I remember going hungry.

COVID, until recently, was handled by my university differently than other illnesses. I think that’s rather stupid; I fully support masking and mandatory self-isolation time during illness, but I don’t think those should be COVID-exclusive policies. I should be guaranteed a rescheduled exam if I have strep or the flu, also. But, because of the ongoing pandemic, COVID was unique as far as enforced isolation policies. For five days after first symptoms (at the time I was infected), you were forbidden from attending class, and for the next five days, you had to mask. You’d get a doctor’s note from the clinic excusing you from all your classes for a few days, it was a whole thing.

I did not initially get diagnosed with COVID. I started showing symptoms on Saturday night, but on Sunday, my rapid test at home was negative. On Monday, my rapid test in the university clinic was negative, and I only got a doctor’s note for the day, with instructions to return if I got worse. That afternoon, my fever soared to 101 degrees, and I was so delirious that I forgot how to treat a fever. I had to cancel attending DND, even masked and socially distanced or online, because I was incoherent from exhaustion. The next morning, I was too ill to talk or drive, and had to use an AAC to ask my friend to drive me to the doctor.

Funnily enough, even in that state, I did not think to ask my roommates to drive me to the doctor.

Which is odd for a couple reasons, honestly. On Monday, I had been in the living room the whole afternoon, shivering under a blanket on the couch and staring at a wall for hours. My roommates both had schedules which had them passing me by several times. Neither interacted with me at all, until I went into the kitchen and used my AAC to try and talk to them. Even then, they often breezed past me or ignored me when I did use my AAC, and I left that conversation frustrated because I didn’t get enough time to type a sentence. I may as well have been a rock. A sweaty, shivering rock. But I had talked to them, and I had known I was going to need to go to the doctor, and they were right there. So why didn’t I ask them to help me?

I didn’t eat at all on Monday, as far as I recall. I know I woke up on Tuesday starving. I know the only thing I have evidence of me consuming is water and tea. I know I got stuck in the shower that night, laying in the tub, too weak to climb out. For a while, I couldn’t lift my head. I’m impressed I didn’t fall asleep there.

Tuesday came, and I was diagnosed with COVID after the third rapid test came back aggressively positive. There’s something to be said about not assuming a negative test means you’re not infected with COVID, but that’s a different discussion. To be safe, I was given a doctor’s note exempting me from class until Friday. I tried to be responsible, and so I told my friend, my roommates, and anyone I had been in contact with since Saturday. Most people said “oh, I’m so sorry you’re sick, feel better!” My friend mentioned they’d disinfect their car. My roommates told me not to leave my room. Don’t get them sick.

And that’s reasonable. I’d already planned on self isolating. We were all Honors students; because the university treated COVID differently, if they were considered infectious, they would also have to miss a week of class. But their concern had nothing to do with my health, or their health, or anyone else’s. Their only response was “don’t get us sick. We can’t afford to miss class. Don’t leave your room.”

And so I didn’t.

It’s funny, how not leaving your room gets very difficult after a while. For starters, I had to use the bathroom. That, I accepted, was a necessary quarantine breach. I couldn’t pee in my room. The landlords would kill me, but more practically, that’s just unsanitary and would make me getting sick more likely. I couldn’t hold it forever, either. At some point I was forced to leave. And that was fine, small dilemma resolved, I’d only go when I desperately had to use the bathroom. But what about leaving for other things?

I never thought to ask if I could leave to get my things from downstairs. That was frivolous, even if I wanted them. Or to go downstairs for my water, or snacks. Too risky. Common areas. My roommates had been very clear that any risk of them getting sick would be dire.

Which meant that when my sick body started having bodily needs, things quickly got very complicated.

That first day, after my appointment, I ordered chipotle. My mom had venmoed me some money when she heard I was sick, worrying that I hadn’t been eating. Which. I hadn’t. I asked my roommate to bring me my food, and after a while, she did. Perfect. The burrito would tide me over for a while, I thought. I’d be full for a long time.

Then thirst started to crawl up on me. I had juice at the doctor’s that morning (I was hyperventilating and they needed an accurate measure of my heart rate), but other than that, I’d had nothing. I needed water.

But I didn’t ask for any.

Instead, I waited until the dead of night, and then stole down the stairs, grabbed several waters, crept back upstairs, and chugged desperately while hoping my roommates didn’t catch me leaving my room.

Why did I do that?

Why didn’t I just ask for water?

Why did I feel ashamed, like I had broken some law?

The next day, I woke up starving. Which makes sense. I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before. I was sick. My body needed energy to heal and it didn’t have any. I complained to my friend that I was hungry and sick; they were very kind, and went to the grocery store for me, buying me popsicles and juice and Gatorade and other foods and medicine and such. Except, my roommates didn’t want any strangers in the house, so they delivered it on my doorstep. Which I couldn’t get to. One roommate collected the groceries, sent me a photo, and I was suddenly struck with guilt. Here I was, inviting a stranger to her to our home, inconveniencing her by forcing her to put away my groceries. But I was also very thirsty, so I asked for one of the Gatorades to be delivered to my room. She brought up the whole pack. Left it outside my doorstep. I waited until she was back downstairs. She didn’t bring up anything else; none of the medicine or food my friend had bought me. But in fairness, I didn’t ask her to.

The next 48 hours were marked by living off of that Gatorade.

I was thirsty, so I drank a Gatorade. And then I realized I felt less hungry afterwards, so I opened another one. Drank that one too. The fun thing is, I don’t actually like Gatorade? I asked for it because I was dehydrated and knew I needed electrolytes to replace the fever sweat. But usually, Gatorade is something I begrudgingly sip at.

I finished four bottles that day.

That night, I texted my roommates and asked if someone could microwave me some food. It was already precooked, I just needed it microwaved. I got back one roommate’s text: “I’m in class”.

Around an hour later, the other roommate stopped studying long enough to make dinner, and saw my text, and apparently felt kind enough to microwave precooked sausage for me. She didn’t really check it? It was still cold in the middle. Which. Was not great, given that I have major texture sensitivities surrounding cold food. But she had made it for me, and I hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours since then, so I ate it. Slowly. Forcing myself to swallow. Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it, just *swallow*. You have no room to complain.

I was still hungry. So I had another Gatorade.

Thursday arrived, I was on my last day of quarantine, and I had a weekend of recovery to look forward to. I was egregiously sick of Gatorade. My teeth, in my phone’s camera, were pink from the red dye. The paper plate from last night sat on my floor, forgotten, still smelling of sausage. I caught up on schoolwork. One of my two labs had leftover recordings from 2020, so I could make that one up online, and I got an exemption for attending the other one. I was weak and shaking from low blood sugar and illness, but I had shit to do, so I did it. Was it my best work? No. Did it get done? Yes. I was too tired to care about scores.

My homework was done. It was 3:48 PM. I was starving.

I texted and asked for someone to make me a frozen meal from the freezer. Slightly more inconvenient than the microwave. It had to go in the oven. I winced typing it. My roommates were so busy. They didn’t have time to waste on me.

Return text: “I’m in band til 5:20”.

Coolcoolcool. I can wait. I’ll sip another Gatorade.

5:20 comes and goes. I hear the door downstairs open. Half an hour passes. No sounds of food making. Welp. She’s busy. Maybe she forgot, or class ran overtime and I misheard, or she just can’t do it.

I text: “Checking in on the food situation?”

Suddenly, in that moment, my roommates stopped caring if I got them sick by leaving my room. The third time I ate in four days was by dinner I cooked myself, sitting on the floor of the kitchen with a mask on, trying not to fall asleep and let it burn.

Honestly, I walked away from that situation feeling like I was in the wrong. Clearly I had misunderstood something. Every time I asked for something, there was a long pause, or I was told someone was too busy to help me. I was burdening my roommates with my needs, when they were trying to work on schoolwork. Maybe I should have known I could leave my room for water, or to cook, during the day. Nevermind that I was so tired that standing up made my legs shake. I could still walk. I could sit on the floor and wait for my food. I could have taken breaks on the stairs if I was tired. I’d been lazy and needy and presumptuous.

My friends had… a different opinion about that situation.

This week, I got sick. I knew I was likely going to get sick. I went to visit some close friends, knowing some of them weren’t feeling well, and that I was going to be staying in their house. It was a calculated risk for me. I wouldn’t be in contact with a lot of other people during the trip, and if I did get sick during the trip, I wouldn’t leave the house, and regardless of how I felt, I would wear a mask while outside the house. I knew I could easily self isolate when I got home from the trip, since my bedroom is across from the bathroom and right next to the kitchen. I thought that I could just sleep during the day and eat at night, and nobody would have to be bothered by me when I got sick. I love these friends very much, and for me, it was worth it.

Notably, I live in a new house now, and with new roommates.

I did get sick, like I predicted. During the trip, no less. The second half of my visit was mostly me sleeping on a couch, or trying very hard to stay awake on a couch. I was miserable a lot of the time. I cried several times over minor inconveniences. I felt lazy and needy and presumptuous; now my friends had to put up with me being sick and weepy. I wasn’t being helpful. I wasn’t being energetic and fun to be around.

The way they treated me was night and day, compared to my old roommates.

Every time someone passed me by, they asked if I was okay. Did I want tea? Did I want some Emergen-C? Could I be persuaded to eat something? Did I need ibuprofen, or perhaps some pseudoephedrine? We ran out of sparkling water, and my friend just. Went to the store and got me some more, and some chips I liked, and some candy as a treat to snack on. I misplaced a plushie, and started crying, and… someone got up and helped me find her. They also played video games and streamed it so I could watch it from my phone while resting. Someone made my favorite dinners. My sensory issues flared up halfway through eating toast, and suddenly I had multiple people helping me get food I could eat to take my meds with. When I needed to shower, I was given access to a shower chair. I was never more than a word away from help, even if it was just something I wanted and not something I needed to feel better.

And then I got home, and my new roommate did the same thing!

I went to self isolate in my room, fully expecting to be forgotten about for the rest of the day. But my roommate sat six feet away, through my doorway, just talking to me until I was laughing. They made me dinner, and then lunch the next day. They bought me groceries again. Told me I could leave my room whenever I needed to, and that I was allowed to get water and food, why was that even a question? Hey, come watch me play Baldur’s gate. Yeah you can sit in the living room; you have a mask on and we’ll be distanced enough.

And every time I said how nice someone was being, or tried to apologize for being needy or inconvenient, I got pushed back. No, we’re not “being so nice to you”, this is basic decency, Blue. This is normal. People are meant to take care of each other when they’re sick. Who would just abandon a sick person to starve? Why are you apologizing? Why do you keep asking if you’re “allowed” to take care of your basic needs?

I don’t know.

It’s easy to point to my COVID experience and say that’s what messed me up. But even when I was sick with COVID, I didn’t want to ask for help. The negative responses reinforced that I was being too needy, but that idea wasn’t new to me. I already didn’t want to ask. I didn’t ask for food multiple times a day. I didn’t ask for the food and medicine my friend had bought me. I didn’t ask for water; I stole it from my own minifridge in the dead of night. Why didn’t you just steal food too, Blue? Great question! I felt so guilty about getting the water that it outweighed my intense hunger.

And the whole time I recounted it to other people, I doubted my own experience of the events. My memory is notoriously shitty when I’m tired or sick. I lose chunks of time. It happens. Maybe I forgot when my roommates did help me. Maybe I was emotional and misremembered how they treated me. Maybe they did care, and did ask about me, and I was too feverish to remember it. But I do have text records of every conversation we had between that Tuesday and Thursday. Because I was in my room the whole time. And could not talk to people. I have timestamps for their responses, and I have what they said and what I said.

And from those brief texts, I can tell you that I was treated as needy. and lazy. and presumptuous. I can tell you that my needs weren’t met, and instead of being angry, I apologized. I can tell you that my roommates were quick to respond when I talked about the cat sitting in the bathroom sink, or where to find the pizza cutter, but when I asked for any help, it was radio silence or “I’m in class”. Any help I did receive in that time was delayed, with no verbal confirmation it was happening, and I was left in extended limbo wondering if anybody would help me or had even read my messages.

All that’s changed is, now I know it didn’t have to be that way.

These old roommates still call me their friend. I don’t really know that I want to be their friend anymore. My friends didn’t neglect me so much that I spent hours shivering on the couch ignored, or got stuck in a shower with no way to ask for help, or stole water in the dead of night.

[renthony]

Considering the fact that there's still ongoing waves of covid, bird flu is an active concern, and I'm disabled, no, I don't have in-person social life. And since people refuse to mask up, get vaccinated, or offer virtual participation in things anymore, my attempts to find wider social groups keep getting hamstrung. It sucks. A lot.

I've thought about joining the local French conversation group, but they don't have any covid safety protocols in place. I've thought about going to the weekly free art classes at the comic school, but they aren't covid-safe either, so I just watch the recordings when they upload them on YouTube later. I've thought about going to multiple groups at the local queer community center, but when I asked if they had covid safety protocols, their excuse was that "Ron DeSantis banned mask mandates, so we don't do that anymore," instead of doing literally anything to fight DeSantis. I keep thinking about going back to my theatre & stage combat troupe at the ren faire, but I got sick after the show every single year pre-covid and I cannot risk that "faire crud" being covid proper. I just can't.

I am an active member of a union, but that doesn't count for this poll because I exclusively participate online by video calling into meetings. I play D&D with my parents and siblings every week, but that doesn't count because they're family. I talk to multiple friends and family members every day and regularly check in with folks, but it doesn't count because it's on my phone. I hang out with my housemates and we do all kinds of things together, but that doesn't count because they're the people I live with.

I am being as social as I safely can. It feels really shitty that so many people think it isn't good enough. It feels really shitty to constantly feel like my choices are "be a weird angry shut-in" or "elevate my covid exposure risk." It feels like there's no winning.

If you genuinely believe that it's important for people to have in-person social outlets (and I do agree!), here's what you need to be doing:

Follow the People's CDC's Safer In-Person Gatherings guide (which is due to be updated for 2025 soon).

Get your updated covid booster. People aren't getting their updated vaccines, and it's a problem. If it is available to you, you need to GO. GET. YOUR. BOOSTER. And get your flu shot while you're at it.

Advocate for improved air filtration in the space you want people to meet in. Push for air purifiers if the HVAC system can't be fully upgraded. Help make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.

At gatherings, provide FREE high-quality N95 masks for people who may not be able to access them. Get some for yourself if you can, and actually wear the fucking things. Over your nose and mouth. Properly.

Stop participating in social dogpiling when people make honest blunders or commit a faux pas. A lot of people have been isolated for years by this point. Social skills atrophy if they aren't used. Is that "weird" person in the group actually hurting anyone, or are they just awkward, intimidated, and out of practice when it comes to social groups?

Stop being a shithead to people who still can't participate. Stop entertaining the belief that people who don't have a robust external social life are "defective" or "untrustworthy." Stop treating people who don't have a robust social life as if they're dangerous, stupid, or shady. Sometimes people just don't have a robust social life. There are many, many reasons. It's not something you should make harsh judgments about.

Evaluate your space for general accessibility. Can disabled people enter and make use of the space? Is it mobility aid friendly? Sensory friendly? Are there things that can help make it easier for disabled people to find, access, and participate in the group? Have you asked any disabled people about how you can make improvements?

Get your fucking covid booster. It's on here twice because data suggests you fuckers aren't doing it. Go get your fucking vaccine.

I know I'm setting myself up for another barrage of, "Ren, it's just some stupid tumblr post, it isn't that serious" comments, but...well, it is that serious to me. I want to participate in social groups again. I want to go places and do things again. I want to go out. But I, and a lot of other people like me, just don't have the option.

You can help give us that option by giving a shit about covid safety and disability justice in your community.

Thanks, Anon!

-submit your poll!-

[cloama]

My partner keeps begging me to move to his country and I keep standing toes down for the US bc I want to be in my own home and these mfs ain’t running me out my own shit. But then I see stuff like this:

“Wear protective gear”

The CDC won’t say wear a mask.

A little over ten years ago, H1N1 aka Swine flu almost killed me. It tore through Florida and the country ignored it. It left me with some terrible respiratory issues from which I recovered after some years. Just as I went to only needing my inhaler once a month, COVID-19 hit and I managed to successfully evade infection from 2020-present. Bird flu will be my third plague.

I honestly don’t know what I’m gonna do if this reaches catastrophic levels. All the ills of this place are laid bare in a crisis. I also am aware that migrants workers have even less access to healthcare than us interact with many domestic labor animals. No one will help them. No one will protect them. Then after they hide their deaths they will let it will kill the rest of us. I am not being alarmist. I simple see.

What is the benefit to plaguing your public? I mean I get it a bit. I listen to Imani Barbarin and other disability activists. Sick and infirmed people are the last class of people you can subjugate discretely and the healthcare industry is a money maker but like— we don’t have any money!

I said I wasn’t gonna get catastrophic but I accurately guessed everything that was gonna happen during Covid and I am actually spiraling about this.

Bird flu does not care. It will murder 50% of those infected. Elected leadership are arguing about masks. I don’t wanna die. I just got a crumb of happiness. It’s too soon.

Okay I’m going to work.

[towhomever]

February 7 2024

Been a while huh? 4 years based on my last. Major updates are that I broke up with David by the end of 2020. I think past me told the story better and it was going in that direction. More than anything, I met Pieter online. He was shy, quiet, and sweet. In short, exactly my type. We were online dating for the whole of 2021 then I finally made the decision to call it quits and move to Europe in 2022. I essentially forced my parents to let me go under false pretense that I had acquired a job for a marketing company in Belgium when in reality I had nothing. I met up with Pieter in Madrid on January 20 just to make sure he wasn't a catfish (although we have been video-calling for a year before hand). We stayed at my brother's apartment while we were exploring Madrid in the mornings. Then I flew to Belgium with him and officially started living together on February 8.

It was a rough first year because it was hell to adjust to the weather and seasonal differences. Not to mention all the trauma from my childhood, both by my brother and parents, and from my last year in University were starting to come up.

During my last semester of University the College secretary found out that I was mistakenly credited for a class that I hadn't taken. I asked about that class in the past and they said according to my transcript of records that I had finished that class. They essentially fucked up the classes on my transcript when I shifted from Industrial Engineering to Civil Engineering. I had a breakdown because I was rushing to finish all my classes and my thesis while studying remotely then this happens. I had passed everything except for that class so they managed to make that class available for me that summer because it is usually offered only in the second semester. I took it, had a rough time studying, and eventually passed it.

When it was over, I didn't get a celebration for my graduation. My parents barely cared about it except on Facebook of course where they made a big fuss. They didn't even want to take photos with me around campus. Natalie was the one taking all my pictures for me. Either way, I figured I would be out of there soon enough. Then we got COVID. My dad got sick first and we were all telling him to quarantine himself but the selfish bastard argued that it wasn't COVID and that it was just a normal flu. And as expected, 2 days later, my sister and I showed symptoms. I couldn't smell and my sister couldn't taste. My mom was asymptomatic though. We had the option to either stay at home or go to a quarantine facility. The main benefit of the quarantine facility was that if one of us got more dire then we would have direct access to the hospital. Only my mom was worried for my dad. I genuinely thought we should stay home. Natalie and I pleaded that we stay home on our own but they said we either have to all stay at home or all be in the quarantine facility. So we had to stay in a small room for 10 days straight with my insufferable parents who spent the entire time arguing about trivial matters like my mom's brother not being more compassionate when on call with my dad or how the mother superior nun at the church my mom is obsessed with likes my dad more. They would turn into screaming matches and my mom would even run out into the hallway playing victim to this man she can easily leave and honestly should have left to die of COVID. I would have to damage control and tell my mom to go inside and for my parents to stop arguing because Natalie and I could barely keep our heads. My mom even started yelling at Natalie to get better so we can get out of the quarantine facility and I had to reason with her to stop because that won't make her get any better.

After all this, I told them I was leaving next year. It inevitably turned into this big fight and they were pressuring me to stay but I was set on leaving by this time because my parents were something else. I told my sister I would make something of myself in Europe and that I would get her out of here. I promised her that I would help her and that she can live with me soon.

So fast forward to today. I got a job at ASML in the Netherlands in May of 2022 as a Production Engineer. The Netherlands was more accepting of expats and didn't really need to convert our degrees into a Dutch one because ASML is an international company as well. Luckily Pieter and I lived just across the border in Belgium. This did make it a little complicated in terms of having to get my social security and insurance in the Netherlands and deal with the paperwork for Belgium as well. Either way, it was all worth it because my starting salary was at 2.4k euros monthly with a 6% increase each year for the first 3 years for a fresh-graduate bachelor degree holder. Not to mention we had 13th month pay, holiday bonuses, and 40 vacation days in total and boy was I happy. I never expected to find something like this so soon, and what an opportunity it was compared to the companies in the Philippines that were paying a literal 8th the amount of what I was being paid at best with only 10 days vacation. Point is, life was going well for me.

My parents and Natalie decided to visit Europe in July. They first visited Matthew and Armie in Madrid before coming to Belgium of course. Natalie got into another stupid argument with my parents and started self harming by scratching her arms profusely. She was in a dark place and I remember that place all too well. I was worried for her and I promised to help her get out of there once she was done with Highschool. I tried to help her out with her plans for University here but she's not as confrontational as I am when it comes to my parents. She's fierce but she knows what happens when you hit a dead-end with my dad. There's this terrible power-trip he exhausts on us, and basically when you've proven him wrong and he's losing his stance he threatens to hit us or just plain hits us. In short - he and my mom are fucking physically and emotionally abusive.

My parents and Natalie then came to visit us afterwards and Natalie ran into my arms. I could tell she had a stressful time and was really excited to see me. She, Pieter, and I had the best time. My parents visited mostly to see how I was doing. I was doing really well and so were Pieter and I. I mean Pieter and I definitely had some ironing out to do but one thing I always appreciated of him was the consistency he brought. He was kind, caring, dependable, and everything I ever wanted in a partner. I knew it annoyed them to see how I was now. It annoyed them to see how I was with Pieter and how I was thriving without them. My sister on the other hand was so happy to be around Pieter and I that she would even sleep on our little couch in our tiny apartment instead of the AirBnB my parents rented out a few blocks away.

In August, my parents, Natalie, Pieter and I went to visit Paris and Versailles for the summer. We all then went to Spain to meet up with the rest of the family and Auntie Roenna and Uncle Vince who were also visiting Spain. This definitely put a toll on Pieter and I because he could see how draining my parents were and how controlling they were. They even started telling him what chores to do because Auntie Roenna was "our guest" and we had to cater to her even though we were all supposedly on vacation.

Pieter also found it incredibly exhausting being around my brother, because in the short time that we have spent around him he has tried to cheat on Armie by having coffee and hoping to sleep with this girl named Paula who was part of their friend group. He also claimed that a lot of women were into him and even hurt Pieter's thumb by "teaching" him arnis. He even got in this fight with Armie saying that she doesn't think he's manly enough because he's not tall like Pieter is. This bit we found hilarious though.

When it was finally over and Pieter and I returned to Belgium, I started seeing my therapist Sophie Pollock. The rest of the year was pretty calm after that. The only other big thing was that one of my colleagues was fired and went to prison for punching a guy in the face an effectively blinding him. This colleague of mine was named Bas Vorstenbosch and he was a professional kickboxer as well. When he got out of prison he tried calling me up a few times and was asking to meet up but I declined because he was also borderline racist and misogynistic at the office. My two other colleagues Marc and Jur were also low-key racist and misogynistic but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Fast forward to June of 2023, I and my colleagues when to a week long conference in Wilton, USA to meet the rest of the people running ATT (Automated Torque Tooling). I clicked very well with the people from the Wilton factory and they were very impressed by my the KPI (Key Performance Indicator file) I created from scratch last year. That was originally Marc's project that he told me to "figure out" and when I did, they were all so impressed with it. While they were complimenting my work as I was presenting, Marc and Jur abruptly left. Soon after when I joined them for coffee they started cracking jokes like "Maybe you should run the other factory since you can do everything right?" They were basically edging me out of the competence. They even went so far to say "How about you run the Twinscan Factory and Marc and I will run the EUV factory."

I tried not to think too much about it because I stayed for dinner and drinks with the people at Wilton and they basically revealed how much they hated Marc for his work ethic and how Jur acted like his little puppy following him around everywhere.

All this aside, it was a good conference and very motivating for me. Besides, I didn't have time to think about it because Pieter was flying in to JFK to spend the next 5 days with me on holiday in New York. I even got to meet up with my dad's cousins Uncle Peter and Uncle Joe. Uncle Peter is one of the Executive producers at CNN now and he used to work on Broadway while Uncle Joe is an attorney in New York. They were really impressed with me that I was an engineer and an artist, but Uncle Joe did the classic dad thing where we started comparing his two sons' successes to mine. One was planning to join the military and the other was about to graduate from uni with a Bachelor's in Sports science. He essentially wants to become a coach of either basketball or a football team. I didn't think their career track was too bad but I guess in a parent's eyes their children are always disappointments. Although Uncle Joe was definitely a better father because I could see he loved them. He joked around about them but he still spoke of his love of them. Moreover, he was very liberal and against homophobic and racist people. I found this hilarious because my dad must be everything he hated. No wonder they haven't met up again after all these years.

The main highlight of our New York trip was that we went to see Wicked on Broadway which I had dreamed of watching since Junina introduced it to me when I was 13. I cried during and after the performance of course and Pieter finally understood my obsession with Broadway. Afterwards we flew to Canada to stay with my Auntie Roenna and Uncle Vince (who are also way better parents than my parents because they don't hit their kids nor do they power trip as hard as my dad does). I introduced Pieter to all my cousins and I met all of their partners. Miggy was weird around us, almost like he was obviously intimidated by my success. He asked if I was materialistic out of the blue. He also said he idolizes Matthew, so that was enough of a red flag on it's own. He also sells Jesus merchandise, like T-shirts and stuff. I think Steffi and Raffy are still some of the more chill cousins among all of them, but they had all moved on with their own lives already. Steffi was pregnant with her and Elliot's first child. Michelle was living in Ottawa with Kyle with their baby Hope. The Sta Cruz siblings all had their own partners but still lived at home mostly. Although Miggy did get engaged.

When we returned to Belgium I filed for sick leave at ASML because I was having so many flashback from the last time I was in Canada. Before we went to Canada, I had just gone to the ER for self-harming. I had smashed a glass on my forehead because my mother kept screaming at me for not bringing int he laundry in time. She was yelling that I wanted her dead and that I was so ungrateful of a child for forgetting about the laundry. I also had flashbacks of my childhood and I was feeling anxious about returning to work with Marc and Jur. This is when I started my EMDR therapy sessions to specifically combat the memories regarding the physical and sexual abuse I endured from Matthew during my childhood.

All while this was happening, Pieter and I were looking into buying an apartment because with my salary increase we could finally afford it. Not to mention rent was such a waste of money. We moved into the new apartment in November and got the place ready in time for my parents, Matt, Armie, and Natalie to come visit. They visited for the holidays (December 19-January 9). My parents and Natalie again stayed with my brother and Armie first in Madrid before coming here. When they came here, things were fine for the first few weeks. They were impressed with the apartment and had a new found respect for Pieter because he had money saved up that he used as down payment for the apartment. With my salary and the money he saved up from working in the past, we managed to buy our home. Of course my parents kindness only lasted the first week. Soon all hell broke loose about how they want Natalie to study in the Philippines and my dad cracking fat jokes at me in front of Pieter's family. Also Pieter told my parents that he plans to propose to me and my mom told him that he might as well propose to me already because he proposed to them. In short, they were being insufferable. I told them off that night and said they aren't welcome in my house if they keep acting that way. Natalie joined the conversation and we argued that she has a right to hold onto her passport because it's her document and that she has a right to study where she wants. My parents argued that they're footing the bill so they can control where she goes. To which I said I can pay for it if that's the case so she has the freedom to choose. She can also always take a part time job while she's here. My dad couldn't say anything else and almost had a heart attack from it.

They were quiet for the rest of the stay and Natalie stayed with Pieter and I for most of the weeks. During this time Armie confided in me and Natalie that my brother was being abusive towards her. She tried to break up with him recently and he yelled at her, threatened to cut himself, and threw glasses at her. I advised her to run from him because there's no way that he would ever change especially since he doesn't take accountability for his actions. My brother even sent me a voice recording when this happened and said "it's not so much what I did but her reaction to what I did" So he clearly has zero capability of self reflection.

When they returned to Madrid, my parents fought with Natalie. She was defending me when my parents were playing the victim saying they were not welcome in my apartment and that only Natalie is the one welcome at my place. Natalie then said "She said you are welcome to stay so long as you don't disrespect her." Then my dad asked where the disrespect was and Natalie said "You called her fat in front of Pieter's family" Then my dad said that it was a jokea nd when Natalie tried arguing he started going "Don't dare me Natalie. You don't want to see me angry" which is what he used to say before hitting us. I then bought Natalie a ticked back to Belgium and told her she can take it if she wants, but that it will be hard for her to find a university here because she still hasn't finished highschool.

Which brings us to today. Natalie went home to the Philippines to finish Highschool and plans to run away here. My mom texted saying they plan to hear Natalie out if it is indeed cheaper to study here, so I helped Natalie come up with an Excel file. We found out it was a million pesos (20k euros) for her to study here because DLSU in the PH is ridiculously expensive. Natalie has yet to report this to my parents on a power point file. Chances are they will change their mind when the time comes so I have a backup plan where Boris and my Ate Ernestine to help my sister escape if needed.

As for me, I am reintegrating into work and thinking solutions over with my manager about the Marc and Jur issue. I also am resuming EMDR sessions with Sophie and this time will be tackling the Sexual abuse memories.

Also just to explain - the sick leave scenario at work allows someone to be on sick leave for up to 2 years with full pay. I have to have bi-monthly meetings with the company doctor and bi-weekly meetings with my manager to keep up to date on my mental health progress and reintegration.

So yeah- a lot has happened since my last post.

[bbbellamywrites]

you know sometimes i start thinking that maybe i did just make up the shitty parts of how my mother 'raised' me. like maybe it was just in my head, y'know? and then things like this happen and i'm reminded of every time i would tell her i didn't feel good and she would tell me to stop faking it. i'm reminded of the fact that i had to ask the school nurse to call my grandfather instead, because i knew my mother would just tell them to send me back to class.

i have covid.

i'm living at home right now. my stepdad stayed home sick on tuesday. on thursday i developed a fever.

they told me it was just a 24hr bug/flu going around. i accepted that, though i was skeptical given that i was still sick.

sunday i decided to take a covid test. i didn't think it'd be positive, but we had the tests so i thought i'd check. it came back positive. i told my mom - her response? "Great."

this morning i get told to just stay in my room while my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew come over. she doesn't think it's likely i have covid. i'm told this through text. before i've had the chance to get up and use the bathroom or get food or water. i stay in my room for three hours, waiting.

even with the risk of me having covid - which had to come from one of them - the two of them go to my aunt's house. my family - aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents - are all there.

i sleep most of the day, on and off. i can't shake the feeling that she's wrong. i take a second test, it's also positive. i tell her.

it's my fault my immune system is weak, because i don't leave the house. because i didn't have a shit immune system before i stopped going out anywhere. because i didn't spend most of my childhood with strep, and later mono, or sinus infections - like i didn't let her convince me the sinus infection i had when i was 18/19 wasn't that bad.. right up until her ex boyfriend took me in to a clinic and they told me if i'd waited another day i would've needed hospitalized due to the lung infection it'd turned into.

sometimes i almost forget. because sometimes it's easier to see that she loves me. and then i get sick.

anyways

does anyone have any tips for getting over covid quickly? i just want it gone and i can't go to the doctor.

[cowboyjen68]

Parental Rant

I just get her back in school. Doing well. Going without arguments. She feels good and passes all classes at the end of the quarter with the help of a very good staff at the school. 

Then over break she gets sick. Covid? Flu? Strep? Mono? I have no idea. No one is open from Thursday of last week until today. No way I am going to the ER for 4 hours for them to tell her to take Tylenol and rest. The ER has way too many sick people to expose an already sick child and myself.

Today our Doctor’s office is not answering. The clinics are not answering and no on line appointment are being accepted. Walk in only. I have to head to work. The website suggests between 2 and 4 for best times to walk in. Makes sense due to the work day. 

My roommate maybe can take her today. Or I can take her tomorrow after 330. The school has to be skeptical about her actually being sick. There is no doubt the kids has something. Fever, sore throat, fatigue, almost passing out. She is eating and drinking and if it was up to me, we would keep her home to rest and get better. But we need an excuse from a dr for the school and her job. 

Sigh..  I guess I will feel better if we know what it is but likely they will say “rest and cold meds”.   She is zooming with a teacher right now to lay out plans for the week just in case. 

It is hard enough to worry about my sick child now I have to worry about school and her passing and what they think. 

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

As you all may know, my mother is on a ventilator for covid 19. She didn’t believe in covid. I tried to tell her but she didn’t believe it. She tried to tell me some kind of Qanon bologne when I’d try to tell her. I would give anything to have more time with my mother. There is some signs of improvement in her feeling better but I am not wanting to become too hopeful. She was on the phone with one of my elder sisters for six minutes rather than two the other day. She was angry at her for letting her kids come in to her house knowing they had covid.

I’m very angry at her doctor who told her she didn’t need the covid shot, in fact just telling her she is healthy. She has a small body frame and is on the shorter side but weighs nearly three hundred pounds and struggles to get around. She’s 59 years old and works as a nurse at a nursing home and works way too hard on minimum wage, has given birth to six children, has always had asthma and is prone to bronchitis and pneumonia. She’s a prime candidate for covid, in fact she is who I thought about the day I remember reading about covid. It’s like this disease was designed to kill my mother.

They sent her to southern Idaho for a ventilator. She is lucky to get one. They’ve run out in many of these red states that didn’t take covid seriously enough. It does not bring me any joy that right wingers and people who didn’t believe in the shot are dying. I’ve had liberal friends say over simplistic things about people from red states getting what’s coming to them and so forth, and people have rejoiced at the idea of trump supporters getting sick and suffering and dying.

I am left leaning, but I never want to get so caught up in my political ego that I eradicate any notion of humanity to the people I don’t agree with or might not even like. Their pain and lives are real and legitimate as anyone else’s. Their families matter too. They are wrong, my mother is wrong. She’s been backwards about a lot of the world my whole life.

But she’s also a very kind person. She is always giving to people and has contradictory, while supporting a fucking horrible president, also put up for and fought her job because of racism she was seeing all around her. She doesn’t really think like a conservative and her way of approaching life didn’t really ever reflect a deeper conservative value or drive. I’ve noticed other conservatives never liked her.

She believed the wrong things because she was driven by religious faith and loneliness to believe the rabbit hole of alt right Facebook. She doesn’t have much of an education, was bullied and abused for most of her childhood. she went to over twenty different schools and moved a lot throughout her childhood. She got married and started having children very young. She always worked as a bartender, or as a caretaker to children with disabilities or elderly folk. She barely understood the internet. She believed in god and joined religious groups on Facebook very open and blindly without even understanding propaganda or the political climate of what is being fought for, which pretty much took her down this poisonous road. And now she’s barely able to talk in an icu all alone, as this virus that she didn’t believe in tries to kill her.

Moving to the city and always being left leaning, but being from a rural area of the inland north west, where I was outnumbered and lived amongst these folk who didn’t like me all that much but I was always having to find ways to accept and understand sometimes gives me a perspective perhaps that maybe liberal kids from middle class families from liberal cities have missed out on. I will never be able to see it as black and white. It would be easy to just say that the people in Bible Belt areas deserve this and be rid of any sadness or guilt. I was disgusted by the anti intellectualism I was surrounded by and I lived for most of my twenties in my own world to avoid it when I was growing up and lived in my home state which is fairly red. But people are the same everywhere. They really are.

Her recovery is slow and I worry something terrible is happening to her organs and lungs as she has fights for her life. I hope her body is strong enough to keep fighting. I appreciate the care and labor and sacrifice the hospitals have given to keep people alive. There is so much anguish. We have lost a mural of so many wonderful and beautiful souls to covid. It’s hard to even fathom the grief and pain it’s left in its wake. I can barely cope with my own.

I took a walk today to think. I haven’t wanted to listen to music in a long while because my mood is on my mother’s condition, but I put in John Prine. He was one of the first people to die of covid that I cared about, albeit indirectly as I only know him through his songs. I had a ticket to go see him play before covid took his life. It was going to be small and intimate outdoor concert in town. His music was always so real and down to earth. He sings about the quiet sad things of getting old and the way that love is about the daily existence with other people. How you build and cope with things.

One of his last songs on the album before he died was about how science has no business tinkering with nature. It’s so genuine. And ironic. Not everyone shares this belief, but I think that the covid flu was made in a lab and someone made a mistake and let it out into the public. I believe it was just human error in Wuhan. Nobody, no government or anything wanted this. And the Chinese government did everything they could to avoid fessing up to the mistake. So the idea of a lab grown virus being what killed John Prine kind of hurts in a way, though he also often sang about being comfortable with death and having peace with a life that was happy.

There are countless people I could blame for my mother’s disease. I could blame the dystopian Chinese government and their inability to admit fault, I could blame our government and our long-standing capitalist system that monetary prioritizes gain over human life, I could blame my mother’s cruel upbringing for not giving her the tools she needed to make wise choices about the world around her, or she herself for not taking care of her body. I could blame her mother and father and brothers.

I could blame my sisters kids for their lack of consideration of what covid would do to my mother’s health knowing she was high risk, or my eldest sister herself for being lazy and letting them go to my moms house knowingly.

I could blame some mentally unwell woman named Susan who my mother might have vaguely known for inviting her to a Facebook group of hate and conspiracy, or blame the nuns who drove religion into my mother’s head as a child. I could blame the easy to punch Ted Cruz or Tucker Carleson or any of the right wing mouth pieces for spreading lies and misinformation to the people they are supposedly speaking up for on behalf of about covid. I could blame it on our artificially based two party system that prevents real discussion from ever happening.

In the end, there is a myriad of things I could blame. So many pieces to the puzzle I could write volumes. But it doesn’t change where we are at now. And I have little control of the world around me. Or what made it that way. It’s disappointing. And in a way, John Prine has that message too. I’m just sad. I try to remember that my mom of the many people I have known was very accepting of death. Maybe it’s because she’s a person of faith, but she has a practical dark humor about her too that makes her accept it. I know she wouldn’t want me to be sad, but I am all the same.

It’s happened at this point where I am genuinely feeling my age and kind of at a crossroads in who I am as a person and what I want to do. I’ll talk about that some other time though. There is only so much a person can read.

[howdon-aldi-death-queue]

NEW SAM FENDER INTERVIEW FOR NME

THE BIG READ

Sam Fender: “This album is probably the best thing I’ve done in my life”

The hometown hero has distanced himself from the ‘Geordie Springsteen’ tag, but there’s no shortage of rites-of-passage yarns and colossal tunes on the upcoming ‘Seventeen Going Under’

“You can see the ghost of Thatcherism over there…” says Sam Fender, pointing across the water to a vacant shipyard, where once the shipbuilding industry was so healthy that vessels towered higher than the rows of houses on the shore. We’re on the waterfront in North Shields, just outside Newcastle, and our photographer is snapping away for Sam’s first NME cover shoot.

The singer-songwriter stares stonily into the lens as wafts of seaweed and fishing trawlers are carried by the northern coastal breeze. He’s already been stopped for a few pictures with fans, but remains eager to point out the impact that Tory leadership has had on his working-class town over the last few decades. “It’s been closed since the ’80s, from the ghost wasteland of the shipyards. You’ve got all the scars of Thatcherism from The Tyne all over to the pit villages in Durham.”

It’s as good an introduction as any to the outspoken musician, whose 2019 debut album ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ was a record for his sleepy hometown to be proud of – tackling themes that range from male suicide (the heartbreaking ‘Dead Boys’) to world tensions (and the “kids in Gaza” he eulogised on its soaring title track). He set weighty topics against blisteringly well-executed Americana with the fist-in-the-air euphoria of Bruce Springsteen’s colossal choruses and sax solos. Much like his hero, Sam smartly weaves his own political standpoint and personal circumstance into gripping anthems of a generation, which earned him the ‘Geordie Springsteen’ tag.

“I can’t exactly bat off those comparisons, can I?” he says back in his cosy recording studio nearby. “At the same time, I don’t feel worthy of that tag. The first time I heard it, I was like, ‘That’s fucking sick’, but you don’t want to be riding off the coattails of The Boss for the rest of your life. I can write my own songs, they’re different and my voice doesn’t sound anything like Springsteen’s. I don’t have his growl; I’m a little fairy when I sing.”

He may have toned down the Springsteen vibes slightly on his highly anticipated second album ‘Seventeen Going Under’, due later this year, but there are still plenty of chest-pounding anthems capable of making your hairs stand on end: “I much prefer Americana to the music we have in our country at the moment. I love the leftfield indie stuff like Fontaines D.C, Squid and Black Midi, but I love a chorus and melodic songs. I think the American alternative scene has that down with Pinegrove, Big Thief, The War On Drugs.”

‘Hypersonic Missiles’ thrummed with a small town frustration almost that every suburban teenager could surely relate to. This was most notable on ‘Leave Fast’, where he sang about the “boarded up windows on the promenade / The shells of old nightclubs” and “intoxicated people battling on the regular in a lazy Low Lights bar”, a reference to his beloved local. But album two sees him fully embrace North Shields, an ever-present backdrop to cherished memories and harrowing life events of his youth and surroundings.

It’s no coincidence that the 27-year-old has turned inwards and penned a record about his hometown while being stuck at home like the rest of the country: “I didn’t have anything to point at and I didn’t want to talk about the pandemic because nobody wants that – I never want to hear about it again. It was such a stagnant time that I had to go inwards and find something, because I was so uninspired by the lifetime we we’re living in.

“I’ve made my coming-of-age record and that was important for me – as I get older, these stories keep appearing; I’ve got so much to talk about. I wrote about growing up here. It’s about mental health and how things that happen as a child impact your self-esteem in later life. On the first record, I was pointing at stuff angrily, but the further I’ve gotten into my 20s, the more I’ve realised how little I know about anything. When you hit 25, you’re like: ‘I’m fucking clueless! I know nothing about the world.’ It was a humbling experience, growing up.”

Early last year, before the pandemic hit, Sam was set to jet off to New York pre-pandemic to record in the city’s infamous Electric Lady studios founded by Jimi Hendrix. “Looking back, I’m thankful that it happened,” he says. “If I went off to New York and did my second album there… it wouldn’t have been the same record. I will go and do the third one in NYC, come hell or high water – I’m fucking out of here!

“The forced return home really informed the direction [of the record]. I was on the crest of this insane wave; we’d sold out 84,000 tickets for the [‘Hypersonic Missiles] arena tour that we still haven’t played yet. I’m still waiting to hear when it’s going to be rescheduled. It’s incredibly frustrating; I’ve got loads of frustrated fans. That was all cancelled on the day of the lockdown. I thought it was only going to be a couple of months and that it would be another swine flu thing, but fool me – I was stuck in the house like everybody else.”

It’s not the first setback that Sam has dealt with in his career. In the summer of 2019, he was ready to make his Glastonbury Festival debut with a Friday afternoon set on the legendary John Peel Stage, a rite of passage for any emerging artist, but had to pull out due to a serious health issue with his vocal chords. The mood in the room shifts dramatically at the mention of this devastating period: “I don’t want to focus on that, to be honest, because it’s just negative news and it’s in the past.”

“The further I’ve gotten into my 20s, the more I’ve realised how little I know”

Looking back now, he says, it was a tough decision, but ultimately the right thing to do: “We were doing so much at the time and I just burnt out. If you damage your vocal cords, you can’t take it lightly. If something happens like that and you keep going, you’ll fucking lose your career forever. I never want to end up behind the knife; I just refuse to put myself in that situation.”

The fact that his 2019 breakthrough ground to a halt again in COVID-decimated 2020 “was frustrating as fuck”, he says, “but I took solace in the fact that everyone was stopped in their tracks that time; it wasn’t just me.” This was in stark contrast to the singer’s experience of pulling the biggest moment of his music career in order to rest his vocal cords: “I didn’t talk for three weeks; I had to be silent and just watch Glastonbury on the TV, going, ‘This is completely dogshit’. But you can’t even say that out loud – you’re just saying it over in your head like a psycho. I’d take a pandemic over that any day.”

There was a brief flash of light when he headlined the opening night at the world’s first socially distanced arena, Newcastle’s Virgin Money Unity venue, to an audience of 2,500. Yet Sam’s not in the mood to wax lyrical about that, either. “It was amazing,” he says, “but it didn’t happen again.” A local lockdown in the North East brought the following shows – which would have featured Kaiser Chiefs and Declan McKenna – to a premature end in September: “It was another false start. We thought everything was going to get moving again but then we were just sat around [again].”

As for this reaction to the Government’s handling of the pandemic? It perhaps says it all that he’s selling face masks emblazoned with the words ‘2020 Shit Show’ and ‘Dystopian Nightmare Festival’ on his website. “I think everyone has said enough haven’t they?” Sam suggests. “I never want to see Boris Johnson’s or Matt Hancock’s face ever again. As soon as they come on the TV, I just turn it off.”

Political tension bubbles through ‘Seventeen Going Under’. Its second half boasts tracks such as ‘Long Way Off’, a brooding but colossal festival anthem brimming with angst and unease. “Standing on the side I never was the silent type,” Fender roars, “I heard a hundred million voices / sound the same both left and right / we’re still alone we are.” It’s gripping stuff; a Gallagher-level anthem ripe for pyro and pints held aloft.

Sam says the song is about feeling stranded amid political divisiveness here and in the US, epitomised when Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington back in January: “You’ve either got right-wing, racist idiots or you’ve got this elitist, upper-middle-class section of the left-wing, which completely alienates people like myself and people from my hometown.”

“The polarity between the left and the right has me feeling like I have no identity”

Closer to home, the last UK election, in 2019, saw the so-called ‘Red Wall’ crumble as working-class voters in the north defected from Labour to Tory. “The polarity between the left and the right has me feeling like I have no identity,” Sam says. “I’m obviously left-wing, but you lose hope don’t you? Left-wing politics has lost its main votership; it doesn’t look after working-class people the way that it used to. Blyth Valley voted Tory just north of here. Now, that is saying something! We’re in dire straits when a fucking shipbuilding town is voting for the Tories – it’s like foxes voting for the hunter.”

He’s even seen his own working-class friends peel to the blue side: “I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I understand it, though. I’d never vote for the bastards because I fucking hate them and I know what they’re up to, but I get why people don’t feel any alliegiance to left-wing politics when they’re working-class.”

As ever though, Sam isn’t masquerading as an expert: “I’m not fucking Noam Chomsky, you know what I mean? I’m not going to dissect the whole political agenda of the Tories and figure it all out because I can’t. All I see is a big fucking shit sandwich – every day through my news feed – and it’s just, ‘Well: that’s what your dealing with.”

The singer is fond of describing North Shields as “a drinking town with a fishing problem”. Today he adds: “That’s been the backdrop of my life: all of these displaced working-class people. It’s a town that’s resilient that still has a strong sense of community. In a lot of big cities that’s dead. In London everything changes from postcode to postcode, but everything is quite uniform up here.”

When NME was awaiting Sam’s arrival outside the studio before the interview, a passerby clocked our photographer’s gear and asked, “Oh aye – are you waiting for Sam? We all know Sam – a good lad; very accommodating with nae airs or graces about him.” Another pointed to The Low Lights Tavern down the road, where Fender used to pull pints on the weekends: “He was a terrible barman, and he’ll be the first to tell you that. I think he got sacked about six times during his time there.”

Sam (who confesses of his bartending know-how: “He’s totally right!”) hit the local to celebrate when ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ won him a Critics’ Choice gong at the BRIT Awards in 2019, placing the trophy on the bar. “I owed The Low Lights one for being such a shit barman,” he says. “I wanted them to be proud of us because they fucking certainly wasn’t proud of us when I was around working there!”

“Celebrity stuff freaks me out. I’d rather just live my life”

He’s clearly a key member of the local community, then. How did he see the pandemic impact on his family and friends – especially when the North East faced the toughest Tier Four lockdown restrictions last December? Sam pauses before bluntly saying: “I lost more mates; there was suicides again. Mental health was the biggest thing. We lost friends who had drunk too much.”

A track on the new record, ‘The Dying Light‘, is an epic sequel to ‘Dead Boys’, with the poignant last line of the album ringing out “for all the ones who didn’t make the night”. Sam, unable to truly distance himself from The Boss after all, explains: “It’s very Springsteen. It’s my ‘Jungleland’ or ‘Thunder Road’ – it’s got that ‘Born To Run’ feel; there’s strings and brass [and] it’s fucking massive. It’s a celebration. It’s a triumph over adversity.”

He stresses that it was vital for him to be in regular contact with his friendship circle through that traumatic time: “It becomes important when you lose friends to suicide… You realise it’s always the unlikely folks. We lost a friend to suicide at the beginning of last year and it was someone you’d never expect. It really hits home; it’s important to check in on your mates.”

Sam has alluded in previous interviews to a health condition that he’s not yet ready to fully disclose, and tells NME that he spent three months shielding at the beginning of the pandemic: “I was alone for three months and that was very tough… When you’re completely alone and isolated, it’s impossible. I spent a lot of time drinking and not really looking after myself and eating shit food, but I wrote a lot of good lyrics.”

There’s a certain resulting bleakness to some of his new songs, but Sam also wanted light to shine through. “It’s a darker record, but it’s a celebration of surviving and coming out the other end,” he explains. “It’s upbeat but the lyrics can be quite honest. It’s the most honest thing I’ve done.”

You might expect a young hometown hero to rail at having been denied the chance to capitalise on his burgeoning fame in the last year or so, but Sam insists, “I still have imposter syndrome,” adding: “I don’t feel like it’s happened… I’m walking around the street and people ask for photos and it just feels bizarre. I’m like, really? I feel like I haven’t come out of my shell yet.”

Sam has rarely been one to court celebrity, and revealed in 2019 that he’d turned down the chance to appear in an Ariana Grande video. “It was an honour but I would have just been known as that guy in the video,” he tells NME. “All of my mates would have been flipping their heads off, but I don’t think she would really want an out-of-shape, pale Geordie. I’d rather just live my life, because all of this celebrity stuff freaks [me] out, you know?”

He might have to get used to it: things can only get bigger with the arrival of the new album. “As a record I think this one is leagues ahead [of ‘Hypersonic Missiles’],” he says, “I’m more proud of this than anything I’ve ever done. It’s probably the best thing I’ve done in my life. I just hope people love it as much as I do. With the first album, a lot of those songs were written when I was 19, so I was over half of it [by the time it was released]. Whereas this one is where I’m at now.”

“This is a dark record, but it’s a celebration of surviving and coming out the other end”

Still, he adds: “At the same time, this record is probably going to piss a lot of people off.” He’s referring to a line in one of the more political tracks, ‘Aye’, where he returns to his most enduring bugbear, divisiveness, and claims that “the woke kids are just dickheads”. Sam’s no less forthcoming in person: “They fucking are, though! Some 22-year-old kid from Goldsmiths University sitting on his fucking high horse arguing with some working-class person on some comments section calling them an ‘idiot’ and a ‘bigot’? Nobody engages each other in a normal discussion [online] without calling each other a ‘thick cunt’.”

He’s eager to make this statement, though, come what may: “I don’t fucking care any more. I’m not really sure how the reaction is going to be. People used to say things online about me and I used to get quite hurt about it, but now I’m like, ‘Well, they’re not coming to my house’… [But] I get so angry. In Newcastle we say ‘pet’ and someone was trying to tell me that was fucking offensive towards women. You’re not going to delete my fucking colloquial identity. It’s not even gender-specific; we say it to men and women. My Grandma calls me ‘pet’! That brand of liberalism is fucking destroying the country. We could be getting Boris Johnson and all them pricks out of office if we stopped sweating over shit like that”.

Sam might be outspoken, but he’s self-aware, too. When we were talking politics earlier, he said: “I didn’t want to start on ‘cancel culture’ because I don’t want to sound like Piers Morgan [and] I fucking hate that cunt. But there is a degree of it which lacks redemption; people fuck up. Everyone is a flawed character. If you’re not admitting that you have flaws, then you’re a fucking psychopath. The left-wing seem to be that way and the right-wing are fucking worse than they’ve ever been. Politically I have just lost my shit.”

In all of this uncertainty, though, it seems a sure thing that Sam Fender will take his rightful crown – as soon as the world lets him – with the colossal ‘Seventeen Going Under’. “It’s going to be a hell of a return,” he insists. “I know the fans are still there, you know? So I’m not really worried – I’m ready to go out there and do my thing. Finally!”

[springday-aus]

Hockey Player!AU with Mark

moodboard link

Group: NCT

Member: Mark Lee 

Genre: fluff, romance 

Additionally: college!au

Type: Bulletpoint AU

Word Count: approx. 2.3k 

→ Inspired by NCT U’s 90s Love! 

I’m gonna be completely honest: I don’t know shit about hockey so apologizes in advance

Mark is a left-winger for the team

he plays for his university’s team and they’re actually pretty good

within the three-ish years that he’s been on the team, they’ve won a couple of championships

it’s not really hard considering that Mark takes everything too seriously

(at least that’s what Donghyuk says during practice all the time)

Johnny somewhere: “okay Mark”

Yuta: “let’s not overreact Mark”

Taeyong: “leave my son alone”

Mark: “I’m a grown adult…”

Taeyong: “shhh”

since he used to play for his team back in hometown, he naturally joined the university’s team

he was a natural and everyone easily took a liking to him

especially since now they have someone to make fun of constantly

by they, I literally mean just Donghyuk

I’m just kidding—it’s all in good fun because it just shows how close they are

Mark is just that one college kid that’s still cute even when he’s not a freshman anymore

the other team members still treat him like the youngest even though YangYang and Sungchan are like

👁👄👁 hello ?

speaking of which, their teamwork is incredible and it shows through their games

and, on the rare occasions that they don’t win, they still have dinner together afterwards

well, it’s less of dinner and more of drinks and strategizing what went wrong—which are kind of depressing but it’s fine

at least that’s what Sicheng says as captain, but it sounds like denial

anyways, even though Ten is the co-captain, they all work to make their play plan together

they all contribute ideas, especially since they’ve been in the positions they’ve been in for, like, ever

anyways

again, Mark is like really good

so you know he got that bombass scholarship

and that’s what really pushes him to do well bc let’s be real, college is e x p e n s i v e

he also likes ice skating in general because the cold reminds him of home

so he’s one of those hockey players that also likes figures skaters and it’s funny because he gets so many weird looks from the others

(altho, Jeno goes with him sometimes bc he’s nice)

back to what I was saying tho: Mark is really good

despite his personality, he’s a bit more aggressive on the ice—considering he’s a forward

Donghyuk, the right-winger: he makes sense

there’s the passive aggressive-ness

Mark? who knew he had some strength to him when it’s actually applied

seriously, have you seen his thighs?

speaking of which, the team serves a lot of looks

which means a lot of speculators that show up to the games

which means lots of fans

people typically come for the looks, but then stay for the games bc the team is very underrated

they actually win games and everything but like

advertising for the team? nonexistent

@stupid college funding distributions that focus on mediocre sports like football

so, where do you fall into the mix? you’re an og stan

you’ve been in the stands since you entered university

it didn’t even have anything to do with the members (altho, it is nice to have some eye-candy)

you just……… like hockey

even if you don’t understand much about it

it’s just… interesting to watch

so, whenever the season rolls around, you go to the games

but to say over the years that you didn’t develop a particular attachment to our boy Mark…… is an absolute lie

so, do you have a crush on Mark?

yes

but also like

who doesn’t have a crush on Mark

this man is literally so talented and nice and adorable and he just makes you want to take care of him all the time and ugh

one of your friends went to a game with you and literally was just like “oh he’s cute”

You: “we know”

he’s def one of those guys who everyone has or has had a crush on at some point

and you are no different

the thing is that you are fine with not ever confessing because you’re happy with just being on the sidelines because you’ve. literally. just been on the sidelines…

the idea of confessing feels ridiculous bc realistically, what would you mean to some guy that literally e v e r y person has a crush on?

the thing is though is that Mark knows you

at least, he knows of your presence

if he didn’t, it would be embarrassing considering that you come to every game - he’s got loyalty unless some people

Ten: “who?”

Mark: “dude”

Donghyuk: “is this another one of your imaginary friends?”

Mark: “I TOLD YOU THAT IN CONFIDENCE”

jkjk , they all kind of know you, considering you’re one of the more consistent faces since they’ve been playing in these games (primarily the home ones bc free tickets for students but still)

you also don’t paint your face or anything—you just show up in your university sweatshirt with a couple of those foam light up sticks or something

again, not that wild like signs with his face or anything

you’re just…. a spectator

but yeah, Mark knows of you as a loyal fan ?

who also is kind of cute when you’re cheering for them

I want to emphasize that you have gone to, like, nearly every game, but the main ones you’ve *always* have gone to are the home games bc they’re more convenient

or the final games bc hello

they’re the finals, why the fuck would you miss the finals

I emphasize this because, when you’ve suddenly gone down with the flu, you literally cannot make it to the finals championship game

you thought: no one was gonna notice your absence anyways

haha, you thought

anyways

your friends figured you were sick from the beginning and were like, my friend, it’s flu season, stay away from me and pls stay at home

(wash your hands kids, it’s still covid season)

so you didn’t go and stayed in and binged watched iCarly or something

meanwhile, during the game, Mark was like

where... where are you???

so homeboy is highkey distracted and lowkey worried bc did you die???

(you were dying bc of your clogged nostrils, but otherwise, no)

they somehow managed to win by a couple of points so it was kind of fine

but the teasing was increased by all of Mark’s friends

i.e. Johnny, Donghyuk, Jaehyun, and everyone else

come on, it’s so easy to make fun of him

but like he doesn’t care about any of it bc he was worried about you

which got him thinking

why is he worried about someone whose name he doesn’t even know? is there something more? why is there something more? he literally doesn’t know you? except that you come to the games and you’re really cute cheering him on? what is this?

you know, ✨just Mark things✨

this bothered him for quite a bit more than he liked to admit

and it’s about a couple of days later

things are normal and you don’t feel like everything is dripping out of your nose

until you’re walking through campus from your class

and there’s some footsteps running from behind you that makes you coil up into a semi-standing ball bc you thought a bunch of frat boys were just excited or some shit

but then the footsteps stop at you and you’re standing there, wide-eyed

in front of an out of breath Mark

he was walking out of his class with Jaemin and he spotted you from across the quad

and immediately ran to you

Jaemin: I was talking but okay

this isn’t about you Jaemin

anyways

Mark is in front of you, panting and you’re just like sir?

You: “how are you out of breath? aren’t you an athlete?”

Mark: “oh my God, you’re just like Donghyuk”

you give him a bit of time (and some water bc he seemed like he needed it)

and once he’s caught his breath, he stands up and blurts it out

Mark: “what happened to you during the championship?”

You: “....................... what?”

seeing you blink at him confused, he can feel his ears reddening when he’s realized the situation he’s put himself into

Mark: “um, I just”

Mark: “I noticed that you weren’t at the game”

You: still confused bc how does he know about you

You: “huh?”

Mark: oh my God this is the wrong person, want to die

Mark: “you know what, I have the wrong person, I’m just gonna bounce I am so sorry—”

he starts backing up, but you aren’t letting him escape

You: “whoawhoawhoawhoawhoa, hold up hold up”

You: “I didn’t even know that you knew that I knew you”

You: “wait, did you run here just to ask me that?”

Mark is full on flushed at this point bc of all the questions and realizations and it’s all crashing down on him all too soon

and now you have this mischievous look in your eyes that remind him of Ten when he’s clowning Doyoung and he feels like he’s made a mistake

a good mistake but still a mistake

You: “is it?”

Mark: “well, you like, show up to all of our games and you didn’t go to the finals so I didn’t know if anything happened”

You: “oh, I got sick and I figured I shouldn’t be going into giant crowds while having my insides die internally”

You: “but, I did hear from my friends, congrats btw”

Mark: “thanks”

Mark: “are you feeling better tho?”

You: “yeah, but like, my throat is still kind of shitty”

Mark: “oh, if you want, I have a couple of friends who might be able to cook something up for your throat”

Mark: “I’d offer to make something, but Kun doesn’t let me in the kitchen anymore after finding out about the egg incident”

You: “the egg incident?”

Mark: “I can’t cook, like. at all.”

You: “I think I’m good, I was just gonna go get some tea to make it less scratchy or something”

Mark: “I can walk you?”

You: “sure”

so you two go to a cafe or something for you to get some warm tea and you two end up talking and you get to know each other a bit

and then you end up trading numbers and you make some time together

since Mark doesn’t have to go to practice until the next season, his time has opened up considerably

sometimes you study together

other times, you go check out some other places nearby campus

(eventually, you did get to try Taeyong, Jaehyun, and Kun’s food, to which there was no turning back at that point bc they make the best kind of food—free)

you’re basically dating at this point and his friends know you as his significant other so

Chenle: “is (Y/N) gonna be here?”

Mark: “no? it’s our movie night”

Donghyuk: “aren’t you dating tho?”

Mark: “what”

he told you he took it casually and cool, but considering how red his ears were getting when he told you………………. cute

Mark: “c-can you believe they thought we were dating?”

You: “is that not what we’re doing?”

Mark: “what?”

you both established your relationship after that and Mark got a lot more shy and it’s super adorable bc it makes you wanna take care of him and ugh

he’s precious okay

also cut to him trying to ask the other guys for advice, but then he gets embarrassed as Johnny and Ten tries to educate him about love

or how Lucas gives him cheesy lines to use on you

these boys are having a field day and Xiaojun and Doyoung have never felt more at peace

anyways

def the nervous type that he can’t even hold your hand and keeps asking if it’s okay

so you’re the top of this relationship bc he’s a shy lil boy

after a bit tho, he gets more comfortable and it’s great

he’ll get teased often right? when it happens in front of you, he just runs to you with a whine of your name and buries his face into your neck

and you end up yelling at someone

it’s cute tho

bc they def see you both as an adorable couple

when the hockey season starts rolling around again, you def spend more time at the practices—whether you’re there to watch, do your homework, or just help motivate him to play better

you started dressing up more too, especially since he gave you his jersey so you started wearing them to the games (and also face paint bc Jungwoo had some extra for an unknown reason)

and you make Mark Lee signs and it’s super cute

Sicheng also invites you to the afterparty dinners bc why not

also, remember that thing I said about watching figure skaters?

you two watch the Olympics for that and it’s like tradition now for you two to settle in front of the tv with snacks and watch them skate

so, since he’s an athlete, he has to be careful with his body bc then like scholarship will go poof

that means some of your dates might be physically limited

like he’ll go mini-golfing with you, but he can’t go to like self-defense classes with you

he’ll go to support you but if his foot gets busted, his coach and the rest of the team will be on his ass and he feels a bit bad about it but like you understand

considering that you absolutely refuse to get on the ice bc hockey is hard people

speaking of hockey, you told Mark he’s hot when he plays and he was FLUSHED

bc like the look in his eyes and the way he carries himself…. reminds you of when you’re doing some more………...steamy activities

anyways, stan Mark Lee

he’s a sweetheart who works so hard and you’re there to provide him with lots of love

[blush-and-books]

Juke 48 fluff please...

Prompt #48: “I told you to take care of yourself.”

Ksjahdsf High School AU inspired by the fact that my generation has been so crushed by the pressures of our education system that we would always show up to school with colds and strep and literally anything because we refused to miss school. Double inspired by the morning I threw up at 3AM and had a cold but literally went downstairs and monologued to my mom that I had to go to school bc I had two quizzes that would have been hell to make up and I would have had major anxiety if I missed anything. And she let me go. Triple inspired by the fact that pre-COVID I would get sick routinely 4 times across Oct, Nov and Dec because my peers would also show up sick. So, yeah. Here’s to the american education system 

Luke knows that something is off with his best friend when she finally approaches her locker that Wednesday morning, where he had been anxiously bouncing on the balls of his feet waiting for her.

Where she is usually like sunshine to him, glowing brighter than the California sunrise -- a lyric in the song he was planning to show her, but would never admit was inspired by her as well -- she arrives with the pale glow of the moon instead. Julie’s eyes are half-open, and her usually bouncy curls have been pulled back and up unto a messy bun. 

He hasn’t seen her like this since-

“Jules,” he mumbles, half to himself and half to her when she finally looks up and notices him. Instantaneously, he takes an energetic step towards her, letting his hands rest on her upper arms. “Are you sick? Again?”

As if she doesn’t want to hear it, not again, her bottom lip juts out in a pout that is only seen on a miserable Julie Molina before she brushes past him to her locker. Deeply concerned, Luke trails after her. 

“Julie, hey,” he attempts, but she won’t look up at him. There’s a shame in her face while she gets her calculus textbook from her locker, and it’s then that Luke notices the thermos she’s clutching in her left hand. “Let me take this stuff. Drink your tea. Don’t try and talk, I’m sorry I didn’t notice.”

She shakes her head, it’s not his fault, she’s the idiot showing up to school sick, but she couldn’t miss today. She just couldn’t. 

Without putting up a fight, she lets him take her backpack and textbook from her possession while she unscrews the lid of her thermos and chugs two big gulps of tea. Temporary relief is brought to her throat, but it doesn’t last long. 

“I-” She attempts, but Luke shoots her a glare and wags a finger at her. Ignoring him, she powers on. “I have a calc test and a history quiz and an English debate.”

“You can make those up.” “But do I want to? Do I want to miss a whole day of notes and work and assignments because I have a runny nose?”

(And a sore throat, obviously. And a headache. She also woke up right before her alarm to throw up, but she hasn’t felt the urge to do that again since. You get the picture though.)

“Jules, I mean this in the best way possible, but you look like there’s a lot more than a runny nose happening here. A runny nose was two weeks ago. This looks like your whole body aches.”

(Fair assessment. It does.)

She lifts her thermos to her lips once again to soothe the throbbing that resulted from her excuses, feeling her stomach twirl in a way that she can’t tell is another bout of nausea or just Luke making her painfully fall more in love with him. 

He, on the other hand, is one step away from hauling her over his shoulder and driving her home himself. He doesn’t know what to do. Julie’s stressed, and the stress has made her vulnerable to colds for the past couple of months, and this is the third time he’s seen her sick. No matter what, she shows up to school -- freshman year, she stayed home sick with the stomach flu, and had a panic attack in the bathroom on the day that she came back. 

He knows because he was in her music class that year. Her best friend, Flynn, had rushed into the music room to explain to their teacher, and he’ll never forget it. 

Coincidentally, it was two months ago, with Julie’s first ceremonious cold of the year, that Luke officially realized that he was in love with her. It was the feeling of seeing her uncomfortable, powering through because she felt like she had to -- he was so proud, yet so worried, and wanted to bring her home so they could watch Tangled and he could make her the matzo ball soup recipe that Alex taught him when they were kids. 

“I know,” she croaks at him, face crumbling. “It does. I feel like shit. But I just have to get through today, and I’ll be fine.”

(After spending six hours at school, another two on homework, pedaling through five bottles of Gatorade and getting four hours of sleep because her throat and sinuses prevent her from any adequate rest. Yeah. She’ll be fine.) ((She’ll still come to school tomorrow.))

Luke knows all of this. In his head, he’s drafting the text to his parents that he’ll type out in his lap during first period to tell them that he’s going to be at the Molina’s for the next couple of days, taking care of Julie. They do have a band to worry about, after all, and their lead singer needs to be in top shape. 

Just looking at her tired face makes his chest hurt. She looks like she hasn’t smiled in a long time. Wanting to comfort her, somehow, he reaches his hands up to cradle her cheeks -- but she swats him away. 

“Luke, no. I’m not getting you sick.”

Fighting her flailing hands, he manages to slip his own to her cheeks, making sure that the fingers that are wandering into her hair rub her scalp. That’s always a calming, relieving feeling. 

“Impossible, mariposa. My immune system is Herculean.”

She looks up at him, fully, for the first time that morning. He can’t help but grin at getting to see her face, no matter how tired she thinks she looks, and even though she thinks he is full of shit she can’t help but mirror his expression. 

“There’s my girl,” he whispers unconsciously. Her skin warms underneath his hands. “Are you alright? Do you have a fever? You’re getting a little toasty.”

Her skin temperature rises from her blush even higher as his hands slip from her hair and to her forehead, pathetically testing for a fever. 

“I’m good,” she shakes her head, trying to brush it off. His eyes refocus on her, and he sighs; the air staying silent between them as she tries to decipher what he’s thinking. 

“You need to take better care of yourself,” he insists. “I told you to take care of yourself. Can’t have my frontwoman blowing her nose in between each song at a gig.”

“I’m your frontwoman now? Fuck Julie and the Phantoms, I guess.”

Luke smirks, and for a heavenly moment forgets that the precious girl in front of him isn’t in pain, but she stiffles a cough after her joke. Frowning, he drops his hands to grab hers so that he can hold them up between their chests. 

“You’re my everything, silly. Frontwoman, best friend, study partner, favorite person-”

“-Walking petri dish.”

“Yes. My walking petri dish.”

The joke lightens Julie up. Maybe today, if her and Luke can keep making jokes, she will get through. She can’t think of anything else to say as his lips press against her forehead in a gesture so caring that she would grab his face and move those lips down a few inches if she weren’t, you know, a walking petri dish. 

Before either of them can say anything else, the school bell rings. It’s time for her miserable day to start. Just the idea of sitting still in her math class makes her shiver, and she wraps her arms around herself. 

“Are you cold?” Luke jumps to ask, moving closer to her as the halls start moving with crowds of other students. 

“Luke, I’m fine-”

“My locker is right by your math class. I have a flannel in there. You’re wearing it today.”

“Luke-”

“No arguments. I was walking you to class anyways. I’m walking you to every class, actually. Your backpack weighs more than you do and that’s the last thing you need to feel right now.”

(Not to be creepy, but Julie Molina would marry Luke right now if he asked. Sometimes she wonders if her other best friend, Flynn, is right when she makes jokes about her and Luke being a married couple. If this is marriage, sign her up.)

“Thank you,” she says lightly, trying not to strain her throat. Luke responds with tugging on her left hand, beginning to pull her towards the staircase at the end of the hall. 

“We’ll get you better, Molina. Mark my words.”

Tagging @willexx because you got all impatient on me. love you babe and love you too anon!!