#especially if she still has debt from undergrad!!!!!!!

[queenboimler]

i'm still baffled that hen went to med school and then....decided to stay a paramedic?

probably over 250,000 in student debt and for what 😭

[lutrainman]

Been wanting to create some quick profile pics, but I haven’t really fleshed out all main and supporting and chatizens. For now, I’ll give you the main. Still haven’t gotten all the other chatizen profiles done. Nor do I plan to in the future.

warning lots of profiles to skim through. Not all of them are fleshed out.

Terrence E. Coyote (middle name Egnacio)

ChibiRoom handle: Techy-mancer2772

Age: 25

Species: Anthro Coyote? (his dad hasn’t confirmed if he’s part wolf)

Close colleagues call him Terry. His friend Rev will call him Ter (pronounced Tear, as in “tear it all up”). Youngest prodigy in science and engineering. Already 2 PhD and current researching scientist at Acme Technical University. Has been going through a shut-in gremlin phase about 4~6 months ago.

He just finished up his last contract deal that has freed him from college debt, especially after the debacle involving an undergraduate intern. So he’s gone into a pseudo-gremlin mode by indulging in all of the nerdy stuff he’s deprived himself of; including anime, cartoons, shows, movies and video games, personal sci-fi prop making, reading books, comics, graphic novels, and going to sci-fi or comic conventions.

Terrence is an introvert by choice and isn’t very social. So he’s socially awkward, and tries to hide it behind a professional facade. Unfortunately, he comes off as standoffish, aloof, and a bit arrogant. Only because he holds himself to a high standard in the pursuit of science and using science for good things. Has a few inventions and breakthroughs tied to him. But he’s best known to be a collaborator, despite how obsessive he is with research and the details.

Joined “Retro-tech” chibiroom since he has grown up retro-fitting or making old tech work.

Creon Gilead

Age: 24 (going on 25 eventually)

Species:Publicly Human. Latent Mutant status hidden for now

Sous-chef and assistant manager to the Leghorn building cafe that she started when she first worked as a barista at the coffee bar. Also overworks a lot with side hustles, her main job, and community/volunteer work. Loves motorsports, hover-board racing, roller skating.

Adrenaline junkie and adventurous. Quite reckless and has a YOLO mentality. She tries to keep an open mind to new experiences. She’s multi-lingual due to her life experience and time in the military, and living in the Crater. Her life hasn’t been kind, and she is both lucky and unlucky with whatever wild scenarios that happen near her. Creon is a glass-half-full type of girl who always strives to be the best version of herself. Which means doing her best to be kind in a cruel world.

Despite trying to be honest and true, she’s a bit cagey about her past. Nearly abstained from dating/romance for 2 years. Until Terry literally fell into her lap one night on the train. She’s unaware that the chatizens of the Retro-tech Chibiroom refer to her as “Snow White.”

Revel R. Runner (middle name Reginald)

Age: 24

Species: Anthro Roadrunner

One of the undergrad students who got lucky with interning under Terrence, despite Terrence’s vehemence against taking on another intern. Goes by Rev most of the time. He prefers it. Rev was the only one to pull Terrence out of his shell, most of the times. Rev is the only one who can keep up with Terrence, or at least understand him when they work together. And Terrence is able to keep up with Rev’s speed-talking. Rev has made it his mission to keep Terrence from becoming a cyborg in the possible future. Rev thinks Terrence needs to live a little and not let science be the sole reason for existence. Also works as a researching scientist and engineer alongside Terry.

Alex Bunny

ChibiRoom handle: Black-Ace-Kazma

Age: 24

Species: Anthro Bunny

Works as one of the personal trainers and instructors at the Acme Tech campus gym and recreation center. Later on, Alex will become Terrence’s personal fitness coach. Also someone who likes to watch really old school movies or films.  He’s a martial arts nut so he has an old collection of Kung-fu film dvd/blu-ray sets. These were passed down from either an old relative or grandfather. Some even on VHS cassettes. So Alex also knows how to use antique projectors, VHS, DVD & Blu-ray players. Later on, Alex will figure out Techy-mancer and Terry are the same, but won’t reveal this at all. He silently enjoys the shitshow and continues to encourage Terrence with the pursuit of personal and physical growth. Alex sometimes does some stunt work for films or tv.

Lexi Bunny

ChibiRoom handle: Loola_Honey55

Age: 23

Species: Anthro Bunny (distant cousin to Alex Bunny)

One of Creon’s besties. Met Creon when they were both auditioning for TV extras. Marketing Research specialist for a fashion company that caters to anthros. Lexi is gregarious, ambitious, and quite bubbly. But Lexi can also be ambitious, hard-working, and introspective when she needs to be. On spare time she takes care of her plants, tiny garden, and streams playing video games. She’s also a fashionista who likes to take thrift-store clothes and fix/spruce them up for herself. Lexi joined chibiroom asking for advice on integrating old consoles, emulators, or stream setup. But mostly the video games, since she likes to explore old-school games ranging from late 90s, and early 2000s. Plus, she likes some of the older consoles and games.

Ripley R Runner (middle name Roland)

ChibiRoom handle: RippingW!r3z226

Age: 22

Species: Anthro Roadrunner

Rev’s younger brother. Moderator of the Retro-Tech Chibiroom. Actually working on his own apps and software in spare time. Secretly wants to get approval from dad and take over family business. Due to a lot of time in the Retro-tech chibiroom, he’s made a few programs, mods, and even inventions to help the group. Has tested them out. Lexi was the first guinea pig to test out programs or plugins for her stream and video game setup. Rip may seem slow-speaking, quiet, and aloof, but he’s just as smart as his big brother. Maybe even smarter, especially in certain departments. Rip has that perfect balance of being business savvy, entrepreneur, and software engineer and inventor.

Tina Russo

Age: 26

Species: Anthro Duck

Another one of Creon’s besties. Met Lexi through Creon. They too are besties. Tina is down-to-earth, blunt, feisty, and street-smart. Tina can be brutally honest, especially during the early days of befriending Creon. It’s thanks to Tina that Creon started developing a no-nonsense attitude and was able to set boundaries for herself. Family came from Italian immigrants. Does construction work in modular housing. Has always liked building stuff as a kid. Helped her dad out a lot in his plumbing and handyman work. Has a degree in architecture. Transferred to Acmetropolis from home in New Jersey to work with a real estate company that is undertaking a city renovation project.

Daniel Duck

ChibiRoom Handle: Duck_Dodgers_livedangerous

Age: 24

Species: Anthro Duck

Is kind of a pessimist and a conspiracy nut. He’s really paranoid about how the government is using current technology as surveillance. A bit short-tempered and comes off as delusional or egotistical. Deep down he’s just a lonely, insecure guy who got done dirty by the child foster system. So he’s had to grow up a bit street-smart and cynical. The “Retro-tech” chibiroom is the only place he sometimes finds solace in and the first place he consults in regards to retrofitting some old gadgets to work. That and he’s kind of a lonely duck trying to cope with his unfulfilling mundane life.

Samuel D Tazman (middle name Denver)

ChibiRoom handle: Slam-Taztic-devil

Age: 28

Species: Anthro Tazmanian Devil

A local wrestler who works in construction work and welding during the day. Sam is actually chill and respectfully polite in real life, which tends to clash with other people’s perception of Tasmanian Devils. Sam is very fond of good food and happens to know which local food venues are best. Joined “Retro-tech” chibiroom for adapting some tech for his big hands.

Oberon_Maestro67 (chatizen)

Species: Human

A music enthusiast, musician, and loves performing or going to music concerts. Absolutely hates the idea of AI music overtaking normal organic music. Has offered a lot of audio tech integration advice and music recommendations.

T!meSk!pper136 (chatizen)

Species: Human

About high-school senior who’s kind of lonely but loves making models and gunpla or making robots for bot-fighting. Lives with grandpa, who is an acclaimed professor and expert on theoretical physics and time. For now, he takes solace in the Retro-tech chibiroom.

Sylphair375 (chatizen)

Species: Human

A bitter, pessimist who seems to like being a naysayer and bringing up the worst case scenario. Is actually a recovering athlete who is bitter about how his athlete career barely started after a bad accident and injury.

Cloudy-chance-185 (chatizen)

Species: human

Currently a news anchor intern working under Misty DeBreeze. Actually went to school to study weather and meteorology. Part of a small collective of volunteer weather watchers collecting local weather data for climate change studies.

Massivechad305 (chatizen)

Species: human

Just a guy trying to go straight while living on parole. Had been jailed for some time for burglary. Participating in a new parole rehab program which was experimental and difficult. Joined chibiroom to get help and resources for retro-fitting tech that accommodated his size. Doing odd-end jobs here and there. Training to get a welding license.

Wac-gran20K (chatizen)

Species: human

Creon’s next-door neighbor, enjoying her well-earned retirement with her pet canary, Tweety. She’s already aware that Creon is “Snow White” that everyone in the Retro-tech Chibiroom chat likes to talk about. She just chooses to not reveal this secret and just watch the drama unfold. Granny is the definition of “sweet little old lady.”

Yeah there are other side characters, like Zadavia and others who are also chatizens or just regular citizens living normal lives. But I don’t think I’ll get into them now.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Maybe for 2024 I will make it a goal to just actually read or watch all the really good media that I’ve been putting off starting/finishing. I often like to save some of the really good stuff for some indelible later, but actually maybe later is this year. So, some stuff I’m finally gonna get through this year must include:

-finally finishing harrow and nona instead of waiting forever for alecto to come out so I can just binge all of the rest in a row as was my initial hope after finishing Gideon and skimming through chunks of Harrow. What am I waiting for. When I finish it once I can still just read all three again before Alecto comes out. Plus I’m gonna get way more of the layers to these books now that I have read so many metas written by people who have already read the extant series like a dozen times.

-Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’ve watched many other classic shoujo, but not this one??? Somehow??????

-Leverage. Self explanatory.

-The Expanse. Another series I have only heard good things about, especially from @battlestarbones

-Naomi Novik has several books I haven’t read yet that I absolutely should starting with Spinning Silver.

-I should try to get into Earthsea again. I tried quite a long time ago and I think I would get way more out of it this time.

-half of Wheel of Time tumblr is obsessed with Realm of the Elderlings, and so many people have recommended it to me, so I guess I gotta do that too.

actually there are many pieces of media that have been recommended to me over the years that I have to add to this list. Most importantly, I owe my beloved friend @platanosandprejudice a life debt at this point because I have yet to make good on my years old promise to them to play Undertale in exchange for listening to my conspiracy theory presentation about One Direction in undergrad (don’t ask you don’t want to know trust me) so:

-Undertale

-I recently got a recommendation from @mean-lesbians for a Very intriguing sapphic webcomic based on Edgar Allen Poe’s works called Nevermore, and the art and pitch were Very good so it’s gotta go on the list.

-Maybe MAYBE I will read one or two of Priest’s webnovels. Perhaps. I could be persuaded. Like I know she Will give me some characters that I will love and then she Will make them suffer horribly and probably die, but to be fair, that’s true about Most media I enjoy, including other entries on this list so.

-OH and that reminds me, I can’t forget that I also promised @izoryotaro I would at some point watch Nirvana in Fire, so that’s also on the list.

[nightsprung]

bee has brainstormed new ocs! here's the short rundown:

sloane kelly, 20, cis female, diana silvers. sloane has always been a relatively quiet and unassuming person. little does her sleepy town of yellowknife, ohio know that she's the mysterious voice of the observer, the host of semi-hit nighttime radio show the watch. the show delves into stories of the paranormal, supernatural and occult, and especially puts the town of yellowknife under a critical lens when it demands to find answers to several inexplicable disappearances over the years.

julie mason, 28, cis female samantha logan. julie mason is a well-enough known name to the public. one of the most promising and revered athletic talents to come through UCLA's women's basketball team with sights set on a professional career with the WNBA, those dreams were ripped away cruelly in a collision with a drunk driver on the way home from a championship victory party when she was 22 years old. since then, julie completed her schooling in psychology, obtained her masters and now works in mental health therapy, specializing with athletes.

harlow olson, 22, cis female, maya hawke. spontaneous is one way to describe harlow's childhood. turbulent is another. she never knew much about her father, and her mother was always free-spirited to a fault that forced harlow to grow up faster than she should have. multiple new schools, multiple new cities and towns, multiple new places decorated her childhood and teen years but none of them ever felt enough like home. she'd balance her dreams of attending film school with the realities of having to work countless hours in her spare time to help cover bills; and even then, it wouldn't stop debt collectors from finding them. in the midst of her adolescence, harlow tracked down her birth father and found he could offer her something her mother never could - stability. she petitioned to move in with him in an effort to have a more "normal" life as a teenager - a job to cover her own whims instead of bills, the same teachers semester to semester, a consistent group of friends. after high school, she finds herself studying film at NYU as she had always dreamed, but there's still some pieces of her that feel fractured. missing.

skyler cauldwell, 23, nonbinary (she/they), ayo edebiri. skyler has always been adept with technology; growing up in the digital age certainly helped with that. it's no wonder she ended up studying computer engineering in college, with the hopes of a promising career in cybersecurity. life is relatively normal for them; they have challenging courses, a core group of friends, several extracurriculars that eat up their time, debate team included. she's set to go to nationals with the rest of the team her senior year, but comes down with a nasty case of bronchitis days before the team is set to fly out to the competition and has to concede her spot to the alternate. the guilt they feel when the top news story a few days from that point is on the missing flight the team was on. months later it'd be discovered that the plane had crashed on an uninhabited island, and only a few members from the team survived.

summer beaumont, 19, cis female, sadie stanley. summer beaumont is your quintessential girl-next-door type. she's never had a bad thing to say about anybody and you're more likely to find her getting a cat out of a tree than doing anything particularly thrilling. it's no wonder that she's celebrating finishing her first year of undergrad by spending two months of her summer as a counselor at camp pinewood. she's great with the campers, especially the younger ones, and is always happy to cover for her fellow counselors, so long as they extend the same courtesy when she needs it. she will need it, by the way - typically on nights when the moon is full and the wind is howling. yeah, definitely the wind. don't mind the fact that she spends most of the next day in her bunk, or that her favorite pair of keds have been discarded completely for a fresh pair.

(reading this back summer sounds like a werewolf - she's not lmao. but she hunts them, and other monsters! a girl needs hobbies, after all!)

melanie ford, eternally 27, cis female, ella purnell. melanie ford has been dead for years now. the definitive story is a drug overdose, but she swears she'd never touch the hard stuff. no, this wannabe socialite has standards! the truth of the matter is melanie's death was far from an accident, and until the mystery around her demise is solved, she's cursed to continue walking the earth. in the meantime, she's trying to bide her time in limbo by doing good deeds, in the hope that it'll balance out some of the less than savory things she did while she was alive and secure her a spot in the good place.

[peacockss]

susan sontag, regarding the pain of others // becca de la rosa, mabel // john darnielle, devil house

emran khan. 36. he/him. film director + screenwriter. 

app. skeleton. pinterest. playlist. dynamics (tba).

(short biography + timeline below)

t i m e l i n e.

january 12, 1957  — born in oxford to pakistani parents; his mother helped run a film house (primarily catering to students), while his father worked in one of the cowley factories. as a childhood, it was one of little note.

1975   — begins at ucl. escapes one city to trade it for another. reads for english, but finds a community in the student film circles (for a time).

1979  — emran graduates from university & writes + directs his first film, touring it on the standard circuits. it is received to minor acclaim. this however, does not feel like it is enough.

1981  — emran is weighed in the balance and not found wanting; he accepts the summons, he askes for his desire.

1982  — said desire does not fill his lack. 

1986  — begins to repay his debt.

1990  — returns to his writing with a wild fervor -- the stories all seem to hold some hold in their center, some emptiness that is just out of reach. they are well received, highly regarded. and still, this is not enough.

1993  — once again, a return.

hcs + vibes.

when he was an undergrad, studying english lit, he absolutely wanted to write poetry/become a poet; sucks that he doesn’t have the right eye for it (a mar on his ego that he tries to pretend)

if he has a weak spot, it is for his parents, and his mother in particular. on occasion, he brings her to film events, going sunglass-less for the evening so that she might pass undetected. this is his folly, the center of his heart. it is perhaps the one thing that he would not fully cut through to find a story, and even then, he still cuts.

opts for a clean fashion style -- sharp and refined edges, only a few pieces of high quality. if he owns something, it ought to matter. only owns two pair of sunglasses, both identical.

is less meticulous about his home: while it is his set, the set upon which his life is based, it is also his space away from the world, and so reflects the more casual parts of his mind. in other words: it can be kind of a mess.

his films range genres, but tend towards sharp and stark imagery. all of his romances are never actually romances. his latest project is a documentary on the lives of oxford students. it is very much liable to be cruel.

YES he does watch bad reality tv shows. NO he will never tell anyone about this (please someone find out).

will down an espresso shot like a vodka shot. has vile habits re: caffeine.

is very, very quick to smile, less quick when it comes to smoothing over a situation.

in all honesty, is an introvert, but actively pretends he isn’t, especially since in his time at school, he became aware of how everyone was always looking at him, and learned to work with it. still needs his quiet, at the end of it.

(”what the dragon said: a love story” -- catherynne valente)

[arcticdementor]

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

tl;dr political rant post:

it had been my goal from 12 years old to do an arts degree in philosophy (yes what a nerd- thanks to my dad playing a Great Courses philosophy dvd one morning in 2007 and my dad always taking me to the botanic gardens/the uni some weekends).

i graduated from my arts degree in 2018, with a major in english and a minor in philosophy. i was so, so lucky to even get into my communications & media degree (at first i was originally going to do marketing communications, advertising & PR)... but i realised that i was not made for business subjects- despite my mark101 tutor telling me she thought i had knack for marketing- something under this policy that i wouldn’t undertake due to the price hike for commerce/business degrees. nor was i made for a media degree. so i changed to arts & humanities.

although under this atrocious policy, english subjects are made “cheaper”- why on fucking should the rest of someone’s arts/humanities degree be so much more expensive, all depending on the fields they choose???? so you’re telling me, if i was instead to enter undergrad this year to do my english degree... that my english major would be subsidised, but my philosophy minor would be at double the cost (along with the few first year business and communications&media subjects i did), unless i forced myself to pick maths or science subjects that i would most definitely fail, no matter how much work i’d put into them??? or there’s languages- but much like maths/science- there’s the problem with my handwriting that stopped me trying french and even japanese (ironically, since it’s know for its ~painstakingly neat and orderly~ script- but my handwriting is still messy, disorderly and confusing asf).

*please note that most of this next section is just me being highly spurious and cynical. it’d probably work out fine*

but you’re also telling me that under this policy that i’d also probably have to forego my reasonable adjustments in those subjects (yes i still have trouble with my handwriting to this day) mostly because a lot of software still won’t let you write out maths problems properly or i’d have to spend twice as long trying to get a graph to work in excel or idek matlab (please teach me maths nerds)???? and most maths working out is probably better handwritten or whatever??? and that’s besides the point that i still can’t use excel at all 😂.

so with these classes then, would i be battling from day one of first year with professors to let me use a computer during exam periods (unless of course they use online/take home exam methods like philosophy)???? probably (im being very suspicious here because i don’t know how science/maths etc faculties work).

although i did get this once with one particular english professor; who used the excuse that he didn’t know how to set a computer up for exams because he had been on “sabatical for 4 years” or whatever and so “didn’t know the policies anymore”.... so then according to him it was apparently “the students job to do it.... especially since you’re in third year, miss williams”..... however, i was promptly then told by EVERY uni offical that i approached for help to do it for me.... and my other professors across my course that had done it for me, that it was in fact the PROFESSORS job/responsibility to set it up, and not the student’s??? like. help your students fuckwit professor grant??? honestly. anyway. aside from my personal struggles in the english department: let’s proceed. (this was a real incident btw).

would i be at a significant disadvantage to other students by not being able to use a computer during maths exams or science exams because of the drawing of diagrams and graphs and “showing your working”???? hell yes. would i want the professors in that department to probably condescendingly telling me all the time to “present my work neater and more precisely”? FUCK NO. it’s exactly why i avoided every maths and science subject in undergrad- even including the astronomy subject that i wanted to do- because it also meant that fellow students had to read my handwriting for practicals etc as well, that i wasn’t entirely keen on either. but i did not need the harsh reminders of “be more precise and infallible in your work presentation” that i’d had at school constantly for 11 years of maths lessons; affecting my mental health and performance in a subject during a uni semester.

moreover, that’s besides the fact that i’d flat out fail the “year 12 band 4 maths” requirements- unless they want to waive those- for first year maths/science subjects (at least basing it on my local uni).... considering that i actually skipped out on maths completely in year 12 by doing a TVET/tafe/technical college course in live theatre, production and events (which no surprises here, actually included maths anyway 😅).

because, fuck. is ANYONE seeing a trend in my study choices here? hell, i almost did a commerce/business dual degree with a tafe diploma in event management for crying out fucking loud. and you’re telling me that’s also doubled in price?? it’s obvious that i was interested in the arts & humanities and business subjects from the get-go. but under this policy- i’d be charged double for having my interest in event management, instead of say, biology (which is a subject that if it weren’t for mark scaling in my final hsc exam- i would have failed completely)??? utterly ridiculous.

i even contemplated doing a double degree with law at one point (or doing a legal studies major/minor- which is now a course at my local uni, but was not while i was there). however, law course fees have also doubled under this new policy. leaving that out of reach for me, despite that a double degree with law was out of reach for me anyway..... since my mark average was 65% and not at least 75% lol. but as if those marks averages will actually matter under this new policy.

under this bullshit policy, i’d be forced to take science/maths or even teaching (another field i had to avoid, since people can’t read my writing on a whiteboard from a distance half the time either.... besides the fact that i’m not really the ~teacher type~) subjects- all so that my degree price overall will be ”reduced”..... meaning that i would have to trade out my philosophy minor for something in maths/teaching/science (or maybe creative arts- since those fees stayed the same roughly)... instead of sticking to what i was good at: philosophy and other humanities/social science fields like sociology and history????

i understand that many people will snub me with saying “oh why did you even BOTHER going to uni if you were THAT indecisive about what you wanted to do?” which is something i’ve seen many older people saying on posts about this policy. but hell, i was 19 FUCKING YEARS OLD WHEN I STARTED UNI, FOR GODS SAKE. OF COURSE I WAS GOING TO BE FUCKING INDECISIVE ABOUT MY DIRECTION IN LIFE! because, newsflash fuckwits: not everyone has a defined career goal at 19. hell, i still don’t have one at almost 25..... since i’ll admit here, that i flunked out of my postgrad library course.... because i realised that i simply couldn’t cope with learning simple HTML, CSS and javascript coding for website design & user experience design 😂 (again help me computer wiz friends). yes, believe it or not, librarians have to know that today. and most people think that it’s just all about books (okay that was me, but i was wrong). also, if you’re wondering: postgrad library courses aren’t affected, thank god. but my point is, aren’t we meant to fuck up and pick the wrong things in life sometimes??? aren’t we meant to be indecisive about our choices in our late teens up until our mid 20s???

but now you’re telling students that their very first year of uni is practically set out for them, even for arts/humanities degrees (im not counting properly prescribed degrees such as engineering/science/communications & media (they had prescribed majors and prescribed first year subjects, which is why i left it. because i felt trapped in the prescribed marketing et al major etc); all because the government is telling them that “oh to make your first year cheaper: (A.) get good marks.... so that we don’t cancel your HECS place and (B.) pick subjects outside of the arts/humanities like science/maths/tech related subjects so that you don’t pay a whopping $14,500 for your first year of uni and will be more likely to be “job ready”. whatever the actual fuck “job ready” really means. and this all as if there ISN’T enough pressure for a 18/19 year old to succeed in their first year of uni already.

although, the one thing i’ll say is that my one year advanced diploma in marketing that i did in 2014, was $16,500. i still haven’t made any moves to pay it off. but it was constantly in the back of my mind during uni, both undergrad and postgrad. it was there as a reminder to pick cheaper subjects, so as to not greatly increase my combined hecs debt and vet-fee help debt; which is now sitting at $42,500. which under this new policy is the new price of ONE arts & humanities undergrad degree. i’d hate to be going into uni next year at 19 years old (or any age really) with that price tag on my degree.

anyway. that’s the end of my non-sensical rant. morrison and the rest of the libs etc can go fuck themselves.

[acecademia]

Do you feel like you are both a full time student and a full time employee? I have seen numerous professors online say that if someone is taking classes full time then they shouldn't also be working since they should be treating school like a full time job. Some professors I know in person have also said this but I feel like none of the professors like to admit that students might need to work to pay for their classes.... What are your thoughts about what some professors say about classes?

Hi, nonny!

So my experiences are super specific to my situation, and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all kind of scenario here.

I was able to get a full-tuition scholarship for undergrad. I still took out loans to help pay for my rent and food, but my parents also gave me some money every month to help pay for groceries and whatnot. Upon graduating from my undergrad program, my parents split the college savings account they'd set up for my brother and me. We each got half. That half was enough to pretty much exactly cover what I'd racked up in debt. I did not work during undergrad. My parents and I discussed it. They had both worked through college. My mom went to a college that was 100% work-study for all students, and my dad worked a few different jobs through college, I believe, like bartending. My scholarship was awarded for academic achievement, and one of the conditions for that scholarship was maintaining a high GPA. My parents agreed that school needed to be my priority and that I should focus my energy on keeping up my grades so I would keep my scholarship. Undergrad was a hell of a lot easier because of that. I wasn't trying to balance 15 hours of class per week with a 20 hour/week job and then homework and trying to actually have social interaction or just play a video game. It let me adjust to the independence and really settle into the level of self-sufficiency that I needed to achieve.

During my MLIS, I was paying out-of-state tuition. I had my assistantship which paid me a bit every month and came with in-state tuition remission, but I was still paying about $6k/semester with the difference in out-of-state and in-state tuition. I was working 20 hours/week in that job, and with a full load of classes, it was a lot. One of my friends who didn't have an assistantship was, at one point, working 40 hours/week at a full-time job on top of taking classes full time. I legit do not understand how she did it. It took a toll on her, though, and she eventually had to cut back on how many hours she could work per week because it was not sustainable.

I'm now working even more with the PhD because the classes require more time, and in the spring, I had an extra overload TA position (and my research study). It's a lot, and I'm honestly pretty exhausted already. I need a break hahaha

ha

ha

seriously please I need a break

In an ideal world, college would be a hell of a lot cheaper, and no one would need to work their way through school. I think the work is useful if it's an assistantship or something, especially in master's or PhD programs where it's relevant to your future career goals. But that's not reality. In reality, not everyone is privileged enough to be in a position like I was where I could take out the loans I needed and also have the safety net of my parents to fall back on. I have been incredibly lucky in my life to never have to worry about where my next meal is coming from or if there will be a next meal. If something happened and I suddenly had no money, I know I could go to my parents for help. They're not rich by any means, but they're upper-middle class and can afford to help out their kids every now and then when or if we need it. I think trying to work full-time and be a full-time student is a recipe for disaster and extreme burnout, especially if you have any other obligations on top of that (like a family or spouse). But also, I'm sure there are some people out there who can handle that. I definitely couldn't, though.

I also strongly believe that, as a professor, your job is to help your students. If you have a student who's struggling because they have outside obligations, that is a student who needs support, not disdain or judgement. Work with them. That's one thing I've really loved about my MLIS and PhD programs, in particular. The professors tend to have an attitude of "look, we're all adults here, and you have a life outside of school. if something comes up, let me know, and we'll figure it out." And it's just super chill and comfortable.

tl;dr: There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution here, but working full-time and going to school full-time is insanely intense. Not everyone can afford to focus solely on school, and that is completely okay and needs to be normalized. Also professors need to acknowledge that your life does not revolve around their class because that's just really dumb

Also, my current boss told me he recommended another PhD student quit her full-time job and focus solely on her PhD, so that's a thing that happened 🙃

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND CADILLAC

Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do each kind of work in the way of noticing it consciously. The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't know. Most of the people who've had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't.1 That word balance is a significant one. I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them.2 What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? We're good at making movies and software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money.3 When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, then a lot of people. One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to be than the worst?4 In this model, the research department functions like a mine.5

I'm sometimes accused of meandering. With each step you gain confidence to stretch further next time.6 You had to for guests. Perl. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to be inferior people.7 Of what? And because of supply and demand, they pay especially well.8

If free copies of your content are available online, then you're competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's why they do it so well.9 Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs.10 I make a note of what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are.11 It didn't seem to harm us. He redefined the problem as: make one that's beautiful.12 Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. It's exciting to chase things and exciting to try to guess answers.13 Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what he meant. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good.

A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. There were a lot of false positives. At least, that's how they see it. If it fails, that is. But it's certainly possible to do things that make you stupid, and if you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth the time. Hackers & Painters. Particularly to young companies that are growing fast, but haven't been doing it for long enough to have grown big yet. Do we want to get the resulting ideas past other people's. Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Note too that determination and talent are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the 1960s.14 It's one of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat.

But no one those days was paying a lot more than Yahoo. Conversations with corp dev is not doing a bad job of talking to them before they are. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at.15 When you're too weak to lift something, you don't need either of those. It's something they plunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts became less about ancientness and more about texts. If they're only paying a twentieth as well. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined.16 We want kids to be innocent so they can get the most done. The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.

If you're really productive, why not modern texts? The place to look is where the line ends. I think founders will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users need. And I think this sort of thing it becomes national news. The less it costs to start a company. In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest.

Notes

I know when this happened because it doesn't change the meaning of life.

Currently we do at least 150 million in 1970. Patrick Pantel and Dekang Lin.

Just use the name Homer, to a car dealer. A supports, say, but no doubt often are, but those are writeoffs from the most difficult part for startup founders tend to use some bad word multiple times. Ii. I'm not against editing.

Of the remaining outcomes don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

But if they do for a patent troll, either. If our hypothetical company making 1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 4 years.

It should not try to get elected with a screw top would have disapproved if executives got too much. Another tip: If doctors did the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to believing anything in particular made for other reasons, the switch in mid-game.

Good and bad technological progress, however. Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard they work. This is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their companies took off? But that doesn't seem to have to talk about startups in Germany.

I may be exaggerated by the government to take board seats by switching to what you really want, like selflessness, might come from meditating in an urban legend. And if you know Apple originally had three founders? When you're starting a company if the students did well they do now.

After Greylock booted founder Philip Greenspun out of business, having spent much of the biggest winners, from hour to hour that the worm infected, because investing later would probably only improve filtering rates early on?

We Getting a Divorce? Perl.

Don't invest so much from day to day indeed, is a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the sense that there were about the same reason I stuck with such tricks will approach.

But it's useful to consider behaving the opposite way from the CIA. There are successful women who don't like to invest at any valuation the founders. But while this sort of things you waste your time working on is a dotted line on a scale that Google does. 0001.

But try this experiment is that you're not going to create a great deal of competition for the future.

VCs thus have a standard piece of casuistry for this essay will say that it refers to instant ramen would be more likely to come in and convince them. But this seems an odd idea.

You're going to drunken parties. I have no real substance. VCs should be working on Viaweb. But iTunes shows that people get older.

After a bruising fight he escaped with a slight disadvantage, but in practice money raised as convertible debt is a shock at first, but this sort of person who would never have left PARC. Again, hard work is in the Valley has over New York, people who did it lose?

[the-parallax-of-rain]

Honest asks: L, O, Y 😊

L - If I have siblings.

Yes! I have a younger sister who is currently starting college at Zoom University 😂 A few weeks ago, she texted me a screenshot of one of her classes hoping for my sympathy – apparently she had to sign up for an astronomy class and they were learning about protostellar clouds. I was like, well you’re not getting sympathy from me, umm, I love astronomy and you should know this? 😌 We’re 4 years apart and she was my best friend all through childhood. She loves creative writing and is also a super talented artist as well. Lately we haven’t talked as much as we used to, but I’m going home for the winter holidays so I’ll get to see her then!

O – If I like my school.

Oh boy. Putting this under a read more because it got long! 

I’m interviewing here for med school but I’m positive they are 1) not on Tumblr and 2) can’t verify who I am in the first place lol, so here we go! Small rant time. So I went to Hopkins for undergrad and I’ve learned some pretty nasty things the administration (the hospital, in particular) has done to the communities of Baltimore. Not only in the past (I’m sure many people know about Henrietta Lacks) but still ongoing – for example, the hospital suing low income patients who are unable to pay their medical bills and subsequently forcing them into debt (and also apparently garnishing their wages? Jesus). It’s terrible and predatory and makes me sick especially because Hopkins champions its own efforts in growing local communities to prospective students. And since Hopkins has such a large influence in the state (I think they’re one of, if not the largest employers in Maryland), they hold immense power over these communities. I’m sure that other large medical centers do the same thing in their respective cities, and there are positive things about Hopkins (obviously the innovative research comes to mind!) but it’s so important to hold them accountable. Especially because Hopkins gets a lot of positive press re: their COVID tracking/response. I simply wish for them to be exposed more. I’m including an article here in case you want to read up more on this medical debt thing, and I also wrote a rambly thing about med school/healthcare as a business and my vague thoughts on why it sucks here.

Y – If I like my town and why

Guess I’ll talk about my hometown! I’m from a small city in Southern California, and though I haven’t found myself actively homesick throughout college I do miss it there! I still consider it home. I have lots of great memories there with my family and friends – I’m still close with my friend group from high school, and most of them still live there. And lots of small things that keep me connected to there and make my heart ache as well: there’s a pipa tree (I don’t know what it’s called in English lol) that was planted in our yard when I was a toddler and it’s just now starting to bear fruit. Our pets are all buried in the backyard. My room still has some books I read as a kid. My mom’s cooking that I’ll never be able to replicate because I am just talentless in the kitchen. 

Some other people also asked this question and I’m gonna need to take some time to craft another answer because I love Baltimore and I need to do it justice LOL.

[mcttys]

* ･ﾟ ❀ { cis male . he/him } wait ! is that HARRY STYLES we see moving into bloom 36 ? oh no , its just MATTHEW “MATTY” HARRISON ! bloom’s newest tenant is a TWENTY FIVE year old WRITER from CAMDEN, MAINE — yellow spring’s just got a whole lot brighter . if the HOPELESS ROMANTIC isn’t stowed away in their loft , you can almost always find them WRITING AT THE IVY . 

hello !! i’m sam and i am so excited to be here. i have been looking for a place to play my bb matty for quite some time. i’m tweaking his backstory a little bit to fit better with the plot but he is just a soft lazy love sick mess of a boy whomst i love dearly and hope you can tolerate as well ! please see below for some headcanons 

full name: matthew “matty” ryan harrison  age: twenty- five birth date: march 7, 1995, 3:13 pm zodiac: pisces sun, taurus moon, leo rising  hometown: camden, maine religion: raised roman catholic but kind of agnostic now  sexual/romantic orientation: bisexual / biromantic  character parallels: rob gordon (high fidelity the movie), richard papen (the secret history), theo decker (the goldfinch), charlie (perks of being a wallflower) aesthetics: hazy golden afternoons, second hand poetry books, a yearning for the italian country side, worn out vintage t-shirts

pinterest board

writer by choice, romantic by chance: i have this in his pinterest board and i feel like it rly sums him up! he’s such a romantic to the point that it is a flaw. he romanticizes everything which has gotten him into trouble before. i.e....mistaking things that are certainly not love, for love. 

you may say he’s a dreamer: big goals! big ambitions! big lazy boy! he has dreams to move to a big city like new york or paris, to live in a chic and cozy apartment, to write 3/4 of the year and vacation in some beautiful getaway in the south of italy every summer. somewhat unattainable especially considering he’s currently drowning in student loans but a boy can dream?

i kno that u got daddy issues: grew up in a small, picturesque town in maine. you know the boy romanticized it yes sir he did !! but that doesn’t mean he had a perfect childhood. he was an only child of a loveless romance. his mother and father had him at 16 and 17, respectively, and tried to make it work despite the lack of actual emotional connection between them. his dad and he never really bonded, especially since matty was more interested in reading picture books and playing dress up than he was tossing a baseball outside. he’d always been closer with his mother. still, it didn’t hurt any less when he came home from school one day at eight years old, his father’s things gone. it didn’t hurt any less to watch his mom cry over him for days.

money, money, money, must be funny: after spending four years of undergrad  studying literature and creative writing at brown university in rhode island, the kid is swimming in debt. he got involved in some shady businesses for money, doing things he didn’t really want to be doing, and still feels ashamed of today, so he doesn’t really talk about his past much! but, the reason he moved to yellow springs was because he fell in l*ve back in rhode island. it ended up going south, quick, so he packed up his things, took what little savings he had, and found yellow springs. this was when he was twenty-three so he’s been living in the bloom apartments for about 2 years now? 

sloth and the seven deadly sins: matty is a total homebody, but that isn’t to say he doesn’t like going out at all. he does! he’s just kind of a wallflower when he goes out. much more of an observer. he does prefer to stay in tho, with a huge fluffy blanket and a big cup of tea. please...have sleepovers with him. he’s a huge cuddler.

another delusional pisces: yes...he has his head in the clouds okay! sometimes they are so far up in the clouds that it’s hard to tell if he’s living in the same reality as everyone else. something he perceives as true is often totally false. it’s often why he thinks he’s in love after 1 date and everyone else is like that’s called INFATUATION , MATTHEW . 

wash your dishes and take out the garbage!: not a slob but quite messy. his room has clothes strewn all over the place and he can never keep his papers organized. he often forgets tea cups in his room until the entire collection of mugs ends up on his bed side table and he’s like whoops ! and brings them out to the kitchen 

cat: has a cat named cat. basically when he still lived in rhode island for school he came back to his place one day and he realized a cat had followed him home. and he was like shoo cat ! and she didn’t listen . he was like . i can’t take you in here cat . no pets allowed . anyway he ended up having a full on conversation with this cat in the hallway and then the cat followed him inside his dorm ANYWAY and he hid her  and took care of her for the rest of the semester and just called her cat and now that’s her name and he took her with him to yellow springs and they are best friends 

wanted connections: dang u know i want them all but !! let’s think. 

ambiguously gay duo - give me a brotp where everyone is like “are they....you know....” but it’s just PURE , UNADULTERATED FRIENDSHIP  (m/nb) river

ok this is piggy backing off the above because they very well could be the same connection but the schmidt to his nick. matty is lazy and unmotivated but extremely creative and needs someone who is motivated and passionate and they make a good dynamic duo !  inspo: ( x , x , x ) (f/m/nb) zane

cuddle buddy - this can be completely platonic but if any muses love to hang around the house as much as he does !! please give him someone to be lazy with (f/m/nb) sumi

unrequited love - it’s a bad religion !!! give me someone matty is head over heels for but they just........do not feel the same way.  (f/m/nb)

muse - matty is a writer, so i would love to have certain eccentric characters be people he models his own characters after ? i think that would be so cute and this could work for a few connects  :( (f/m/nb) selene

extrovert to his introvert - someone who drags him out to social gatherings, makes him do things outside of his apartment, yknow. forces him to get out and get active ! he probably would not go to parties if it were not for this person (f/m/nb) gemma

exes - matty’s been here for 2 years so this all depends on timelines. but ! give me exes on bad terms ! exes on good terms ! anything ! (f/m/nb) domenica 

ex fwbs / one night stands - on the same note, matty is the type of guy who falls in love in 0.02 seconds but can fall out of love just as fast. this would be one of those circumstances (f/m/nb)

college friends - matty went to brown university in rhode island so if we got any pretentious ivy leaguers in the house say aye 

[vanillachai-latte]

First day of the challenge! Tell us about you and your goals, what are you looking to accomplish?

I saw Hermione’s 200 challenge, and I saw it as the perfect excuse to get back to blogging and hopefully start up my 1L Advice Series again! I’ve never really talked about myself, my hopes and my dreams, so here goes!

I’m almost done with my first semester of law school, and boy-howdy has it been a ride! I honestly never knew what I wanted to do with my JD. And to be even more honest, I didn’t realize I wanted to be a lawyer until I got here... A little background on the situation, I did my undergrad in social work. It was all fine at first - I was one of those people that believed I could change the world, one client at a time. However, reality struck, and I realized after my short time as a social worker that I was just one person and I couldn’t help those that didn’t want to be helped. That was a hard wake up call to me because social work had been my passion for the last three and half years. I burned out very fast, and I fell into a deep, deep depression. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to be miserable for the rest of my life.

As time went on, one of my coworkers mentioned to me that she just finished taking her LSAT, and she would be moving away to go to law school. My curiosity was piqued, and I inquired more about it. I went home to my boyfriend that night, and while we were relaxing, I off-handedly mentioned, “Hey, what if I go to law school?” From the start, Lam was my no. 1 supporter. It took awhile for my parents to come around (I’m a first gen. student, and they didn’t even help me get through undergrad, why would I tack on another $120K of debt?), but eventually, I had a whole team behind me.

I took the LSAT, and I got into some schools! I thought, “Whoa, maybe I can actually do this!” I chose my school, and less than a year later, I was moving away from my family and the love of my life to pursue this new dream. I’ll admit, I was scared I was making a bad decision, but now, three months later, I can say with confidence that this was what I was meant to do.

Since I came into law school without a clue what to do, my goals and ambitions are developing as I go... Right now, my goal is to simply make it through my first semester unscathed. I want to do well on my finals, of course, but I need to keep reminding myself that I won’t be that 4.0 student like I was in my undergrad. They tell us all the time that some of us are in for some huge reality checks if we think we’re going to make all A’s. 

Also, by the end of my 1L year, I want to have an idea of what kind of law I want to practice. There are so many options open, and they all sound interesting and rewarding. So far, I have it narrowed down to personal injury, or malpractice suits. Surprisingly, I am doing great in my Contracts class, so maybe I can do something in the business world or in estate planning. Who knows! I still have a semester of my “law school basics,” maybe criminal law will be my thing. 

As far as my ambition, I just want to be the best I can be. Not just as a law student, but as a person. I’ve seen some people’s relationships be effected because all they embody now is a law student, and that kind of scares me. Especially with my boyfriend; if I do change, I want it to be something that makes our relationship better than it already was. 

[farcry5-obsessions]

OC Interview

Choose an OC, answer the questions as them, and tag 5 people!

Photo by @myworldisbiworld who I am also tagging because all your ocs are 🔥🔥

Tagged by @jacobmybeloved 💕 thank youuu ily

Tagging: @words-and-seeds @fkingpeggies @johnseedsplane @dolphinitley @thesuplexrangerexperience

And anyone else! Idk who has done this already or not, so feel free to ignore this 💕

1. What is your name?

Nora Williams

2. Do you know why are you named that?

Nope.

3. Are you single or taken?

Complicated- I don’t recommend trying anything though, for your own safety.

4. Have any abilities or powers?

Do sniping and sarcasm count? I’m a criminal psychologist, too.

5. Stop being a Mary Sue.

Stop being an asshole 🖕🏻

6. What’s your eye color?

Coppery brown

7. How about your hair color?

Black

8. Have any family members?

Yup. My parents got divorced when I was a teen. So, there’s my mom and her husband, Don. He’s pretty nice, but his daughter, my step sister, is in that monstrous teen phase. My dad didn’t remarry. He’s a retired military general. Suuuper pleasant *sarcasm*

9. Oh? How about pets?

I want a cat!

10. That’s cool, I guess. Now tell me something you don’t like?

I chose my career(s) because I wanted to help people. A big part of that decision was motivated by my hate for manipulators and abusers. I have a real soft spot for victims of abuse, and I definitely believe people can change, but there’s some I just can’t forgive.

11. Do you have any activities/hobbies that you like to do?

I do a lot of outdoorsy stuff over the summer. I spend a lot of time training and working out. Other than that, I like reading, video games, and eating.

12. Have you ever hurt anyone in any way before?

So many

13. Ever… killed anyone before?

*smiles* before coming to Hope county I was a sniper for Portland SWAT. Before that, I was in the military. What do you think?

14. What kind of animal are you?

A fox! Cute but ferocious

15. Name your worst habits?

I believe ‘wrath’ has been mentioned a few times

16. Do you look up to anyone at all?

Yea, I guess. I had a professor in undergrad that was the most inspirational for me. She really helped me through a lot of personal things during my studies, and even helped me get a job in Portland!

17. Are you gay, straight or bisexual?

Um, honestly, I haven’t dated a lot- military time, strict parents etc. But I tend to go for guys, but girls are nice too! It just has to be the right person; then, I don’t really care. I’m just not one for hookups without feelings unfortunately

18. Do you go to school?

I have an MA specializing in criminal psychology! That’s how I ended up in this mess with the Seeds- I was just supposed to evaluate Joseph, but here I am stuck in the middle of fuckin’ Montana with a buncha peggies.

19. Ever want to marry and have kids one day?

If I make it out of all this, I’d love to get married. Kids, though? Got my tubes tied. I like the idea of adoption. There’s lots of kids out there that need love... I can’t help but think none of this would’ve happened if the Seeds ended up in a loving home, especially John...

20. Do you have any fangirls/fanboys?

Does John Seed count?

21. What are you most afraid of?

Elevators. I got stuck in one once when I was deployed- they’ve freaked me out since. If I’m being honest, though, probably losing someone that matters to me.

22. What do you usually wear?

Before Hope County, leather jackets, boots, flannels, leggings, anything comfortable that I can still look cool in.  

23. What’s one food that tempts you?

Chocolate. Oh my gosh. The fact the peggies took all the chocolate they could find is probably the most monstrous thing a person could do. *leans in* But I know where John Seed keeps his stash.

24. Am I annoying to you?

Oh, you’d know if you were annoying me.

25. Well, it’s still not over!

Okay?

26. What class are you (low/middle/high)?

What kinda question is that?! None of your fuckin’ business. *has massive student loans debt*

27. How many friends do you have?

A few close friends. I’m not extensively social. I don’t want a big group of people, just a few I can trust. Here, I’m closest with Joh- uh- Jess and Sharky. I like most people from Hope County though, except Hurk Senior. That guy and his wall can get fucked.

28. What are your thoughts on pie?

Love it.

29. Favorite drink?

Coffee or red wine.

30. What’s your favorite place?

There’s this spot in Holland Valley that, when no peggies are around, is perfect to just curl up by the fire and look out over the valley *sighs* It just feels really peaceful there, even if it’s just for a moment, and I know it won’t last forever… (It’s the lookout spot at Seed Ranch.)

31. Are you interested in anyone?

No one I should be interested in. I always have had fucked up taste, though…

32. That was a stupid question…

Is it that obvious??

33. Would you rather swim in a lake or the ocean?

Not a fan of swimming, but I miss the ocean. It’s too cold to swim on the Oregon coast for most the year, but I miss it so much.

34. What’s your type?

Messed up with a tragic backstory. I like someone I can tease, but they should have a soft side to them. Appearance wise? I like someone that takes care of themselves, nice style, a little dark but pretty... tattoos…

35. Any fetishes?

Wouldn’t you like to know. *smirk*

36. Camping or outdoors?

At this point? Luxury hotel

[calzona-ga]

Warning: Spoiler alert! Do not proceed if you have not watched Thursday's 332nd episode of Grey's Anatomy, which officially makes it the longest-running primetime medical drama, surpassing ER.

Grey's Anatomy became the longest-running primetime TV medical drama Thursday by celebrating with a party, both on and off screen.

Abandoning tradition, ABC's crown jewel marked its milestone 332nd hour -- officially surpassing ER for the honor -- with a get-together that brought together the current ensemble, led by OGs Ellen Pompeo, Justin Chambers, Chandra Wilson and James Pickens Jr., to commemorate Catherine's (Debbie Allen) new lease on life following her successful cancer surgery. Unlike the majority (if not all) of Grey's' previous episodes, this one didn't feature any medicine or medical case, a decision showrunner Krista Vernoff, whose history with the show dates back to the groundbreaking 2005 pilot, said was intentional.

"It's pretty extraordinary, and a little surreal. ER is such a television legacy, and was such an extraordinary program. If ER didn't exist, Grey's wouldn't exist. So, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to ER, and to [executive producer] John Wells, and we are so grateful," Vernoff, who spent five seasons working alongside Wells on Shameless, told ET on Thursday of Grey's making history. "This is exciting and monumental and a little crazy, and we're all just sort of walking around here looking at each other like, 'What?'" (George Clooney, who played pediatrician Doug Ross on ER for the first five seasons, joked in February, "That's got to stop. We gotta go back and do more!")

And unlike the Grey's landmark 300th episode in its 14th season, which paid tributes to past cast members who have since departed, like Sandra Oh, T.R. Knight and Patrick Dempsey, hour 332 looked ahead at what's still to come for the doctors of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. Because, as Vernoff said, "To celebrate how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go."

Following Thursday's historic Grey's TV moment, Vernoff jumped on the phone with ET to reflect on the lasting legacy of the ABC series and looks ahead at what's still to come, including Meredith and DeLuca's full-fledged romance, the unexpected arrival of DeLuca's father and what's next.

ET: Congratulations on making TV history! How did ER shape Grey's Anatomy into what it's become? Krista Vernoff: ER broke the mold for medical shows, and it was incredible, and it was dramatic, and it was just groundbreaking television for its time. And when we were in the writers' room in the early years of Grey's Anatomy, our conversations were often, how do we do it differently than ER? Like, we didn't want to be an ER copycat. How do we be in the hospital world and do it differently than ER? In the early years of the show we rarely brought in patients through the emergency room. They usually came in through surgical rounds.

We leaned, tonally, into romantic comedy, which I think was a part of [creator] Shonda [Rhimes]' pitch from the very beginning. As I recall, when she pitched the show, she said, "We have the drama and excitement of ER, but a tone that's all our own, with romance and humor in equal parts." We always, in television, build on each other's legacies. There was MASH, and then there was China Beach, and there were multiple shows in between, and there was ER, which really broke new ground. And Grey's Anatomy is... We all stand on each other's shoulders.

In approaching this particular episode, what did you want to accomplish or achieve with this hour that differentiated it from a typical episode of Grey's? With the 300th episode, we looked backward. It was a very nostalgic episode. It paid tribute to the whole length of the series. With this episode, we made the decision to look forward, and to celebrate how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go. And so, Bailey's speech to Catherine of "We don't know what the future holds, but no one ever knows what the future holds." People still love us, we're still here, and that's cause for celebration," was really the theme. We threw a party to celebrate this milestone. And we wanted to do something different than we had ever done before.

There was a lot of brainstorming, and what we came up with was we had never done an episode with no medicine. I think this episode is probably a little bewildering to watch after 15 seasons of Grey's Anatomy. You keep waiting for the medical crisis that never comes. That's how we decided to break new ground with this episode, while also emotionally laying the groundwork for the stories moving forward.

The episode did a good job of sprinkling in red herrings, especially with the arrival of Alex's mom, Helen Karev (guest star Lindsay Wagner). I thought something was actually wrong until it was revealed that, actually no, she was right about the fire. Thank you. And I have to say, Andy Reaser, who has been on the show for many years now, wrote this episode, and he did an amazing job with the question of, who started the fire and all the fire hazards and [having] a little bit of mystery -- a little bit of mislead. He did it beautifully. And Chandra Wilson, who directed it.

Speaking of looking ahead, it appears as though you're fully embracing the idea of Meredith and DeLuca. Is this the end of the love triangle with Link?The love triangle with Link is over.

Was it a surprise to you that we would be talking about Meredith and DeLuca in this way? It was a surprise. I think it was a surprise to Meredith, and that is what's so joyful in watching it, is how life surprises us all the time. Every idea that we have about our life and what's going to happen next, we're always wrong, and life comes in and surprises us. And DeLuca has come in and surprised Meredith, and put her. She's bewildered and delighted by this turn of events. And I think you see that all over her face. But the amount of smiling that we're seeing from Meredith is really a joy. Where does this leave Link? Is there another story involving him that has yet to be explored that you can tease? There is. Link has some of his... Some of the most exciting and delightful stuff I've seen this season is coming from Link in the coming episodes, but I don't want to tease what it is. I asked Giacomo Gianniotti recently whether he believed Meredith and DeLuca were endgame. What is your take? For sure. The one thing I know for sure is that I'm not going to comment on Meredith's endgame at this stage, and the reason for that is that there's no end in sight to this show. We are still delivering ABC's highest rating in the demographic. We are still their No. 1 drama in the age 18-to-49 demographic, 15 seasons in. So, I'm not building to the end of the series. I am looking forward, much as Bailey and Catherine's conversation mirrored. We don't know what life is going to bring us, and we are looking forward. And so, I'm not commenting on endgame because for me there's no end in sight. At the end of the episode, we met DeLuca's dad, Vicenzo (guest star Lorenzo Caccialanza), for the very first time, who called Andrew by his given Italian name, Andrea. How is the unexpected arrival of his dad going to shake things up? Dad brings drama. If Dad's wardrobe suggested anything, and the arrival, and the Italian that nobody understands -- including Meredith. Like, Meredith speaks a tiny little bit of Italian, Meredith took three years of Italian in undergrad. She didn't understand that conversation that they were having any more than any of the rest of us did, so when [DeLuca's] dad stepped out of that limo, everybody but people who are fluent in Italian were completely shocked. Dad brings drama, for sure, and that's all I'm going to say.

I do remember DeLuca mentioning that his dad was a renowned but corrupt surgeon in Italy who was mentally unstable, and he's not exactly what he was before. Is that what you're exploring in terms of his arrival?DeLuca's father has a history of mental illness and it's a complicated relationship for DeLuca. And yes, those are some of the themes we're looking at moving forward.

Amelia and Owen really went through a roller-coaster this episode. Amelia breaks up with Owen, and now they find themselves in a place where they may be co-parenting Leo. Is Leo the saving grace to their relationship? What are you setting up here? I don't want to tease what's happening moving forward, but I do want to say that I think that story was really beautifully told, and I think that we felt so much joy in the return of Leo to Owen and Amelia, and simultaneously this heartbreak of "Wow, they just broke up, like, what happens now?" And I think that Amelia had a real moment of clarity at the party when Meredith pointed out that Teddy has been a thing in Owen's life and will always be a thing in Owen's life. And she realized that it wasn't a love triangle so much as a circle that is making her dizzy, and she's stepped out of the circle. It will be really interesting to see what happens now that Leo's back.

Is Betty/Britney's story over? Are you satisfied with how that story wrapped up? Peyton Kennedy is an incredible young actress, and so, I don't know. I love her, and I love the character. I'll always call her Betty, because I think it's her preferred name. I love her, and I guess my hope for her is that she gets clean and sober, and finds some happiness back with her parents, who I do not think are bad people. But who knows?

And Teddy and Koracick. When did you get the idea to put them together? I'm really enjoying their dynamic and I didn't expect to. The idea emerged in the writers' room earlier this season, and you float test balloons with actors and their chemistry when you begin to build a thing. You put them in a scene or two together and see how it plays. And from the minute we put them next to each other at the table read we were like, Oh, that's happening. Koracick brings out a lightness in Teddy that is just a joy to see. He makes her laugh, and she deserves to laugh. I think she does the same for him. We've learned so much about his history as a character, and his personal pain, and it's really fun to see them bringing joy to each other.

Again, congrats on the milestone. It really doesn't seem like the show's going to ever really end.

[thelonelytraveler11]

Is this really the best I can do?!

It's been three years since I've done any form of research. I haven't worked in almost three years. Just in case anyone's wondering, yes, I filled out job applications (a lot, like ~250 before I gave up). For the past couple years, I've been living off my savings, the little bit of money I get from my family, and the little bit of money I get from having part time jobs. My work experience since dropping out has been pretty dismal (on average), I haven't been able to hold down a job that gave an appreciable amount of money for longer than 3 months at a time without being fired or being so miserable that I just said "fuck it" and quit.

I understand the concern some may have. You may consider it my fault for being unemployed. Quitting a job that I'm miserable while doing may seem irrational or irresponsible, but speaking as a person who spent almost the entirety of his college years being miserable, I can say with all honesty that being broke is better than being miserable. I envy those that can’t seem to comprehend my way of thinking, because that probably means they have a very good life. I wouldn't want to work in an environment that negatively affects my emotional state for 4 decades anyways. Having disposable income isn’t more important than my well being. Having a job I actually enjoy doing is very important to me because I don't have many sources of happiness in my life.

I'm kind of a loner. I don't have a strong relationship with any of my relatives and I don't have friends anymore (and even more troubling, I don't care to have those types of relationships anymore). The only potential source of happiness is my job. I don't foresee me failing in love or developing a close relationship with anyone. If the current trend continues, I think its more probable that it doesn’t happen.

I feel numb most of the time and when I do feel something, I'm usually thinking about my college days and that something is usually anger. It honestly was my biggest regret, going to the University of Illinois. Sometimes I wished I never went to college. Literally the only thing that was even remotely good about my college experience was my grades, everything else sucked. Looking back, I wish I went back to working at CVS after I graduated from HS.

In the alternate timeline, I probably would have been better off in the long run (very little stress, no debt, live rent free at my mom's house for a couple of years after graduation while working a presumably full time job which would enable me to save up a fair amount of cash before moving out). Instead, I came away with nothing. My college education was completely worthless, I reaped no benefits from being a degree recipient. All I did was waste 7 years of my life and thousands of other people’s dollars studying stuff that ultimately wouldn't matter. If I were a benefactor for the UIUC department of chemistry, I would be pissed to hear my story because that means my money isn't being put to good use, especially if I added into one of the scholarships that was awarded to me.

So, I know what your wondering, why am I writing this post? Well, I was trying to get ride time with CFD and I called for a specific person that wasn't in. Someone took a message and wrote my name down as Joel Dennison. Dennison was the last name of the NMR guy at UCI. That got me thinking about my college days and how I hated basically everyone. I caught myself looking through emails and for the most part, the more I read, the more I remembered, the more enraged I got. Now that's one sure fire way to put me in a bad mood, get me thinking about the bad ol' days. I bet many of the people I went to grad school with are enjoying their careers, while I was completely forgotten (and if they're not enjoying them, well at least they have them).

I’ve always wondered why were the other students so complicit? Is racism really that prevalent? Is there something else going on? See, it's one thing to not say anything while they were still students because it runs the risk of them being treated like I was treated. But to not even offer a helping hand even after their careers were established, knowing what they know, is un-fucking-real.

I never really felt welcomed in chemistry. People seemed to be more in love with the idea of me. I noticed the longer I stayed, the worse I was treated. At U of I, it was .... kinda bad. I experienced a form a discrimination where I would have written essentially the same answer as my lighter counterparts but received lower grades (slightly lower, but still). People assumed I did well in certain classes because the professor "liked me" (pretty sure no one at U of I liked me much). People also made statements that are crazy racist and then tried to pass them off as jokes. I fucking hated life in Champaign-Urbana.

SIDE NOTE: the following story doesn't necessarily reflect the chemists, but it does represent a subset of the student body at U of I. So, I'm sitting in the cafeteria with three dudes I already knew and some guy from the next table looks over to me and says "Sorry, if I offended you". I calmly replied "what did you say?" And Oh....My....God.... the look of utter fear was plastered all over his face. I said, "What did you say?", again, calmly. I can not stress enough that I was visibly calm throughout this entire situation. And then I noticed he was shivering, I figured I would warm up a lil bit by using my hot ass breath, so I repeated the question louder and slower (you know, to give the guy's body time to come to thermal equilibrium), again.......calmly. He was still frozen in fear. So now I am mentally gearing up to jump across this table to snatch this little boy's neck out from under him. And then something miraculous happened, my tunnel vision broke down and I realized someone was calling me. It was Jon (one of the kids I was sitting with) telling me to drop it...so I did......so, yeah, that's the story of how I almost got kicked out of U of I for snatching the neck out from under some little white kid during sophomore year. 


But there was one instance of me being the butt of racist jokes in chemistry that I can remember. Then UIUC grad student, John Overcash (who I believed worked for Ken Suslick), made mention of me "cooking crack up in the kitchen" on more than one occasion. Apparently, since I was a black chem major (that specialized in organic chemistry) I must have been a drug dealer beforehand. Or maybe he thought I was a drug dealer then....who knows...

To make matters worst, people have used the stuff other people made up to put themselves a head of me. Senior year I had an interview with eli lilly. My interview was at 9 am and there was one person interviewing before me at 8 am. The 8 am slot was taken by one Joseph Cullen (a fellow undergrad). During the end of his interview , I could vaguely hear what was said, but it sounded like Cullen told the interviewers that I was a drug dealer. The door opens up, the interviewer shoots me a look and goes into the room where my interviewers were and talks to them. Meanwhile Cullen walks past me. I give him a thumbs up and he walks away chuckling to himself. These are not good signs. I can’t say for certain that these people really believed I was a drug dealer, but their behavior suggested it. It was their reaction to me saying the phrase "nice white crystalline product", that’s what suggested it. I was describing the physical characteristics of the product from a reaction I ran and it just so happen to be a white crystalline solid (...smh). What I want to know why were these people so quick to believe Cullen? Yes, what Cullen said could be true (which it wasn't) but couldn't it also be true that he's trying to give himself a better chance of getting a job by undercutting the competition?

I wish I got a job offer as an undergrad. I honestly didn't want to go to grad school, but I had no other choice. Visiting grad schools was a whole ordeal, I was told in one way or another that I wasn’t welcomed ... at every school. At Scripps I was told explicitly that I wasn’t good enough to be there by complete strangers (how exactly would they know given that they never assessed my ability to think ... who knows). At Indiana University, I was placed in a hotel room by myself because they heard I slept naked. At UCI, I was told that I wouldn’t make it pass my first year (again, by complete strangers). At Caltech, I was told I didn’t belong because I was a drug dealer (or that I look like a drug dealer, apparently).

Now, I ask you, how do drug dealers look exactly? What are they’re defining characteristics? I ask because if you asked someone who lived in Champaign-Urbana for four years to imagine what a drug dealer looks like, they might imagine a srcawny white boy in a frat (not someone that looks like me). What makes the Caltech visit even weirder was that Prof. Sarah Reisman was just standing by, staring at me while I was being told I didn’t belong (by the help, you know, the people who was serving drinks). It was like she was trying to read my facial expressions to get a sense of what type of person I was (or am). Or was she using the help as a proxy to express her own thoughts (I’m not sure)? Was she waiting for me to “defend myself”? 
How would I be able to do that exactly?

SIDE NOTE: it’s impossible to defend yourself when there’s no evidence for or against whatever accusations there may be. It all comes down to what people choose to believe. The help has already chosen to believe I’m a drug dealer (or at least look like one) and I’m willing to bet there’s really nothing I can really do about.

No matter how I analyze the situation, Reisman’s behavior does not reflect positively on her as a person. I’m not sure if she knows this, but she was the primary reason I had to not go to Caltech. I found her behavior to be very off-putting and I got the sense that she didn’t really want me to go to school there. On top of that there was talk of her wanting to have (oral) sex. 


DISCLAIMER: I am effectively asexual, I don’t have sex ... with anyone ... or anything (yes, I actually needed to say both).

Now, I didn’t believe the talk when I first heard it because I thought there was no way a self-respecting, competent professor would admit to wanting to engage in a sexual relationship with a perspective student ... this is what I choose to think. However, the more I heard of her desires to have (oral) sex, the more I believed it. But I never fully accepted the rumors as the truth until my first year at UCI. Reisman came to Irvine for a talk and as always almost all the Organic students showed up. Before the event, I was sitting at the small table with another grad student in my year, her name was Beth R. (I don’t know how to spell her last name and I’m not going to try to google it). Beth ended up mentioning how pretty Reisman looked .... I “mmmhmmm”ed her. I could hear the chatter going on behind me, Reisman seemed mildly disappointed that I didn’t agree. Beth soothed her ill feelings by saying that I didn’t disagree. After the event, I was talking to Prof. Scott Rychnovsky and Reisman came up in the conversion. This was the final nail in the coffin that made me believe the rumors were true. It wasn’t the fact that he said she would’ve blown me, it was the fact that he said it soooo enthusiastically. He was as enthused as a person could possibly be in a professional/academic setting. No one should that enthused by the thought of a man getting his dick sucked as much as Rychnovsky was by the thought of Reisman putting my dick in her mouth, no one. It was kinda weird. 


The thought this woman hocking loogies on my dick tip, and imagining the sensation of warm saliva slowly rolling down my shaft (as I quote lines from the movie, Shaft (the Samuel L. Jackson version...obviously)) as I knock my head back, praying to god that I don’t come away from this situation with paper cuts (she has thin lips) just to look back down after noticing she paused just so she could fill the waves from my pulsating erection and make eye contact as she goes deeper and increases the pace eventually moving to the point where she starts straggling my balls and moaning like Lady Gaga singing a lullaby to baby while stroking my hard cock until I cum for her as Nicole Nava sits beside her while taking notes shouldn’t be even remotely amusing.....TO ANYONE...EVER!!!!!! But apparently to Rychnovsky, it was. It was at that moment I never wanted to be affliated with Caltech as long as Reisman was there. If Caltech and Illinois were the only two places that offered me jobs after finishing the PhD, I’d have to change careers.


Okay, so here’s the thing. I don’t really view professors as people. When I was a student, they were more like encyclopedias that could talk to me. They simply took the form of a human, kinda like a barbie doll. They’re anatomically incorrect, they lack genitalia, so they don’t have a gender. I honestly, believed this. One time, during senior year, I walked in the third floor bathroom in RAL and I saw Prof Steven Zimmerman taking piss. My face immediately screws all the way up, my inside voice says “How is he standing up and taking a piss when he doesn’t have a dick?”.....I thought that....I literally thought that....I shit you not. Just so you know, it wasn’t just Zimmerman, it was every professor. The women are doubly dickless, in my mind Suzanne Blum was like —(Mia Khalifa) because she has negative two dicks inside of her at all times.

DISCLAIMER: just so we’re clear, I’m NOT alluding to the fact that Blum has to get people to agree to have sex with her. Nor am I alluding to the assertion she’ll probably be nothing more than an afterthought for literally anyone. I’m merely trying to stress the fact that I don’t think of professors as people, but as encyclopedias that can talk to me.

I was made to feel unwlecomed at every school I visited. Why? Well, you'll have to ask them. I can honestly say that by the time graduation (from U of I) came around I didn't believe that i would have a successful career as a chemist, but I put everything into this so I couldn't just leave...

Grad school was even worst because on top of being the black kid, I was also the social pariah. The other students did a real good of making me feel unwelcomed. So much so that after two weeks of living in Irvine I stopped trying to make friends. No one seemed interested in being cool with me (I'm basing this off people's behavior ... obviously). And if some of them were, the way they showed it was so unique that I couldn't even recognize it as a sincere attempt to get my attention.

I also experienced some the same stuff I did when I was at U of I. Namely, instructors not giving me what I earned. In Dave VanVraken’s class I always received the second highest score on the exams. The really curious thing is that no one knows who received the top score. Once, when I asked to see the printed out distribution, the TA refused to show me (why?). I'm willing to bet that single point ahead of me was a dummy point. In Liz Jarvo’s class, when the first exam came around, we found out the high score was a 83. Who got the high score?...no one knows, but when I received my test the number 38 was written on (Also note I just so happen to get the same score as the other kid from U of I). At first, I was puzzled and glanced over to Peg (the TA). She sees my score, turns to Jarvo and says "he knows he didn't get that low". While I don't remember Jarvo’s exact words, she stated in some way that I would come to her and argue my case for a higher grade. So, here's the thing. I shouldn't have to defend myself or argue with you to ensure that I'm treated like everyone else. It should be a given. 


From what I hear the reason why I was treated this way has something to do with them not wanting me to "talk stuff" to the other students. 


Okay, so where is this coming from? I ask because I’ve been me long enough to know their opinion of what I’m like isn’t actually based off me. If they actually talked to my fellow classmates, the most common thing you’d probably hear is that I’m quiet. So either these people are just making up stuff to justify treating me how they want to treat me or my classmates are liars. I’m not really the type to talk about my grades (or really anything) unless the topic is explicitly brought up in conversation (and this is assuming I feel like talking at all). You can dress it up however you want, but treating me like a second class student for any reason solely reflects poorly on you (it gives no indication as to what I’m like). There were instances like this in half the classes I took. Some, admittedly were a smaller deal than others. In Vanderwal’s class I got marked off once because I didn’t draw both arrows in a mechanism that included a homolytic cleavage. For those that don’t know, if a homolytic cleavage occurs and you show one electron going in one direction, it is assumed that the other electron goes in the opposite direction and therefore does not need to be explicitly stated (minor, but mildly annoying). In polymer chemistry (taught by Aaron Esser-Khan), we had one assignment where we needed to propose something that wasn’t in the primary literature. I proposed a polymerization based off a derivative of the Hiyama coupling. Khan’s critique was that since it wasn’t already in the primary literature, it probably wasn’t a good idea ... really?! And don’t even get me started on spec because that spec TA was sketchy as fuck. He intentionally told me the wrong due date for a homework assignment and I’m pretty sure he shaved a couple points off one of my exams...

Okay, so these experiences are only a subset of the shitty things I experienced as a UCI student. But do you know what made life at UCI worst than life at U of I? My research advisor (Suzanne Blum)....and to a slightly lesser extent my fellow group members. Over the years I grew to hate them. I was lied about, I had a homework assigns hidden behind water coolers (Darius Faizi), I’ve had the nitrogen lines removed from air sensitive reactions (Darius Faizi, Suzanne Blum), I had products from reactions switch out for reagent alcohol (it’s a mixture of ethanol, methanol, and isopropanol) (Josh Hirner), I’ve had septums removed from reaction mixtures (Josh Hirner), I’ve had people try to placate me with sex (Katrina Roth), I’ve had people try to use the fact that I was in an agitated state to get something they wanted (Katrina Roth), I’ve had people turn on the indoor lights in my car in an effort to drain my battery while I’m allowing them to use my car to practice driving so they can get a U.S. driver’s license (Muhammed Al-Amin), I’ve had people ask questions just so they can not listen to the answer (Chao Zheng, Drew), I’ve experienced asking people for help just so they can not even try to help brainstorm what the answer could be (Darius Faizi, Kim Tu), I helped others brain storm shortcomings for a proposal, just to catch an attitude when they realize I didn’t catch everything the first time around (Quinn Easter). 


SIDE NOTE: To provide context, Quinn asked me to look through a synthetic route in his proposal that he was intending to present in his advancement to candidacy exam. There was something I didn’t immediately see but did bring up during a group when he was giving a practice presentation. He became visibly upset and mentioned he thought I was trying to make him look bad. If I was really trying to make you look bad, I wouldn’t have told you anything, so that you would’ve made the same mistakes when it actually mattered. Quinn, you’re an idiot.  


l’ve had people call me after I already dropped out and given up on chemistry from a redacted telephone number claiming to be an official representative of UCI calling me in an effort to get my address (Suzanne Blum, Ashley Davis), and I’ve had the experience where I ask for information pertinent to group website maintenance and they act like I’m hitting on them (Adena).

SIDE NOTE: 
This is something that always amused/offended me, having  someone assume I’m attracted to them because I acknowledged their existence. It’s funny because because they have the audacity ... but it’s also offensive because the operating assumption is that I don’t have standards, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (They seem to make a lot of faulty assumptions)

What was this experience suppose to teach me? How was I supposed to become a better person or scientist because of my affiliation with the group/university? Me coming to Irvine and working for Blum was a total waste of my time. I’m not entirely sure what her deal was, but it seemed she had a preconceived notion of who I was. No matter what type of relationship we have (or suppose to have) this will cause problems where there shouldn’t be. 


Is the request that someone’s opinion of you is actually based on you too much to ask for? Because I feel it’s a basic request that most people should be able to easily do. The contemptuous treatment did subside with time (mostly because I avoided talking to other students when ever possible) but it never really stopped. Why did it start to begin with? I’m willing to bet the only things they don’t like about me has everything to do with me reacting to the way they treat me.  Again, I have to ask, is racism really that prevalent?


Then one day, I started getting so fed up with life that I decided I needed an escape, even if it’s only for a couple weeks. So, I started planning a trip to Europe. I worked hard in the weeks coming up to the trip. I was trying to finish my entire project before I left (sadly, I didn’t, but I tried). Things were looking on the up and up. Before I left, Blum even said I was meeting her expectations, that was the nicest thing she ever said to me (it was the nicest thing anyone at UCI has ever said to me). I went off on my trip, and during the middle of it I received an email essentially telling me that my time at UCI was finished. Why? I still don’t know. 3 years later and I still don’t know why my career was ended before it was even given a chance to start.  It’s hard to move on with your life when you don’t have closure. It’s really hard to move on when you still have to live with consequences of other people’s actions.

 SIDE NOTE: I got the sense sometimes that Suzanne Blum did not really care about her job 100% of the time. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s like, either she truly didn’t understand the importance of her role (as the leader of a research group) or she truly doesn’t give a shit. Either way, she doesn’t deserve to be in the position she’s in. 


I still remember my last day in Irvine. It was bitter sweet. I was so happy to finally get to leave but also a bit anxious because I knew that the thousands of hours I spent studying and doing research was time wasted and it would never amount to anything. I knew I wasn’t going to get a job with my credentials. I even saw Eric (the other kid from U of I) in the student center when I went over to get lunch. He was looking at me all sad and shit because he knew I didn’t have a future in chemistry. We didn’t talk, we just walked past each other and exchanged glances. I tried to conceal a smile as I walked by. By the time my Dad’s flight landed, I had moved most of the stuff out my apartment. 


Life at home was hard. Depression is a mother fucker. I liken it to  a less severe version of sleep paralysis. I felt like I was stuck in my own body. Kinda like how I felt in the early Irvine days when it would take me hours to roll out of bed. I would literally wake at 6 am and just stare at the ceiling for ~4 hrs before I could convince myself to get up. And to make things worst, no emotional support was offered by my family. Their assumptions that I’m somehow responsible for other people’s actions along with their snide remarks about me being lazy did the opposite of help. I regretted coming home, even more so when I found out I somehow failed the background check for CPD. 


Now, how in the holy fuck does someone without a criminal record fail a background check? The only reasonable thing I could come up with to explain this is that the work experience I listed (my research experience) doesn’t count as work experience because instead of working for a salary, I worked for credit hours or a stipend. I have to tell myself things like this to convince myself I’m not getting screwed over in every facet of my life. If this is true, then my college experiences are doubly worthless because not only can the credentials I’ve earned not be used to get a job I’m more than qualified to do, but they can’t even get me a job you don’t even need a bachelor’s degree for.  


I wish I moved to LA after dropping out. If I stayed in Cali, I’d be force to move on with my life because I wouldn’t be able to sulk in my mother’s house for months. What would I do for work? idk...but I’d find something, and when I get fired, I’d just move on to the next dead end job.

As time went on, I found it easier to move, I still have scars though. Scars that may never heal. What can I do from here on out? I’m not sure. Going back to graduate school isn’t an option (or any program that requires letters of recommendations) because after experiencing what I’ve experienced and allowing those that I depended on for letters of rec to learn about my experiences, everyone seemed to be complicit. Either they didn’t do anything to change the course of action or it seemed like they were trying to cover it up by telling me to take the site down. I lost faith in everyone, I don’t think I can trust any of the profs to submit a letter of rec on my behalf when they either have done something that goes against my interests, are complicit in the wrong doing of others, or seem as though they’re attempting to cover up what happened to me. Even if I could get in anywhere, I still don’t want to go back to school. I lost faith in higher education. I lost faith in people. Whatever I do, I have to be able to do it without a college degree.

Just in case you’re wondering, I can’t depend on my college friends either. Mostly because I wasted no time trying to make friends. I’ve come to believe that friends are a worthless luxury.

I honestly believed that if I studied hard and knew my shit someone would hire me. I was wrong. I learned the hard way that to the outside world you are not you. You are not the sum total of your thoughts and actions. You are your skin color. You are your hair texture. You are the clothes you wear on your back. You are what people choose to believe you are. You are not you. People don’t care to get to know the people around them, they just want to feel as though their justified in believing the way they do. So I guess in order to get by in life you just need to be everyone’s friend and present yourself in such a way that everyone deems acceptable. Having the skills needed to do the job is more of an afterthought, huh? You know, one of the corollaries is that you’re expected to exhibit a certain level of extroversion. Welp, it just so happens to be the case that I’m an introvert and if the previous statements have some truth then I can honestly say this system was set up for me to fail. The only way I can get by in life is because I’m better than the other guy. No one will ever choose me because I’m their best friend.

I believe that’s where some of my problems stem from. When people see my face, they expect an extrovert (or at least someone who is more extroverted than me). When they find out I’m not who they want me to be, the reactions can range from essentially nothing, to mild disappointment, to mild hostility. And I think this is because people are more interested in the idea of me than actually getting to know me. So when they meet me and actually get to know me after building me up in their heads they’re kinda like “...oohh, this is it?!”. I don’t understand people. It’s like people just assume that you’re going to conform to their world view while refusing to even bend to yours. Now, I’m totally opposed to the very concept of “fitting in” because of all that. I got the sense “fitting in” means assimilation, which may involve losing qualities that make you unique (ones you may actually like about yourself). I don’t see why I should change in any way for people I don’t like, that I don’t see the benefit of being associated with, or for people that never liked me to begin with. People even sometimes mock my behavior, presumably because I’m not what they want me to be and this is just their way of trying to get me to conform.


The most recent example of this is my cousin Sonia (she’s multicultural). I went to her graduation party during the summer. And as with most family functions, it pretty much consisted of me sitting quietly most of the time. So fast forward to when it’s time to go home. My mother and 2/3 of my brother’s children are making their way to the car, noticing the third one is missing I go back for her. As I’m making my way up the front porch, three of my cousins (one of which is Sonia) are in my path and I say “watch out”. As I walk past Sonia, she says something along the lines of “woah, he must be serious....” while laughing... I’m going to say this once, “Mocking my behavior because I don’t act how you want me to act will never help anything”...... unless you’re actively trying to get me to dislike you. I have to remember that Sonia is just a child. Maybe it hadn’t dawn on her yet that there’s more to life than what she’s experienced. She’s probably never met a person like me, so she won’t know what to say in order to get me to interact with her. But then I’m like, “But what makes her think making herself look like an ass would actually help her in any capacity?” How does this explain the behavior of grown ass men and women who do the same thing?”. I wonder if it’s a cultural thing, and these people just don’t realize how bad they make themselves look to people that aren’t like them. 


On the way home, I started thinking, “Is this really the best I can do?”.  Have I been doomed to live a life where I’m not really happy? No, it can’t be the case. I still have faith. I may not have faith in other people anymore, but I still have faith in myself. I believe I can make something out of nothing, even if no one else does.

After going through all I’ve gone through, all I want is to not suffer anymore. I just want to be insanely rich for no reason. This won’t solve all my problems but it will eliminate many. If I ever come into having an ungodly amount of money, I’d give some of it to my family so they can afford many of the things that they want in life. Then I’d disappear, never to be seen or heard from again.


I’ve become acutely aware of the fact that people want to learn useless knowledge without ever having to talk to me.

DISCLAIMER: the knowledge is useless because we won’t/don’t have a relationship of any sort. Why waste your time learning information that isn’t relevant to your life?

So I’m going to take this opportunity to answers some personal questions because the thing I hated the most about you people is your unique combination of arrogance, ignorance, and obliviousness. While I can’t help with the arrogance and the obliviousness, I can help with your total lack of knowledge. So, without further ado ...

QUESTION TIME

Did you ever like life in Champaign county?

I was excited to be there in the beginning, then I met the people and all that excitement went away quick.

What’s your fondest memory from college?

That one time when Chipotle was doing that 2 for 1 deal. That was cold.

So, what’s up with your sexuality?

I don’t have sex because I don’t want to take the risk of having children, also no STDs. People were oddly obsessed with my sexuality and I never quite understood it. Here’s the thing, I’m a little self centered and I’m like you in the sense that I don’t immediately acknowledge other people’s way of thinking all the time. I honestly don’t understand why there was as much “interest” in knowing what I’m interested in (I use quotes because if people were actually interested they probably would have try talking to me). My viewpoint is that your claimed sexual orientation is irrelevant, it’s not even worth bring up in conversation. The reason why is simple. If you see a pretty girl and you know she’s interested in men, it doesn’t necessary mean she’s interested in you (assuming your male) right? That’s why the only thing that matters to me is whether or not the person I’m interested in is interested in me. 

It’s funny because if you completely ignore the fact that not everyone thinks like me, it would seem as though there were ALOT of dudes that wanted me to fuck them when I was in college.

To the people “interested” in knowing my sexual orientation. Ask yourself two questions. Do you want a shot? Do you think you have a shot? Think hard about it. If the answer to one of those questions is “no”, don’t waste your time.

If you haven’t already figured it out by now, I don’t think like a normal person. I’m never going to adjust or change to make you feel comfortable, the best thing I can do is not talk to you at all. I don’t adjust to you, you adjust to me. Why? because fuck you, that’s why.

Are you ever going to have sex?

Maybe, maybe not. What’s it to you?

Do you think people like you?

I know they don’t. Based off their actions, they don’t want to like me either. They’d spend less time gossiping about the negative characteristics I could have and more time actually getting to know me if they did.

You don’t think people know anything about you?

It all depends on what you think it means “to know”. Personally, I don’t. I’m never around people long enough for them to be able to get a true sense of who am I as a person. All people get are snapshots. Sadly, that isn’t good enough. That’s something I don’t think most people realize, actually.

What if after reading this, people actually started trying to get to know you, how would you react?

My recommendation is that you don’t waste your time. You can’t undo the damage that’s already been done. I’ve already stopped caring.

If you could go back in time and pick another college, which would you pick?

Xavier University in NOLA. I’d pick this HBCU because I’m fairly confident some of the problems I encountered at U of I wouldn’t have existed there.

Why did you choose UCI?

Because they told me I wasn’t going to make pass my first year.  I knew what type of student I was. I knew I had what it took to make it through any program. But I was at a low point in my life, where nothing seemed to be going right. I figure If I go there and get forced out after a year, it wouldn’t be my fault. The devastating thing is they let me get so close to graduating before just booting me out like they did.

Why did you use the word “they”?

Someone easily could have stepped in and did something. The department just enabled her (Suzanne Blum).

What grad program do you think you should have choose?

Indiana University or Rutgers probably would been better for me.

What motivates you to do well?

Meaningful positive reinforcement. Don’t just give out compliments for the sake of giving out compliments.

What’s one thing you hate most about people?

Their stupidity. Before I was told I failed the background check fro CPD. I’d get calls from some sort of case worker for CPD who was suppose to determine my eligibility. This dude asked me if I “resigned” from the Blum group and acted like that was a perfectly valid question. This wasn’t a job, it was a component of an academic program. I WAS A STUDENT. There was no resignation. You don’t resign from school. You either graduate, drop out, or get expelled. I know some college education is required for employment with CPD, so it’s far more likely that this guy is an idiot. REMEMBER GRAD SCHOOL IS STILL SCHOOL AND THERE ONLY 3 WAYS TO LEAVE.

Did you ever consider taking legal action?

Yes, but I know the people I’m dealing with aren’t above lying. Since there’s no physical evidence (that I have in my possession) proving that wrongs did occur, I’m reluctant to believe I’d actually win. It’s not smart to get into a “he said she said” battle with people that are believed to be pathological liars.

Are there any common misconceptions you’d like to clear up?

I wasn’t doing the school shit to make friends. I only wanted to make money. That’s the only reason why I was there, to make money. Every time someone why I as getting a PhD, my answer essentially went like, “I’m getting a PhD because money.” I see no point in trying to make friends with people who seemed to have been conditioned to dislike me.

Also, just because I’m quiet it doesn’t mean that I’m stuck up. It is in fact possible to be someone who isn’t a big talker.

Contrary to popular belief. I am in fact a HUMAN BEING. I have emotions and sometimes something could happen in one part of my life that can affect other parts of my life (like how well I do in school or how productive I am in lab).

Why did you just give up?

What’s the point of playing the game when you know you’ll never win.

It seems like the college years were a hard time for you, did you ever do something to ease the pain, like drugs or alcohol?

No, I love myself too much to potentially set myself up for problems later. I gave comedy a thought, but I found really hard to want to be funny when all I’m thinking about is the depressing shit that inspired the joke. If I’m gonna do something, it’s gonna be something were I don’t have to live with the consequences of my actions. I was suicidal. I was planning to kill myself the night before my thesis defense.

Why then?

I was fairly confident that no one there cared to save me from myself. But just in case someone wanted to surprise me, I figure it would be best to do when no one would expect it.

How?

potassium cyanide. The night before my defense I was going to make it my point to get a bottle of potassium cyanide. a couple months before my trip to Europe, I looked up who had it. It was on the fourth floor (or maybe the fifth). Go all the way down to the last lab space on the right hand side. When you walk into the lab space go along the right hand side and go through the door on your right. After that go to the first door on the right hand side. I placed a bottle on KCN in the first column on the left hand side, top shelf. The bottle should be on the wall on the left side (assuming it’s still in the same place I left it). I figured it wouldn’t get much use due to its inherent toxicity so it would probably be in the same place I left it when I needed it. I wouldn’t be surprise if the bottle is still in that exact spot.


Did you ever think about getting help?

From who? When I did finally ask for help, the first thing I was told was that the department sided with Blum (mind you this is before any type of investigation occurred). As soon as I posted the email from Chris Vanderwal on this blog, his tune changed immediately. But his actions didn’t reflect the words he put out in the public space. He was of no use. He had no interest in helping me in any capacity. I’m sure of it. I’m all alone in this world, I don’t have a safety net so if I fall, that’s my ass.

What about the professors from UIUC?

My previous statement stands. I had no one.

Is that why you started the blog? You felt like your were all alone and just wanted someone talk to, even if that someone was actually a void in space?

Yes, that’s exactly it.

Is that why you’re still posting, you still feel alone?

yes

But what about your family?

With them I’m a dependent not a provider. They’d be okay without me.

So have you really never sought out a therapist?

I couldn’t find steady work. I can’t afford it. Depression is a rich people disease. When you’re broke you’re just labeled as lazy.

What’s one thing you want everyone to know?

You shouldn’t let your assumptions or the assumptions of others affect how you treat me. Remember, you don’t know me. I could come to be your best friend, your faithful and supportive business partner, or the love of your life and you’d just let me slip away all because someone told you dislike me.

(Also, please don’t waste my time talking to me about all the typos I made)

[im-the-king-of-the-ocean]

Barbara Lake - Life Timeline Notes

@archaeopter-ace

Here’s what I got for Barbara’s age and her timeline.

Under a cut cause it gets really, like really long.

A note I want to add after writing this all out is that I don’t have a definite, exact age pinpointed for Barbara, just a lot of theories and possibilities based on what we know and what I wanted to write in my stories (I originally did all this specifically in preparation for writing my fanfic Shadow of Change, which is a Barbara backstory).  This post isn’t necessarily meant to prove anything, just give what my thoughts and considerations have been.

Barbara’s Age: The Math

My original guesstimate that I use throughout my musings is that Barbara’s somewhere in her late 30s to early 40s.

-50s seem too old, given lack of gray hair (her hair is very clearly solidly red-brown).  On the one hand, I want to say lack of gray is due to 3D model/animation design.  Maybe it was easier for them to just not add in that much detailing?  But then we have Strickler who does have graying/white hair and more defined facial (age) lines, so they clearly can do that much detailing on the character models, but didn’t for Barbara.  My interpretation of this was that they didn’t want her to appear in that age range.

-Early to mid-thirties (30-35) seems too young.  Given we have confirmation from the show that Jim is 16, that means Barbara had him at her current age - 16 years.  So, say Barbara were currently 35, that would mean that she gave birth to Jim at 19 (35 -16).  That, and any age younger and we’re in teen pregnancy area.

Jim as Teen Pregnancy Possibility

(I don’t personally like this idea, but this post is meant to cover every potential scenario so that’s why it’s included)

Jim as a teen pregnancy is not completely outside the realm of possibility in theory, but I feel like it would create more hurdles to jump over than what we see in the show, especially financially.

Barbara is a doctor (meaning she’s been through undergrad, med school, and residency).  To get to this point, she’d have to pay off student loan debts, deal with the costs of a baby/young child, and be able to afford a house.  

I’m not saying she can’t find a way to make all that work out if she started as a 19 year old (I mean she’s Barbara, she probably could tbh), but I feel like it would be extremely hard.  Particularly if she doesn’t come from a super well-off background and if James Senior left the picture relatively early on.  

She’d either have to find a way to completely support herself and her kid quickly or get help from people like her parents (who are not in the picture as of the show, so who knows about them) while simultaneously doing everything it takes to become a doctor.

Just having the time for both kid and medical career would be difficult at best too.

I feel like we’d see more signs that the Lakes are still paying off her student debts and/or the house too if she started off younger/at a place of more instability.  For instance, one of Jim’s worries about his mom could have been he’s concerned about Barbara trying to support them/straining herself to make enough money. But we don’t see that.

More Numbers

According to the research I did back when I wrote Shadow, in general:

College (undergrad) Graduation: 22 yrs old

Medical School Graduation: 26 yrs old

Residency: 29-30 yrs old

which brings us to this picture:

(sorry it’s so huge, I don’t really know how to edit down photo sizes on tumblr).

Source: This post

which shows that Jim was at least a kid at a time when Barbara graduated.

I’ve seen numerous theories on how old Jim is in the picture that range from 5-6 years old to 11-12 years old.  Personally, I stuck to the younger range.

Say this picture shows Barbara’s undergrad graduation.  That would likely put her at 22yrs of age in it, which would mean she was 17 when she has Jim if he’s 6 (22-5) and 10/11 if he’s 11 or 12 (22-12), which would mean that one’s literally impossible.

Based on Barbara’s appearance in the picture (she doesn’t strike me as early 20s here), I’d say it’s likelier that it’s of her med school graduation, meaning she’d be around 26 and not 22.

In that case:

26 - 5 = 21

26 - 11 = 15

I like the numbers for a younger Jim in the picture way, way better so that’s my headcanon and I’m sticking to it.

Then, if Barbara had Jim when she was 21 that would mean her current/2016 age is 37 (21 + 16), which I feel is within the realm of possibility.

**However, these numbers can be fudged a little.

(if one happens to be a 22 year old who wants to write a story but is kinda uncomfortable with the idea of having a dfab protagonist who gets pregnant at their own age or younger.  Am I saying I purposefully messed with the numbers of when various life events happened for Barbara for my own comfort? yes, yes I am).

So, one could decide:

maybe Barbara graduated college late (at 23-24).  It’s possible.  I had a friend who graduated at 24 and I myself am graduating a semester late (so I’ll be 23 by then).

That would mean:

College (undergrad) Graduation: 24 yrs old

Medical School Graduation: 28 yrs old

Residency: 31-32 yrs old

If Jim is 5 at the Med School Graduation while Barbara is 28, that would mean she’d be 23 when he’s born and currently (in 2016) 39.

Personally, I wiggled these numbers around again later when I wrote GhostHunters!. I wanted that story to take place in 1985, about a year after Ghostbusters was originally released in theaters (it’s plot-related) and I wanted Barbara to be a kid at an age where it would be realistic if she got massively obsessed with the Ghostbusters (also plot-related) so I decided she’d be 10, which would mean she’d be born in 1975.

so:

1975: birth, 0 years

1985: 10 years

2000: 25 years old (Jim is born)

2016: 41 years old

Early/Mid 20s Barbara Becomes A Mother Possibility

I feel like if Barbara were in this age range when she had Jim, it would be less likely for her and James to have been married beforehand.  If that’s so, I lean in the direction of him being an unplanned pregnancy.

Barbara and James could have met at college, become boyfriend/girlfriend, then start to be sexually active, which eventually leads to an accidental pregnancy (Jim).  They decide to raise the kid together, potentially marry, and settle down in Arcadia.

*In Shadow, I have Jim happening simultaneously to Barbara’s med schools applications.  She and James conceive Jim during that process and her decision to go to Arcadia’s Medical School is rushed by the fact they want to have a home before the baby arrives (I didn’t actually manage to work that into the story, but it’s in my notes).

Another Possibility: Late 20s Barbara Becomes A Mother

For the sake of my curiosity, I also decided do calculations for what if Barbara were currently 45, the oldest I’d guesstimate for her based on her physical appearance.

That would mean she had Jim when she was 29 (45-16).  Then, going off the med school graduation pic:

College (undergrad) graduation: 30 yrs old

Med School Graduation: 34 (29 + 5) yrs old

Residency: 37/38 yrs old

This would then beg the question of what was Barbara doing between the ages of 18, when she would leave high school, and 26, when she entered undergrad, which could make for an interesting backstory narrative to fill in.  

This also works better for her marriage to James and their house + kid being a planned thing, I think.  Like they’d have more time to be together as adults before making those life choices.

An interesting possibility could be that James was meant to stay at home more to take care of Jim so Barbara could pursue college/med school.  This would lead into a situation where James and Jim were closer since they spent more time together (and, subsequently, Barbara would be the more distant parent since she isn’t there as often).  Then, them being close would have caused Jim extra hurt when James walked out.

Though, at one point in the show I think it states that Jim used to tell Barbara everything so those two have likely always been close.

And that’s all I got!  Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far, I know it’s super long.