#Weird Anecdotes

[crones-trash]

Publishing again.

I've posted another one of my Weird Anecdotes for those who enjoy reading them.

[weirdanecdotes]

I Learned to Hate in Nursery School

This is not an anecdote I share casually. Lovers and husbands have heard it, best friends, a therapist or two. It’s not the kind of story you tell to just anyone. But then, no one who’s heard it has ever believed it so…

In my earliest memories, Papa was going to Georgia Tech and working nights, Mama worked as a bookkeeper for Rhodes Furniture Store, and I got sent to a nursery school when I was two. Small children don’t see the big picture, don’t understand the good reasons behind the arrangement of their lives. They only know what they need and resent not getting it. Maybe I needed more love and attention than other children did. But, I doubt that. I knew for sure that I wasn’t happy being put in a system that only noticed me if I deviated from the prescribed regimen.

O how I cried! And begged! And pleaded every morning, “Please, I don’t want to go, please, don’t make me. Please, Mama, take me to work with you, please don’t leave me in that awful place!”

In retrospect, I feel bad about dumping all that guilt on my poor Mama; she really had no choice. Papa was in college and worked double-shifts at a greasy diner. But they needed more.

From my childish point of view, my parents were as cruel as Cinderella’s, dropping me off into that teeming play yard to be jostled about by other babies whining, “Please don’t leave me here.” It was really a very high-class school located in a white frame house in Buckhead across from Regenstein’s Fine Clothing Store on Peachtree Road. All the very best struggling two-income families sent their tot-bodies to be warehoused there.

The Art Room and Rainy Day Playroom were downstairs in the basement and the other classrooms and an office were upstairs. The facilities were as nice as nursery schools can be, I suppose, and the curriculum wasn’t much different than the way Kindercare’s are run today. I could have been happy if I had accepted the situation, but that was the problem; I just couldn’t get used to having somebody telling me what to do almost every minute of the day.

It was the uncompromising schedule I disliked the most. Everyday followed the same routine without inspiring any moments of joy or wonder. Even in “art,” pressure was applied to make you stay inside the lines.

Lunch was gruesome in its blandness. The dietitian splatted scoops of nutrition on top of each other upon the plates. Hard under-cooked green peas rolled over mounds of over-cooked macaroni and cheese. Chunks of raw pineapple peeked out like the tips of yellow icebergs in seas of green Jell-O. It was simply disgusting.

I always had indigestion after lunch; it was a combination of my seething resentment and nausea over being forced to eat this mess. Yes, forced! At this point in the day, the Director appeared. Scowling and glaring, she patrolled the tables like a storm trooper.

The Director of the school was not a kind, loving woman devoted to small children. Maybe she had been when she started out but some bitterness or disappointment in her life had transformed her into a cold, autocratic despot. She held a wooden ruler in her hand at all times and would slap it against her palm. Slap! Slap! Slap! Like the beating wings of an angry hornet.

Slap! She’d pop her palm right next to my ear and make me nearly jump out of my skin in fright. And if you really resisted eating your canned, sliced, slightly heated carrots, she’d pop you! On the thigh, or the calf, or your shoulder, whatever was handy.

I hated her, purely and with such passion and purpose, and to such an end, as you will soon see, that I have never been capable of hating anyone so much again in my whole life.

After lunch, we heard a story delivered by the Director. She transformed storytime into a boredom to be endured when it should have been a life-enhancing experience. Papa was far more entertaining. The stories were chosen not for any value other than sleep inducement. Because right afterwards came nap time, the break the Director and her assistants waited for all day — and the ordeal I most dreaded commenced.

I was a delicate, little bird-child, vibrating with nervous energy. I only missed being labeled hyperactive and addicted to Ritalin because my parents weren’t rich enough to take me to a fancy doctor. I stopped taking naps when I was 18 months old and still had trouble getting to sleep at night. My imagination was developed during the long hours between the time I got put to bed and the time I finally managed to fall asleep. Maybe I wasn’t exercised enough or maybe I was hyper-adrenal, I don’t know. Sleeping was not something that came easily to me then nor does it now.

Now this Director had a fixation on children actually sleeping during nap time. It wasn’t good enough to lie quietly staring at the ceiling until this period of forced inactivity had passed. Oh no, every little eye had to be closed and if you couldn’t sleep you’d better learn how to fake it!

“Close your eyes, Jackie,” the Director would stand, menacingly, over some small child, “I said, close your eyes!” Pop! She’d swat the kid with that ruler. “Don’t you dare cry! I said, be still and go to sleep!”

Somehow I evaded her notice but right after my third birthday, I got caught. I remember actually trying to reason with this crazy woman, “I’ll be quiet. I won’t talk to anyone, I promise. I just can’t sleep. Just let me look out the window and I won’t bother anybody else.” How pathetic I was. This was a real issue for me. I couldn’t figure out how to explain everything else I hated about the school but I could make my mother understand this part of it.

“I just can’t sleep, Mama, you know I can’t. Tell her not to make me try to sleep.”

“Couldn’t you just try, darling.”

“I do, Mama, I try but I can’t and she makes me pretend and it’s boring!”

My mother complained on my behalf and that made the situation worse. I imagine the Director explaining that it was important to establish discipline in young children, that we needed to learn to eat, draw, and sleep when we’re told and not to question the authority of our elders.

“Well, well, well,” the Director said to me after lunch the next day, “You’re having trouble sleeping, are you? Well, we’ll have none of that, do you understand? When it’s nap time, you go to sleep. Understand?”

“But, I can’t.” I protested.

“Oh yes you can and you will.” Her eyes glittered with malice.

Defiance swelled in my chest and I retorted petulantly, “You can’t make me sleep if I’m not sleepy.”

“Don’t talk back to me, young lady. If you can’t follow the rules then you can’t be with the other children. We’ve got a special place for problem children like you.”

That was ominous; I swallowed hard. “Come with me,” she snapped while grabbing my arm and jerking me along beside her. I didn’t cry or whimper. I matched her willful glare for glare. I was cold with anger. She yanked me down the hall and shoved me into the bathroom. After saying, “This will take care of you,” she shut and locked the door.

I couldn’t believe it. She had locked me in the employee bathroom! It didn’t seem real. I put down the seat on the toilet and climbed up to sit. My skinny legs dangled over the sides of my high perch. The bathroom was a windowless, white tile cubicle. There was a grubby bar of soap, a dirty hand towel and a partial roll of toilet paper.

At first, my punishment didn’t seem too bad. I hummed a little tune and listened to it echo around the room. I began to tell myself a story like I always did when I was alone and bored. I was starting to build up a plot line about being a princess that gets stolen by Gypsies when discomfort began to interfere with my concentration.

My perch on the toilet was cutting off the flow of blood to my feet. I tried crossing my legs and leaning back against the cold ceramic tank but it was hard not to slip off and the chill edged into my back muscles. I got up and paced around my little cell. There aren’t any comfortable places in a bathroom, really. I tried lying down in the tub but it was hard and cold. Ditto the floor. Even sitting on the floor became intolerable after a few minutes because of the cold tiles.

“Solitary confinement.” I’d heard the term in a prison movie I’d seen on our neighbor’s TV set. It drove the guy in the movie crazy. I wondered if I was going to start raving and screaming like he had done. I wondered if other “problems” like me had pounded on the door and begged to be let out.

I washed my hands for want of anything better to do. I managed quite a bit of play out of the soap bubbles and that got me humming again. I decided I wasn’t that unhappy with my punishment. It beat lying on my mat with my eyes squeezed shut.

Drying my hands, I got the idea of laying the towel out on the floor and lying down on that. The floor was still hard but the towel took the chill out of it. I lay down on my side and studied the caulking between the tiles in the floor. I rolled on my back and imagined clouds on the ceiling. Then I started up my story again.

The princess was about to be rescued by the mysterious prince when the Director jerked open the door suddenly as if to catch me in a criminal act. I jumped up startled.

“Come along,” she said cheerfully, “It’s time for Outdoor Play.”

As I followed her out to the play yard, she confidently asked in a sickly sweet sing-song voice, “Have you learned your lesson?”

Her attitude and her question so surprised me that I laughed incredulously. I couldn’t think of anything to reply. She stopped and turned on me, all sing-song gone, “I said — have—you—learned—your—lesson?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. I couldn’t figure out what she meant. I hadn’t learned how to sleep on command if that’s what she wanted to hear.

“You were asleep when I came in,” she declared smugly.

“I was not,” I shot back without thinking.

“You were!” She hulked over me, clutching the ruler up in the air like she was going to swing it and chop my head off.

I shrank from her anger but held to the truth with a feebly muttered, “Was not.”

She started hitting me with the ruler. After beating me until she was red in the face, she demanded, “Are you going to be a problem at nap time again?”

I had cried during my beating; it hurt and I was still sniffling and swallowing hard from the sting of it but I clenched my jaw and narrowed my eyes, “No. You can lock me in the bathroom again.”

“Ha!” I think I surprised her, “Okay, we’ll see who wins this little test of wills.” Then she turned on her heel and went off to pick on somebody else.

I whispered to her back, “I’ll win,” I smiled with my certainty, “Cause you’re gonna be dead.”

In my childish mind, the Director was crazy. The Director was mean. And the Director deserved to die! As soon as possible, some how, some way, I was going to kill her dead and that was that.

“I had to give Sally a spanking today for lying,” she told Mama later.

In case you were born decades after I was and don’t understand why Mama accepted this and didn’t sue the school or call CPS to report child abuse, the answer is: Almost everyone beat their children! This was The South where “Spare the rod; spoil the child” was the guiding rule.

Driving home Mama wanted to know what I had lied about and I told her, “I can’t sleep at nap time so she locked me in the bathroom. It was cold and hard but okay. I played by myself. She came in and said I was sleeping and I wasn’t. Then she hit me.”

Seeing that this little telling had disturbed my mother, I tried to reassure her, “It’s okay. She’ll be gone soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s gonna die,” I stated.

“Oh, Sally,” Mama moaned, glancing at me anxiously, “Don’t say things like that.”

That night I hardly gave a thought to the Director. It was a given, a done thing. First chance, I’d kill her. It never crossed my mind to figure out how a small child was going to overcome a grown woman. I thought nothing of guns or knives or poison. I was going to do it. Period.

The very next day we were downstairs in the Art Room. I was sitting at a table pasting magazine cut-outs onto a piece of construction paper when the door upstairs opened and I looked up to see the Director coming down the stairs ahead of her usual schedule. I had a clear shot at her and I fired. A raw, uncivilized bolt of primal hatred lanced out of my eyes and hit her squarely in the stomach. She doubled over, lost her footing, and fell with a scream down the length of the stairs to land with a terrible thud on the concrete floor.

I jumped up, knocking over my chair. Everyone did. The Director was a twisted heap on the floor, convulsing, twitching blindly, frothing at the mouth and spitting blood. The crumbled mess moaned horribly.

I threw up my breakfast. Children started screaming and running out the back door into the parking lot. Teachers and assistants ran frantically about, some after the children, others to stand a foot or so away from the Director, fearful of touching her. One of them had to jump over her to race up the stairs to the phone to call an ambulance.

The Director’s thrashing diminished to a rhythmic rocking from side to side and her moans rose into wails of agony. Tears blinded me. I stumbled a few steps toward the mess that I had made and it looked up at me, not really seeing. I wanted to say something to her. I wasn’t sorry; I didn’t feel at all sorry or guilty—not then. But I didn’t feel triumphant either. Everything I felt in that moment was summed up in three words I said to her, “I didn’t know.”

I didn’t know!

Jimmy Cagney said, “Aaaargh,” and fell over when the FBI riddled him with machine gun bullets. He didn’t turn into a spastic, blood-spitting, pain-wracked heap of broken bones. Movies and TV weren’t at all realistic in my youth; nothing had prepared me for the reality of life and death and mutilation. What I had done to the Director was a horrifying, nauseating, bad thing.

The power of the mind is an awesome force, dear reader. I tell you I knocked a woman down a flight of stairs without ever touching her. By the sheer force of my hatred, I brought terrible grief to another human being. I didn’t know such things were impossible. Before I knew I couldn’t or shouldn’t, I did.

As I stood there looking down on what I had done it was like I was an empty jug being filled with the cold waters of guilt. I began to sob uncontrollably and beg, beg, beg the Universe to undo what I had done.

The nursery school was closed while staff, parents and children waited for the Director to be taken out of intensive care. But I found no joy in staying home with Mama given the circumstances. I tearfully confessed but she didn’t believe me. I reminded her that I had told her the Director was going to die.

Her reassurances were rather odd. “You’ve done that before,” she used the kind of nervous but cheerful tone that always crept into her voice when she entered areas of thought that disturbed her, “Remember. You said my friend Norma was going to be sick and she got appendicitis, remember. Did you make that happen to Norma? No, of course not. And Jill, you said her baby was going to come when it wasn’t due and she went into labor that night. You said it’d be a boy, too. Now, did you do that? Of course, not. It’s just coincidence.”

I tried to repeat the word. “Co-in-C-denz,” and she explained, “A person says something and then it seems to come true but not because the person said it.”

“But this is different,” I insisted, “The other times I just knew something, this time…”

“Not really,” my mother interrupted, “You’re always talking, always saying funny things, sometimes, well, just a couple of times, well, anyway, like I said, it’s just coincidence.”

Mama was actively censoring her data to conform to her reality view, which did not include premonitions or psychic phenomena. I was left without guidance in a torture chamber of guilt. A couple of days later, I overheard my mother telling a friend, “The Director’s going to survive. Her leg was broken in multiple places, her hip fractured, her arm broken, her shoulder dislocated, but the worst damage -- this is interesting -- was caused by a wooden ruler; it broke two ribs and punctured her lung. She carried it around with her all the time.”

This last bit of ironic justice eased my guilt. Yes, I had done a bad thing and vowed to never hurt someone like that again. But, the Director was a bad person, a mean woman who tormented small children and someone needed to do something about that. It had fallen on me to save myself and the other children.

The Director needed over a year to mend so I never saw her again. By the time she returned, I had moved on to a public kindergarten program. But, the school re-opened without her and was improved by her absence. The same schedule was upheld; the food was still bland. The overly cheerful teachers and their assistants were still overt in their mock enthusiasm. When I told one of the assistants that I couldn’t sleep during nap time, she asked me not to disturb the other children and gave me a book. After that I spent all my nap times flipping through illustrated books and other children did, too. Without the menace and the malice of the Director, their system was tolerable.

[calvin-af-crone]

I put up another story on Weird Anecdotes. This one is super spooky.

[steakout-05]

in love with how Data runs across the screen back to his station like a fucking cryptid in episode 24

[onelungmcclung]

Here comes Twinkletoes.

[rambutanjpeg]

bookworm guy from that one game

[platinumgigi]

you know, in light of the Great James Somerton Callout Double Feature™ recently, it made me think back to when i used to watch James' videos. i wasn't an avid fan and never watched his streams or anything so i couldn't have any inkling of the plagiarism on my own, but this all now reminded me of one instance where he made a point of something in one of his videos that was so blatantly wrong, it made me wonder "wait...did you even watch the thing you're talking about?"

and that was with his video on the Owl House, because i believe there was a bit near-ish to the end where he's talking about the open queer representation in TOH, and at the time the video came out the show itself hadn't concluded yet, but he mentioned alongside the not only very canon Lumity as representation the show had to offer, he also mentioned...that the show was hinting at there being a potential romantic relation between Hunter and Gus????

and that had grabbed my attention and made me confused, because...no?? did we watch the same show??? cause if you've watched the Owl House not only would you know that Hunter was 16 and Gus was 12, which is really stretching it in terms of acceptable age gaps, but also...their relationship was not like that, and didn't have any sort of romantic subtext to try and grasp at. the way they hung out and interacted was much more of a "dudes being bros" way (silly headbump handshake, comforting each other in their insecurities and what people saw them as "weak" for), and i'm pretty sure even at the time the episode came out where Gus and Hunter officially became friends, Hunter was already showing signs of crushing on Willow???

so, in retrospect, it now occurs to me that the reason James mentioned that was not because he had simply misinterpreted Gus and Hunter's interactions and the shows intentions for them in the future, but it was deliberately James grasping at straws to shoehorn in some kind of MLM representation into the show where there wasn't any. and while, yeah, in an openly queer show, still not seeing yourself represented kinda sucks, but James Somerton is clearly a person who doesn't value anything in the LGBTQ+ community other than the G. he thinks being a gay man (especially a cis white gay man) is the only real way of being queer, or at least the most "oppressed" type of queer, probably because news media only ever gave significant attention to the deaths of cis white gay men during the AIDS crisis, and that is pretty much James' only point of reference in "historical events that happened to queer people" because god knows he didn't care enough to research and write on his own, let alone research and write about queer history involving queer people who weren't cis white gay men like him.

and it's especially shitty that he that he tries to force this idea of Hunter and Gus having romantic subtext right after he talks about Luz and Amity's relationship. i'm personally not the biggest fan of Lumity within the story of the Owl House, but the representation is really great, especially for something in a disney cartoon. so him trying to then detract all the sapphic representation that Lumity provided and even built the show upon with an MLM relationship that not only is weird in context but also never even happened?? the AUDACITY.

and what gets me even more is that, by the end of the show, while Hunter does end up in a relationship with Willow, it's not a straight relationship. it was confirmed by the show's creator Dana Terrace after it concluded that Hunter is bisexual and Willow is pansexual, and while yeah, real shame that there wasn't any actual expression of those facts during the show's runtime, it's still nice to know that they're queer, and thus their relationship is queer. it's also great to have a canon bi/pan couple when there's STILL an immense infighting problem between bi and pan people thinking that one of the sexualities is trying to erase the other due to their similar (but not same) definitions. so having them not only coexist but also be in love is great!

but you just know, you just KNOW, that even if James' video was made after the show's official conclusion, he would probably either:

A: ignore Hunter and Willow's relationship and try to play on plausible deniability that they're just friends since they never had any great romantic gestures like Lumity's confession and many kisses

or

B: make a shitty argument out of it that the Owl House "could have gone leaps and bounds further with their representation, but Disney was so homophobic that Hunter couldn't possibly get to also be gay, so he had to end up with a woman :("

and while i think both are probably just as possible as each other, my money would be on option B, because god damn it this man can't praise a piece of queer media if it doesn't somewhat center around or involve gay men, and leave it to James Somerton to try and project himself onto the white teenage boy and think that if he were gay, that'd somehow make the story better.

this man actively hates women, especially queer women whom he loves to pretend are actually straight women, and if he had the chance would still do everything he can to try and make a queer relationship between a man and a woman into some woeful narrative of "what could have been" if they just made the man gay.

god, from this singular moment alone where i had a very questionable opinion of James, the knowledge i have now completely recontextualizes everything. this guy is a plagiarist, a misogynist, but most of all, an internalized homophobe who replaces the word "gay" in the content he steals from with "LGBTQ+" and "queer" because he actually *would* just like to use the word gay, but if he did it would make it more obvious that he's plagiarizing, so he instead makes "queer" and "LGBTQ+" be synonymous with gay to make it look like he's actually being inclusive.

and i don't really remember much about his video about Korra, i don't know if i even watched it, so the only frame of reference that i have is what Hbomberguy said about it in his video, and i frankly do not want to go and give James anymore views he has not earned and will never deserve, but i think he did a similar thing in trying to grasp at straws with a potential queer relationship between Mako and some guy who i don't remember (i really didn't watch much of Korra sorry) but that also kind of was not the case of their relationship at all either, from what i've heard. at most it was just people shipping them, especially since the footage James Somerton used in his video was from a fucking ship AMV and not even from any of the high resolution episodes. so again it seems like there's an instance of James trying to shove in an MLM relationship that doesn't exist in a show whose lead representation is a WLW couple.

again i could be wrong, and correct me if i am, but unless there's a convenient re-upload of that entire video on another channel or even another video website, i'm not going to give James' channel any more attention than it unrightfully has.

fuck this guy.

[solarwreathe]

christmas with no limits

really, this art was all an excuse to show you this image. i miss when old movie promo photos were awkward as shit.

[mosstrades]

Oh wait this is fucked up actually. Marcy grew up around Simon while he was actually already under the effects of the crown (both physically and mentally). He was already unraveling by the time they found each other, even if he still felt like he was 'himself', so Simon as we know him, regular-ass Simon, would be in ways a kind of stranger to her. Physically, in his appearance and presence decoupled from the effects of the crown; situationally, what with them not being in a barren wasteland and whatnot; emotionally and personally, with Simon maybe doing things or showing himself to be things that Marcy didn't know to expect. And add to that how much they've both changed over the course of their lives since they separated...

While Simon managed to see her life through Ice King's eyes for a while, I like to imagine the memory is fuzzy at best and entirely unreliable at worst, so — in a way, truly, their reunion is them getting to know each other all over again, in a new dynamic, but with the base of that same old, foundational relationship; that same old, old love.

And I'm so normal about it.

[crones-trash]

I barely have the energy to maintain my daily routines & household maintenance. I'm going to stop sharing my stories on my Weird Anecdotes blog if I don't get more likes or reactions. Goodness gracious, when I did this on My Space over a decade ago, I built a community of over 100 people around the world who engaged in long dialogues w/ me & each other about my content. Often, I got negative reactions, replied, & we had stimulating conversations. I enjoyed myself. I was hoping the same would happen here. But alas, it hasn't. <heavy sigh>

[weirdanecdotes]

On Being Psychic – Part 1

I don’t know if I am an evolutionary mutant or a recessive throwback. For the first twenty-five years of my life, I wrestled with knowing too much and wanting to be rid of my “special gift.”

As a small child, I didn’t know I was psychic; I just was. I knew/felt/saw/received information and had no reference, no way of knowing that everyone didn’t perceive the world the way I did. Information popped into my mind and jumped out of my mouth before I even noticed. My days were peppered with news bulletins from the Aether and I delivered them thoughtlessly.

I’d ask Mama things like, “Why does that person have a yellow cloud?” And, “What are those pretty ribbons in the sky?” Or tell her, “Don’t make plans with Alice. Dot will call later to invite you to a party.”

Going to Sear’s one day when I was about two years ago, I told her, “The road is blocked. Take another way.”

“Now why would you say a thing like that?” My mother dismissed my warning until we were stopped by the backup of traffic and saw an ambulance pass by.

“Too late,” I said to the ambulance, “They’re gone.” Mama shivered in response.

When she started taking me to nursery school, the route she took included a rickety humpbacked bridge over railroad tracks. I hated the school and getting me to go was a workday chore. I cried and begged, “Please don’t take me there.” Then as she drove us toward the railroad bridge, I started screaming, “No! Don’t go that way!”

Probably she had conveniently forgotten about my being right about another road being blocked or maybe she remembered because she shouted at me, “Shut up! Stop it now!”

I shut myself up until only whimpers escaped my mouth as I anticipated what was going to happen. On the other side of the bridge, the roadway widened to two lanes to allow a left turn lane, went steeply downhill and got stopped by a traffic light. We usually had to sit thru a couple of lights before it was our turn to get thru.

That morning, there must have been extra traffic because we ended up stopped on the top of the hump. And a train with a very long load came barreling under it at high speed. In my memory, the noise was unbearable but much worse, the bridge shook and creaked like it was going to collapse. I couldn’t help myself and started screaming in terror. Mama screamed right along with me and pulled me across the front seat to hug me close to her. Then we both cried and clung to each other until the damned trained passed and the world returned to “normal”.

She had tissues in her purse and wiped both our faces while she promised me, “I will find us another way to your school. We will never—never come this way again.” And when she picked me up that day, we took a different route home.

There was absolutely nothing in her background that prepared Mama for dealing with me. She was raised in a strict Southern Baptist family in Charleston, South Carolina, got a high school education, and took a course to be certified in Accounting. She didn’t enjoy reading and had not significantly expanded her mental boundaries or even tested her intellect since leaving school. How she withheld judgment over my little prognostications for so long is a mystery to me. I think she probably coped through an automatic denial mechanism. I’ve known her to do this with other, more serious, situations that were unpleasant to her. So it can be presumed she simply forgot things she couldn’t understand as soon as they occurred. Quite a few people do this as a way of life. But, we never crossed that bridge again.

My parents made no secret of the fact that I had been adopted. I can’t remember ever not knowing that “your real mother could not keep you and she knew that you would be better off with a Mama and Papa like us who would love you and take care of you.”

Papa bought a two-volume book set titled The Adopted Child—one for the parents and one to be read to the child. Reading the book for me, he asked, “What would you rather do in a candy store? Close you eyes and grab whatever you could reach? Or look around and pick out the candy you wanted?”

“Pick! Pick!” Even simpleton toddlers make this choice but I didn’t. I looked at both of them anxiously and Mama volunteered the answer, “We picked you.”

Now whatever psychologist wrote this framing of the situation overlooked the implications. I heard quite clearly that my “real mother” had put me up for sale in a candy store because she didn’t love me. I could imagine myself like a baby doll in a box displayed on a shelf until my parents came and “picked” me.

Even the constant reassurances that I was “special” only made me feel awfully different in some indefinably bad way. Much later in life when I would take my children away from my brawling parents’ house, I would assure them, “Remember, you’re not related to those people.” I always knew that but I didn’t realize it mattered as much as it did. Psychic abilities often skip a generation and my life would have been better if I’d had a grandmother or an aunt who understood what was happening to me.

[altschmerzes]

like i should not have to say in the notes of my fics on ao3 'this is a gen fic, it is clearly marked as a gen fic, it is not meant to be shippy, please respect that' when the fic is already clearly marked as gen and with tags indicating the dynamics are not romantic/sexual.

and then it still doesn't work. people still do this shit, no matter how loudly or clearly people say that on their fics. nobody can make you read and interpret a fic a certain way but what is it gonna take for you to understand other people's gen fics are not about your ship and you absolutely should not be saying things about your ship to the author based on their gen fic. most of fandom is already about you and what you're interested in can you not be happy with that and leave me and my fics and every other gen fic out there the hell alone.

[peachdoxie]

Until I saw @chickenlover-19's freshly ghosted Danny comic, I hadn't considered that Danny, like Jazz, probably didn't believe in ghosts before becoming one, and now I'm imagining someone asking him what was the worst part about being a ghost and they're expecting some angsty answer and then just Danny replies, "learning my parents were right."

[runawaymarbles]

Sometimes I think about the housemate I had in college who once said to me with absolute disgust, "if you weren't working on your [final papers] then that means you lied to my parents." I was floored because I had not heard someone say something like that since elementary school. Girl was 22 years old. Was she only then realizing that a college student might look into the face of people 30 years older than her that she's never met before and will never see again and not explain that while her intent was to work on her paper, she had gotten distracted by fanfiction?

Anyway I hope she's doing well

[blue-rick24]

A small confession: I have made sure lately to keep up with everyone else’s Rick Bear-related bloggings (as you may have noticed), and it’s so that I can attempt to live vicariously through them for reasons I am embearrassed to say XD

Even though I bought him right at release (which, already, was 6 months & just a few days ago, believe it or not 🥺), I still have not yet found myself in a position where I could have gone and gotten him stuffed.

I’m a bit serious when it comes to my plushies (as a collector & enthusiast) and my Build-a-Bears especially a step above that, with their birth certificates ‘n’ all (there’s also the decade-long attachment I’ve had to them for both the pure fun of ‘em & also some personal reasons) XD

…So, it has almost felt a bit like I’m being a bad bear-parent or something XD (LOL, the word-play/puns you could make XDD). A silly feeling to have, yes 😆 but I still feel it

I QUITE LITERALLY LEFT HIM FOOD (b-a-b food) SO HE SHOULD BE SURVIVING IN HIS BOX JUST FINE LOLL XDD but you don’t even understand how much it hurts my soul as an avid bear stuffer and massive rick fanatic that HE HAS JUST BEEN SITTING THERE AS A SACK OF FUR 😭😭XX’DDDD!!!

I’ve been teased (don’t worry, I’m sure it was in good nature) a bit recently abt it lol XD and from that I’ve found that this particular ‘failing’ of mine being pointed out really.. sorta… stings XD I’m pretty embarrassed about it (I tend to put lots of pressure on myself, too, which absolutely does not help) and it’s just one of those things that I’ll feel down about when I think of it

But seeing all of you guys enjoying him really lifts me up!!!

I want nothing more than to cuddle a well stuffed Rick boi of my own!! XXDD (well, aside from having an improved mental health… Ig it’s whichever comes first, at this rate xD)

I love him so much that I even drew him! Don’t tell anybody I’m nervous XXDD

Reblogs are off but replies aren’t (I love & welcome chatting 😄) & if you guys don’t dislike me for my strange developing attitude towards this probably really menial thing then maybe I’ll just put them back on LOL

It’s weird; I literally have zero problems when it comes to my confidence towards being a deranged rick fanatic LMAO XDD

But this? because I’ve been teased & it’s just been months that I’ve been able to get in my head about it even when I was sure for a while that like almost noone even knew of the bear’s existence??? It’s got me fucked up LAWL

And for all of those who are thinking it: please just note that I don’t do disgusting things to my plushies or stuffed animals. I don’t care what you do but seriously I don’t do that myself. I’m really all about treating my items with respect and, hell, you can’t even find me cuddling with them if I am not certain that I’m wearing clean clothes or not XXDD (I sure as well can’t get myself to sleep with them OOF that sounds like a collector [me]’s nightmare XXDD)