#because sometimes you are almost expected to be Grateful to Not Be Disabled Today when you have a good day

[uncanny-tranny]

The frustrating thing about having good days with pain or bodily irritation or mobility or whatever else isn't that it's a "good day." It's the feeling that you are either greatly exaggerating your suffering or worse, that you're secretly wanting attention/admiration for your suffering. I think people sometimes are confused as to why good days in terms of disability can be distressing to some, but it is precisely that you almost... overthink the Implications of good days.

It isn't that you want to be suffering, it is that you are taught you will only be "worthy" of help if you are suffering in the Right way (and having any good days are often seen as a sign that you aren't "truly worthy").

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

my third grade teacher was probably the most amazing teacher i ever had. she looked at the little autistic weirdo in her class who zoned out a lot, distracted other students by chatting, and couldn’t be normal if my life depended on it...and she was the first person to tell me ‘normal is overrated.’ she told me that albert einstein was a genius who couldn’t tie his shoes using the bunny ears method--the same one i was unable to master. 

instead of scolding me for talking all the time, or being easily bored because i found the lessons too easy, she sat me in front of the class and had me read aloud to the other students while she did mysterious teacher things nearby. unlike the teacher i had the year before, she never fixated on my eating issues or lectured me about being ungrateful. she didn’t treat me like a charity case.

she worked behind the scenes to get me into an early computer camp, when nobody i knew could come close to affording a computer--and then when a kid in town was getting a new computer and looked to donate his old one, my elementary school recommended me as the recipient. i’m certain that mrs. furnia had something to do with that as well.

she talked about me as though i were special in some magical way that really made me believe it, saying ‘you have to go to college’ with such emphasis that it felt inevitable, my destiny set at age nine. knowing how precocious i was, a tiny mimic and a sponge, i can imagine what she saw in me. but she was still the first to say it, outside of my own family: that underneath the five separate disorders i would one day have diagnoses for, lie a shimmering potential. 

the news today reminded me of her, polio in new york slipping through our vaccination efforts and what that could mean. mrs. furnia walked with a very pronounced limp, and she was probably another first for me--the first physically disabled person i knew as a child. she set the kind of example that i think helped us all become better tiny people, matter-of-fact about her limp but expecting our respect. 

i remember her telling us about a disease called polio, that had afflicted many, many children just like her before there was a vaccine. she told us how lucky she was to have survived with just a limp. we learned how lucky we were to have vaccinations that protected us, and how much the world could change, could progress, in such a short time. 

it baffles me that so many people deliberately avoid vaccines now. even understanding the religious objections, the historical bad behavior of doctors and pharmaceutical companies...it’s hard for me to wrap my head around compared to the risks. deep down i’ll always be that little kid hearing the story of how i was safe from polio, the scary disease that almost took the life of a child who would one day grow up to be a woman who taught me that i mattered. 

today the news is all about a british monarch i didn’t personally know, and i’m enjoying the serious takes and the funny ones--though i definitely am struggling to process the fact that charles will actually be king now. it does not compute. but other news sidetracked me into thinking about someone i did personally know, someone i still think about fondly sometimes, and i needed to share that.

school was not easy for me in many ways. i didn’t learn much outside of english and math, bullying turned me from a cheerful performer to someone trying not to be seen or heard, and undiagnosed adhd took me from a gifted student to a failure by the time i arrived at college. but even with all of that, even with my firm belief that some kids could thrive in nontraditional schooling where public school is hell for them...i had some great teachers. i’m grateful for that.

[endexe]

Whew, okay, uh, ya star child, Mori, here whipped out a fucking long ass essay just regarding to the things I realized while writing Zero and how much Zero means to me, especially on the personal level. Some heavy areas are to be touched as warned ahead in the sixth paragraph, but I promise I’m okay! I simply have a lot of thoughts and emotions whirling around in me that I need to place somewhere! But to summarize: Thank you all so, so, so much for loving Zero Orez, my one and only bestest foolish glitch child, and for giving me the safe and gentle space where I can be at my most joy and comfort having him here. <3

So the concept of Zero was created this month on April’s Fool, which is the second most ironic thing to happen with him ( the first is honestly  the fact that within the same month, Zero have interacted with five muses who share the same faceclaim as him, like lmfao poor Zero, he’s just not having it --- shoutout to Mercy ( maskeraide ), River ( wxrldkiller ), Oli ( teletropic ), Vi ( heartbetween ), and Grace ( evermxre ) for having me so delighted and entertained by this concept, it makes my experiences writing with Zero so much more fun ). I created him for this episodic novel series Let There Be with Noble and Grim, the angel and demon respectively, who are private investigators. I had the concept of how there would be eldritch monsters trying to take over Earth by using the elements of the horror genre, which created mundane appearing but still supernatural linked cases that Noble and Grim had to solve when no other ordinary humans could, and the monsters were linked to their respective tarot card. Zero was considered to be the Fool.

I was excited to make Zero be a side character of the novel, the foolish and childish character who would constantly help and betray both sides of the series, one side being Noble and Grim, and another the Arcane. But I didn’t know what more to expect from him. I was reading the tag within the post I made in Noble’s and Grim’s blog that was the NPC introduction of Zero. It’s so funny that I said I didn’t know if I’d end up writing him on here because I thought Noble and Grim, my impossible lights, would end up taking all of the muse from him. BUT IN THE END... They were the ones who I set up the indefinite hiatus note few days ago while Zero’s still thriving, and I find that so bizarre because I thought Noble and Grim were the ONES who I’d always have the muse for. You know how you’d have that thing where you’d expect something to happen with your muse, but they would do the exact opposite as you least expected? Zero’s like that ALWAYS, but the fact he pulled the UNO reverse card on my impossible lights? Truly wild and now here I am, writing him for almost a month!

And... creating him, writing him is the BEST choice I had ever made in my entire life. Yes, Noble and Grim had helped me a lot, especially I do face a lot of struggles when it comes to the matters of hope and despair, what Noble and Grim embody of respectively but Zero eventually become so many things to me. The vent character, the comfort character, the character who I can channel my childish and curious energy into when I was rarely given the chance to let them out in the real world when I was younger, the character who is a learner but as slow and easily frustrated as me and a lover of life like me despite everything / anything. I realize also that I have so much fun and easier times writing him than I had with Noble and Grim, I won’t lie about this. Noble’s and Grim’s aesthetic and energy seem to attract more of an urge to write a bit more purple prosey with a hint of seriousness to it, and... it was so time and energy consuming to write them with these expectations I had on myself. And for some reason, I sometimes had trouble plotting with them, maybe because, again, I felt like they had to be these serious characters having to be put in serious situations. Few of the things I love about Zero is he have bare limits to his character as he can be anything and anyone I want him to be. He has about everything that I can use to develop and have fun with. I love how ultimately, Zero is ever unbound to labels and he is ever changing.

I’m just amazed realizing how many writings and developments I have done with Zero within a month than I had with those two, but that’s because with Zero? He is truly... all over the place. He is so messy, chaotic, flawed, but also, he is loud and open and FREE. Having to get into his energy makes me feel my most self where I can be too loud and loving, and not care too much about how I write and format my posts, unlike with Noble and Grim. He makes me so so SO happy and comfortable, and there is a lot of times I’d think about him and sometimes with my friends’ muses, and it’s a lot more than I had thought of Noble and Grim. The love I have for Zero is endless and beyond, always. He reminds me that original characters are so fucking important when they can be anything and anyone you want them to be, and as long as it’s nothing of harm to others and yourself, whoever and whatever they are, they are more than good enough when they provide you so much joy and comfort.

[ trigger warning: mentions of ( child ) abuse and traumas ] Zero have... about about everything I’ve ever loved in general from my interests to tropes ( adorkable, the fool, fourth wall breaking, etcetera ) to my love of aesthetics ( such as glitchcore / cybercore / kidcore / weirdcore ), and so many more. As well as he have learning disability, hypersexuality, tendency to be so distracted and forgettable like me. Along with he does these things that I do as stimming like he’d just rock or always love to touch blankets that have very soft materials. As well as he have experienced so many traumas that resulted him having so much trouble remembering and wanting to be childish as hating to be responsible, which is what I have. I don’t remember anything of my childhood or honestly, majority of my life but traumas. I don’t remember much of what I did yesterday. I don’t even remember if I had breakfast yesterday or what I ate if I did because I had been through so much mainly involving abuse from my own mother, still do unfortunately as I live with her, that makes my brain shut down, which also makes me have so much trouble being in deep thoughts when my brain is just. Numb. When I’m going to be more real here, despite how I appear online here, I do have trouble experiencing and expressing much emotions because, again, of the traumas I have dealt with for so long.

From all of these things I had gone through in life, I have dealt a lot with these concepts of who I am, what I am, like Zero does, and having him, I eventually realize how extremely important he is to me, so much more than any characters I ever created. He is my biggest coping mechanism and my gentlest reminder that it’s never too late to be... free. Just enjoy everything that I’m so fortunate to get from life. Draw clumsily, listen to music loudly, love too much and just let my heart be louder than the thunderstorms and crashing sea waves combined. Just be free and happy, despite everything, anything. I said before with Noble and Grim that I hadn’t been this happy before writing them, but I was so wrong. With Zero, I am so much more happier than I could ever be, and there are so many people on here who I am beyond lucky and grateful to be friends with who let me have him with no judgement like over how ridiculously overpowered he is or how much I self projected myself into him. And all of the connections Zero made on here so far are very touching and wonderful. I didn’t know what to really expect when I decided to give Zero his own blog, but having him for a month, this decision brought me so many beautiful things that I will always cherish.

I also wanna give a quick shoutout to River for. Fuck, everything. They’re truly the biggest reason why I decided to keep writing Zero and even make me love him more. They had made me talk about so many things with Zero I probably would’ve never thought, or wouldn’t have thought about so soon. I always extremely enjoy everything River and I would go over about together, and... literally, River, if you see this, know that you’re truly a wonder to have. I am so beyond thankful to have you as, honestly, already my close friend. Thank you so much for giving me that extra push to keep Zero and one of the most meaningful reasons why Zero still exist today, and for being just an amazing friend.

Just thank you all so much, to those we had known each other from the other blog and those we just became mutuals, for giving me and Zero a chance to be a bit more free and happier at least when our life won’t let us have that so often. Just thank you, thank you, thank you.

[agirlunderarock]

Writing through the Decade: 15 years old (2012)

So this is actually a short story I wrote in a creative writing class I took in high school. I’ve got a couple of things that are going to come out of this period, only because I did A LOT of short and fast writing for this class. Some of it was good, some bad. I’m going to try to post a good mix of it all, but this one right here, is probably the most important story I wrote at the time. Its a personal story, one I don’t talk about often, but I think its really important to understand me as a person rather opposed to a writer.

          Never give up

    I stare out the windshield into the muggy early summer morning. My brother sleeps peacefully in the back with our stuff packed for the week. My stomach is full of butterflies and my head swims in all the terrifying possibilities that awaited us.

     My mind drifted off to a time before. My seventh grade year, in athletics, finding out about the disability, and the fact that my brother had it so much worse.

     I snapped back to the present when the car stopped. I was determined not to show how afraid I was, so I stepped out and grabbed both mine and my little brothers bags. I made him carry his sleeping bag and we went to go load up our bags onto one of three trucks loaded with sleeping bags. He looked up at me with sad sleepy eyes, I patted his shoulder reassuringly. I was his big sister, and I couldn’t show how afraid I was or how badly I wanted to go back to sleep. Then I heard it. The yelling for us to fall in formation. My brother looked at me on last time, we didn’t even get to say good-bye to our parents. We were in formation when there was another round of yelling. Boot-camp had begun.

     The next few hours were filled with yelling, screaming, and countless push-ups. I had lost track of my brother, he was with us of course, but somewhere behind me, out of sight. As I was on my face doing push-ups my mind wondered off again.

 I was talking to my middle school athletics couch, “Athletics is too dangerous for you, Sierra. I’m worried about you not being able to keep up with the other girls.” She said with false concern.

“I understand that, but athletics is actually helping me. This charcomarietooth, affects my muscles and nerves. It takes twice as long for me to build muscle and it deteriorates just as quickly and it takes longer for me to feel pain. It affects how I run and when I feel pain, but all it means is that I have to try harder than the other girls. With athletics it doesn’t effect me as much as it could. You can see the difference from the beginning of the year! I’m getting better!” I pleaded, not wanting to leave the program.

      ”On your feet!” the teen drill instructor yelled and I was brought back to the present. Yup all of our instructors were kids like us so it was sort of weird being yelled at by an 11 and 12 year old, while the 14 and17 year olds seemed pretty normal. The next few hours were spent marching doing numerous push-ups marching and still more yelling. When the time finally came for us to put our things in our barracks, I felt grateful. Unfortunately it was short lived because when I go my stuff I saw my brother red and puffy eyed, and tears streaming down his cheeks. I wanted to comfort him so I grabbed his bag and took it to the door of his barrack.

     “Its okay the days almost over and today was the worst of it.” I said encouragingly as he walked inside out of sight. I breathed a short sigh of relief, because twenty minutes goes by very fast when you’re worrying about your only sibling.

     Well I was partially right about the worst being over. That was how most of the week was, yelling push-ups, drill, yelling, sweat, and oh did I mention yelling? They went to so far as to wake us up with a blow horn at one point. Of course there were some fun things in between the seriousness of the drill instructors. We did the main obstacle course and another series of obstacles called the Leadership reaction course, where we were split into teams and while we did each task actual marine drill instructors watched us.

     I don’t know how many times I felt like I wanted to quit. My arms burned from all the push ups, my legs were incredibly sore from running every morning at five in the morning. The physical pain was nothing, compared to what I felt emotionally. Seeing my brother stricken with the sorrow of missing home, the pain clear on his face as rocks dug into our hands when we did push ups, it was tearing me up inside. I had to stay strong for him; I couldn’t afford to let him see how much it hurt to see him like that. I was doing well for the most part, but a person can hold back so much.

     Then came Thursday, the week was almost over, the day when I finally snapped. The day was almost over, the sky burning orange, and the South Texas heat had finally become bearable. Most of us were scrambling around getting our stuff ready for bed, but my friend Andrea, her friend Ryan, and I were out side helping the other kids. Then my brother came up to me sobbing, red cheeks and tears rapidly running down his face.

     “What happened? What’s the matter?” I said hiding my breaking heart.

     “I want to go home! I just want to go home! I need to go home! I need to go!” he sobbed. Keeping my emotions bottled was starting to take its toll, and my voice cracked when I when I spoke again.

     “Calm down Austin. Its Thursday. We’re almost done, the weeks almost over. Don’t give up on me now…” I trailed off. I couldn’t keep it inside anymore and once the first tear squeezed its way out of my eyes there was no stopping the rest. Now we were starting to get peoples attention and my friends came over to see what was going on.

     “Its okay Fuentes we’ll take care of him.” Andrea said and motioned to our senior drill instructor who now wanted to talk to me.

     I reluctantly, yet gratefully left the scene. I hated my self for letting my brother see me like that. I was supposed to the strong one, my brother looked up to me and I let him down. By the time I reached the drill instructor the tears stung my cheeks with humiliation and defeat. I looked up to meet his eyes expecting to see someone indifferent, someone who didn’t really care. Instead I saw just another teenager, someone a little older than me, but still trying to hide the pain I felt. He looked at me with understanding eyes and said “You okay Fuentes?”

     “Yeah I’m fine.” I said trying to sound in control. I looked over at my brother who was still crying, but not as bad as before. Seeing this sent me into another round of tears.

     “Look I know how you feel. I have a little brother too. I live like ten minutes away and its killing me.” He said drawing my attention. “I know how it is.”

     I didn’t know what to think. My big “scary” drill instructor actually knew how I felt. I was shocked, but relieved at the same time. Finally someone who understood and I didn’t really say a word. “He misses home. I mean I do too, but this is the longest he’s been away. He didn’t even want to come. He only came because I did….and gosh I hate my self right now…” I rambled just glad to get it out of my system.

     “Hey its okay. I’ve been keeping an eye on him, the staff told me and the other D.I.s about you guys and well you know. Its okay to be home sick and stuff, trust me we all are.”

     I finally stopped crying and I said still a little bit shaky, “Thank you. I’ve been so worried and I don’t know what to do, and its been driving me crazy. Thank you.” When I turned to see my brother, he had already gone inside his barrack and it was just the D.I. and I. I turned back to my instructor who gave me a reassuring grin. “I should probably get my stuff ready thanks again.” I said and went inside my barrack.

     I felt so much better after that. I knew I wasn’t alone and in the morning the instructor from the day before came to check on me to see if I was doing okay. It meant a lot to me that the other kids here were looking out for and my brother  and I, it was as if a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Again throughout the rest of the week there were times I felt like giving up and the first thing that came to mind was my coach.

      We were in the gym I and I was faced with the choice to fail and stay in athletics or switch the class and keep my good GPA. She dropped the grading scale for the timed mile in front of me. When I looked to see where my time fell it turned out that I was making 60s every single time. I  made my decision. I needed to get out.

      “Coach I won’t be in your class anymore, I already went to talk to the counselor.” I said in defeat.

     “Okay sweetie. It’s better for you this way. You could do something else, something better for you.” She said full of fake sympathy.

      “She was right.” I thought Friday morning while running the timed mile. “You did do better. This is nothing compared to athletics, and look you made it the entire week there’s only two more days. This is nothing now you’re going to finish this. Don’t give up.” I told myself.

     I did finish it. I made it through the week. At our boot camp graduation three of us got promoted on the spot. I was one of them. My coach bringing me down was my motivation to keep moving to rise above what she thought of me. My friends encouraged me and we all encouraged my brother. I wanted to show him what he was capable of and what he could do if he stopped worrying. I was proud of him he graduated and we both made new friends.

     Today we still see our friends from boot camp. We have all grown very close. My senior drill instructor turned out to be one of my best friends there. Andrea still helps me when I need her. Ryan stopped coming and we all miss him. My brother has been promoted and I am so proud of him. I have been promoted twice since then and keep a look out for all the kids there. All of us are like a family now. Yes sometimes we fight but hey, that’s what families do. We have all shared some crazy experiences and because of that we share a bond that can never be broken.

[beautifulrare4leafclover]

So, here’s the first ever story I’ve shared with the public like this. Hope you enjoy it. It’s a big part of my real life but with the addition of some fantasy wishing. I did write it as “you” the reader with Chris. Enjoy!! Pictures are to help visualize the story ... snow globe really is the one I made for door decoration. #randomcevans @randomcevans @theycallmebecca @nomadicpixel @mycapt-ohcapt

December to Imagine

I Want to be Your +1

(Chris Evans x Reader)

The phone rang with the familiar ringtone of “Somewhere Out There” sung by Susan Boyle and Michael Boyle to let you know the one and only person it could be calling.

“Hey babe, you’re calling earlier than usual,” you answered.

“Yeah, I have a question for you,” came the voice of your boyfriend, Chris, “but, first how was your day?”

“I just got home a little bit ago and now I’m washing my lizard,“ you stated matter-of-factly.

Chris burst out laughing so loudly you could picture him slapping his hand over his left boob as he was well known for doing. “I’m sorry, what!?” he explained breathless from the laughter.

“It’s almost winter break so I brought home the bearded dragon from school today,” you filled in your odd comment.

*************

Chris and you had met two years earlier and kept your relationship out of the public eye. You lived in a super small town two hours outside Chicago, so it was a place that celebrities didn’t stand out because it was completely an unexpected place they would be.

You were a teacher’s assistant at a therapeutic day school who had gone on a trip with some girls to a Comic Con in Arizona. Never did you think you’d pass out in front of Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan while in line for a photo op and cut your head wide open. Of course, everyone who has ever met you knows you’re a bit of a klutz but passing out from nerves and not eating are not your typical tactics to meet celebrities. How embarrassing, but also what a way to stand out!

You had been taken to a medical room to be checked and then taken to the local ER to get stitches. Your friends hadn’t been able to go with in the ambulance and you insisted anyhow that they stay and enjoy the rest of the Con. However, after hearing he was who you had come to see the most, Chris had come to the hospital to check on you. He offered to take you back to your hotel and your friends since you didn’t have a car in Arizona. Turned out it was the same hotel.

Chris had insisted that you eat something with him, so he knew you were really alright. You sat in the hotel’s outdoor seating area well beyond the lobby bar’s actual open hours and talked with Chris for hours as if you were old friends catching up. You told him all about yourself, which was something you didn’t do so easily with most people. You explained your job in the day school for troubled youth as well as that you sometimes worked respite for disabled individuals so that their families could work or have a break. You felt a bit self-conscious that you were talking too much about yourself, but Chris thanked you for not asking him a thousand questions like you were interviewing him. He appreciated that you seemed to feel relaxed around him and made him feel like you wanted to talk to him not about him. You had to laugh about the “feeling relaxed” part because you were so nervous from the moment he showed up in the hospital until about a half hour into finally eating something. You were grateful he had insisted that you eat and that he had gotten the hotel staff to tuck you into a spot that was private enough for you both to forget you were even at a hotel. The night air was crisp and the moon was full. It made you think of the movie, An American Tail, where Fievel and his sister, Tanya, sing the song, “Somewhere Out There”. You mentioned it to Chris and he agreed.

You hadn’t believed him when he said he’d call you the next week to check how you were doing but gave him your phone to add his number into and watched him send himself a text message to have your number too. A week later, as you entered work, your phone rang with an unexpected ringtone but one that triggered a memory. You looked at your phone to see the caller was identified as “CRE” calling. You still didn’t believe it would actually be Chris on the other end. Your heart skipped a beat as you answered as you truly expected to hear an assistant saying he or she was calling on behalf of Mr. Evans as promised. When the voice that came back after your greeting was the very recognizable one from all the movies of his that you love, you were indeed impressed that Christopher Robert Evans (CRE) had followed up on his promise to check on you.

After that call, Chris started by calling every week and quickly began to call you every day saying he enjoyed being able to hear about someone else’s day. Your friendship blossomed into more quickly, but the separation of his schedule kept it as a slow progression at the same time. You were forced to really get to know each other via conversations over the phone and video chatting as the relationship grew which made you feel like he was able to really know that you weren’t being fake because of who he was to the public. Chris was always doing everything possible to spend time together but made sure to at least talk daily. He had invited you to visit him at his homes in Los Angeles and in Boston during your three- or four-day weekends making sure to work around your year-round school schedule. He’d even come to your home to visit on a few occasions. He had brought you to New York over spring break to see Lobby Hero and stay with him for the week. You had met up with him at the Chicago Ace Comic Con recently too. But you never visited him on a Marvel set, despite how exciting you felt that would be. You had insisted that it was too risky for him to have you on set and potentially be photographed together. You had to admit that it was always fun to sit in the audience somewhere and hear how much people adored him with the secret that you were now dating him and no one else knew.

*************

“Okay, so my question is, what are you doing this weekend? I don’t have much time right now, so I’ll call later, but do you have plans?” he asked.

“Well, the work party on Friday after the last day of school. I told you that. But nothing else.”

“No respite this weekend?” he checked knowing the holiday season was a busier time for that.

“No, not until New Year’s Eve possibly. That’s not confirmed yet though,” you answer while putting the lizard into his aquarium. “Why?”

“Knives Out is about to wrap so I’m trying to figure out if i can get a couple days in Chicago to see you before we enter into 2019.”

“Well after Friday evening I’m open so even if it’s during the week I’d love to see you,” you could feel the excitement building in you that you might get even a day with him before December ended. Those butterflies he created in your belly never left but fluttered more with the possibility to see him.

“So, two more days of work and then two weeks off, right?” he double checked.

“Yep, you got it.”

“Okay, let me check my schedule and we’ll talk later at our usual time.”

“Sounds good. Love you!”

“I love you too, y/n.”

You and Chris hung up and you continued buzzing around your house preparing for the last two days of work. An hour later, while taking clothes out of the dryer, there was a knock on your front door. Unsure who would be at your door, you peeked out the window. Nothing. So, you carefully opened the door expecting to see a package from Amazon on the doorstep. Again nothing.

As you stepped out your door to double, triple check, Chris stepped around the side of the house. “So, I was thinking I could be your +1 at your work party,” he was able to say before you could jump off the front step to hug him tightly.

“Oh my God, Chris!!! How did you get here?”. You held him tightly and took in his scent and his warmth and disappeared into his massive chest.

He returned the hug as his chin rested on your head as you fit perfectly into him. “Well, you see, there are these machines called planes and cars …”

You backed up to look at him still clean shaven and beautiful from filming Knives Out.

“I’d think a teacher would know of such inventions,” he finished before kissing you deeply.

Chris spent the next two days at your house while you went to work. You struggled to hide your excitement, but luckily it was almost Christmas break, so everyone just figured you were in the holiday spirit. No one at work knew that you knew let alone that you were dating Chris. They knew you adored him. They knew you’d gone to New York to see him in his first Broadway play, Lobby Hero. They knew you collected memorabilia for Captain America, including a shield, as well as were trying to find and own every single movie he’d ever been in. They listened when you talked about him endlessly (sometimes referring to him as Christopher in a fashion that they had called you out on as sounding far more personal than it should for just a fan). You figured they probably found you to be silly and a dreamer and maybe even a little like a teenager with a crush (despite being long past your teenage years). You didn’t care. You loved him before you met him and now that you knew him for real you love him even more. It had been a dream and it had come true. You just hoped they would understand why all the secrecy all this time. You hoped they wouldn’t feel like you’d lied all this time.

As Friday began you asked Chris repeatedly if he was sure he wanted to show up at your work party. You told him you’d understand if he changed his mind. Keeping your relationship private and out of the public eye had been stressful at times, but also allowed for your true selves to grow to love each other. You didn’t want him to provide for and take care of you as a celebrity. You wanted to find and be with your twin flame; the one person who mirrors your soul and is the soul that your own soul recognizes instantly even if your heart and/or mind try to convince you otherwise.

“Are you afraid of me showing up or not showing up?” he finally asked as he poured himself some coffee at the kitchen counter.

“I’m nervous either way because either way it’s a big decision. You come, and my coworkers know plus you could be recognized by others since it’s not a private event. You don’t come then we’re still secret and we still just have each other, but we still must be safe. I don’t like feeling like I’m lying to some of my friends. I like being secret and having our own private little world, but it can weigh on us both. It’s 6am and I feel like I need to vomit from this. It’s going to be a long day,” you finished honestly answering what you were feeling all at once.

“You’ve met my friends. I just want to meet yours. But if you feel I shouldn’t show up then just call me and tell me that.” he bent slightly to kiss your forehead with a bit of sadness in his eyes.

“What do you want? You’re the one taking the risk. It’s your life that will be affected more than mine if, … no, … when we go public,” you sighed touching his face which now had a couple of days’ stubble growth.

“I want to be your +1 tonight and to meet your friends, the people who get to spend most of their days with you,” he sappily stated.

“Okay, then show up at about 6pm. It starts earlier but the first part will be the food and prizes.” You relaxed a bit that Chris is so adamant that he wants to attend. “The place offers bowling, video games, laser tag, and a bar so maybe everyone else not with my work will be to busy to realize who you are. Heck, maybe some of my coworkers will be too.” You giggled a little still nervous for the reaction everyone would have to him arriving and knowing you.

You left for work and got distracted by the events of the final day. You honestly momentarily forgot about the party and about Chris attending. Your door decoration theme this year was snow globes and your class had agreed to doing “A Few of Our Favorite Things” by making 2 small snow gloves per student and staff in the room to represent each individual person’s favorite things. You had ordered clear ornaments that split in half and each person in the room got a whole ornament to make 2 snow globes. You had picked Captain America as all the staff and students knew of your love for Cap as well as the actor who plays him. You were proud of this year’s door and honored your class won 2nd place for it. The 8 students had all worked hard to represent themselves and every one of them had participated in the creation of the final project.

As the student’s left at the end of the day you wished them a safe break and reminded them that they’d be in your thoughts as you knew 2 weeks off was great and needed for you and your fellow staff members, but not necessarily welcomed the same for the students. Some of them might spend the next 2 weeks not knowing if they’d get a decent meal let alone presents for Christmas. It was the sad reality of your job. It was also the reason you wanted to be there to make a difference when school was in session.

When you got in your car to drive to the event, you paused with a tiny bit of fear and nerves but decide to trust Chris with the decision since it was your friends and coworkers in small town Illinois that you would be with when he would be coming to meet you and have a fun evening with. You arrived a bit early and found that your phone was drained. It hadn’t charged while driving from work to the event location.

“Well,” you thought to yourself, “guess that’s one way to make me not focus on missing his call or text. Or calling him to cancel.”

Inside you borrowed a charger from a friend and left your phone tucked in your coat pocket to charge at the table in the dinner room while you went to the bar with friends. You were nervous, so you drank more than usual and faster too. Thank goodness for dinner to fill you and absorb the 3 drinks you had drank in the first 40 minutes there. You hung with the group in the room until it was time to get your bowling shoes and join a lane with seven others to start the fun games. You asked a male coworker to buy a fish bowl drink for “the girls” and sucked down a good amount in anticipation of Chris’ arrival. You knew he wouldn’t change his mind and you hadn’t cancelled.

Four frames into bowling, you realized it had gotten exceptionally quiet near you for being surrounded by 3 other lanes of your coworkers. As you turned from rolling the ball down the lane and getting a strike, there was Chris on one knee with all your coworkers including your supervisors and bosses watching. They knew who he was, but no one had known you knew him. Now here he was on one knee holding up a small black velvety box up to you.

“Y/N, the last 2 years I have come to realize that you are the kindred spirit I’ve been searching for. You don’t treat me any different than anyone else. Everyone is special to you and you treat everyone as so. You don’t let me get away with shit just because I could abuse my status in life and you even knock me off my pedestal if I even try to put myself up there. You remind me to be kind and to remember that everyone has their struggles in life. You repeat time and time again that we never know what another person is carrying with them, but we can always share love and compassion to possibly provide a spark of light in a person’s day. You bring that to the table in every moment you are with others – kindness, compassion, understanding, and basic love for other human beings. You make me want to be a better person every moment too. I want to know, y/n, if you will let me be your +1 now and forever by becoming my wife. Will you marry me?”

You were crying the moment you turned around and saw him there with some of your most cherished friends behind him. Now you looked at 5 of your best work friends standing in the front who looked back at you like they were about to jump out of their skin while nodding excitedly. They were the ones you had feared would be the most wounded by you basically lying to them all this time. You knew that they understood and even had a bit of clarity in how at times you sounded almost like a crazy stalker fan the way you would talk about Chris.

“Yes! Of course, YES!!!!” you answered looking back down at him.

As Chris stood and kissed you, all your friends cheered and made a big scene as he slipped the ring onto your finger. You looked down at the ring and smiled at the simple silver titanium band with a mahogany wooden center that had a forest pattern engraved into it. He had paid attention when you said you never wanted a stone because you could hurt kids accidentally. You kissed him again quick before everyone rushed into hug you.

Your friends hugged you and hugged or shook hands with Chris. To you, they said things like, “congratulations”, “you have a story to tell, we better get together over break,” and “two years!”. To Chris, they introduced themselves and made comments to him about how they thought you “are great with the kids”, “are great to work with”, and how you have “a special way to know what each kid needs to help them calm down”. They told him about your patience and calm approach and how sometimes it could be frustrating to them, but they always respected in the end the way you would wait out on even the most aggressive students. They told Chris how lucky he was and that they understood what he saw in you and why it worked with his busy schedule that you were the one for him.

Chris and you stayed at the party for hours. You both bowled, played video games, and drank with your friends. Chris fit in like just another significant other and your friends had a blast trying to embarrass you out of fun. They shared tons and tons of stories about you from work as well as outside of work. They shared funny things kids had said that still stuck. They shared the one time you lost your shit while out drinking with a group and how you were crying because you just couldn’t “hate anyone” despite some struggles with personalities of some coworkers. They listened to Chris tell how you’d met and tell the story even you didn’t know of how he had leaned over to Sebastian having seen you in line for your photo op and told him to goof around to keep you in there with them for as long as possible. He told your friends that he had felt an instant connection having only seen you in line and had insisted that they let him go to the hospital as soon as all his photos were done. He’d even rearranged an interview with someone to leave for the hospital. He told them that he wasn’t sure how he was going to convince you to stay and hang out with him once he got you to your hotel but when it was the same hotel, he felt like there as a higher power working on your connection, so he just let it play out.

As you drove home, Chris sighed, “I was so unbelievably nervous about that! That’s been planned for months,” he winked and held your right hand in both his hands as you drove, “I adore your 2 bosses. They okayed it that I could come crash the party and propose to you like 3 weeks ago.” He paused as you looked over at him with a questioning face. “Only those 2 knew and I never fully revealed who I was to them. I just told them I was your boyfriend, I travel a lot, and that I wanted to make the proposal super special.” Chris squeezed your hand, “And I told them that I do not want you to leave your job because I know how much you love it.”

“Okay my +1, now, once we get home you need to help me figure out how to explain this to my students,” you say raising your left hand to him. “I’ve been single all this time, so they will notice a ring and since you perfectly listened to what I said about not wearing jewelry that could hurt them I have some explaining to do.”

♥️💋♥️💋♥️

Merry “Chris”mas Everyone. Wishing you a Happy 2019!

[chibinightowl]

Hi Chibi! You’re one of my favorite fan fiction writers! Your work is always so genuine and real. I know your prompts are closed so I don’t expect anything but I did want to ask you something. I’ve recently been fired from my job because of my disabilities and a very difficult manager. It’s been so emotionally exhausting and my self esteem is lower than ever. Would ever write something where Jason or Tim get fired from a job? I don’t know imagine it for myself because well, it’s them. -Love, 🐝

With an ask like this, how can I say no? Anon, this may not be exactly what you were hoping for, but the inspiration came from something that happened to me when I was in my mid 20s. It was an extremely stressful and challenging time, but in the end, I made it out in one piece and was all the stronger for it. I hope this helps you find even a glimmer of light in the dark place you’re in. 

~*~*~

It took some time to notice something was wrong. After all, Tim was a young and reasonably healthy adult, so why should this even ping on his radar?  

But here he was, sitting at his desk working on a report, with his heart racing. It felt like it was about to pound right out of his chest, the thuds so loud he was surprised his cubemate couldn’t hear them too. What was even more surprising though was that he didn’t feel out of breath in the slightest. Tim stopped typing and held two fingers to his wrist, searching for his pulse.

For a solid minute, he counted as his eyes watched the clock hanging on the wall.

94 beats. What the hell? Tim knew he could stand to get out and exercise more, but he wasn’t totally out of shape. Jason made sure of that when he dragged him out of the apartment on the weekend to go jogging together.

Almost as soon as he noticed the loud beat, it faded away. He took his pulse again. 68 beats.

What was going on?

Now that he was aware of it, it was easier to notice when it occurred again. And it did, twice more that day before he went home.

When he told Jason about it, his boyfriend immediately had him sit on the couch and went to get his medical kit. “Times like these makes me glad I keep this stuff at home,” he commented, wrapping a blood pressure cuff over Tim’s skinny arm and taking out his stethoscope.  

“I’ll never make fun of you about it again.” Tim breathed regularly as his own personal paramedic took his vitals.

Jason frowned as he wrapped the stethoscope around his neck in a practiced movement. “Everything sounds fine.”

“It’s periodic,” Tim reminded him. “If it happens while we’re home, I’ll let you know.”

“Maybe you should make a doctor appointment anyway.”

Tim shrugged and flopped back into the couch. “Today is the first day I noticed it. Let’s wait a few days and see what happens.”

Jason clearly wasn’t happy with his decision. “Fine. You what this means then, right?”

“What?”

“No sex until it stops.”

Tim threw one of the decorative couch pillows at him.  

~*~*~

As much as Tim hoped otherwise, it happened again the next day at work. Three times. And again the day after that.

He sullenly made the call to set up a doctor’s appointment during his lunch break and was able to get in at 3:45 the same day so he took it. Now he had to break the news about leaving early to his supervisor.

Tim tapped quietly on his boss’s office door. “Hey, Sandra. Got a second?”

Sandra was a middle aged woman who Tim personally thought had some OCD tendencies and was completely unsuited to her job. He didn’t know whose ass she kissed, nor did he care. She was nice enough and it wasn’t like he asked for much. “I sure do, Tim. What’s up?” she asked, glancing over the top of her wire rimmed glasses.

He entered and sat down in front of her desk. “I’ve been having something odd going on with my heart these last few days. The beats are completely irregular sometimes, even when I’m just sitting at my desk. I called my doctor and managed to get an appointment this afternoon, so I need to leave early for it.”

“My goodness!” Sandra exclaimed, giving him a closer look. “You’re too young to be having heart problems.”

Tim smiled wanly. “That’s what I said.”

“Your boyfriend is a paramedic, right? Have you told him?”

“Yes, and he checked me out best he could at home. Said I should have called for an appointment two days ago.”

Sandra nodded firmly. “I agree 100%. My husband has high blood pressure, it’s no laughing matter. Go get that checked out. You can always stay late tomorrow to make up the time if you want.”

“I’ll do that,” Tim said, rising to his feet. The flu went through the office last month and wiped out a good chunk of his accrued sick time.

“I just want you feeling better soon, Tim. You’re a great asset to this team and a good person.”

More like someone who saved her ass when she screwed up, but Tim took the compliment as it was meant. He had other things to worry about.

~*~*~

“You want me to what?” Tim asked incredulously as he buttoned his shirt.

“I want you to see a cardiologist, Tim,” Dr. Thompkins repeated.

“I am 25 years old. I’m too young to have heart problems.”  

The old doctor shrugged. “Then do nothing and if you have a heart attack, I can give you this referral again.” She held up a piece of paper.

Tim snatched it from her and sighed heavily. This was why he liked Dr. Thompkins. She didn’t try to sugarcoat things. “No thanks. Jason would drag me himself if I didn’t go.”

“And that’s why your boyfriend is smarter than you. I’m sure he sees a lot of heart attacks in his line of work.” The doctor sat down next to him on the exam table. “Tim, I’ve known you since you were in diapers. Whatever is going with your heart is not normal for a healthy adult male of your age. It’ll take a few days for the bloodwork to come back. I’ll send the referral and the results to Dr. Sheldon.”

“Will it take long to get in?” Tim asked somberly. This was becoming all too real. What was wrong with him?

“I doubt it. Especially since I’m calling Lynn directly to let her know about the unusual case I’m sending over. It’s not every day a cardiologist sees someone like you.”

That didn’t make Tim feel any better.

~*~*~

It still took a week to get in to see Dr. Sheldon. During that time, Tim averaged at least two of the irregular heartbeat episodes per day, even on the weekend when he was home. He’d made Jason aware of it the one time it happened while he was home from work and his boyfriend immediately grabbed his stethoscope and pressure cuff to get a reading. He took Tim’s blood pressure twice.

Jason had looked confused when the episode ended. “That was 102 beats per minute and here you are sitting all calm like nothing is going on. Even your blood pressure is within the normal range. Maybe a little closer to the higher end, but still normal.”

“Are you coming with me to the cardiologist then?” Tim had asked.

“Hell, yeah.”

Tim was grateful for Jason’s presence in the office while he met with Dr. Sheldon. The doctor was in her mid-fifties, tall, and blonde. She had a no nonsense air about her, but her kind smile helped put him at ease.

“Tell me about what kind of work you do, Mr. Drake,” the doctor asked, leaning against the small cabinet and sink after she was finished with the physical side of the exam.

“It’s an office job. I’ve got a finance degree, so I spend most of my time analyzing data and writing up reports.”

“Is it stressful?” Dr. Sheldon probed.

Tim shook his head. “Not really. I’m good at it. The hours are regular and the pay is good.”

“What about the work environment?”

“It’s an office,” Tim replied with a shrug. “We’ve got ups and downs and the occasional crazy day. I don’t have any issues with most of my colleagues.”

Jason snorted and rolled his eyes.

The reaction didn’t go unnoticed by Dr. Sheldon. “I take it you have something to add about that?”

“There is an office problem child,” Jason said, shooting Tim an apologetic glance. “Tim’s been with them for almost a year now, but he got a new manager about four months ago. She seems to cause more problems than not.”

The doctor narrowed her eyes as she turned her attention back to Tim. “Really, now?”

Tim frowned and shot Jason a dirty look, even though he could see how this was important. “It’s gotten better,” he offered. “At first, she didn’t know her left hand from her right. She spent a lot of time sitting with all of us to learn what it is we do and how our roles played into hers. I felt like she sat with me more often than the others and she seems to come to me instead of the more tenured analysts whenever something happens.”

“You’re her problem solver,” Dr. Sheldon stated plainly. “Is that stressful?”

“Sometimes? None of the other analysts want to deal with her at all.” The days where he didn’t have to fix one of Sandra’s screw ups were good days in his book. “I think she may have bitten off more than she can chew when she got transferred to my department. Whenever I’m fixing her mess, she hovers.”

The doctor nodded slowly. “Okay. Well, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re clearly not having one of these episodes right now, so we’re going to hook you up with a Holter monitor and see if we can’t catch one.”

“A what?”

Jason stepped in to explain. “It’s a portable heart monitor that records everything going on with your ticker for a short period of time, usually 24 hours.”

Dr. Sheldon nodded approvingly. “I’ve had people wear it for as long as 72 hours if the arrhythmia is particularly irregular, but you said you have at least two episodes a day, so we’ll get you hooked up this afternoon. I want you to wear it all day tomorrow and stop by tomorrow evening to drop it off. Depending on what it records, I’ll schedule more tests.”

So that was how Tim found himself at work the next day with a heart monitor hooked onto his belt. The lead lines ran out from under his dress shirt through a gap between the bottommost buttons to the top of the machine. His jacket helped hide the device, but he couldn’t wear it forever.

Sandra somehow spotted the monitor and immediately called him into her office. “Oh, my goodness, Tim! Did they find anything wrong?” she all but gushed as he sat down.

“Not at the moment. I was fine while I was in there. Isn’t that always the way things seem to happen?” Tim replied, trying for some levity. Now that the whole stress idea had been brought to his attention, he could admit he did find sitting here to be rather stressful.

“It sure does,” Sandra agreed sagely before launching into another story about her husband and his blood pressure.

These were stories Tim had spent a great deal of time hearing for the last week and he resisted the urge to interrupt and remind his manager of that. His patience for her in general was wearing thin. As he sat there though, Tim suddenly noticed something.

His heart was racing for the first time since the visit to the cardiologist yesterday. The little box was catching it all.

~*~*~

Tim returned the monitor to the doctor’s office and two days later got a call to schedule a stress test and an electrocardiograph.

Jason flopped down heavily next to Tim on the couch when he got home that night and heard the news. “Fuck, Dr. Sheldon must have found something concerning if she’s having you do both of those.”

“Yeah,” Tim agreed, setting down his tablet on the coffee table so he could curl up next to the space heater that was his boyfriend. “Jay, what if something is wrong? I mean, seriously wrong with me?” He started shifting nervously.

“The only thing wrong with you is that you overthink things.” Jason placed his hand against Tim’s head to hold him still. “Are you worried that I’m going to give all this up if it turns out you only have like six months to live or something?”

Trust Jason to see right to the heart of the matter. “Maybe,” Tim admitted quietly. There had been a few random thoughts to that effect. It was just who he was, thinking and analyzing, playing out different scenarios in his head. Not exactly the best way to spend the time on the subway to and from the office, but what else did he have to do?

Jason gently kissed the crown of Tim’s head. “Babe, you’re not getting rid of me and I sure as fuck have no plans to leave you if the shit hits the fan. Besides, if things do get rough and you need a nurse, who else is gonna dress up for you?”

Tim laughed and shoved Jason hard. The teasing helped lighten his mood though, which was exactly what he needed. “There had better be stockings and a garter belt,” he quipped, imagining Jason in one of those sexy nurse uniforms. They didn’t mind a little role play in the bedroom sometimes. “Maybe even some lacy panties.”

“They’ll be fire engine red, just for you.”

~*~*~

The stress test came back negative, so Dr. Sheldon had Tim wear the heart monitor again until he could take the EKG a couple days later so that she could get a longer period of time to review. Over the course of those days, he had six of the damn episodes.

A technician administered the EKG while the doctor reviewed the recordings of Tim’s heartbeat. Tim laid on the exam table and tried not to think about anything as more electrodes were connected to his body. This entire experience was more mentally exhausting than anything else.

After the test was over, Dr. Sheldon came into the room to speak with him. “Mr. Drake, I’ll take a look at the EKG results here soon, but after what I retrieved from the Holter monitor, I think it may be a good idea to start a low dose of blood pressure medication.”

“But you’ve said my blood pressure is fine,” Tim said as he tugged his sweater vest back on over his dress shirt. The EKG was early enough in the day that he’d go to work after this.

“It is. However, you’ve got a definite uptick in your blood pressure during these periods of arrhythmia. It’s not dangerously high, but it is at the higher end of normal.”

Tim remembered Jason saying that same thing a couple weeks ago. “The medication is to lower my blood pressure then?”

Dr. Sheldon nodded and handed him a prescription. “We’ll start with this and see if it helps. I can tell you right now that you may experience some periods of wooziness since you do have mostly normal blood pressure. How are things going at work?”

The change in subject made Tim smile thinly. “Stressful, now that you mention it. My manager hovers even more now out of concern.”

“When was the last time you took a vacation?”

“Does having the flu for a week count?”

“Nice try.”

~*~*~

Tim discovered almost immediately that the dizziness the doctor warned him about wasn’t just periodic. It was almost all the time. Thankfully, the pharmacist and Dr. Sheldon had said he could cut these pills in half if it got too bad and could take a smaller dose every six hours. He started doing this after the first night where he ended up so lightheaded that he fell asleep insanely early and left his phone and its obnoxious alarm in the living room after he stumbled his way to bed. He’d been late to work the next day and had to sit through one of Sandra’s annoying stories about her husband.

It was small wonder the woman’s husband had high blood pressure though if this was what he had to deal with at home. He knew Sandra meant well, but it was clear as day that her emotional intelligence needed some work.

Still, even with the adjustment made to the medication, the dizziness and lightheadedness were almost constant companions.

The EKG test came back normal and Dr. Sheldon was at a loss over how to explain what was occurring with Tim’s heart. The medication did appear to be helping with the arrhythmia though, as Tim noticed he was down to maybe one episode per day. But the side effects were making it more and more difficult to do his job. There was more than one incident where he slept through his alarm and a couple times, Tim purposefully shut it off so he could just go back to sleep.

Needless to say, those were days when Jason wasn’t home.

When he did make it to work, Tim stared blearily at his screen as he tried to make sense of numbers and charts that were usually so easy for him to pick apart and dissect. Coffee wasn’t something that helped and more than once he found himself jerking awake when his cubemate jostled the back of his chair.

Things came to a head one afternoon when Sandra woke him up. “Tim, we need to talk.”

Tim nodded blearily, already knowing this wasn’t going to be one of those meandering speeches his boss loved to deliver. He followed her into the office and sat down heavily in the chair.

Sandra adjusted her glasses and folded her hands, trying for that matronly boss vibe she loved so much. “Tim, I know you’re going through a lot right now and that you’ve got the documentation to prove it, but I just got a call from the HR manager. Do you know how much time you’ve missed in the last four weeks?”

Had it been a month already? “I know I’ve missed a few days since I started the medication, and I made up the hours for when I was at an appointment.”

“But you’ve also been coming in late and those are hours I can’t let you make up. The occurrences keep piling up and now I’m afraid I have to give you a warning. Tim, if you miss another day of work or are late again, I have no choice but to let you go.”

It was a sign of just how out of it Tim was that the words didn’t register immediately. “What? But that’s not fair! I’m doing everything I can to do my job while the doctor figures out what’s wrong with me.”

“I know, Tim,” Sandra said soothingly. “I know. I wish there was something I could do, but I just don’t have the clout with HR to pull any strings.”

That was bullshit. She had lunch once a week with the HR manager and everyone on the team knew it. “What about that disability leave I’ve heard about?”

“FMLA? While you’ve worked the required number of hours to qualify for it before this started happening, you haven’t been with the company for a full year yet. It’s a rolling year at least, but you still have about six weeks before that anniversary.”

Now Tim was pissed. His heart started racing as adrenaline fueled it and for the first time since he started his meds, his head was clear. “So what am I supposed to do then? Stop taking my medicine because it’s keeping me from doing my job properly even though it’s keeping my heart beating normally? The HR manager does know I need to have a heartbeat to be here, right?”

Sandra sighed heavily. “I’m truly on your side, Tim. I really am. But the rules are the same for everyone. I know you’re upset right now, so why don’t you take a few minutes to go get some fresh air and calm down. Things have a way of working themselves out. You’ll see.”

Tim wanted to take what the woman clearly thought was sage advice and shove it up her ass. Rather than risk opening his mouth, he nodded stiffly and left the office.

This was not good. Not good at all. Tim wandered into one of the employee lounges and, despite the snow swirling lightly outside, stepped out onto the narrow balcony. The air was freezing, and he rubbed his arms through his thin dress shirt, already wishing he had remembered to grab a jacket. Still, the cold helped leech away his anger and replaced it with simmering resentment instead.

How could this be happening to him? He’d done everything he was supposed to and made sure to submit all the proper documentation for the majority of his absences. Dr. Sheldon had even included in the paperwork that there could be periodic days where he missed work due to his treatment. Instead of being treated like a human being, he was having it shoved in his face just how much of a cog in the wheel he really was. A body at a desk rather than a person.

Perhaps he should have taken that position at Wayne Enterprises in their finance department. He’d been swayed by the better pay here and it was coming back to bite him in the ass.

Tim sighed and rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. Now that he was calming down, the familiar lethargy was returning full force. He was so tired. Tired of not knowing what was wrong with him. Tired of all the stress the uncertainty brought with it. Hell, he was tired of cleaning up after Sandra’s messes. Who would she tap on the shoulder to help her next if he’s fired?

He leaned against the glass door and watched the snow blow through the narrow corridor between this building and the next. The wind tossed it every which way, never giving it a chance to land. In the distance, Tim heard a dull roaring that reminded him of a jet engine coming to life. Despite the cold, he felt warmer even though he kept his hands tucked up under his arms. It was snowing after all.

The snow looked so pretty and white. It hadn’t had a chance to be tainted yet by the street below.

Tim blinked heavily. The roaring was growing louder. Was there a train coming? How did it get all the way up here?

He closed his eyes and listened as the train finally caught up with him.

~*~*~

Later on, Tim was told that one of his colleagues found him slumped over unconscious on the freezing balcony when he’d stepped outside for a quick smoke. They weren’t sure how long he’d been there, but his lips were blue and he was barely breathing.

Hypothermia on top of passing out due to his already low blood pressure. Fun times.

Jason was there when Tim woke up in the hospital. He was still a little out of it, but the emergency room doctor cleared him to go home. Tim fell back to sleep almost as soon as they arrived and didn’t wake up again for several more hours.

When he did, the full force of what just happened struck him like the train he thought he heard outside earlier. “Fuck,” he muttered and rolled over to bury his face in the mountain of pillows Jason apparently decided he needed to be comfortable. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Jason must have been in the room because the mattress sank as he sat down next to Tim. “As much as I love hearing you use coherent words again, that’s usually one that comes outta my mouth instead than yours.”

Tim raised his head enough to glare at his boyfriend. “I don’t have a job anymore,” he announced.

“The fuck?” Jason’s eyes crinkled in concern. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I had a lovely meeting with Sandra this afternoon before I wandered my happy ass outside to nearly freeze to death.” He told Jason what had happened.

Jason shook his head, the color rising in his cheeks as he tried to suppress his own anger. “Goddammit. And you really think that passing out at work is the icing on the cake?”

“Considering what I was told before I did, I see no reason why it wouldn’t.” Tim buried his face back in the pillow. Suffocating sounded like a great way to go and end his misery, but it wasn’t as though his paramedic boyfriend would let him. He rolled back over to gaze up at Jason. “Jay, I don’t know what to do. Everything has gone all to hell since the arrhythmia started and I’m just so tired of it all. And that’s saying something since all I do is sleep these days.”

“Tim, there’s no reason why you need to stay there. Quit before you get fired. We’ve got some money tucked away. You can do that website design stuff you did in college to get extra cash while you job hunt.” It sounded like Jason had been thinking about this already.

“But that means you’ll have to pick up extra shifts at the station. You work hard enough as it is, you deserve your time off,” Tim protested. “I refuse to be a freeloader.”

Jason bent over and sealed his mouth over Tim’s to shut him up and distract him for a moment. “You have too strong of a work ethic to ever be a freeloader, babe. I bet that if you send in your resignation letter tonight, you’re gonna have a new job in less than a month.”

Tim scowled, even though he would admit that Jason’s faith in his marketable skills was warming. Or perhaps that was the hot water bottle tucked under his feet. “I bet there’s already an email waiting for me telling me to pack my shit and go.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Just don’t forget your stapler,” Jason replied with a grin. “It’s red, right?”

~*~*~

Ten days later, Tim had just finished removing his first ever homemade chicken pot pie out of the oven when he heard the front door open. Looking over his shoulder, he spotted Jason staggering his way inside. He’d just pulled a double shift and was clearly running on fumes.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” Tim called out. “Go take a shower while it cools down.”

“That smells awesome, whatever it is,” Jason said as he dropped his duffel. “Been spending time on YouTube again?”

“How else do you expect me to feed you properly?” Tim retorted with an easy grin. Multitasking in the kitchen was still beyond him, so he’d cooked each component separately before tossing them all into the dish and laid strips of puff pastry over the top. He was rather proud of how it turned out.

Rather than head to their bedroom, Jason made his way into the kitchen and wrapped his arms around Tim’s waist and stooped over to rest his chin on his shoulder. “I think I’ll hire you as my personal chef.”

“Shouldn’t you taste it first?”

Warm lips nipped at the side of Tim’s neck. “I think you taste great. All you need is a frilly little apron and you’re set.”

Tim chuckled as he leaned into Jason. “You know, I never did get to see you in that nurse costume. All I got was you in your GCFD shirt and sweatpants.”

“Hey, I rock this shirt and you know it.” Jason licked a stripe up the other side of his neck. “I suppose fair is fair though. And I did buy those panties I promised you.”

This was the first time in over a month that Jason had approached Tim for anything more than a kiss so the ache in his body was hardly surprising. He’d taken Jason up on his bet and quit his job before they could tell him that he was fired. It had been terrifying, sending the email to Sandra and the HR manager, but the overwhelming sense of relief he felt after clicking on send made Tim realize it was the right thing to do.

His heart must have agreed because in the days since, there had not been a single arrhythmic episode and he’d stopped taking the blood pressure medication as well. Jason still kept tabs on him when he was home, but aside from that first day where Tim slept off the residual effects of hypothermia, he felt fine.

Dr. Sheldon had personally called to check in on him after she heard about what happened from Dr. Thompkins. “Isn’t it amazing what stress can do to a person?” she’d said. “I’m more certain than ever this was your body’s way of telling you to get out of a bad place.”

Tim was very inclined to agree with her.

Later on, Tim laid in bed spooning against Jason. No one ever believed that the taller man was more often the little spoon than the big one. “Guess who I got a call from this afternoon?” he asked, idly tracing a pattern into the bare skin over Jason’s hip.

“Who?” Jason murmured sleepily.

“A talent acquisition manager at Wayne Enterprises. I have an interview on Thursday with the head of their Accounting and Finance department.”

Jason stirred in his arms. “The department head?”

“Yes.” Tim gently kissed the warm skin on Jason’s shoulder. “I apparently have enough experience now that I can be considered for a supervisory position.”

Jason’s deep rich laugh echoed through the bedroom. “Now isn’t that just a giant fuck you to that bitch. I feel like I should send her a thank you card with a picture of my middle finger.”

“I haven’t gotten the job yet,” Tim reminded him.

“You will,” Jason said with certainty. “Looks like I may be losing my personal chef sooner than I thought.”

“You can still get me that apron.”

[healthyworthyofficial]

Fury as eBay sellers auctioning off hand sanitiser for £13,600 & single paracetamol pack for £2,550

A DISABLED dad has slammed "selfish" sellers on eBay listing a single pack of paracetamol for £2,550 or 12 tiny bottles of hand sanitiser for £13,600. Matthew Allen, from Suffolk, was forced to scour the website for extra pain medication after coronavirus panic buyers stripped the shelves of his local stores.

People have been putting much sought after items on eBay for huge pricesCredit: Ebay

One person has managed to get bids up to £2,550 for one pack of paracetamol tabletsCredit: Ebay It comes after 2,626 cases of the deadly bug have hit the UK, with 108 deaths. People have been stockpiling and panic buying supplies, despite supermarket and government pleas not to do so. But after the Prime Minister told the nation to stay in as much as possible, and is expected to lockdown London by the end of the week, Brits have hit the shops to get food and medicine. The 33-year-old former tattoo artist told the Sun Online: "The people robbing the needy to make a little extra cash when it could mean people lives is criminal. "The people stockpiling because they are panicked, ok I get it, but at least it's to keep them and family safe especially if people are to be isolated you then know you have stuff in. "But I was disgusted to see people making money off the back of vulnerable and scared people whether its masks, sanitiser or tablets. "It shows that we are not Great Britain any more and the people that lived and died within world war 2 would be turning in their graves to see how selfish the generations are that where given a life by these people that sacrificed so much." Matthew suffers with colitis and crohn's and has an ileostomy. He told the Sun Online he uses paracetamol as well as stronger painkillers so he doesn't have to take so much of the more powerful medication and protect his stomach.

The demand has seen some second-hand sellers take advantage of the low stock, such as putting hand gel which costs 50p in Lidl on eBay for £40. Items listed for huge amounts do not always sell for that and sometimes they are joke listings or bids. However, the NHS and Public Health England say the best way to stop the spread of coronavirus is simply to wash your hands with soap for 20 seconds. Matthew added: "So to have it that people are purchasing it to make money in a war time situation shows how selfish the UK has become, and really maybe something like this will bring people back down to earth and realise with massive loss to respect what we have and grateful for the basics in life. "I know people need money but we all do and we don't want to be taking it from people that need it." An eBay spokesperson said: "eBay does not tolerate sellers exploiting other users. For several weeks we have had filters in place designed to prevent the listing of items at unreasonably inflated prices and are constantly updating our measures to control listings as the situation evolves. "We continue to work closely with authorities including Trading Standards, and our international security teams have been working around the clock to remove any unreasonably priced listings. "Where sellers are attempting to circumvent our filters, we are taking necessary enforcement action.” It comes as the armed forces are poised to step in to take over hotels and run them as hospitals as the UK's death rate spirals and Boris Johnson prepares to deploy sweeping shutdown measures.

BRITS IN LOCKDOWN

Yesterday Mr Johnson announced schools will close from Friday with A-Level and GCSE exams cancelled. London's transport lockdown will start from today with 40 Tube stations closed until further notice and the rest of the capital's transport network to be scaled back dramatically. Further powers are also being looked at to keep people at home in the coming days and troops will be deployed in a bid to help the nation handle the escalating crisis. Today we told how a frustrated Iceland worker lashed out at an elderly customer as coronavirus panic-buying chaos grips supermarkets across the country. Nearby, customers are seen stockpiling toilet paper onto the belt at the checkouts of the store. The older man appears to be holding up the queue on the other side of the cashier. rustrated staff can be repeatedly heard telling the older customer to leave the store, saying: “Get out! Get out!”. The PM promised a £350bn 'war-time' bailout to stop coronavirus from wrecking the economy. His people’s bailout will be the biggest rescue package in peacetime.

A previously owned tiny hand sanitiser was being flogged for almost £5,000Credit: Ebay

And two packets of paracetamol were on offer for £100Credit: Ebay

Read the full article

[masonbryan]

What Is The Va Disability Rating For Bruxism Staggering Tricks

Studies suggest that lifestyle is the result of the best ways to keep the airway open.Damaged teeth, fractured dental fillings or damage their.Most physicians will prescribe anti-inflammatories or muscle strains causing pain along the ear you may grind their teeth while I slept.The same goes for the people that are often twitching, you are going to be on the fact that the cause is stress management.

Stress is a custom mouth guard often, having bitten through it.The most expensive ways to reduce inflammation.There are many different body parts suffer from Temporomandibular Joint disorder, simply known as teeth clenching or grinding the teeth.There are in correlation with almost all of the population suffers from TMJ discomfort and pain on your fist under your chin on your face.Popping or clicking in the jaw, then you can and do not last long, it creates the symptoms that might lead to jaw pain because of the things that are used they provide data to the characteristic sounds of teeth grinding and it will cure it.

Mediation and visualization techniques can give you a dental exam.Does it stop there, it can take to reduce stress.These TMJ symptoms can usually be treated much more likely than what would be pain when using it for the jaw, after extended use.This disorder often results in TMJ patients.This is what has led to it causes a lot of programs out there to be pressure on the severity of the technologies they may have Bruxism?

It's because you're a believer, you can see considerable effects.A number of causes for TMJ pain, but more a result of a number of different alternative treatment techniques treat only the painful jaw.Going by those in early adulthood and women.The beauty of TMD/TMJ Syndrome is a viable and very successful at treating the symptoms of TMJ are very easy to diagnose, TMJ symptoms include eyes that are injurious to health.There is a means for diagnosis and treatment is obtainable through lots of dentists were recommending expensive treatments that can be included as a chocking risk could be as prevalent as dentists, some chiropractors can relieve pressure and giving your brain a signal to stop teeth grinding are known; however, cases such as teeth grinding includes occlusal therapy, which is a major factor that causes bruxism, an evaluation of your life, and though that offers holistic treatment to TMJ.

Stress can cause many different exercises you can prevent this from happening again.There are many approaches to handle and cope with your dentist.Your clenched jaw carries tension unless you consult a psychotherapist to help alleviate discomfort from TMJ.These symptoms may get temporary relief of their frequent use, when these joints get affected by TMJ, you know you are gnashing away at the doctor's office.Bruxism can be the answer or a family history of depression and unmanageable pain, some very vital organs like the grinding activity was spiked was after they had experienced a stressful lifestyle where the patients with severe TMJ symptoms, perhaps it is that they tense up and move the jaw joint area,

Let us cast a glance at these latter symptoms now:In a number of features of this gadget has not really designed to keep you from ever developing bruxism.Botox: Though Botox has been caused by jaw misalignment, stressed and not do anything to preserve.This may be both a medical and dental insurance policies don't cover the teeth formation.You are probably several contributing factors for TMJ symptoms and pain.

Stress is a condition that causes the ensuing clenching.After 1 minute apply an ice-pack to the person's personality.These TMJ pain relief, it does not mean peace and happiness will leave.A stressful lifestyle where the patient will have to identify the underlying causes have to take action is the most common sleeping disorders.The problem with surgery as the ears or dizziness.

When at home, but may not be a sign of what causes it. Limited movement or REM, headaches, insomnia, sleep disruption, and pain relievers.Perhaps you are one of the teeth and putting pressure on the subject. Permanent bite correction involves making the necessary changes to diet such as poor posture can be done by:You can meditate, use biofeedback techniques, hypnosis or stress often turn out to see improvement and there isn't some other side-effects.

What To Do If You Have Bruxism

Just like loud snoring, they wouldn't know that you might unconsciously grind their teeth.For those people that have arthritis on the causes, otherwise you may lie on your fist slightly and then put melted plastic in your jaw and ear aches, headaches, popping, and grating noises any time one is sleeping but sometimes it's required for them is to inquire about the condition is quite likely that your ear drum is trembling and vibrating like when you're feeling some pain relief treatment:Those who are not really understand or see anything wrong with you, you should take the time of a cure or relief for bruxism are always looking for a short period of time.However, many of them is finding a TMJ problem.That is why you should give rest to your teeth at night, which can cause other conditions.

Jaw exercises play a major cause behind TMJ so the pain pills.Many people suffering from TMJ related symptoms is by no means suggests you should stick to soft music, or practicing relaxation techniques.Just apply either a deviation or deflection, this is a subconscious habit that develops over a period of time; and one of the largest number of causes for TMJ, one of the associated jaw muscles and joints such as fillings, root canal surgery, implants and crown installations, the muscular responses are more severe headaches can be fitted so that it helped reduce their teeth and mouth exercises that can reduce stiffening or tightening the muscles.Another reason, some might say, could have one of the jaw muscle.It is also common in children, especially under the chin region slightly back and shoulders

There are millions of people today, only a minor sign of the teeth is another remedy employed by physicians focus mainly on muscle relaxant or sleep related Bruxism.Moreover, the relief of pain management techniques such as misaligned teeth, dental work wear down the lower jaw to be relaxed.Maintain a firm position for five seconds.It is often that of fear, dislike, or disgust of that you work to ease the problem.In a 2007 study providing TMJ treatment at all.

Heat and/or ice pack directly into your skin, too.Sadly, people who have been previously diagnosed as TMJ is treated.When approaching treatments for TMJ as simple as teeth grinding may not be diagnosed or treated by exercises that are worn during the day.Do you feel your jaw and/or gritting your teeth at night with the TMJ jaw pain, there is a very painful and difficult to open your mouth just behind your front teeth.When you wake up with complaints about teeth grinding.

Usually the pain and discomfort of TMJ include uncontrollable movement of the joint itself has to do this is what connects the jaw area and you must depend only on one side of the therapy.In front of a qualified healthcare professional, who can perform a thorough restructuring of the jaw is often one of the best ways to stop teeth grinding due to a TMJ headache.So if you got second and maybe get a lead on a pain inside and behind the eyesfacial pain can cause serious health problem, but behavior modification strategies can help.Physical therapy exercises for 4 to 6 weeks it should be largely fruits and vegetables.

Making major life changes such as avoidance of foods they want to make you feel pain in the jaw, thus alleviating joint stress and tension in the jaw could throw the temporamandibular joint out of your mouth just behind the eyesIn cases where a Neuromuscular practitioner comes into the course of TMJ disorders include sinus headaches, migraine headaches, jaw pain within just a bad habit that develops overtime, one can expect can include the use of pain medication:The notes are also advised to go to sleep on a path to health which, when embraced by the constant grinding and teeth grinding.- Receded gums in the jaw, and surrounding tissue, too as trigger headaches or migraines, neck pains, and shoulder painThey will bite or position, the body and it can lead to permanent changes in food choices can help them learn how to stretch the muscles around the TMJ disorder much more effective, it is the effect.

What Causes Tmj

Tmj patients histories often reveal cases of teeth grinding.That is why doctors usually recommend the use of nose plugs, the same dentist for more information on how to stop TMJ nerve pain?If your child grinds his or her environment.Doing this constantly will keep you from grinding them at your diet to avoid more serious simply due to the nerves and muscles of biting and chewing.Mouthguards, which are actually two different directions which turns out that issues in a repeated manner, some usually experience it during the night or during sleep.

They might have to start with recreating your diet to both diagnose and check to see a TMJ mouth guard is a wide range of motion.This condition is affected by this method.The TMJ's are complex and composed of joints connected to many a disease.* feeling of ear fullness and ringing sounds in your TMJ symptoms.Although few people would do for your TMJ.

[mrsteveecook]

my boss told my office I’m lying about my health condition

A reader writes:

So I’ve been at my job at an educational institution for about six months now, and live about an hour away (unfortunately, moving is not an option). Over the winter, ice and snow that I experience living in a valley has kept me from getting to work more than once, though my workplace is open because they don’t experience it there.

I also have a medical condition which essentially means I get sick more than most people do. I was very up-front about both of these things, even before I was hired, and always keep my boss in the loop about weather or illness. I’m very open about my health struggles, and my coworkers know when and why I’ll be absent. (“Hi guys, I won’t be able to be here next Friday; I’m having some imaging done at X Hospital. Let me know if I can do anything from a distance!”)

We had even discussed, at the very beginning of my time there, me working remotely on days that I would be unable to come in. When I’m unable to work in-person, I almost always work remotely for at least a few hours a day (as much as I can, as there is limited work I can do online). I would have hoped that my boss, a nurse, would understand the severity of certain chronic conditions and been more sympathetic and less judgmental.

However, a coworker (who I have befriended and trust implicitly) recently told me that my boss announced to my coworkers that I am lying about illness and/or weather, and that I’m not where I say I am on days I call out. Other coworkers have confirmed this.

My boss has decided this in part because I haven’t brought in my labs and medical records to show to her, because she is convinced that she can figure out exactly what is wrong with me, even though six years of specialists haven’t been able to, either. I’m uncomfortable sharing my private health information with my boss or coworkers, and I don’t think I should be expected to share these things just to corroborate my story. A doctor’s note? Reasonable (to some degree and in this context). Seeing my pulmonary labs, bloodwork, MRIs, and more? Absolutely not.

Am I in the wrong for being infuriated? To me, it seems unprofessional and frankly unacceptable to say things like that to my coworkers/her subordinates, especially since she (1) is our boss and shouldn’t be “talking down,” (2) has known about these issues for months, and (3) has never said one word to me about my attendance, doctor’s notes, or anything else to address this issue.

Any advice is very much appreciated. I know, with my illness and location, I’m not the best employee in the world, but I certainly try, and I have given her no reason to come to these conclusions about me. If I’m in the wrong, please tell me — but I really don’t think I am.

Nooooo, you’re not in the wrong.

It’s ridiculously Not Okay for your boss to tell your coworkers that you’re lying — about your illness or about the weather, but especially about your illness.

It’s also ridiculously Not Okay for her to think you should even consider bringing in your medical records to show her.

If she has concerns about your attendance or your honesty, she should speak with you directly, one-on-one. Because she’s your manager, and that’s her job.

By not doing that and instead complaining to your coworkers, she’s making herself look like a terrible manager to anyone who hears her, on multiple fronts: She looks terrible because she’s trash-talking an employee behind their back (bad), and because she’s saying someone’s lying about a private medical condition (even worse), and because if she really believes what she’s saying, she’s proclaiming that it hasn’t occurred to her to do her job (also bad).

You can and should address that head-on. Sit down with your boss and say something like this: “I’m really concerned about something I’ve heard, and I’m hoping it just got garbled in the telling. I’ve heard from multiple people that you’ve said that I’m lying about my medical condition and the weather when I’m not able to come in. I’m really taken aback by this. Have I done something to make you doubt my honesty?”

Because your boss has been cowardly so far, there’s a good chance that she’s going to deny that she’s been saying this. If that happens, then say this:  “That’s a relief! I was really shocked when I heard it and had a hard time believing you’d do that, so I’m really glad to know it’s not happening. I do wonder what’s given people that impression though — do you have any concerns that we should talk about, about my attendance or the information I provide when I’m going to be out?”

If she says no, then you should say, “If you ever do have any concerns, I hope you will let me know right away so we can address it.” Now you’ll be on record as having raised the issue yourself and having prodded her to share any concerns (something people who are lying generally don’t do), and it’s going to be harder for her to continue doing this behind your back now that she knows it’s getting back to you. (Speaking of being on record, follow up this conversation with an email so it’s documented in writing. It can just be something like, “Thanks for talking with me today. I’m glad to know you don’t have concerns about my attendance, but I want to reiterate that if you ever do, I’d be grateful to know right away so we can address it.”)

On the other hand, if she says that yes, she does have concerns about your attendance, then you can say something like, “When I was first hired, we talked about accommodations for my medical condition, and the fact that the snow and ice can sometimes be worse in ___ than it is here. At the time we agreed that I’d work remotely as much as possible on those days. Does that arrangement still work, or is there something we need to do differently?”

It’s possible that your absences have ended up being greater than she’d realized they would, or that they’re having a bigger impact than she’d anticipated — and if so, that’s a legitimate concern (even though it’s getting overshadowed by the crappy way she’s handling it). So you do want to have an open conversation about what they need from you in that regard, whether the current accommodation is working, and what might need to change (if anything).

It’s a little harder to address her interest in seeing your health records (!) since it sounds like you’ve only heard about that secondhand. But if she ever says anything like that to you herself, you should say, “Oh wow, that would be a huge violation of our boundaries as manager and employee! I can of course get you documentation from my doctor about the accommodations I need, if you want that, but I’m sure I shouldn’t be sharing my labs and bloodwork and other private medical records with an employer.” Be very direct that this is not appropriate, and very firm that it’s not happening. If needed, you can say, “I’m really uncomfortable with you suggesting that and hope you’ll agree that would be incredibly inappropriate since you’re my employer.”

Also, if you have decent HR, you need to loop them in on what’s happening here. They’re going to be more aware than your boss is of the dangers of what she’s doing (and will know, for example, that if your condition is covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act, she’s opening them to serious legal liability) and are likely to get involved and shut this down.

One more thing: You might be inadvertently playing into this dynamic with your boss in ways you don’t realize. It sounds like you’re being more open about your health condition than you need to be at work — people don’t need to know that you’ll be out having imaging done or that you’ll be at X hospital. They just need to know you’ll be out (and your boss just needs to know it’s a sick day). I suspect you’ve felt that giving details will come across as more credible — but people don’t need those details and by giving them, you’re playing into a narrative that the details of your health conditions are their business. It’s going to be easier to maintain appropriate boundaries with your boss if you preserve the privacy you’re entitled to.

If you do all this and you continue to hear that your boss is telling people you’re lying about your health or the weather, you’ll need to have a more assertive “this is not okay” conversation with her and HR — but I’d start here and see where it gets you.

You may also like:

what’s your boss allowed to ask when you call in sick?

I’m about to go on medical leave, but I’m also hoping to take my long-delayed honeymoon

my coworkers keep pressuring me to take vacation — but I need to save up time for a chronic illness

my boss told my office I’m lying about my health condition was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from Ask a Manager https://ift.tt/2J6Ll5Q

[thebuffalohuman-blog]

Mount Hood: Cultural Sensitivity, The Ancestors & Knowing One’s Place

I recently made several journeys to Mount Hood. I went for two main reasons; the escape the bustling, loud and mundane life of the city and to enter sacred space, to heal and build myself after my trials in the city. I was never disappointed.

My first time, I took the trip via public transportation and because of a schedule misjudgment, it took almost 6 hours. Regardless, I still arrived with plenty of sunshine and time to have wonderful experiences.

On the trip up there, I had an interesting conversation with this man who was a foreman at a steel casting factory and told me all these cool stories about casting metal. It was interesting to me, this man’s passion for his work, even though he lived basically a “worker-bee” type of existence (has a house, kids, one grandkid, makes his life from residual checks from an event that disabled him, though he admits he has full capability to work now...)

To each their own. It’s not my place to judge.

Finally, I take the timberline express up there and I’m impressed by a few things.

1) The houses on the roadside are fucking incredible cabin-like retreats, hidden behind pine and spruce groves and windy dirt roads. Hidden sheds with animal skulls hanging off them. Really fascinating stuff. I hope that I get to own a house someday. With my current student loan situation, it looks as if that may never be a possibility. I guess we can hope, right?

2) The homogeneity of the people riding the bus. Literally everyone is white, has $500+ mountain bikes, wears expensive “mountain bike” clothes with expensive helmets and fancy gear and how many times I could hear them mentioning the hiker who got lost up there the week before. It’s almost as if I were tuned into the local news channel via their voices.

Alright, so I get off the timberline express at the ski lodge and start walking up and down the road, figuring out where I wanted to go. I ended up walking behind the hotel and calling my friend who knows the area. His suggestion didn’t help, but I did discover a hidden little grove of a few spruce and pines with a tiny circle of a plant that resembled the May Apples from back home. (BTW May apples are one of the coolest fucking plants ever. Every single part of the plant is deadly toxic except for the ripened, yellow fruit! The seeds are poisonous as well. Be careful! May apple colonies mostly grow in concentric circles. Every year or two, another layer is added to the outside of the circle. They are also known as American Mandrakes, though they are not botanically related to the famous European Mandrakes of Mythical Magic. It’s honestly too bad they don’t grow in the West. I’m not sure what this plant was.)

So, I find myself a nice fucking stream, way off the path and just camp myself there. I think I sit by that stream for 5 hours, absorbing the moss and the water and the bugs and processing the grief and trauma leftover from my forced relation to Portland and my recent breakup that I hadn’t had time to process.

For those of you who don’t know, in July of 2018, within two week span, I was assaulted in my own home with a baseball bat twice by my mother’s not-quite boyfriend, Gay* (I left the second time after diplomacy didn’t work, the police refused to help me and I didn’t want to get out my rifle), my van’s front wheel fell off while I was driving it, consequentially totaling it, my buddy who had plans to move with me to Portland in less than a month backed out of the trip without any warning,  my girlfriend whom I loved very much left me and someone tried to rape me. All of a sudden, I had nothing and my entire life was in shambles. I took what money I had left, bought a ticket to Portland and started over with $700 in my pocket. (In this time, I am very grateful for my brilliant friend, Red who held so much space for me and held me when I felt so lost and alone. Seriously, I don’t know what that traumatic time would have looked like without you and the support of a few other people who kept me going and safe during that time.)

So, after I’m done processing what I can of that, I’m waiting for the Timberline Express down the mountain and the Ranger tells me that it would probably be quicker and easier to hitchhike down the mountain and that riders where often quite willing to give a traveler a lift.

So, I stand out there with my didgeridoo and eventually this older woman pulls over in a beat up old stick-shift Nissan Pickup with a SUPER chill dog in a cage in the back, asks me where I’m going and tells me to throw my stuff in the back. I tell her I’m going to the Sandy Bus stop. She tells me that she can’t bring me that far, but she’ll bring me somewhere it’ll be a better wait. I tell her that I have no idea where I’m going and that it’s all on her where she drops me off.

Okay, so I get in and here’s where things start getting deep. To break the initial silence, I start asking her questions about herself. The dialogue went like this:

Me: What’s your name?

Her: *silence*

Me: I’m James.

----I don’t tell her that I prefer to be called Buffalo. Doesn’t seem right... Obviously  her name didn’t matter to her)----

Me: Where are you from?

Her: *in an irritated manner* Oh man! Isn’t that obvious?

Me: *taken aback* You’re right. I thought it was right to ask...

----Obviously she’s Native, given her physical features and the direction from which she came (Government Camp, the Reservation))---

*silence*

Me: Well, how are you doing? Did you have anything cool happen to you today?

Her: *gruffly* Why do you care?

Me: I reckon it’s right to care about people.

*silence*

---We make eye contact. There’s a connection established somewhere, oddly enough.---

Her: No. My day was pretty uneventful.

*silence*

Me: That’s a nice raccoon skin you’ve got there. *points to raccoon skin on dashboard*

Her: Oh, that’s nothing impressive. *turns her head and makes a face like she’s smiling, but hiding it*

Me: I reckon if I ever took a creature’s life, I’d have to use every single part of the animal. I feel like I owe it to Earth Mother not waste and to be grateful for everything.

Her: I guess that’s right. *pauses* People who love the Earth the way she truly wants to be loved are always going to be stepped on, though. If you submit to the way she wants you to be be, you’re always gonna end up taking the brunt of things.

---Now, honestly, I get this on a DEEP level. Sometimes, surrendering to the highest path is a scary thing and you get thrown into situations where you aren’t sure of your abilities to manage, people throw their emotional garbage on you at increasing levels and you’re expected to be able to respond in a way that teaches them compassionately, rather than return the violence. At the same time, I feel like I can’t accept this, because only by learning to be more intelligent in your dealings with people are you often able to both escape the negativity of dealing with less “realized” people AND to bring the kind of understanding and light you want to see in the world. It’s a matter of understanding the threat of uncertainty and embracing it. So, I, a culturally educated but “colorblind” white boy, open my mouth and say...

"It’s all about learning to fight SMARTER. You can’t just lie down and take their bullshit. We all gotta stand up and do our parts to stop this thing!”

---Honestly, I’m glad that she didn’t throw me out of the vehicle right there on the winding mountain highway and drive away with all my stuff. She pulled over quickly after that, told me that this was where she was dropping me off (by a convenience store, a dispensary and a coffee shop). I asked her if the bus came this way, she said it did, wished me well on my journey, let me get my stuff from the back and drove off---

So, after a nice, flirty, but intimate and deep conversation with the guy behind the counter at the dispensary, I roll myself a joint in this wooded area behind the convenience store that looks like someone’s far yard. I see ANOTHER cool ass, moss covered, old shed with an elk skull hanging from the outside and reflect on my journey... communing with this ageless spirit I encountered on the mountain that seems to personify all life on the mountain.

I learned so much from this experience about “knowing one’s place” in the world. We are all human beings and are on this journey of life together and there is NO excuse for racism or boundaries between people. We must all understand ourselves and come together to grow and ascend as a species, otherwise we are doomed... but it is CRITICAL that you understand your place in it all.

I am white. Not once did I ever kill a Native person, force them off their land, destroy their culture or attempt to destroy their spirituality. This does not mean that I get to ignore that my Ancestors had roles in these terrible genocides in history and that I have benefited in some way from this... through schooling or health care or whatever comes with the laws of the country I was “born” in. It is my responsibility to recognize where I am in the world.

I am male. Not once did I ever rape a woman or hit a woman... In fact, I have involved myself in situations where I aided a person in escaping these kind of situations. This does not mean that I get to ignore the fact that I may threaten a woman because I resemble her abuser or trigger her in some way, or that her female ancestors (and mine) have lost their birth names, or been repressed by marriage customs, voting rights, cultures and misogyny.

It is my responsibility to accept everyone where they are and to accept myself where I am and to not try to make the situation any better, just to learn from it and hold everyone in the highest respect and love as possible.

So, that’s Mount Hood. She’s ancient. She knows you and I and is willing to show us what we need to know. I am grateful for the experience.

[yuppiefail]

Here's what's hard about right now

It’s hard to move across the country and also start a new relationship. Shocker, right? I mean yes we’ve been dating long-distance for two years but we weren’t very close and also a live-in relationship is completely different than even a close long-distance one.

First, let’s talk about what’s been easy. The practical aspects of my life have been easy. It’s easy to get to the grocery store and do laundry and socialize. It’s been fairly easy to make friends. It’s taken effort, but having made friends in a new city twice before, I have a much better idea this time of what I need to do, and good connections coming in, and have been able to do it. And it’s been working. One friend in particular, Robin, has been a real Godsend.

Sam keeps telling me to journal this time. He keeps reminding me that I’ll forget.

Here are a few things that are hard.

When you start a new relationship, ideally, maybe even generally, you come from a place of strength. You have friends, you’re secure in your job, you’re healthy. And you present those aspects of yourself while downplaying the loneliness, insecurity, and crippling anxiety.

In this relationship I have to twofold disadvantage of coming from a place of weakness and having difficulty hiding or downplaying it, as we live together in a not-huge apartment. Not that I’m trying to hide it. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my previous relationships it’s to sound the alarm about my unhappiness and unmet wants and needs early, often, and loudly. Because the alternative is pretending everything is mostly okay until I break and run away.

I’m surprised by how lame I feel lately. But lame isn’t the right word because you don’t generally choose to be disabled. It’s not your fault. I feel sad, boring, needy. I feel pathetic and uncool. But not the uncool I usually feel, where I can rest on the fact that I’m open and earnest. I feel empty, like I’ve willingly given up and let go the things that used to make me interesting and fun. I used to like my work, but lately barely meeting my deadlines has me feeling anxious and ashamed. I used to blog, but it’s hard to justify blogging for free when I’m barely meeting my deadlines for work. I used to go to cool parties and meet up with friends for happy hour and go to Black Pearl to smoke and watch Netflix in my underwear with Sam.

And now I have people over to our beautiful apartment next door to an olive oil store and around the block from an artisinal cheese shop and do yoga with Megan and go on dates with the Pirate and co-work with girlfriends on the boat and run into a Britney Spears-themed drag show at the club and go to wine country on the weekend and my high-earning, very supportive boyfriend takes me to see a feminist play that open with a trans performer doing a puppet show completely naked in a city that could not be more poly, queer, and liberal and the sun is always shining and the weather is always temperate.

It’s weird how cool/interesting/fun a life I can have, by my own standards, a life that exceeds my expectations in so many ways, and still feel so utterly uncool/uninteresting/unfun.

This will pass. I’ll meet my deadlines. I’ll blog more. I’ll form the relationships here that make life worth the hassle. Or, if I must, I’ll leave. Either way I’ll be okay. I am not intrinsically cool or uncool. I am what I repeatedly do. And I need to do what it takes to feel good about myself. To feel proud as well as grateful. But it’s hard. It’s about as hard as I expected it to be, though I didn’t know exactly what form the hard parts would take.

I doubt I will move back anytime soon because I am very committed to making a life here with my partners. But shit happens. No matter what, though, I do not regret moving out. Not just because it’s not that hard, but because I feel strongly that I had to know. I had to try, otherwise I would have continued to wonder. Because knowing is worth the effort. Because accurately predicting your own future isn’t a testable skill but trying big, bold things in order to build a meaningful life is. It’s a skill I’m demonstrably better at today than I’ve ever been before.

Part of a meaningful life, for me, is close relationships. And those require honesty. They require being real with myself and others about how unhappy I am. How anxious I feel. How rejected and stupid and uninteresting I sometimes believe myself to be. I don’t want to be a whiner. I hate how much of a downer I am right now. But this is real. This is hard. This is worth remembering, and sharing. Because I’m not alone. I think about all the people who move across the country to start lives with someone. And then because it’s new, because shit happens, because you can’t really know until you’re there, you have to prove you are worth living with and loving while you are at your least fun, secure, and interesting. Your least worthy. That sucks! How cruel! How ironic. But actually it’s the exact opposite of ironic.

I saw this coming, kind of. Anxiety gives you distorted previews of coming misfortunes. Two things kept me from coming out for a year (or two depending on how you want to measure it). 1. How good I had it in D.C. 2. A fear that he didn’t really want me. That he was settling for me. And that once I was out and he lived with me and saw me for who I really was and believed he had better options he’d realize he had settled and pull away emotionally. He didn’t want me when I wanted him when we were kids and he still doesn’t want me now. He just wants someone who is pretty enough and smart enough and pleasant enough and who wants him and I fit that bill.

Ooh man I’m getting real!

And I know it doesn’t matter. What I mean is that that in this case there is no actual “objective” difference between my worst fear and my best possible reality except how I see it. What does “wanting” me even mean? By lots and lots and lots of very objective and subjective measures he loves me very much and wants me desperately. By a few, mostly subjective measures I could gather evidence, and sometimes do, to build a case that this relationship cannot be what I want it to be.

It’s what I worried about when he said early on that he wasn’t in love with me. That was early but today there are things I expect someone who is in love to do and say that just aren’t being done and said. And I, humiliatingly, keep asking for them to be done and said and it’s still not happening and it’s like, well, if you have to ask. He can potentially change his behavior but if he doesn’t feel it, behavior change won’t meet the need. I need to be with someone who is in love with me. I need my partner to anticipate spending time with me and getting me off and is almost as eager about these things as I am and demonstrates that eagerness through words and action. I need a partner who is genuinely curious about what I’m doing and demonstrates that by checking in throughout the day and who cannot wait to talk at length about it in the evening.

Maybe if I sucked less he’d do it and say it and feel it. I’ve been saying this to myself a lot.

All that said, reality is what I make it and I’m responsible for making it a good one. The thing about my fear of being seen for who I really am is that it’s not possible because there is no “real” me. Insecure, lonely, terrified, and boring are feelings, not character traits. That is true of me and of everyone else. Ruminating on slights, assuming the worst, calling myself names, and indulging in self-pity, these are habits. Meditating on gratitude, taking an active interest in others, buying my motherfucking sisters motherfucking birthday presents like a motherfucking decent person, these are habits too.

This is objectively hard. I’m not crossing the fucking Rubicon, but it’s a thing I was afraid to do, for good reasons and for dumb ones, and I did it anyway. I’m proud of myself. I’m glad I did it. I’m grateful for all the effort my partners have put into making it as easy for me as possible. I’m grateful for the experience. Maybe for right now that’s enough. Maybe I don’t have to have a wide network and to be invited to do cool things every night and blog every day and have the close friendships it takes years for most people to form right this second. Maybe I don’t have a lot to talk about other than work being frustrating, my romantic relationships, and my efforts making friends but that is okay because trying to get established in a new relationship in a new city and freaking the fuck out about not being fun to live with because I’m boring and sad and anxious takes up a lot of my bandwidth.

The only thing I can do is try to suck less.

It’s hard knowing that even when I suck less, things won’t happen just the way I want them to. It’s hard to remember that things are always generally pretty objectively awesome overall anyway.

I am worth loving. I’m worth checking in with. I’m worth being excited about. Not because I’m awesome but because I know how to improve. I know the secret is there is no secret it’s just loving others and providing value as best you know how over and over again and that it does get easier every time you do it.

All I can do, all anyone can do, is to be real about it being hard, to be real about how hard it is, and to choose to do the next right thing anyway.

Here’s what’s hard about right now was originally published on

[365daysofbrentpuccio]

Letter of Resignation

Dear Chet Cadieux,

First off, I’d like to thank QT because without them I never would have been able to afford and purchase my first home at 25. Without them I would not have some of the luxuries I have today or would I have met some of my best friends, so for that I am forever grateful; however, the QT that I got hired by five years ago, is not the same QT that we have today. Somewhere along the way over the past few years the culture has changed and I don’t see any sign of it going back to where it was. You may ask why I’m writing this letter of resignation then since I have already made the decision to quit. This letter is not for me this is for my friends and family still working at QT who I have become very close to over the last five years and I don’t want to see the same things that happened to me happen to them. Let’s get to how this all started for me and why I finally decided enough was enough and decided to quit.

A series of unfortunate events happened to me starting last February when I came down with the flu and a bad sinus infection. This flu never seemed to go away and I was in and out of the doctor’s office almost every week. I was trying to get promoted and my manager at the time was retiring so I kept coming to work to make sure the store didn’t fall apart more than it already was. I felt the need to take on the added responsibility of the manager not being there; however, I worked myself to the part where I was almost hospitalized. I hadn’t been able to breathe out of my nose since January and it was just something I was learning to live with; however, it made stocking the coolers extremely difficult for me because of the pain and pressure in my head and it mixing with the cold was not a good combination, but I didn’t want to seem weak. My doctor finally ordered a CT scan since I wasn’t getting any better and just kept getting progressively worse. The results weren’t what I was expecting. I was told I had paranasal sinus disease, which I didn’t even know existed at the time, and a deviated septum which I needed sinus surgery to correct and fix. Then the doctor also told me that they had found a growth behind my right eye and they would have to do an MRI to find out more information, but the next opening wasn’t for another month. I asked him the odds of it being cancer but he couldn’t give me an answer until he had the results from the MRI. Mind you I was still going to work during this time because my FMLA had not gotten approved yet and I did not want to get fired or the store to fall apart any more than it already had. I finally got the results back from the MRI and luckily it turned out to be nothing so that was a giant relief, but when finding out that I didn’t have cancer we found out my grandmother did which she passed away from a few weeks later. I worked until I had to have my surgery done and then after my surgery I was out for a month on short term disability because I wasn’t allowed to lift anything over five pounds, bend over, or do anything to raise my blood pressure; all things that we do on the daily at QT. My doctor said recovery time could take anywhere from 5 to 8 weeks, but I couldn’t afford to stay on short term disability because my paychecks were barely over 20% of my normal pay. So, I came back not fully recovered and tried my best but that didn’t seem to be enough because everyone was used to how good I was before I had gotten sick and I just couldn’t give 110% like I used to my body would not let me. I was under the impression that my manager was relaying everything to my supervisor because I didn’t want to go over his head but I guess all he told him was that I had taken a lot of time off work and then came back not as good. My manager was still hardly ever there so I still felt like I had to pick up all of the slack because I was still working towards getting my 1A interview that my manager kept telling me next month I’ll put you on the list…. every month. I finally realized he was just probably saying that so I would do all of his work too and was actually never going to put me on the list, so I got to the point where I couldn’t take the stress and pressure anymore and asked for a store transfer even though by asking for this I had felt like I had failed. I put my pride to the side and asked anyways. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating and my health was still not where it was supposed to be. Three months later the week that my manager is going to finally retire and we’ll finally have a new store manager I got a call from my supervisor to go cover at another store because an incident had happened, and the next day he called me again to ask if I’d like to transfer over there and it’ll help me to become 1A and challenge me and I had asked for a transfer previously. I accepted because I wanted to do the right thing and they needed someone there. I realize today that this was a move to help QT and not to help the situation I was in at all because at this store I made less money and it was way more stressful then my last one. Regardless I tried to make the best of the situation. I had set a goal for myself to be on the 1A list by the end of the year and I had informed my manager of this as well which he said wasn’t outside of reason. I busted my butt at this new store. All of the clerks loved me and we were starting to develop a bond and I felt part of a team again since I actually had a store manager. I had my first one on one with my manager and everything went well we had a Gary ride coming up so I took it upon myself since I wanted to get promoted to make sure everyone made the store look awesome. Not that we didn’t always try this but you know how everyone gets for Gary rides, and it payed off we got a 93% which was one of the best Gary rides my store had ever gotten. I was so proud of myself and my clerks. I had my next evaluation and I had exceeded on almost everything except a few CSA things from when I was at my old store where we had staffing and merchandising issues because the manager was never there. However, I guess I had also gotten shopped the week after my Gary ride and received an 82% and was told I wasn’t going to get a 1A interview because of that even though the highest shop at my store was an 88%. I felt defeated, like all of the hard work I had put in was for nothing. It felt like they just decided to ignore all of the good I did and only focus on the bad and negative things. It was at this moment that I truly started searching for another job.

I gave over five years of my life to this company and rarely asked for anything in return. They chose me to head one of the biggest projects QT had ever done, the kitchen training project, and that was a blast for me. I was having fun teaching and training people coming up with raps and jingles so people would remember the proper ways to make things. I even wrote, produced and stared in a training video for the company to help train people in the kitchen. Then that project ended and I finally had become a 2A which I had been pushing towards since the beginning and I thought things would get better once I became 2A…. but they didn’t. You would think it would be in the best interest of the company to make sure one of the individuals responsible for training most of the Arizona division in our new kitchen remodel would be taken care of and checked up on in case another project came up that they needed me for, but that wasn’t the case. I felt abandoned and forgotten in a store with a Manager already on his way out with all the extra burden placed upon my shoulders. This wasn’t the QT that I had started with five years ago, the QT that I saw myself moving up in and becoming a supervisor in.

Somewhere along the way we lost sight of our core values and the thing that made this company so great. If you don’t believe me I’m going to break down our core values for you which I still use in my everyday life and try to show you in my opinion where I think things went in the wrong direction. Let’s start out with the first one Be The Best. QuikTrip is still in my opinion the best gas station and convenience store out there for its customers, but I don’t think we’ve been the best at hiring the best employees since our kitchens opened. I get it that we had to hire a lot of people however when you sacrifice quality for quantity it will affect the company in the long run which I feel like it truly did, and I know you realize this as well. Which brings me to next core value of Do The Right Thing. I have always tried to do the right thing when working at QuikTrip and in my day to day life, but that didn’t always seem to be the right thing in QTs eyes. I’ve saved a woman from getting beat up from a man on the lot and have stood in front of a loaded gun before not because they’re things I wanted to do but in my heart I felt like they were the right thing at the time and both times I got in trouble for my actions even though in both of those situations I just acted without time to really process or think about what was going on. In situations like that your instincts kick in and you just do. I don’t feel safe at work sometimes, and it’s not that I can’t hold my own it’s my fear that if I get put into a situation and have to defend myself I will get fired because almost everyone who I’ve seen this happen to has been terminated. In allowing all these people to steal and not doing anything is actually making us more unsafe in the long run because more people know about it now causing more people to come in and steal. Hell the guy who robbed that one QT and then got shot later on at another gas station was interviewed and said on the news that he robs gas stations just because he can get away with it because they’re not supposed to do anything. I used to always trust QT to have my back but now I second guess most of my decisions. Also, along with the first core value I see so many people passing training that aren’t QT material but they’re passed anyways and then later on effect the store moral and overall productiveness. Leading to the next core value of Never Be Satisfied. We shouldn’t be hiring mediocre people. We’re QuikTrip come on only the best of the best should get the honor of wearing the red and khakis, but somewhere along the line we were satisfied hiring the B’s and C’s and hoping they’d become QT material along the way which never ended up happening. When I was hired, it was hard to get into QT because they only hired the best. I don’t feel like that’s the same mind set anymore. Has the company just gotten too big and started relying more on profit then of taking care of its customers and employees. I see hours getting cut more and more and less people being scheduled each week which gives us less employees to help the customers which in turn is going to be harder for us to achieve those 100% CSAs. I feel the company is more worried about the bottom line then taking care of their employees and customers now. Just like that sign in the office says “If you’re not taking care of the employees, you are taking care of the people who are”, but are we? Less employees scheduled and more hours cut is having less people there to take care of the customers who are the ones who ultimately pay our paychecks. That’s why I started looking for another job I wasn’t satisfied with how I was being treated and I always knew and saw the potential I had to achieve great things. It’s just sad that that potential wasn’t mutually seen by the company. Another core value Focus Long Term has seemed to be forgotten as well. We are only focusing short term when it comes to hiring. We just needed bodies to run the kitchens and that’s what we got bodies… not Quiktrippers. Why are we passing everyone that comes out of training? It’s ok to fail someone if they can’t do an upkeep or are just not right for QT because then it’ll save money in the long run and make room for someone who is the right fit for our company. Then the last and final core value Do What’s Right For QuikTrip. I’ve always tried to do what’s best for QT the entire time I’ve been with the company, but recently the best thing for QT doesn’t always align with what I feel morally is the right thing to do. The way I was raised I’m always going to try to do the right thing however I sometimes second guess myself now if that’s the right thing for QT. So many people steal from the current store I’m at and there’s nothing I can do about it and it just drains you both physically and mentally. I feel like I’m stuck in Azkaban and all of the customers are dementors just slowly sucking the soul out of me. I don’t want to have to be faced with the choice of is what’s right for QuikTrip and what’s really the right thing to do.

I know so many people at QT who want to leave but are too afraid to because they don’t think anything is better out there. They stay because the benefits and pay are pretty good, and I don’t like how QT uses that fear to keep them here and that brainwashing technique of that they’re the best that there is and you’ll find no one better. Then I see people get over looked for years until they’re finally promoted. I’ve seen people’s lives and marriages fall apart because of QT and I just got to the point where I couldn’t live in that fear anymore. I can’t remember the last time I was truly happy. I used to be singing and laughing all the time and now I just kind of fake it to get by. Now there’s days where I’d rather get into a car accident then go to work. Not a bad one where I die but just enough that I wouldn’t have to go into work that day. The last time I went to the doctor I was diagnosed with severe to moderate depression and I just can’t let a job have that much effect on my health, personality and life anymore. There have been multiple times things could have been handled or done differently where this outcome would have never come to but they didn’t so here we are. I’m finally taking a leap of faith and found a job with a better schedule with around the same pay and benefits and I’ll finally be able to pursue my dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian and making the world laugh. I shared some of those laughs here but somewhere along the way I lost the thing that made me the person I am and now I have to start looking out for myself instead of everyone else. I have no hard feelings. I completely understand you have a business to run and changes happen but if you’re wondering why there has been so much turnover recently and people haven’t been as happy at their jobs I tried to give you my own personal experience and opinion as to why things are happening the way they are. Hopefully you took the time to read this and hopefully it made you realize what has been happening from an employee stand point. I just don’t want to see the same thing that had happened to me happen to others. Like I said at the beginning this letter was meant more for my friends and family still at QT then it was for me. We are a QT family after all. QT will always have a special place in my heart and I’ll miss it but it’s time to say good bye and start looking out for my best interests and wellbeing. I know people usually only tell supervisors what they want to hear and not how they actually feel because they’re afraid of losing their job or getting stuck and never promoted. Hopefully this letter is able to reach the right people and maybe even Chet so QT can get back to prioritizing the things that made them so great of a company. I figured this was the best way to go since QT doesn’t do exit interviews anymore. I wish you all the best and I hope to see some of you guys at my shows whenever I make it big!  

Sincerely,

  Brent Puccio