#having to go to the grocery store for more Normal Fresh Meat every two days while camping feels lame :\

[blujayonthewing]

the problem with having a longtime special interest in bushcraft/ wilderness survival but only ever actually going camping in the most casual, ‘pitch a tent at A Campground that you just drive to and park’ context and not really even doing that very often is that I am very bad at prepping to go camping in a way that is remotely pragmatic in any direction

[snowe-zolynn-rogers]

Pairings: None

Word Count: 1,937 Words

Summary: Katsuki, stop being a stubborn kid.

Warnings: Child Abuse Mention, Eating Disorder Mention, Food Mention, Forced Eating Disorder Mention, let me know if I should tag anything else.

Usernames: Existence Is A Prison Aizawa: feral cat dad, Aoyama: gay salt, Hagakure: ranch flavored jello, Tokoyami: foil-mecha, Shinsou: farmer toshi, Kuroiro: life is a nightmare, Shiozaki: saviour, Tsunotori: schrodinger better run, Honenuki: pure, Monoma: nat20, Yamada: President Megaphone, Bakugou: deku-deck-you

Notes: I’ve changed Shinsou’s birthday to April 20th because I can.

Aizawa, We Agreed No More Cats: Chapter 6

5:28 AM

Existence Is A Prison

feral cat dad: I swear to god, if you say you're going out for a run, Katsuki.

deku deck-you: ...

deku deck-you: I'm totally not going out for a run.

feral cat dad: Kid, you don't need permission or even to tell us. You're allowed around school grounds, to leave, to the school, ya know. As long as you have your pass for the door, you're good, nothing's stopping you.

deku deck-you: I don't need to tell you where I am?

feral cat dad: No, what you do is your own business. Me and UA are just here to house and teach you. Your actions are your own, you don't have to tell us them.

deku deck-you: Oh.

feral cat dad: It's okay if you want to, but you never have to feel obligated to tell me or anyone else, either.

deku deck-you: It's just my mom made me tell her what I was doing every time I left the house.

feral cat dad: Well, I mean, I obviously know what you're doing every morning at 5:30. So, even if I'm worried, I know what you were doing. I'm also not your mom, I don't want to know where you are every second because you're a kid being a kid, you deserve some privacy. God knows you need privacy after not seeming to have it for fifteen years.

deku deck-you: Thank you, Mr. Aizawa.

feral cat dad: You can call me Dad if you want.

deku deck-you: Dad.

farmer toshi: Child-hoarding Dad.

feral cat dad: You're not wrong.

5:33 AM

Existence Is A Prison

farmer toshi: @deku deck-you, I'm coming, Kats. Wait up.

deku deck-you: Come on then, hurry up.

deku deck-you: You get those wires off today, right?

farmer toshi: Yup. Recovery Girl's fixing me today.

1:16 PM

Existence Is A Prison

farmer toshi: It's official. I can menace once again.

feral cat dad: If you're terrorizing villagers, please don't bring them back armed with pitchforks, I don't like fire.

5:25 AM

Existence Is A Prison

farmer toshi: Kats, where are you, I don't see you.

farmer toshi: @deku deck-you Did you get up early or something?

farmer toshi: Hey, @foil-mecha, Tokoyami, you're in room 9. Have you heard anything in his room?

foil-mecha: His phone pinged when you @ed him. And I swear I heard him moving around a bit earlier.

farmer toshi: Do you think he's okay? Maybe he's sleeping again?

foil-mecha: No, usually he's up for the day once he's up.

feral cat dad: God, did he push himself too much to recover quickly?

President Megaphone: I'm in early, I'm coming over and checking on him since you're in not position to help him if he's hurt, Shouta.

feral cat dad: Fine.

6:35 AM

Existence Is A Prison

foil-mecha: Is Katsuki okay?

farmer toshi: He fine, just malnourished. He passed out after he woke up, ended up hitting his head a little on the ground, and getting a minor concussion.

gay salt: How!?

deku deck-you: I thought our parents were the ones that paid for our groceries but my parents have told me they won't do it.

feral cat dad: Don't worry about him and his stubbornness, I'll be bringing him to the store later once he feels better and making him pick up foods.

ranch flavored jello: Katsuki! The card you got! The barcode! You just scan the barcode! UA pays for your food while you're in the dorms!

deku deck-you: I know that now, Toru. I thought our family or parents paid for our food.

4:16 PM

Existence Is A Prison

feral cat dad: Okay, get dressed and get a list if you want, kid. What foods do you like?

deku deck-you: Well, I'm allergic to shellfish.

feral cat dad: You've been eating with us all week and you didn't tell us you were allergic to something?

deku deck-you: I avoided things that had shellfish in them.

feral cat dad: Katsuki.

deku deck-you: You act like my mother didn't practically force me to have allergic reactions when she was tired of me.

feral cat dad: You're right, I do act like that because that's not okay. It's abuse, Katsuki, and I want you to be safe and happy. So please, tell me if you can't or even don't want to eat something.

deku deck-you: Alright.

feral cat dad; Okay, anything else you're allergic to?

deku deck-you: No, just shellfish.

feral cat dad; Anything you particularly like?

deku deck-you: Mackerel with spinach, mushrooms, and chili oil.

feral cat dad: Then we'll grab the stuff for you.

President Megaphone: I'll spoil you, kid, I'm your uncle now.

deku deck-you: If you plan on spoiling me, get me those sausages that look like octopi. I love them but I haven't been allowed to buy them for around five years.

President Megaphone: I swear, Shouta, this nephew will get all the sausages. UA is willing to buy.

feral cat dad: I know, but don't go all 'grab it all' at the store, Hizashi, the kid can grab his own food at his own pace. You can pick him up extra ones whenever. We're letting him pick up his own groceries probably for the first time in his life. Don't overwhelm him.

foil-mecha: Can you pick me up boiled octopus and baby sardines, Mr. Aizawa?

feral cat dad: Sure, I'll grab you a bunch of fish, kid.

foil-mecha: Much appreciated.

deku deck-you: Is there a limit I can use?

feral cat dad: No, there isn't. UA is full of future heroes who will likely need to build muscle to save others, to do that, you need to eat well, Nezu's rule for us dorm kids has always been to make sure we eat, he doesn't care how much it costs as long as you're healthy.

deku deck-you: Wow, that's actually. Just wow.

farmer toshi: Your shitty parents put you on a budget, huh?

deku deck-you: Usually I had to cost less than 1,000¥ per week. It was hard, especially building muscle to be a hero. I ate rice and eggs a lot so I wasn't completely starving but it was always hard living with them.

ranch flavored jello: Aren't your parents like famous or something? Why did they want you to be on a budget?

deku deck-you: They didn't like dealing with me besides to scream at me. I think it was to keep me from leaving them. They'd hand me exactly 1,000¥ every week I had to use my money for food because they wouldn't buy food for me after I turned 5. Then they'd still tell me what I couldn't buy.

foil-mecha: I feel great rage toward your parents and I hope they have a horrible life now without you.

deku deck-you: I do too, don't worry.

4:30 PM

Existence Is A Prison

deku deck-you has started a video call

Hey, Kats, how's your shopping going? -foil-mecha

Are you upside down, Tokoyami? Why are you...? -deku deck-you

I'm on the couch. I refuse to sit correctly. -foil-mecha

Dad and Uncle Zashi are off getting dinner for tonight because Dad's getting a little souped out. So they're picking up some stuff for that and I didn't want to feel alone. -deku deck-you

Hey, little bro. -farmer toshi

I turn 16 tomorrow for your information. Call me 'little bro'. I'm probably the oldest of us kids in the dorms right now. -deku deck-you

I turn 16 tomorrow. -farmer toshi

Oh my god, I practically have twin sons now. -feral cat dad

Deal with it, Dad. -farmer toshi

Looks like I'm going over to the cake section and picking up two cakes. - President Megaphone

Strawberry. -farmer toshi

You don't have to. -deku deck-you

No, I don't have to, but I'm going to. -President Megaphone

Anything. -deku deck-you

You're getting your own cake, Katsuki. I'm not just gonna pick you up anything. What's your favorite cake flavor?  C'mon, little listener.-President Megaphone

I don't know. I've never had cake before. -deku deck-you

So a variety cake. I can work with that. -President Megaphone

Hey, Kats, can you grab those meat buns and red bean buns in the red bag to your right for me? -nat20

Yeah, okay. -deku deck-you

You're amazing. -nat20

What have you picked out so far, Kats? -ranch flavored jello

Uh, mushrooms, spinach, bean sprouts, eggs, mackerel, and Seiko's bun thing. I'm in the meat section so I'll probably pick up two of those...-deku deck-you

Two of what? -saviour

I got em. Those octopus sausages. I found them. I'm getting two of them.  Are you guys sure I'm not spending too much? -deku deck-you

Pick up anything you will either eat or give to someone else who will eat it. -feral cat dad

As long as you're sure. -deku deck-you

What'd you pick up, twinsie? -farmer toshi

Boiled octopus, bacon, ham, chicken, another two sets of the buns. -deku deck-you

Are you picking up things to eat with rice and eggs out of habit, Kats? -foil-mecha

I wanna buy what I know I like first before I buy things I won't eat. I already hate spending money as it is. -deku deck-you

Reasonable. Just make sure you pick up snacks for yourself since training for a Sports Festival takes a lot out of you. -feral cat dad

I am. Ooh, yoghurt. -deku deck-you

I'm right here, Katsuki. -feral cat dad

Hi, Dad. Alright, I'm ending this. Y'all text me if you want something else. -deku deck-you

Bye, twinsie. -farmer toshi

deku deck-you has ended the video call

5:30 PM

Existence Is A Prison

President Megaphone: I'm getting started on dinner. Should be done by 7.

deku deck-you: Can I eat my ice cream?

feral cat dad: You're allowed to eat whatever and whenever.

deku deck-you: I know, I just worry. It'll go away, I hope. I just get worried.

feral cat dad: Getting worried is normal. I was too when I was in your position.

deku deck-you: You were in my position?

feral cat dad: Kind of. Back then, fifteen years ago, there was no teacher or other students in the dorms, just me and Nezu. I was fresh from nine years in a foster home that would spend the money meant to support me on their own son.

feral cat dad: For the first month, I didn't buy myself food. I'd eat breakfast and lunch on school days and skip dinner and meals on weekends because I was scared of spending UA's money.

feral cat dad: After almost a month with no financial transactions on my account and the Sports Festival coming up, Nezu did a surprise inspection and flipped out when there was no food in the kitchen. He forced me to the store and made me buy dinner for us two because he wouldn't allow a student under his roof to not have food for themselves.

feral cat dad: Nezu sat me down and told me the same thing I told you and, after the Sports Festival, I actually bought myself and four friends dinner at a nice restaurant to celebrate me and my friend's winning tie and I paid the bill without even thinking about it.

gay salt: Wait, there was a tie at the sports festival?

feral cat dad: The first year rounds fifteen years ago, the only winning tie because we refused to fight again.

gay salt: I'll have to watch that and see my badass teacher fighting.

feral cat dad: The sports festivals are all free to watch on your televisions in your rooms, no need to pay to watch on YouTube.

Taglist: @everythingisstardust 

[tlbodine]

Thanksgiving is Gonna Be Weird: A Survival Guide for 2020

It’s 2020, the pandemic is worse than ever, and the holidays are right around the corner. No matter what, this is going to be a weird Thanksgiving for a lot of people. With travel restrictions in place and most of us having a mighty desire not to murder our friends and family by spreading around a disease, there’s a good chance that you’re going to be celebrating a bit differently this year. 

And, hey, maybe you decide not to celebrate at all. Which is perfectly valid! 

But maybe you’re staring down the possibility of your first Thanksgiving on your own, or feeding just the small group you live for rather than a big crowd, or some other unusual circumstance. And if that’s the case, I wanted to compile together some resources/ideas to help you out. I know this isn’t my usual horror fare, but...well, I hope it’s helpful, regardless. 

“Help, I’ve Never Made Thanksgiving Dinner Before” Starter Kit

Maybe you’ve always gone home for the holidays but are currently stuck in an apartment with a few roommates, and none of you have any intensive cooking skills. Maybe you always take the kids to Grandma’s house and have never had to contribute more than a side dish but now really want to do a proper Thanksgiving feast for your partner(s), kid(s) and whoever else lives in your house. 

Never fear! A Thanksgiving feast doesn’t have to be intimidating! In fact, Thanksgiving foods are usually pretty simple; the most challenging part of the whole feast is the project management aspect of working with a lot of different dishes and getting everything ready at once. But the smaller your crowd to feed, the easier that is! 

So, the first thing you’ll want to do is come up with a menu. Sit down and write a list of all the foods you normally eat and enjoy on Thanksgiving. If something is served at your family meal that you’ve never cared for, guess what? You can boot that bad boy right off the list! 

By and large, the standard Thanksgiving feast consists of: 

Roast turkey 

Mashed potatoes

Gravy

Some kind of dinner roll

Cranberry sauce

Some number of vegetable side dishes (often a green been casserole and a sweet potato casserole) 

Some kind of dessert (often/traditionally a pumpkin pie) 

I’ve linked above some easy & favorite techniques/recipes for all of these foods, but of course you can buy time-saving convenience items to get you rolling -- from potato flakes to gravy mix to premade pie. I won’t tell if you don’t. 

If there’s something you’re used to eating every year that you don’t know how to make....call whoever usually makes it! If at all possible, obviously, I’m not recommending you do a seance to talk to your dead great-aunt and get her rolls recipe. Just, like...phone up your friend/family member, get the recipe, and use it as an opportunity to connect. Odds are both of you are missing the human interaction. 

“Hey, That’s Nice, But I Live in a Dorm Room”  Edition 

Okay, okay, I get it. You’re away at college and can’t get home to see your family safely and you’re living in some kind of weird socially isolated dorm situation where you have limited access to cooking implements. Or, shit, idk, maybe you’re couch-surfing or living in a motel or otherwise not in possession of a full kitchen. 

I got you, fam. 

Do you have at your disposal a microwave? Rice cooker? Even an electric kettle will work! 

If you have some way to boil water, you can make instant mashed potatoes, gravy, and stove-top stuffing. If you have a microwave, you can steam some vegetables and bake a sweet potato. For dessert, core an apple, stuff the cavity with brown sugar + cinnamon + butter and nuke in the microwave for 4 minutes. 

It’s hypothetically possible to microwave a turkey, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, I’d opt to buy a deli roast chicken (about $5 at most grocery stores), or even just some turkey deli meat. Alternatively, ham usually just needs to be warmed rather than cooked, and you can buy a big ol’ ham steak at the store for a couple of bucks. 

“I’m Dead Broke Because COVID, Send Help” 

You know the great thing about Thanksgiving food? It’s cheap. No, really! It can be, anyway, especially since a lot of foods go on sale. 

In my area anyway, the local Wal-Mart and Smith’s Grocery have: 

A can of green beans for about 79 cents

A bag of instant mashed potatoes for about $1 

A big can of yams for about $1, or fresh yams for 50 cents/lb (usually a couple sweet potatoes = 1lb) 

Canned corn or peas + corn for 50 cents, or steam-in-bag veggies of your choice for $1 

Stovetop stuffing for $1 or sometimes even 50 cents per box 

Margarine for 79 cents to $1 

Gravy mix packets for 50 cents each

A can of cranberry sauce for $1 or less

Most of these are also available at Dollar Tree! 

A lot of food banks will also be giving out turkeys this time of year, and some grocery stores will give you a free turkey if you spend $50 or $100 on groceries or whatever. Do you have an older relative who needs groceries? Ask if you can go buy their food and deliver it to their door (contactless!) and keep the free turkey.

You can pretty easily feed a group of 4-6 for $20 or so, especially if you’re willing to be flexible on your protein. And what are you doing feeding more than 6 people in the middle of a pandemic, huh? 

“I’m Used to Hosting a Big Dinner But There’s Only Like Three Of Us Living In This House WTF How Do I Scale This Shit Down” 

Maybe you are a Thanksgiving veteran. Maybe you’re accustomed to hosting for a big crowd and cooking a small meal just seems dumb and pointless. I feel you. This is my life right now! But don’t despair! 

The way I see it, you’ve got a couple-three options: 

Option One: 

Cook your turkey + a different side each day, and eat your Thanksgiving feast spread out over a week or so. It’ll keep your leftovers from dominating your fridge, let you eat something fresh, and allow you to enjoy all your favorite recipes. Downside is you’ll have to cook every day, so you tell me if you’re too busy to do that. 

Option Two: 

Cook everything that you normally would, but portion off half of it or whatever to stuff into your freezer, or go deliver it to somebody else’s door. The odds are pretty good that you’ve got a friend or family member who is freaking out about the holiday, and if you can’t see them in person, you can at least drop food off on their porch and then honk aggressively/cheerfully from the safety of your car! 

Option Three: 

Make something different this year. If you’re a foodie, take this as an opportunity to challenge yourself to create something high-maintenance and weird that you wouldn’t normally make. This is a good choice if you’re off work and stuck in your house with nothing else to do. Basically you’re subbing out quantity for quality so the meal still feels special and unique even if it’s, y’know....just you and your cat, or whoever. 

PS: Roasting a whole chicken or a cornish game hen is a fun, small-scale way to get your bird-in-the-oven experience. You can also buy a turkey breast and just cook that, which will be a lot faster than the whole bird anyway. 

"I’m An Essential Worker And I’m Working Thanksgiving And Have No Time To Do ANYTHING, What Now?” 

Dude, I get it. And whether you’re a doctor, nurse, grocery store employee, or whatever other essential service-worker, my heart goes out to you because hoo boy this year has been shit, hasn’t it? I can’t do anything about the hazard pay situation, but I CAN tell you that there are a few places offering delivery-based Thanksgiving meal options! 

You might want to search around a bit for your specific area. Cracker Barrel, Marie Callendar’s, Boston Market, and other types of branded “home-cooking” type restaurants tend to have some kind of Thanksgiving thing. Why not call your local restaurant fav to see if they’re doing something similar? Most restaurants are desperate for a way to stay afloat right now, so a ton of places that don’t traditionally deliver are offering curbside service now. It’s worth a try! 

So, there you have it. 

I hope some of these tips taught you something new, pointed you to a helpful resource, or gave you some ideas. More than anything, I just want everybody to be safe and happy this holiday. So, please -- get creative, wear your mask while you’re shopping, avoid the get-togethers, and be careful. You may save a life! 

[sugarstark]

You guys have REPEATEDLY requested I cover this so- here is a full info sheet on the Little Training Centers in ctca

🐮 the centers themselves are completely remote facilities with accompanied farmland. in the case of mackleberry, a milkman comes daily and certain employees are required to fetch groceries. no littles leave under any circumstances until they are of adoptable age and are transported to an adoption center.

👔 all littles wear uniforms. these vary based on age range and personal needs, but each little has three sets of a winter uniform, four sets of a summer uniform, and two sets of play clothes for when they may get dirty.

🥦 all of the food served is completely intentional. breakfast is filled with dairy and carbs, lunch is some type of meat, and dinner is always a healthy meal with plenty of fruits and vegetables.

🧃for those too young to eat the “big kid meals”, an older little or a staff member will make sure they are fed a similar meal in the form of baby food or are given a bottle.

🧸 every little has a locked cubby in the hall for personal objects. these objects are documented extensively and are only to be taken out by a staff member. this way, a little can “own” something to gain healthy emotional attachment to.

🍼 the babies are kept on a strict bottle schedule. for peter’s age range, he would get one with breakfast, one before naptime, and one at bedtime.

🍭 each little is allowed one piece of candy per day. if they ask the headmaster politely, a second may just so happen to appear, but thats only for his favorites. one time, peter ended up with six pieces.

👼🏽 good behavior can earn the littles almost any award they can dream of. it may be a new toy added to their cubby, or it could be a car ride around the nearest town for some fresh views. either way, if they don’t have any disciplinary issues for a month, there is always a treat in store.

🎨 painting is offered daily during playtime so that the finished products can be used to decorate the building. depending on age, a little may or may not be offered a brush, but all of the paint is non-toxic and finger-ready for the ones that tend to try and drink it.

🤸🏽‍♂️ the littles are not encouraged to rough house, but there’s only so much you can do with all that newfound energy, so a weekly gymnastics lesson is held for the troublemakers to keep them from fighting.

🪑 punishments are issued regularly bu the headmaster. littles may be subjected to timeouts, spankings, essay writing, loss of privileges, early bedtime, writing lines, or feeding a younger little during meals before themselves.

🥏 all outdoor toys are only given to littles older than 4. the younger ones may either play on the safe equipment or go inside for an activity.

🧽 all of the littles are expected to do chores, save for those under 12 months who simply can’t feasibly help. while the bigger kids do most of the janitorial work, the littler ones wash the dishes and pick up every toy on site.

⛵️sometimes, the littles get to take a boat ride on the lake. it’s not much, but the rumors about there being mermaids in there get more elaborate every day, so the excitement is there.

🧺 the littles are never entrusted with doing their own laundry. all dirty clothes are collected when they get changed, and are taken care of by a staff member.

🗝 the littles are locked in the dormitories after 9- no excuses. any of them under the age of 8 are put in nightly protection even if they wouldn’t normally need it due to lack of bathroom access.

🖍 pens and pencils are banned. they simply remind the littles too much of pre-classification schooling. as such, everything is done in crayon or washable marker.

🩹 there is a nurse available for any sicknesses of injuries, and also a separate infirmary to keep outbreaks to a minimum.

🧴bath time is a whole event. each little gets a bath every day, so there are ten bathtubs in the building. a building with 3 bathrooms. three tubs to a bathroom, and one bonus tub in the infirmary.

🚀 classroom activities are extremely important in helping a little to transition. by reaffirming what they should and shouldn’t know, it keeps them from fighting the natural regression. these classes will repeatedly go over the same topics such as “sharing is caring” and the rules of patty cake.

[usednapkin]

It’s Been Too Long... And I Know Long... Long... Long~ Long~ MAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNN~~~~

Long...

Long!

Long~

(moaning and heavy breathing)

If you don’t get that reference, don’t worry. Nobody is perfect. The Japanese really know how to make a great commercial series.

You’re gonna look it up now, aren’t you?

I feel like I used this reference before in my past blogs... can you blame me for not remembering? It’s been ages since I did this again. I’ve grown from a boy to a bigger boy. My gut is bigger. My double chin is doubler. I shave every week now. I drink tea sometimes. Adulthood is a busy lifestyle.

But it’s not only adulthood that’s been making things busy - of course I’m talking about the new trend of putting a fake penis next to your loved one and see if they cuddle with it in their sleep. Apparently, it will instantly get you a hundred thousand followers on TikTok. Try it out! I won’t lie to you!

I joke, that’s a fake trend. But now you’re thinking about whether it would actually be plausible. I dunno man, anything is possible in this world. And right now, we are living in a historical time. Covid19? Black Lives Matter? I wear contacts now? What’s going on?

Seriously though... it feels kinda weird to be doing this blog. I never realized how much it helped me, doing this on a regular basis. Just me and my third computer, typing out my thoughts - it can be very therapeutic, but it also helps me with my creative process. I also learn to type a little bit faster. 

OFFICE JOBS, HERE I COME. #adulthood

Where do I even begin? What do I blog about when there are so many things to talk about? I could talk about how Covid19 affected my life, I can talk about how the BLM movement changed my perspective on how I view the world - but I’m not here to talk about issues in the world, I’m here to entertain, and break down my thoughts in a way that confuses eighty percent of the internet population.

And rant about how stupid customers can be.

I still work the same job - been at it for six years now, like hol--you know what? Let’s talk about how Covid19 affected my workplace. So I work in a grocery store - “Living the dream,” as one of the managers calls it - and during the first couple of weeks that the news declared a global pandemic, oh man... it was fun.

...Is that a weird thing to say?

You have to imagine, my job isn’t the most stressful, eventful, entertaining or fun place to work at, but when the pandemic rolled through. we were busy as fuck, Customers were rolling in, ready to prepare for the worst. And this was before we started to regulate the flow of customers. If the music was super loud, it would’ve been a bangin’ grocery store club. 

But they would have to dance to Haven’t Met You Yet by Michael Bublé.

Imagine your parents grinding to that.

BASS DROPS.

You all probably think that the toilet paper was the first to go--AND YOU’RE RIGHT. It went along with the hand sanitizer and Lysol wipes, but did you know that all the frozen foods, pasta, canned food, and fresh meat were  almost emptied? At one point, a customer asked if we were selling barren shelves. I threw pickles at him.

Aside from all the sales, customers were being rowdy. People were on edge about getting in and out of the store, people tried to slip ahead of the line by explaining injuries that we couldn’t prove was real, I saw these two ladies fight over the last bag of shrimp, this drunk man ate a frozen chicken pie that was on sale for a dollar, this white lady overtly yelled out how she felt threatened by a pregnant black lady standing in line with her husband--

--okay, I may have used situations that weren’t due to covid19, but you get it.

Damn it, Grocery Gabby.

The store was probably seventy percent more chaotic than it would be. I don’t work in the front, so I didn’t see much of the action, but there was a lot more yelling. The owners got into a lot of fights with the customers. A couple of them even got physical. This was the first time that my ordinary job felt like it was a threat to my well-being.

It was kinda thrilling.

But of course, at the same time, it was something that I did not want to last. Later, when the world started to learn more about the virus, and we got our toilet paper supply back, everything basically went back to normal. I miss the days where I was able to bike to work on the empty streets... And I miss my temporary, very short-lived hazard pay.

Yeah, we don’t get that anymore. Our customers aren’t in bad condition like they are in the hospitals. I knew it wouldn’t last, which is why I asked for extra hours during that period. Smart of me, huh? I also had nothing much to do at home, so there was that. Lockdown and everything, y’know?

I look forward to the day where we won’t have to wear our masks in the store again. I mean, I was wearing one before the pandemic happened because Asian style, but now I kinda miss seeing the faces of my coworkers. I also met a few new ones for the past year and I don’t think I’ve ever seen their real faces. I mean, do they have a round chin or pointy one? Do they have moles like me? How’s the condition of their teeth? How can she have boobs so big, yet grow more chin hairs than I can?

These are the important questions in life.

But that’s work in a nutshell. Occasionally, we have issues with anti-maskers, but those customers make up like, two percent of the total that enter our store. Some are even conscious about distance, meaning that they KNOW they choose not to wear a mask, so therefore they try and keep their distance even more from you. It happened to me a couple of times.

But seriously, if you can, wear a mask.

Why do adults hate the idea of being told what to do? Is it their pride? Is it because they feel threatened of the idea that someone is smarter than them? Are they tall, ugly-shaped babies or something? I kinda get it, you’re an adult, and you shouldn’t be told how to live your life and be told what to do by someone else, but when lives are being at risk, think about your loved ones. Is it really worth your pride and ego?

I digress. TL;DR: My first year of covid19 was an eventful one.

“Was it though?”

Yes Bob, it was. 

Now I just have to have faith in humanity to be able to combat this virus until it’s demise. Hopefully we can try and stop it before the variants become too strong. I miss people. Until then, I’ll still be stocking shelves with a bunch of employees who look like ninjas.

Retail Jutsu.

Our ninja stars are crackers.

[soybeantree]

sweetness

pairing: do kyungsoo x (reader) genre/warning: fluffship  word count: 1.8k description:  of COURSE we had to post a ‘valentine’s day kyungsoo story’. please enjoy a simple story about the simple things. happy v-day y’all...or ya know happy february 14th.  a/n: feb. installment of our ‘trying to write a kyungsoo story for every month that he is gone’ series.*shoots finger hearts* 

__________________________

As the dreaded day approaches, you avoid convenience stores, social media, and your mother. Your friends know better than to bring up the subject, and even your best friend has allowed you your peace. Throughout your life, you gave little thought to Valentine’s Day, or as little thought as possible to a day capitalism shoved down your throat. The pink and red vomited across everything grated on the eyes, but the discounted candy available on February 15th allowed you to stock pile enough sweets for the next two months. All in all, February was another day on the calendar. Until…

He was the one who made a big deal about Valentine’s Day. He planned the day months in advance. You had to make sure you had the day before and after off. You two always went somewhere deeply romantic and personal. He brought all your favorite food and cheesy romantic gifts. After the first year, you started to get in the spirit. You would eagerly look forward to the day and plan gifts of your own. Nothing was too extravagant. Valentine’s Day became your favorite holiday. Until… The signs were there. If you had exited your haze of excitement, you would have seen them. He never brought up the subject. He never mentioned plans. There were no clues littered around his apartment, hinting about where you were going and what you were doing. You were the one chattering incessantly, teasing him about his gift and gloating about your happiness. He should have told you. You made a fool of yourself, and he let you. Last Valentine’s day came, and you waited for him with bags packed. After ten unanswered calls, he arrived. You fumed and raged. He said goodbye. He said other things, but all you remember is the goodbye. The days flew off the calendar, and now February 13th waves at you, daring you to rip it off and reveal the truth of today. You leave the page and head into the kitchen for a morning pint of ice cream. Even without plans for the day, you still asked off. Spending the day with gossiping co-workers sounded like hell. Instead, you have decided to eat your weight in ice cream and watch nature documentaries. Halfway through your second pint and third documentary, your doorbell rings. You ignore it. The doorbell rings again. You shovel another spoonful of ice cream in your mouth and increase the TV’s volume. “You’re going to blow your eardrums out.” After the “you’re”, your ice cream and spoon went flying. By time “to” came out, you were screaming. When the sentence finishes, you are hunched over, clutching your chest. “Kyungsoo,” you heave as you try to regulate your breathing. “I gave you the pass-code for emergencies only.” “You weren’t answering.” He crouches to pick up your spoon and pint. “You could have been dead.” Rising, he walks to the kitchen, and you glare at him from the couch. “You know why I wasn’t answering. Now, bring back my ice cream!” The clashing of pots and pans is the only response to your demand. With a growl, you shove yourself off the couch and storm into the kitchen. Groceries fill your counter: fresh vegetables, fruits, meat. You blink at the foreign objects. “Where did all this come from?” “The store.” “I will hit you.” You threaten as you pick up a pepper and rear your arm back. He sighs and reaches across the counter to pull the pepper from your hand. “I brought groceries because I knew you would have nothing healthy in the house.” Grabbing the rest of the vegetables, he takes them to the sink to wash. “I don’t want to eat healthy today. I want to eat ice cream and wallow in my misery.” Vegetables washed, he brings them back to the counter and begins to chop them. “You did that last Valentine’s Day.” “And I will probably do it every Valentine’s Day from now until the end of my life.” Your righteous indignation raises your head and puffs up your chest. “Go watch your documentaries. I’ll let you know when the food’s ready.” You deflate, but stick out your tongue. Not that Kyungsoo notices. He’s too busy chopping. You sulk back to the couch and plop down. Really, you should have known that as your best friend he wouldn’t let you spend the day wallowing. And while ice cream would have been a perfectly good meal for the day, you’re not mad that you’ll have Kyungsoo’s cooking instead. Kyungsoo has been your best friend since your diaper days. Your families lived down the street from each other, and your moms bonded over their shared misery of newborns. His mom became yours and yours became his. All of your memories hold Kyungsoo. He’s been with you through everything, and the idiot is always trying to protect you. He saw the signs and tried to warn you, but you would hear none of it. You were in love. The thought leaves a sour taste in your mouth. The smell of Kyungsoo’s cooking dances through the air. Your stomach growls an unnecessary song. The ice cream did a poor job of filling the hole. Craning your head back, you glance into the kitchen. Kyungsoo moves through the space with choreographed precision, pulling knives and utensils out of places where you didn’t even know they were. It makes sense though. He moved you into your apartment and set up your kitchen. Slumping back into the couch, you switch documentaries, but the next one bores you. The TV goes off, and you meander back to the kitchen and perch on a stool at the counter. “Why don’t you have plans today? I thought you were talking to that one waitress at work.” You pluck a slice of pepper off the cutting board and start to chew on it. “I do have plans today.” Choking on the pepper, you spit out, “Really?” After clearing your throat with the water Kyungsoo offers, you continue. “What? With the waitress?” He stirs the contents of the frying pan before lowering the heat. “I’m making food and eating it with you.” A smile tugs at your lips, but you thin them. “I meant Valentine’s plans.” The word tastes of vinegar. You take another sip of water to wash it away. “These are my Valentine’s plans.” He comes to the counter to grab a cucumber which he starts to slice into thin moons. “These were my Valentine’s plans every year until…” The words trail off. He starts to apologize, but you shake your head. You know he meant no harm. Kyungsoo has a habit of speaking facts and only realizing afterward the emotional repercussions. Rather than focusing on the “until”, you focus on the fact. Before your boyfriend, you and Kyungsoo had spent every Valentine’s Day together. When you were little, your families would get together and make a big meal. Even after you two moved away from home, you would still meet up and eat together. You had never given much thought to the tradition. For the first time, you wonder if the same is true for Kyungsoo. He never said anything that first year when your boyfriend took you away. With a shake of your head, you banish the thought. Kyungsoo is your best friend, emphasis on the word best. It is the only B word which has ever preceded the word friend where Kyungsoo is concerned. He’s never tried to be more or wanted. The last bit is an assumption, but it has to be true. “Y/N.” You blink, coming back to reality. “What?” “I said the foods ready.” The counter holds a full spread. The smell sets off another cacophony from your stomach. A blush warms your cheeks as you mumble a semblance of an apology. Kyungsoo nods slowly. He had pulled up a stool on the other side of the counter, and now sits, waiting. Clearing your throat, you thank him for the food before inhaling it. Stomach full and finally silent, you lean back on your stool and sigh with bliss. “When are you finally going to open up a restaurant? I could eat your food everyday.” “I don’t have to own a restaurant for you to eat my food everyday.” His ear tinge pink. Standing, he reaches for the empty dishes, but you swat his hand away. “You cooked. I clean.” You drop off your stool and get to work. “And don’t avoid the question. I know you and Junmyeon have been talking. With his family’s backing, you could easily get a loan.” You set a load of dishes in the sink before returning for the rest. Kyungsoo hunches on his stool, his forehead a mass of wrinkles. You reach to slap him on the back, but a tingle in your chest brings your hand to your side. Coughing clears the tingle, and you grab the remaining dishes. “Opening a restaurant is a lot of work.” “And you can handle it.” You shout over the faucet. Turning it off, you continue in a normal tone. “You practically run Soo Man’s restaurant for him. So you’ve already got that part down, and you’ve got Junmyeon to help you with the start up part. He’s opened plenty of shops for his family. All you have to do is get over your fear and do it.” You turn on the water to rinse and nearly miss Kyungsoo’s reply. You wish you had. The words were plain enough, but the way his voice dipped and deepened stills your heart. With a shake of your head, you erase the feeling. You’re imagining things buoyed by that pesky thought from earlier. Kyungsoo said, “I will.” He meant the restaurant. He will open a restaurant. Finishing up the dishes, you set them up on the counter to dry. Then you wipe down the counters and stove. Then you sweep the floor and tie off the trash. Then… but there is nothing left to do. The kitchen is clean, and Kyungsoo is still sitting on a stool. “Do you want to watch a movie?” You ask for lack of a better option. He shakes his head. “You’re alive, and you’ve had a good meal. I can go home happy now.” “I would have been fine on my diet of ice cream.” He sighs but says nothing. As he walks towards the door, he pauses beside you. Your heart races as you meet his eyes. He smiles that sweet heart shaped smile before leaning forward and placing a kiss on your temple. The gesture is simple, one repeated many times throughout your life. A loving gesture from your best friend, until… He whispers goodnight then he’s gone. You stand in your kitchen in the middle of the wreckage of the day’s unveiling. A year ago, you stood in the exact same place, but somehow this wreckage feels less like the devastation after a bomb and more like a construction zone after the grounds been dug up to lay the foundation. As you head to your bedroom, you pass by your calendar and rip off two sheets. February 15th stares at you with the promise of a new beginning and mounds of discount candy.

[stevemoffett]

Pandemics Don’t Get a Cute Pun

Being Afraid

It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve spoken to another person in the flesh. Before that, I had gone for seventeen days. And before that, a week.

The first week of no contact began when I said goodbye-for-now to my co-workers. I decided to wait to go to the grocery store until that first wave of people had passed before I tried going. On my last grocery trip, I had decided to “stock up” in case I had to isolate for a little while, and so, having no idea how disruptive the situation would become, I bought a whopping three boxes of spaghetti and one big jar of sauce.

My all-spaghetti diet ran out by Monday, March 23rd, and I had nothing else edible in the apartment. So, even though it wasn’t cold, I put on my jacket (to limit my skin-to-air exposure), a baseball cap (to stop myself from scratching my head, a nervous habit), and my glasses (I stopped wearing contacts to avoid touching my eyes). By March 23rd, the CDC and WHO had not yet recommended wearing gloves or masks in public. But I already had gloves at home (you never know when you’ll need nitrile gloves), and I had two masks that I had to wear when I was around someone who was immunocompromised earlier this year, so I put one of the masks and a pair of gloves on. Then I drove to the store.

The local store was letting about twenty people in at a time. There was already a line forming, just five minutes past opening. I walked to the end and we all stood waiting about six or so feet apart from one another.

Nobody made conversation. In people-watching moments like these, I associate whatever behavior I see with the general attitude of wherever I am, even if there is no such stereotype: Ah yes, that reserved Texas stoicism I’ve heard so much about.

When I got into the store I pulled out a cart and walked stiffly. The night before, I had gone on the store’s website and written a list of the items I needed, grouping them by what aisle they were in. I was going to snake my way through the store one time, get in line, and leave.

A complicating factor of doing it live was that there were lots of people to avoid. During an ordinary cold season, I usually watch out for people near me who might be sick. If they look like they may possibly be sniffling or flushed, I take a breath, hold it, and let it out through my nose slowly as I pass them. Here in the grocery store, I did this every time I walked past people in the aisles, and for extra protection, I scrunched my eyes shut.

There were signs posted limiting the amount of each product you could buy. No more than four boxes of pasta at once, for example. The pasta shelf was totally cleared out except for whole wheat pasta, so I took four boxes of that. I bought three eight-pound bags of dried pinto beans, a couple of bags of rice (I’d heard that beans and rice together make some kind of magical combination where you can avoid protein deficiencies even if you don’t have any meat), a big bottle of canola oil, butter, four big jars of spaghetti sauce, a bunch of hot sauce, ketchup, tofu, and frozen vegetables. The meat aisle was almost completely picked over—I managed to get two pounds of ground turkey from there, though. I didn’t get any eggs because I enjoy them too much; I knew that it would be better to make a clean break from them until after things got back to normal than to agonize over eating the last of them.

In line, I had an extremely full cart. By contrast, an old man in shorts behind me had about four things in his, and he wasn’t wearing gloves or a mask.

I heard him say, in a very low voice, “Stupid motherfucker.” Maybe he said, “Stupid motherfuckers,” plural, but I felt like it had to be at least be partially directed at me.

The teenager who rang me up seemed relaxed. I felt demographically exposed. Now that I am middle-aged, I am very aware of my interactions with teenagers. If movies are any lesson, there are about six million ways that I can make an encounter with one of them a) awkward, b) creepy, or c) both.

“Have you seen many other insane people dressed like me?” I asked, cringing behind the mask since I had already failed point a).

“Not many,” she replied.

“Well, thanks for being here,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem! I’m getting paid a lot to be here!” She said.

When I got home, I decided to take everything up to my place in multiple trips. Climbing up and down the stairs for each trip, though, I started to sweat. When I came in with the last of the bags, I set them on the floor and took my gloves off. I could feel a bead of sweat dripping down my forehead. If it got past my eyebrow and went into my eye, then maybe some of the virus that had landed on me from contaminated grocery store air would be carried into my eye, and that would be Game Over.

I hurried to the sink, tossing the gloves into the trash and ripping a paper towel off the roll. I crumpled it and pressed the part of the wadded-up towel that hadn’t touched either hand over my closed eye.

As the sweat was wicked away from my eyebrow, I felt my fingers moisten and I thought, Could any germs from my hand travel back through this sweat bridge and into my eye? It was true that I had been wearing gloves, but maybe I hadn’t taken them off carefully enough and I’d touched my wrist, or the outside of one of the gloves, and not noticed. I had also grasped the side of the roll to rip the paper towel off. Had I contaminated the edges of a bunch of sheets farther into the roll, too? Could I even be sure I’d properly bunched the paper towel I was holding to my eye without having touched the eye-facing part?

I decided to text all of this uncertainty in a big run-on paragraph to my brother. He responded, “I think you’re fine.”

After blotting the sweat, I got the bright idea to sanitize the frozen vegetable bags I’d bought before putting them in the freezer by spraying them with bleach. I brought them out to my balcony so that I could spray everything down indiscriminately. I sprayed all the bags, waited a couple of minutes, then started wiping them off with a fresh paper towel.

As I wiped the bags, I noticed that they were not airtight; there was a series of little pinholes all over the bags in what seemed like regular intervals. I assume that this was a design feature of the bags. But I could see that the bleach spray was disappearing into the holes, which meant the cauliflower and broccoli inside were absorbing it.

I realized then that I had inadvertently poisoned all of my vegetables. I tossed them in the garbage and thought again of what the old man behind me in line had said.

Now I had no source of vitamin C. I’d thought that there might be vitamin C in meat, but there is not. You get it mostly from leafy greens, a few fortified foods, and citrus fruits. I checked online and found that if I got zero vitamin C, I had at least four weeks until I got scurvy. This meant that I couldn’t go longer than four weeks before my next grocery trip. It was a relief to know that I had a date where re-stocking was mandatory, because if there wasn’t one, I might have felt overly cautious, enough to start rationing my food so that it lasted as long as humanly possible, and I’d lose an unhealthy amount of weight by cutting my calorie intake down to the minimum 1200 a day.

But without a vitamin C source, that wasn’t necessary. I certainly had enough food to last me for four weeks, as long as I was strict. I wouldn’t be able to have any cheat nights, but I also wouldn’t go hungry.

I sprayed the bleach on the faucet handle and the soap dispenser, and left the non-perishable food—Sriracha sauce, ketchup bottles, mustard, oatmeal, spaghetti sauce, and boxes of spaghetti, all standing upright—out on the floor between my refrigerator and the front door. I’d wait another 72 hours before handling them, and even after that, I would wash them with soap before use (except for the cardboard spaghetti package).

Those first few days were extra paranoid because I knew that it was possible I had already been infected. A few nights, I woke up around 3 to use the bathroom, and as I passed my upward-pointing non-perishables there on the floor, they looked less like food items and more like a bed of nails, or like stalagmites deep in a cave: hostile, and waiting for me to trip.

If I cleared my throat several times within a couple of minutes during the day, I got worried. If I sneezed or felt congestion when I woke up, the anxiety would percolate in the background until the symptom went away. I began sniffing my toothpaste to make sure I could still detect mint, since the news had come that smell loss was a common symptom.

But all of this was a distraction from the real sources of my dread: my parents and sister. My parents are old and my younger sister is frail. Each of them has at least one comorbidity waiting to gang up on them if they were infected. They all live together, and my sister requires enough close monitoring that if one of them gets it, they will all get it.

My father has had a particularly distressing habit that he likes to trot out from time to time over the last decade, but since his stroke, he’s doubled his efforts. What he does is personify the small voice in my mind that prevents me from getting back to sleep at 3 AM.

He called me the other day, just to talk. And mostly, the conversation went as normal: I tore my hair out at his and my mother’s relative (to me) disregard for proper exposure limiting, and he gave me his latest movie or TV show recommendations.

After I tut-tutted over another unnecessary trip somewhere both he and my mother had taken recently, he responded, “Yeah, that’s true, it is a risk. Well, you know, if one of us gets this, then all of us will. And we might all die.”

He let the words hang there until I responded, with as little emotion as possible to show him that he wasn’t winding me up, “Sounds like it’s a good idea to be even more careful, then.”

As I said, he’s made a habit of nihilistic portending for the last ten years. The problem is that I am always trying to banish those thoughts when they’re still merely thoughts, but then he just blurts them out, which makes them real. Does he not understand after almost forty years that no matter how irrational, uninformed, or biased a father’s words can be, they are still taken to heart by the son?

And he says these things, but then he doesn’t change his actions in kind. If he believed that the situation were that serious, wouldn’t he be battening down the hatches instead of making flimsy excuses to go to the grocery store? Does he really need to get that steak because he has a coupon? Does he really have to go there for Kandy Kakes because they’re buy two, get one free? Is it really worth rolling the dice each time?

I did ask him this directly, and he replied, “Well, we have to live.”

He meant “live” figuratively—I knew that they had enough bland food there to last them a long time. I asked him, “So the difference between ‘living’ and ‘not living’ is going to the grocery store?”

The frustrating contradiction is that for a generation so insistent on austerity being the “tough love” that the world requires, my parents sure don’t want to be austere. When I had trouble getting a job just out of undergrad, I was told to “pound the pavement,” carrying my resume with a suit on and applying to places in person, because it would be “more impressive” than applying online. The most frequent criticism of theirs was that people my age are lazy softies who can’t do anything for themselves. My dad, who had been a mechanic in his adolescence, liked to repeat a joke about my and my brother’s lack of mechanical knowledge: “If Steve had a nut, and [my brother] had a bolt, the two of ‘em wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get them together.”

Yet, if anything ever has been, this is the time for austerity: you shouldn’t make any unnecessary trips for indulgent foods. Instead, stick with the bland, nutritious diet that will last a long time, and stay away from public places. You can truly turn the risk almost down to zero that way, by being austere.

I think that my parents (I can’t speak for their entire generation, just them) have two aversions to properly responding to the virus. The first is that hiding inside one’s house is not what courage looks like. Courage is going out and showing the virus that they won’t be cowed so easily! Staying in, by contrast, is living in fear and surrendering. But it’s not true. The virus can’t be “shown” anything because it is a cell-invading machine. It isn’t trying to cow them, or “try” anything at all, for that matter. It is only spreading. It’s also confusing because the other great fear of our time is terrorism, and in cases of terrorism, that is the right attitude to react with.

To explain their second aversion to responding prudently to the virus, I believe that at a certain age, you just feel entitled. If you’ve had a life like most people’s then you’ve had your share of happy times, but you’ve also had your share of awful ones. And at this point, almost seventy years in, you probably think, the painful parts ought to be mostly over. You don’t deserve to be cooped up in the house right when retirement, really the only good part of senior citizenship, is beginning. Therefore, you deserve to be able to go out and do things. Unlike the timid young, you simply don’t have the time to waste inside.

While I can understand both aversions (as well as a younger person is able to, that is), I can still disagree with them. And I can still get extremely angry when my parents show this behavior.

For that reason, I am not without my own nastiness. I’m sure my mother didn’t appreciate the time I said to her on the phone, “I want you to remember you said that when they’re hooking you up to a ventilator,” after she told me she’d gone to the Starbucks drive-thru that morning. I mean, yes, what I said was truly ghoulish, but I said it out of love. And, desperation.

Because the 3 AM nightmare that I have lately is the one where I send my usual text to my mom asking how they’re all doing, and she texts me back, “Well, [my younger sister] woke up with a little fever, but she’s fine, she’s fine…”

*

I hear the horror stories. Funerals that have to be attended via the Zoom app. Final goodbyes said over Skype or FaceTime. People dying at the hospital, all alone. I know that it is naive to hope for this, but I still want to be one of those families that just dodges it entirely, you know? Just completely lucks out.

Even though I know those horror stories I keep reading are a textbook case of selection bias (you don’t hear about the vast majority of cases, where a person gets kind of sick but then recovers and is fine), if I want to do some simple panic math, here are the numbers.

-A reasonable infection rate over the whole US population, based on the R0 value: 50%.

-The chances that if one of the three vulnerable people in my family gets it, all three will end up infected: nearly 100%.

-The chances of them dying, given their ages/comorbidities (I’ll be more optimistic with this statistic): 15%, for each person.

Here are the likelihoods for the optimistic scenarios:

-None of them get it. That’s 50% x 50% x 50%, which equals 12.5%.

-They all get it, but they all survive: ~87.5% x 85% x 85% x 85%, which equals about 53%.

That doesn’t represent complete coverage of the probability space, since there are minor variations in what could happen, like each of them could theoretically be infected from an outside source and then give it to only one of the others. But as an estimation, it covers the most major scenarios decently.

So then, to get the probability of the “bad scenarios,” in which at least one person dies, you take the complementary percentage: 100% - (53% + 12.5%) = 34.5%.

Am I really looking at about a one in three chance that one of my immediate family members will die, to say nothing of my grandmother, sister, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew? Hopefully not. The more time that goes by with them not getting infected, the more information healthcare workers and scientists can get about proper treatment courses and possible new medications. And if we go long enough (over a year) without getting infected, we might be able to be vaccinated.

In addition to the nasty pictures I paint for them over the phone if they don’t properly isolate themselves, I have also tried to exploit the older generation’s defensiveness. With a relish that was all part of the act, I told them that there was an alternate name for the disease floating around online, “The Boomer Remover.”

The other term I’d heard, The Boomer Doomer, I refrained from telling them about. My reasoning was this: while The Boomer Doomer is flippant and insensitive, the word “doom” is still scary. So, the phrase “Boomer Doomer” admits some of the disease’s weight and suggests a small amount of seriousness in the mentality of millennial-and-younger generations. That wasn’t good enough.

No, The Boomer Remover was the one I told them about because in addition to being disrespectful, it is downright adversarial. “The Boomer Remover” sounds like a cleaning product. It casts the virus as part of the young’s artillery in the culture war. And it casts the boomer generation as vermin. The name brings to mind fears that older generations must all share since the beginning of time: you will soon be gone, and your absence will be celebrated. Maybe, I thought, their defensive attitudes could be redirected to something more constructive, like making the effort to keep themselves healthy.

It seemed to do the trick. They were more conscious of avoiding exposure to infection after I said it. I don’t know if they really were persuaded by The Boomer Remover—it’s possible that they just got more information from the news around the same time—but they did cut out more unnecessary trips, which relieved me. Not down to zero, but fewer than before. I still don’t accept the unnecessary trips they take, though, and I spare no opportunity to remind them of that.

Coping, Sub-Optimally

I am lucky in my personal situation. To some extent, I can work from home. I have joined the legions of Zoom users. Keeping rigidly to a telework schedule, I have made sure that my sleep schedule hasn’t changed by more than a half hour, and I still look forward to the weekend, even though I don’t go anywhere Saturday or Sunday. The library is closed, and most of my attendees don’t have the Internet, so I can’t run my book club. I can exercise, but after hearing my downstairs neighbors furiously pound on their ceiling during one of my workouts, I’ve had to figure out how to do silent cardio so I don’t have to run through the neighborhood every other day.

One thing that I’m experiencing seems to be something that a lot of others are, too: an unfortunate confrontation with my previous excuse-making. If I had an hour extra in the day, I used to say, I would cultivate a new skill and get really good at it.

After a reliable isolation routine had been set here in my apartment, I found that I did have an extra hour each day, since I didn’t have to commute. I could wake up a half hour later because I didn’t have to drive to work, and when I stopped working for the day, all I had to do was sign out. I could still exercise, still make dinner, and still unwind before bed, so my post-work day was similar, but I gained one more hour I could use as I pleased. What have I done with it?

I am not a gamer. After about six years of not playing any games at all, I bought myself a Nintendo Switch and the newest Zelda game when I graduated in 2018 as a self-gift. I played Zelda over eighteen months. It’s a long game, but the average time you’d have to spend per day to finish the game with only moderate quest completion over that many months is low.

Playing Zelda was like a being able to eat a filling meal whenever I happened to crave it. In-game, I found the environment to be so pleasant that when people in real life asked me if I’d done any hiking lately, I’d almost respond, “Well, no, but I have done a fair bit of hiking and mountain climbing in Zelda.” If I went a couple of weeks without playing, it would take only a minute or two to remember what I’d been doing when I turned it on again. Overall, it might be the best game I have ever played. And it seems like it would be the perfect game for these times, if I were playing it anew.

But lately, the game-playing I’ve been doing over the past few weeks shows a much different mindset—one I haven’t really experienced since I was an undergrad student.

When I was in college, the adjustment to living away from home took a long time, and as a result, freshman year was sort of a wash. I didn’t do well in my classes, my suitemates were all upperclassmen I couldn’t really relate to, and it was hard to make friends in the huge introductory lectures with no assigned seating. I spent nearly the whole year playing video games in my room every evening, ordering pizza after pizza after pizza.

The game I remember playing most was a first-person shooter called Quake 2. I had tried the original Quake when it came out in 1996, but at that time it was too graphics-intensive for the family computer to run. Now, though, Quake 2 was the cooler-looking game, and my new laptop could have run either one easily, so I got Quake 2.

If I could sum up the highlight of freshman year, 2003, it would be: It is 10 PM. It is Friday night. There is a pizza on my desk, only two slices eaten so far. There is me, twenty-five pounds heavier than I am now. I am listening to Zwan, the short-lived Smashing Pumpkins-led supergroup. Quake 2 is blasting on my laptop. Somewhere far away, my future wife shivers for seemingly no reason.

After freshman year, I made a bunch of friends, and some of them became my closest friends, and from that happy vantage point, freshman year looked even more bleak. I resolved that I wouldn’t play Quake 2 ever again. In fact, I decided that from then on, I would think of the intense urge to game, especially first-person shooter games, as a kind of emotional canary in the coal mine.

But now in 2020, stuck in the relative comfort of my nice apartment and isolated from my family, and with the extra time that isolation was granting me, I started looking online for a new game to play.

My computer is fine but is also nothing impressive, processor-wise, so I can’t run a modern game on it. I felt too intimidated to play one anyway, having been out of the loop for so long. So, I searched for “retro FPS games,” and found a game called Dusk. Dusk, the game’s description said, was made in 2018, but was “meant to look like a shooter from 1996.”

I bought it and did nothing else outside of work except eat, squeeze in workouts, and play the game. It only took four evenings, but I finished it. And after that, the gaming urge from freshman year was fully back.

Similar circumstances, similar results. If I didn’t dig up Quake 2, it was only out of a pitiful sense of pride; re-downloading it would mean that symbolically, I hadn’t changed at all since freshman year. So instead, I bought Quake 1, and I’ve been playing that ever since I finished Dusk.

It turns out that since 1996, there has been an online Quake 1 fan community that regularly cranks out game modifications, so there are literally thousands of user-made levels to play in addition to the original game. And the mod levels are all free, as long as you’ve paid for the original game, which costs only five dollars. As a result, nearly every night after work, exercise, and dinner, I turn on a 24-year-old video game (with a fan-made mod that sleekens those chunky graphics up a little bit) and play it until bedtime.

First, I played through the game at normal difficulty, saving after every tough set of enemies (this practice is called “save scumming,” and is frowned upon in the Quake community). Not wanting to be bogus, after I finished it that way, I immediately started replaying the game, this time on Hard difficulty and only saving one time per level. I haven’t made it through the entire game again this way yet, but I’ve also played a bunch of fan-made levels to see what the tinkerers have come up with in the last couple of decades.

Have you ever been so completely uninterested while listening to someone explain their hobby to you that you felt a little bit guilty, but you also felt bad for the person, for being so lame? That’s how I feel right now, re-reading what I’ve just written. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t one of those I-am-quitting-my-addiction-through-the-healing-power-of-writing entries—in fact, I stopped writing this several times to play Quake, even looking up strategy videos on YouTube when I got stuck—but I acknowledge that this is not a good use of my time.

Right now, I could finally be getting those guitar skill fundamentals I’ve always wanted. I could be (getting closer to) finishing all songs I’ve written, or writing new ones. I could be working on an actual short story, or a novel, or something, to point to as a positive thing that came out of this whole crisis, and yet, all of those roads end up in the same place: worry town.

In another way, my laser-focus on playing a game like Quake makes perfect sense. It is similar to a game I already know how to play—it’s not one of the new shooters my computer couldn’t run and I probably couldn’t understand. And it lacks any need for deep thinking. Your goal in Quake is to get to the other end of the level, and if you could try to kill everything you see on your way there, that would be cool too.

If I were playing Zelda, I’d be all the way inside my head thinking about my family as my character’s horse galloped past waterfalls, sunsets, and windblown grassy fields. But in Quake, I don’t have to keep track of my inventory, my life meter, my resources, experience points, magic spells, stamina, side-quests—anything. If I’m still shooting and moving, I can still win. There’s no time for my mind to wander because there are monsters around every corner. And at the end of the level, nothing needs to be committed to memory.

Is it weird that I can’t remember anything about the actual game Quake 2, which I spent months playing as a freshman, except for how it felt to play it? Well, that, and the sparse game dialogue: some enemies would call you “trespasser” or “intruder” just before they tried to stab or shoot you, and there’s a level about midway into the game where you make your way through an elaborate torture factory and you see your comrades all being sawed to pieces, but the only thing they cry out is “It hurts,” “Let me out,” “Make it stop,” or “Kill me now.”

The time I spent playing Quake 2 and the time I’m now spending playing Quake 1 almost seem like one of those cheesy explanations of wormholes you see in science fiction movies. What’s the shortest way between these two points on this piece of paper? someone asks. A straight line, someone answers, and the person who asked the question shakes their head and folds the paper so the two points meet.

*

Life at thirty-five still feels young—I don’t have that fear of replacement yet. But I do have a new awareness of how dangerous it is to get stuck in a rut. Talking with my family over the phone in the past few weeks, I said that I was afraid that I had become “complacent enough that I could wake up one day and realize that I’m forty-five, with nothing new to show for it.” There are plenty of things I know I’m now too old for, ways of acting, ways of dressing. And my life so far is starting to have a true feeling of accumulation to it. Thinking back on it is like looking down a mountain hiking trail, with confusing turns, switchbacks, and even blind offshoots. Some of it is obscured by the trees, lost from memory. It all seems impressively far. Looking forward again, the mountaintop is still in the distance, but now it looms.

In between the previous paragraph and the one before it, I found out that my high school film teacher, Mr. Truitt, passed away. I had mentioned him in my entry about starting a book club, and in it I’d said that I’d modeled my method of discussion on the one from his film class. I now seriously regret that after all of this time since high school, I never used the very small amount of time it would have taken to tell him how much his class and influence meant to me. And, it is an embarrassing kind of regret—an obnoxious feeling, having taken him so much for granted. I’d always meant to contact him some day, but ordinary life took the foreground, and if I spent twenty minutes thinking of what I would write in a letter to him, I’d forget about it twenty minutes after that.

Just as indecent is my poring over his obituary with the obvious question on my mind that anyone has about any death in the past two months.

If something can be drawn from this entry, I hope it would be this: don’t forget to let people know how much you appreciate them. Life is long, but it never feels long enough. And the absoluteness of death is one of the scariest things about it.

[jimlingss]

The Deli Diaries [10]

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5 || Chapter 6 || Chapter 7 || Chapter 8 || Chapter 9 || Chapter 10 || Chapter 11 [Finale]

➜ Words: 2k

➜ Genres: Fluff & Cuteness, That good ol’ slow burn, Slice of Life

➜ Summary: Working at a grocery store deli is absolutely unbearable (and you’re also perfectly aware of how dramatic you are). But it seems like something, or rather, someone might make the job a bit more manageable.

➜ Warnings: Mundane-ness that might make you bored to death

➜ Notes: FINALLLLLLYYYY!!! and also the finale is next chapter, gonna make it a bit longer and worth the slow burn. enjoy!!!

Life is cooking you one of the worst recipes yet.   It is a terrible concoction to be both sick and working. Every time you speak too loudly, coughs are wheezing from your lungs. Your apron pockets are full of tissues since snot is literally dripping every other minute, but even then, you still have a stuffy nose that makes it hard to breathe. Your voice is thick and nasally, sounding as if you just woke up from a four-hour nap. You’re sneezing as well, covering your mouth and nose with a bent elbow and into your sleeve.   Needless to say, you’re one slimy and gross mess.   But you garner little sympathy from your coworkers and supervisors. They still make you work — the only way to excuse yourself from it was if you broke your damn leg, but even then you wouldn’t be surprised if they got you a chair in front of the sink and told you to wash dishes. But not wanting to taint the company’s clean image and god forbid, spread your cold to customers, they’re making you change your gloves as frequently as possible and you’re forbidden to serve customers.   So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be ill and stuck working an eight-hour shift. Sure, you were trapped stocking the deli shelves of macaroni and washing whatever bowl that needed to be washed. Everyone also treated you like you had the black plague, staying away and repulsed at the sight of you, but at least you were spared from having to deal with irritating and demanding customers.   There’s always a bright side...right?   “Woah. What happened to you?”   “Thanks.” You push the boy aside, swiping your nametag on the side of the machine and clocking out for the night. “That really helps the situation.”   “Wow, someone’s Miss Grumpy Pants.” The produce boy clocks out as well and follows behind you, waving goodbye to the manager on duty as you both slip out the front door.   “Maybe because you made me sick.” To emphasize your condition, you sniffle and your airways don’t clear with the small effort. You’ve been feeling unwell ever since the Christmas party and he dragged you outside. The little coughs and sneezes have now morphed into your back throat being clogged with mucus and that same mucus dripping from your nostrils.   But now that your dirty apron was stuffed in your bag and you got to wash your hands, you were feeling better. The frigid temperature of the air was also doing wonders to cool down your cheeks, even if it made your eyes more watery.   “Sorry,” Jimin murmurs, peeking at your face, genuinely apologetic.   You sigh, not wanting to blame him or wrongfully redirect the irritation of your sickness onto the poor boy. “It’s okay,” you reassure, “really, it’s not that bad. I didn’t have to serve customers at all today, except for the very end, so that was pretty nice.”   The boy stops in his tracks, making you pause from walking too. “Here. Wait a second.”   He pulls his red plaid scarf from his neck and you put out a hand. “No, it’s okay, Jimin. You don’t have to.”   “Tch!” — Jimin clicks his tongue in annoyance. His eyes are playfully stern, telling you to stay where you are. “It’s cold outside. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll get even worse.” He takes the scarf and carefully wraps it around you three times, tying the end of it. The boy is gentle, eyes half lidded and brows furrowed in concentration, making you stare a bit too hard.   “Thanks.” You dig your nose into the soft fabric. It smells like him, slightly fruity and clinging onto the scent of fresh laundry. You end up mumbling, “I’ll wash it and give it back to you.”   “No. Just keep it. I didn’t get you a Christmas gift anyway.”   You steal a glance at him before looking straight ahead. It’s dark out and cold. Every breath you exhale makes a cloud of condensation. Yet, even with the temperature low, your hand slips out of the warm confines of your jacket pocket without thought. You’re still walking alongside Jimin and he matches your pace, steps synchronized together.   The back of your hand grazes against his. Your skin skims each other’s and with bated breath and calculated moves, Jimin slowly but surely touches your wrist before sliding down to your palm. He timidly snakes his way down before he’s holding your hand, lacing his fingers with yours.   Your cheeks heat up even more and this time, the cold air does nothing to help. “I’m contagious, you know,” you whisper quietly as to not disturb the peace surrounding you both.   “It’s okay.” The corner of his lip twitches, being pulled upwards.   “What if you can get sick too?”   Jimin squeezes your hand. By the second, he becomes more self-assured. “Then we can be sick together.”   All day people have been distancing themselves from you, from your supervisor to even Yuna and Amber. They practically only talked to you from a meter’s distance or poked you with a ten-foot long pole to get you to do something. Everyone was scared that your cold is infectious and you’ve been pushed away, fended off like a snot monster, having no sympathy from the healthy.   But Jimin doesn’t care.   And you realize that you’ve been craving physical contact. Not just from anyone either….   “Don’t I smell bad?” You’re certain that sanitizer and the scent of deli meat is still clinging onto your oily skin that pours of sweat from each of your pores. If you felt disgusting on a regular work day, now it was ten times worse.   “No,” he muses with pouty lips, cheeks puffed out and rounded. “Not really.”   You glance at him. “Really?”   “Really.” The boy smiles as if placating a baby and one word from him has your worries dispelling away. His fingers move slightly against the back of your hand and you find his natural movements comforting. His head tips to the side as he stares at you. “Was work hard today?”   “Not too bad. They didn’t want me to do any customer service or any production, so I basically cleaned, panned, and shelved things. How about you?”   “It was okay. There was a new shipment of apples and grapes and I cut watermelon before packaging them.”   “Does anyone even eat watermelon when it’s this cold out?”   His eyes crinkle into half-moons when he smiles, cute teeth peeking from the seams of his lips. “You’d be surprised.”   “How does it even taste?” You frown, considering that you’ve never tried watermelon during winter before since it’s more of a summer snack. “It’s not really watermelon season.”   “Well, I had some.” His brown irises twinkle of mischief and you know you’ve rubbed off on him in your slightly kleptomaniac ways. “And it was decent. A bit less juicy than normal.”   “I bet.” You lightly scoff and the conversation dies off. From where you are, you can see your house coming up at the end of the block. Your feet begin to slow down and you hope he doesn’t notice. “Hey, Jimin….”   “Hmm?”   Your hands are a bit cold, but you like it when he holds it like this. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. “Are you working this Friday?”   “I am,” he says and immediately, you become dejected, shoulders hunching, eyes falling downwards. But then— “It’s an early shift, so I’m done at three. Why?”   Oh. “I-..uh...have you watched that movie we were talking about?” You smile, approaching it at a more casual angle to lessen the awkwardness that was threatening to barge between you two and just in case you get rejected, you can play this off. “When Spring Meets Autumn. It had pretty okay reviews.”   Jimin smiles. “You want to go?”   “If you want to.” You shrug nonchalantly, wondering if you’re too casual about it. “I mean...I can get us free tickets since I have this voucher from another time and I have no one else to go with and it’ll expire soon. You can invite your friends if you want—”   “No. Just the two of us is fine.” Jimin grins, mouth expanding and pulling into his rosy cheeks once more. “I’m happy to go with you.”   “Oh. Okay. Sounds good.” The pair of you stop in front of your house, lingering right in front of the driveway. Usually, you’d run up to your doorstep and fish out your keys, wave one last time and bolt to the shower so you can strip off your sticky clothes. But today, you still haven’t let go. “It’s a plan then.”   “It’s a date,” Jimin confirms out of the blue. Your mind reels, wondering what he means, but you don’t disagree or make any signs of disapproval. Instead, you’re too focused on the way the yellow glow of the streetlamp casts down its faint light and paints his skin in warm hues.   “Y-yeah, sure.” Your face feels like a literal furnace and it’s not from your cold. “Uh- thanks for the scarf.”   “No problem.” The produce boy smiles again and again, unable to repress it. But he’s made a bit more shy than before. There’s silence where he stares down to the ground, then at your held hands and then traveling up into your eyes, finding it a bit embarrassing that he can’t hide how giddy he’s feeling.   “I should...probably go now…” You hitch a thumb over your shoulder.   Jimin blinks, breaking his gaze away from your eyes. “Y-Yeah. See you tomorrow?”   “Yes. See you.” You finally let go of him, turning around right in time for your grin to spread into your cheeks. You’re struggling to hold down a squeal and you know for a fact that you’ll be kicking your blankets tonight in excitement, marking down Friday several times on your calendar and putting tens of alarms on your phone. Finally. A date with Jimin. Oh god. You’re already freaking out — none of your pillows were going to survive after being screamed into later.   In the meanwhile, Jimin stares at your backside that walks off all too slowly. His mind races. Before it’s too late, he inhales a sharp breath. He takes a step forward. There’s one thing he just has to do, one thing he’s been waiting so long for, one of the things he’s been dreaming about...   “He, deli girl! Wait!”   “What, produce boy?”   You twist around, unable to resist your smile.   And your gasp is smothered. A tiny squeak leaves your throat. You can’t breathe and this time it’s not because of your clogged nose.   Jimin’s leaning down, kissing you. His lips are soft and the scent of the scarf surrounds your entire frame, though it doesn’t come from the cotton fabric anymore. His lips barely graze against yours. It can hardly be defined as a peck with how chaste and delicate, fast and hesitant it is. You don’t even have time to close your eyes or savour how soft it feels to have his mouth on yours before he’s moved away.   Your fingers automatically lift to your lips, surprised and caught off guard. He is left breathless, chest hyperventilating, big eyes locked into yours. Then, the boy blinks and realizes what he’s done. Your heartbeat pounds in your ears and you don’t know what to say.   He’s the one who speaks — “Okay. Goodnight!”   Park Jimin runs away. Like his tail is caught between his legs, he stumbles and books it down the block, feet scrambling and eyes now refusing to look at yours. You watch him, giggles bubbling from you and spilling out into the night from sheer disbelief. More importantly, you catch him jumping up and cutely fist pumping the air, shouting an energetic ‘yes!’.   God. Not even one date and you’re already such a sucker for him.   You dig your nose into his scarf, warming up and surrounding yourself in Jimin again, replaying the little moment over and over again until it feels like his sweetness is rotting your teeth.   It dawns on you that your lips now taste like vanilla chapstick.

[pyrogina]

my keto experience

Intro/TL:DR

As a preface I can report that I lost 17lbs in 30 days while strictly adhering to a keto diet.  I'm a 34 year old canadian woman who works from home as an artist and a huge helping factor for me was the freedom to stay home on the bad days and the ability to purchase fresh meats and vegetables on a weekly basis. This is a really tough diet but if you put the right pieces in place, it might work for you too.  Additionally, I am NOT a dietitian/nutritionist in any way, shape, or form.  Everything posted here is from my own experience and a modicum of research on the net.  Please double-check my facts before you begin this diet for yourself.

Is keto for you?

The first and hardest question to ask yourself about a ketosis diet is, Can I Endure this? And you should not feel any guilt if the answer to that question is no, because this is a very invasive and aggressive diet that will cause you physical pain even if just for a brief amount of time. Similar to vegetarianism, or is extreme cousin, veganism, a keto diet involves cutting out large swaths of the food pyramid to facilitate this diet. This does not mean going hungry, the foods that are removed will be replaced with other foods, only without any (or minimal) artificial or natural sugars. Sugar is just a chemical, which doesn't sound like a huge sacrifice, right? Most adults don't bother adding sugar to anything other than tea or coffee, but sugar is much more deeply rooted in our lives than you may realize.

Carbohydrates can be found in virtually every type of ready-to-serve foods: breads, wraps, pastas, fried snacks, hors d'oeuvre (these are examples of things I ate before this diet). All of these delicious and very satisfying foods have a fiber content and sugar content. You're still allowed to consume these, and I encourage you do so, but make sure to monitor the grams of total carbohydrates you consume that day. During this diet you will only be allowed to consume 20 grams (to 50 grams, depending on your body and personal needs) a day. remember this. Those 20 grams of carbs maybe the difference between you having a normal day and one of the worst days of your life.

Before I chose to begin a keto diet, I had been exercising casually (as before I was sedentary, more details on this later) and consuming about half as many carbohydrates as I had normally done in my life before. During the two years I was living this way, I was able to lose approximately 20lbs (from about 230 to 210).  If you're starting your diet or lifestyle change from scratch, maybe try starting here first.  Its significantly slower (10lbs in nearly a year), but it will not cause any pain or significant inconvenience.

What’s the big deal?/What to eat?

Sugar is a chemical, and more than that, its a drug that your body has been dependent on since you were a wee baby in your mama’s belly.  Sugar makes your brain work and when you mess with your brain’s intake of the all-important-life-sauce it goes into panic mode. In the first 2-3 days (up to 6 if your me!) you will literally, physically go into a state of depression.  Many had described it to me as ‘keto flu’ but as a survivor of 2009s Swine flu, I can most assuredly tell you that keto is much, MUCH worse.

First, my appetite became very finicky (and i'm already a very picky eater).  I had no desire to eat the genuinely tasty keto meals that my boyfriend had lovingly prepared.  I didn't want to draw, and I wasn't even in the mood to play easy video games.  All I felt like doing was crying or sleeping (which I did, for 9 hours in the middle of my 3rd day).  This is why, whenever I speak to someone who’s even moderately interested in this diet to BOOK TIME OFF YOUR JOB!!! It’s inconceivable to me to be forced to face other human beings in this state of physical distress.  You need to pamper yourself while in this state in order to endure it and ensure your success.

There was one more bump in the road around the one-week point but i'm fairly certain it came down to a combination of dehydration and moodiness (period) so perhaps that was an outlier.  Either way, water is the key when you start feeling shitty.  Get yourself a nice BPA-free water bottle that you're comfortable carrying around and keeping full of fresh water.  Once your body is in ketosis (you can check using those little paper sticks you pee on from the drug store, wash your hands!) you will get tired and moody the very instant you become hungry at mealtimes.  Sometimes you don't even feel the familiar hunger pangs from your previous diet and mistake it for just a general bad mood. Always have a sip of water, babes; that’s your brain telling you to hydrate.

Alternatively, after eating a keto meal you still may feel hungry or unsatisfied, even sad (longing for your favourite dessert).  This is where those 20g of carbs come in pretty clutch.  Finding your perfect portion of reward may be impossibly difficult, I can only tell you what made me feel better when I got the cravings.  Blueberries are quite sweet, they have a lot of natural sugar, but a handful of them sufficed as an incredibly sweet treat (some keto dieters have proclaimed that ‘regular things taste much sweeter than before’, I didn't experience this). Minigo/iogo yoghurt cups are fatty and sweet and work as a decent replacement to ice cream (count the carbs!).  On extra tough mornings (in addition to bacon and eggs! Totally keto!) we would split a cavendish oven-fried hashbrown (about 15g; 7.5g split between my partner and I).

There are a surprising amount of natural foods that are not keto, but in careful proportions, can be incorporated into a daily keto diet.  Most every fruit (that I checked) is very sugary but can make for a nice dessert.  Certain vegetables like carrots or potato have too many carbs to be anything more than a boost when you feel shitty. Red onions have a very small amount of carbs (sugar and fibre work together to your benefit!) and server to replace pasta as a side to a nice steak dinner.

On that note, you need fibre to make your BMs move.  Cutting carbs from your life means your number 2’s go bunny mode…. Take a sugar-free metamucil on any day where you have more meat during a meal than other types of food, or the toilet will be a nightmare.

Meals:

Cutting away pastas, breads, and other sides seems like an insane task but with some discipline and creativity, it's quite manageable.  Breakfast didn't change much: eggs any way (sunny side for me, cheddar omelette for my BF) with bacon or sausage. Lunch was some combination of chicken breast and various salads (so many salad dressings are low or no carb! Read the back!). On steak night, we replace noodles with sauteed red onions fried and seasoning.  Snacktime was usually pre-sliced cheddar cheese (go NUTS that shit is A-OK!), unsalted peanuts (other nuts have marginally more carbs, almonds and sunflower are moderate, check what works for you), or small amounts of beef jerky.  Accompany those snacks with a big drink of water, or if you've had enough of that, certain drinks are acceptable like tea or coffee (with sweetner and high fat milk, skim milk is too sugary), diet sodas, sugarfree drink mix (migo, nestea).  Just remember water, water, water.

Is it worth it? Pros/Cons

Cons:

-HURTS LIEK DRUG WITHDRAWL (you're literally coming down from the lifelong chemical addiction of sugar.  It hurts like Trainspotting)

-MEAT (you will be consuming a lot of animal product)

-POOP (even when you have your metamucil, the toilet can take some time)

-SWEETS (the cravings for your favourite yumyums will almost never stop, it takes monk-like discipline)

-BORING (you can't go out and enjoy meals/drinks with friends and family without them or the restaurant making odd or even crappy exceptions.  Keto menu options are slowly becoming popular though)

-TIRED (the first week or two will be very tedious and you won’t have any energy, even your favourite hobbies may seen unfulfilling for a time)

-ALCOHOL (basically none, unless you like vodka and sugarfree mix, you'll get drunk a lot quicker and end up feeling shittier without carbs in your body to process the liquor)

Pros:

-INSTANT RESULTS (in my first week i lost nearly 10lbs, and then two for every subsequent week. note that, just like any diet, there will be bounce-back)

-APPETITE LOSS (once you get into the swing of this, after the 2 week mark, you’ll find you no longer are pained when your hungry and the bigger cravings subside)

-BUDGET (this is a bit of an odd one and may not necessarily reflect your cost benefits.  Before engaging in this diet, my BF and I discovered we were spending too much money on restaurants and leaving the food in the fridge to waste.  This was primarily because we were too lazy to cook.  Getting off our asses and cooking 6 days of the week made an immediate impact on this for us.  If you already do that, this won't apply.  Concurrently, we spent more money at the grocery store ensuring we always had fresh meat and vegetables; this did net us positive)

-REWARDING MEALS (having to stop and think about what it takes to make a tasty and satisfying meal has forced us to look at things in a different way.  Making yourself and your partner a healthy, supremely tasty meal gets those endorphins peaking)

-EXERCISE (Unnecessary! Your choice! Just note that building muscle increases your weight as muscle weights more than fat)

My fave meals:

-Coffee (reluctantly replacing 1tsp of sugar with a fairy-dust sprinkling of sweetner cos i HATE sweetner, its 20-30x stronger than sugar so you only need 1/20th as much)

-Eggs and bacon!!! (sausage sometimes too)

-Garlic grilled chicken with spinach salad (onions, sliced almonds, feta, dressing)

-Steak and red onions (meat rare and onions grilled with seasoning)

-Spicy ground pork tacos (replace the taco/burrito with large boston lettuce leaves, shredded cheddar, green onions, diced tomato, dab of ranch sauce)

-Baked chicken breast stuffed with ricotta and spinach, topped with parmesan

-Slow-cooked pulled pork slathered with sharp cheddar (just eat with a fork!)

-Baked shrimp with garlic butter and parmesan

-Jalapenos stuffed with ricotta, cream cheese and cheddar, then wrapped in a strip of bacon (great late-night snack)

-Even changing the texture of a cheese can change the taste of the meal.  Shredded cheddar adds a salty bite to a lettuce wrap, grated parmesan can trick a baked chicken breast into thinking its breaded.  creamy cheeses can replace other baking sauces entirely.

-Diet pops (make sure its 0 sugar!), and tea/coffees with sweetner are fine, they do contain a lot of sodium though, make sure to drink 1-for-1 with water (meaning: every diet coke or tea you have, accompany it with the same amount of plain water so your body can process it and pee it out).

Variations/Control:

Vitamins: It should be noted that I take a daily multivitamin (C3+D) as I generally don't get enough sun or fruits.  I highly recommend you take these just in general. They help keep skin soft and blemish free (I initially began taking these because of acne on upper arms and it cleared within days).

Activity: As briefly mentioned earlier, I began shifting from sedentary (not moving much, sitting for hours a day) to a more active lifestyle about 2-3 years ago. This entailed a personal regimen of making an attempt at physical activity approximately half the days of the month (period week was generally excluded).  Every other day I would attempt one of the following: walking at least 2km, 15-20m of floor exercises (‘lady push-ups’, sit-ups), 15-20m of time on the indoor bike, or an hour of house related chores (lifting, laundry, cleaning, anything that involves getting sweaty).  In addition to these, yoga is peppered into my lifestyle as frequently as possibly, particularly in the morning before breakfast. On days where i'm unable to exercise, I at least attempt the basic yoga poses to stave off my (no-longer chronic) back pain.

[prettywordsyouleft]

Domestic! Kang Daniel

Thanks so much for this request! I decided to do this a little different from others out there, with more of a focus on what it was like living together, as opposed to all the more cute, boyfriend styled answers I found when I researched this idea.

Morning routine:

Waking up wrapped up in his arms, soft kisses and morning greetings

Not moving right away, content in each other’s arms

Daniel doesn’t like getting up straight away, or at all, and if he could he’d make you stay curled up in bed all day long

In fact if you both don’t have any plans it’s what he’s going to suggest first

But the cats need to be fed, as do you both, and so he’ll help you out of bed, gently kissing you on your head as you go into the bathroom

Both self sufficient enough to get ready in the morning and focus on your own tasks

Daniel usually still eating as you dart about the house looking for lost keys or your bag

Which are always in the same place but you seem to become frazzled with the list of things ahead of you to do in your work day

Goodbye kisses are brief but sweet, the odd occasion Daniel will follow you down to the door to get more in, because he doesn’t want to say goodbye yet

Chores:

You have a roster that you rotate tasks between each day

Daniel doesn’t complain, he likes knowing what he is expected to do

You share the chores evenly, and have no gender roles (ie girls do dishes, boys mow lawns)

You’re very capable of changing your own lightbulb, thanks

Daniel likes seeing you clean, knowing you aren’t afraid to get dirty

For some reason this is attractive to him, as he watches you degrease the oven

For shits and giggles you make him wear an apron sometimes, mostly because he can get messy when cleaning and it makes it harder to get stains out of his clothes

He complained at first, but you knew he actually liked it, especially since you were the one to put it on him

Now he expects you to apron him up every time

Big cleans outs happen once a month since you both are relatively tidy in your living together

Normally always ends in bickering about missing something obvious all this time

You telling Daniel to clean it himself if he wasn’t satisfied with your efforts

Only for you to keep cleaning because you’re angry and what better way to let off steam than scrubbing at the grout on the bathroom tiles

Likes when you make natural cleaners and learned how to make them as well, because he doesn’t want anything toxic near the cats lol priorities

Cooking /Food:

You do grocery shopping together, and you frequent the local markets as often as you can for fresh meat and produce

You cook together as well, each dividing the work load and preparing what you’re in charge of

You taught Daniel a lot of the meals your mother made you as a child and he loves when you cook them for him too

Daniel is very attentive in the kitchen, and loves eating as many meals as he can with you each day

Sometimes makes you a packed lunch for work, and it’s usually set up as you would for a child, lots of heart shaped pieces, and cute faces made with seaweed

Always a note attached telling you to have a great day and to feel energised after eating his food

Enjoys when you cut up pieces of fruit and peel them for him, feeding him them as you laze about the house at night or in the weekend

Lots of dates are held at home because you both like to cook for each other

Habits you’d like to change:

Living with Daniel has been easier on your relationship than hard

But sometimes you wanted to do more than he did

Daniel’s a self proclaimed homebody and you initially thought you were as well

But there’s only so much laying around the house you can do before you feel unproductive

He doesn’t like how you watch the clock and live to utilise all the hours each day to the fullest because it easily stresses you out

Would love it if you slowed down and even tried to throw out the kitchen clock because he noticed how much you referred to it during the day

Errands/Schedule:

Both use an app to store household errands and a monthly calendar on

Made it easier for you both to know what was happening each day

Admittedly you had to train him on this but it didn’t take Daniel long to like the system, if he was out, he could check to see if you needed something for dinner that night, or pick up the dry cleaning

Otherwise you liked to run weekly errands together on Fridays, getting them done before the weekend began

Would usually end in a lunch date at a cute café, which is why you both anticipated Fridays the most each week

Night routine:

After dinner, Daniel likes to relax

It’s when he’s the most attentive to you, happy to run you a bath, and insists on drying your hair for you if you wash it

On the couch cuddling is a non negotiable past 8pm

If you’re stressed its generally time where you both talk about your day and help each other through any hardships

Otherwise you’re both just watching tv lazily

Daniel often falls asleep there and so you have to decide on whether to wake him up or not

Sometimes just getting a blanket, his peaceful state too precious to disturb

Until he wakes you at 2am complaining that you left him again, and waking up without you beside him is the worst

Other times you shake him awake and tell him to go to bed

You always stay up later than him and he dislikes this, wanting you to come to bed with him

Daniel is clingy, especially when he’s sleepy

You’re like his comfort blanket, and he needs contact with you at all times

Most of the time you just grab a book and go to bed with him

Brushing your teeth together and smiling when you each catch the other looking over in the mirror

Unlike the mornings, the bathroom night routine is shared together

Sometimes you apply each other’s skin care and it feels so darn nice to be pampered like that

If Daniel doesn’t fall asleep before you, it’s a perfect time to whisper sweet nothings at each other, falling more in love if it’s even possible at this stage into your relationship

Pets:

Of course you already knew Daniel had two cats before you moved in together

Now you have three, with Daniel trying to find every excuse in the world to bring home more

You’d have a whole house full if he had it his way

You loved animals so it wasn’t a big deal raising your three cats

Quite often they felt like your children and you would discuss them together like that

“Today Ori stood up when I offered her a treat!”

“Oh my goodness really? Aw I missed it, you should have filmed it!”

Admittedly, you got jealous sometimes with how much attention he’d give them

Or how much he’d spoil them

They had the spare room in your apartment as their designated cat room after all

Let’s be real they had free rein of the house and they ruled you both

Daniel was happy to be the one to clean up behind them the most since he was so used to doing it before you came into his world

You both would feed them each, you in the morning and him at night

But overall, the cats were as much a part of your world as Daniel was

Down time:

Happy to do your own tasks or something together

Gym buddies since you complained about getting too out of shape

Movies were usually your go to for a shared activity

Or you know, something more intimate

Otherwise Daniel would spend his time with the cats, content in playing with them

You liked to read a lot

You had gotten him into adult colouring and now it was something you’d do on Sundays, Daniel insisting on de-stressing together before the new week

Again de-stressing could include de-clothing, but we won’t go there in this, heh (check out Different Kisses if you want more of that side to him)

Liked to go on walks at the park with you when the weather was good

Day/overnight excursions happened twice a month, and generally were planned by Daniel

“Why are we going to the mountains?”

“You mentioned how relaxing you’d find a cabin to be, so let’s see if it is.”

You loved these moments, escaping the daily grind of reality for a magical getaway, making more memories and growing further as a couple

Arguments:

You both usually only bickered about small things like most couples do

But when it was more heated you’d give each other the silent treatment

This changed the whole atmosphere and routines in the apartment

You stuck mostly to the living area whilst he would take the cats into their room and stay with them

Until the argument was over it was like you were housemates, not a couple

Though admittedly, because it was so automatic, you couldn’t help but make him a meal by accident, leaving it for him to eat whenever he came out of the cat room

And he would eat it, not wanting your efforts to go to waste

Awkward waiting on each other when using the bathroom, when usually you just barged in on each other without a care

When the argument was resolved, you spent the next week both really involved in each other’s daily schedule and emotions, trying to get your rhythm back to where it had been

Finances:

You each had your own funds and wanted to keep it that way until marriage

But you both paid an amount each pay into a household account that you had opened together before moving in

That way all the communal bills were taken care of

Groceries you always went in halves for as well

Daniel paid more towards the cats, because he claimed them as his own

Though you wouldn’t hesitate to buy them toys, litter, and feed if you were out and they needed them

At first Daniel kept trying to be the one who paid for dates

But you wanted to start paying too, ever since you moved in together

This was something you sometimes bickered over

And probably the only money related argument you ever had

Because you were both pretty dependable and smart about how you used money

After a couple of months living together you opened another joint account to save for your future, with the agreement if something happened you’d split it evenly

But both of you knew that was never going to happen, so you’d always talk about using the money on getting married or buying a house together one day

I hope you enjoyed this! I enjoyed exploring a different aspect to Daniel!

To read further on Daniel may I suggest: Different Kisses | Working Out with Daniel | Boyfriend! Daniel 

______________________

I accept requests on other idols for the Domestic! series whenever my requests are open! To check to see if I’ve written your bias already, go HERE. Otherwise you’re most welcome to send me a MESSAGE to request someone new.

Other Wanna One members in this series: Seongwoo 

[Main Masterlist] | [Request Guidelines]

Thanks for your support!!

[httpdabi]

Hate me, Date me

Word count: 6.8K

Characters: Wonho x OC

Genres: Romance, comedy, smut

Warnings: 18+, rough sex, spanking, choking, anal sex, public sex, daddy kink

Hoseok was always the person I hated the most, but once he accidentally found out what my kinks are, our terms drastically changed.

Arguin was my profession, you tell me one word and I’ll tell you two. It’s like that since I was a child, starting with my parents, but it never ended so well. I was always ending up with a slap from my mother and scream like HOW DARE YOU and then she would scream on my father to scream on me and yeah, ta daaa show time.

But my parents weren’t the problem for me, oh not at all, those were just small family fights. The problems started with high school, when a fresh ignorant new teacher got a job, she was just a perfect preview of a youngster that got a job because of some connections. Well, since math wasn’t my stronger side, I often decided to cheat on exams and it actually went very well until she saw it and yeah, a big fat FAIL happened. I couldn’t keep my words to myself, so I was shooting arguments at her every class and so, guess who failed again and again ?

But not even that was a huge problem for me.

My biggest problem was and will always be, Shin Hoseok.

Maybe you wonder why.. but don’t worry. I’ll explain everything.

My first day in school, I was so happy and excited to start with school, I always thought that school is one beautiful heaven on earth. Yes, stupido from childhood, till today.

From the very first moment I got in the school, my vision of heaven turned to hell, when I saw that the neighbor who was always taking my doll from me, was going to the very same school. Bullying from the very first second, taking my sweets and food away from me, throwing paper balls on me, taking my supplies and so on. Shin Hoseok managed to do all of that. Every break, he bullied me. What made the things even worse was the fact that our parents were actually really good to each other, so it was a win-win situation for him.

Of course we were children, so I shouldn’t mind that. Years passed, things changed. I learned to stand for myself and I learnt how to argue everyone and put everyone, who was irritating me or getting on my way, down. In high school things drastically changed and somehow I was one of the popular girls in there. Not too popular, but everyone knew about me and I actually had a lot of friends.

But some things never change and in this case the so called thing is Hoseok. What I hated the most was that nothing could stop him from doing it, not even my arguments or anything on this world.

Even if everyone was fine with me, Hoseok never stopped bullying me. We didn’t go to the same school back then, but every time he saw me outside he would come to me and bully me, cracking some sick perverted jokes trying to make his friends laugh or something.

BUT, of course we were teenagers, puberty was hitting him hard.

Now, we are university students, my first and his last year. The normal excuse of him being an asshole to me can’t be found.

,, Breakfast is readyyyy’’ I heard my mother screaming, probably thinking that I was asleep, while I was just scrolling down on my instagram. I slowly stood up and made my way downstairs, hoping that she wont brag about how long I sleep, how there is always so much work and no one is helping her at all.

,, Eat fast and go with your father in shop, we need a lot of stuff for tonight’’ my mother said reminding me on the tonight’s bbq they were planning to make. I honestly never cared so much about it because it’s always the same. They always call close friends and mans are outside working on meat and womens are inside gossiping. At the end when the meat is done they would all get inside and eat and drink wine together.

My mother was making a list for me and my father, while I was choking myself with a toast, trying to put the whole toast in my mouth and my father was looking at me in disbelief. When I couldn’t eat anymore, I cleaned everything up and made my way to my room to change fast.

,, Hurry up, we don’t have so much time’’ I heard my dad yelling from the hallway, so I just wore my grey hoodie and put my hair in messy bun. The whole ride was just casual, I was trying to hit high notes and my father was rolling his eyes every second.

Shop wasn’t so far away from our home, so my solo concert didn’t last so long sadly.

,, You can grab the snacks and fruits and I will go buy the meat and drinks. ‘’ my father said and I nodded my head in agreement.

,, Good morning Mr. Park, hey Miryo’’ I heard the very familiar voice coming from some direction making me shiver immediately. My blood was boiling, he was acting so nice in front of my father.

,, Oh hey Hoseok, what brings you so early here ?’’ my father asked him friendly since he doesn’t see Hoseok in grocery shopping so oft, while I only ignored him

,, My mother needs some stuff for lunch, so she sent me early to buy it all’’ he said and smiled lightly.

,, Okay, tell them to be at our place before everyone else arrives.’’ My father said and smiled back at Hoseok.

,, Of course, see ya later Mr. Park. Bye’’ he said and made his way to pasta section leaving me and my father alone there. Of course they will be there, our first and best neighbors.

,, I don’t understand why do you hate this guy. Such a nice kid’’ my father said shaking his head and he made his way to buy the meat.

I stood there totally pissed off, wanting to go there to him and break his fucking neck. But somehow I managed to calm down and I just went to pick the snacks for tonight. Most of the time I was picking snacks for myself, because I planned to make a movie night. Then I took some snacks that were on list.

,, Oww’’ I yelped in pain and surprise when something hit my head. I turned around and saw Hoseok laughing at me. That fucker just threw a fucking pack of backing powder on me.

I just ignored him and made my way to fruits, I didn’t want to make any scene while my father was still somewhere in the store.

,, Do you want to tickle my pickle ?’’I heard his deep voice once again, only this time extremely close to my ear. I turned around and pushed him away, while he just started to laugh out loud with a cucumber in his hand.

,, Or you rather want to have my seeds?’’ he said taking the sunflower seeds in his hand.

,, You are so fucking disgusting’’ I said putting some bananas in my bag. He started to laugh once again, I don’t know how did I manage to stay calm and not to take that freaking cucumber and choke him with it.

Hoseok was trying to make some more jokes, but I just ignored him and found my father before we went and paid our stuf. Once again, Hoseok greeted us and waved us goodbye and then we separated our ways.

My father noticed how pissed off I was, so he just let me be.

I didn’t have to do much about the bbq, usually my parents spend time preparing the meat and salad and everything, my work is only to bring the plates and bread outside. After that, I just eat and let them be. I mean, what else do I have to do ? Chit chat with my parent’s friends ? hell to the no.

What I hate the most is when some of their friends brings their child and I have to babysit them. I HATE IT and then the child is jumping on my head wanting to do something and play

Shut up and paint on the paper I gave you

What do they think that I am a toy industry ? ugh

When they all arrived, I wasn’t surprised to see that Hoseok wasn’t there, he usually says he’ll come if my parents ask and then he uses some lame ass excuse, but I like it that way. I don’t need him around eating my food and being annoying as always

I made sure I was full, I told my mother that I’m going inside and that she can call me if someone needs something. So, before going to my room I went in kitchen to get some water, I put some cucumbers, lemons, lime and mint leaves in my water thinking it was fancy to take a photo and post it on insta. Yes, I’m that kind of freak

Taking some snacks I went upstairs and lied down on my bed, looking for some movie on Netflix. It was always hard to find something since I almost watched everything good there. But most of the time, I just let some movie play in the background and then I am on my phone.

Since I didn’t have anything to do, I turned on my laptop and started surfing on my tumblr. Tumblr and twitter were like my two secret worlds. One for fangirling and another one for all my kinks.

I lied down on my stomach and started looking for some smut on tumblr, it was a long time since I found some good smut and it was about time for me to find one.

,, Mom, I think I told you about knocking before getting in’’ I said closing my laptop without turning it off.

,, You got a fucking salad in your water’’

I turned around and saw Hoseok standing there with his arms crossed on his chest. He was half smirking and just in second my mood changed, from calmed down I felt like I could jump and slap this bitch in half.

,, The fuck you doing here?’’ I hissed as I sat on my bed.

,, Your mother told me to come here’’ He said not moving a inch or changing his expression.

,, Why did you even come?’’ I said as I stood up.

,, Your parents invited me, remember?’’ he said as he sat on my bed comfortably.

,, I think that you know very well that you are not welcome here, especially here in my room. ‘’ I said standing up.

,, Just get lost’’ I said pointing on the door. Hoseok was about to say something but then I heard my mother calling my name.

,, I’m not done’’ I said and I made my way downstairs.

,, Did you ask Hoseok what will he drink ? Bring some snacks upstairs’’ My mom said nicely. I never understood how could they like a person who is bullying their daughter ? They were seriously sucking his act up, believing that it’s his random behavior.

I nodded my head lying and went back to get him finally out of my room somehow. At my surprise I found Hoseok lying on my bed with my laptop on his lap.

,, What are you doing ? Give me that ‘’ I screamed on him and grabbed my laptop from him. Hoseok looked unbothered, only having a smirk on his face.

,, How did you get in?’’ I hissed on him when I realized that he was literally scrolling on my tumblr.

,, You didn’t even turn off your laptop, you dumbass’’ he said as he made himself comfortable on my bed. Just for a second I prayed that he didn’t find anything on my tumblr.

,, So, Netflix and chill?’’ he asked me and he placed his hands under his head.

,, Try again’’ I hissed.

,, Imax and climax ? Amazon prime and sexy time ?’’ he said with a smirk on his face.

,, More like pornhub and cry yourself to sleep’’ I said and turned off the tv, giving him a sign that he won’t do shit here and that it’s time for him to leave.

,, Come on, don’t be a bad girl, daddy will have to punish you’’ he said and he stood up. I froze when he said that, if he saw that daddy kink shit on my tumblr, how much did he see then ?

,, get out ‘’ I said again seriously, I wanted to burry myself alive, I felt so ashamed. How could I be so reckless and not turn off my laptop whit him in my room.

,, Well anyway, you gotta find yourself another daddy, I already have a girlfriend and she is my world’’ he said nodding his head.

,, This is your fourth ‘world’ in one month, are you building a solar system?’’ I asked him sarcastically.  I was trying to act it cool, like it didn’t bother me that he actually saw it.

,, Anyway, it’ time for you to leave, go to your world’’ I said as I opened the door for him. He just nodded his head and he got out of the room.

,, Don’t wanna interrupt your evening smut time’’ he said before I just closed the door in front of his face.

I felt so lost, I didn’t know what to do all of sudden, Hoseok bullying me wasn’t something I  couldn’t deal with, but now when he knows something I kept as a secret form everyone, it could turn even worse.

Next few days I was trying to avoid Hoseok as much as possible. Of course he didn’t give a shit and every time I would pass by, he would call me some weird names and crack some jokes as usual. But what surprised me, he didn’t crack some daddy jokes in front of everyone and honestly I didn’t expect that. He only sometimes got to me when I was alone to ask me if I found myself a daddy and so.

It was Thursday my parents told me that they bought some cheap tickets for Paris and that I will be alone few days, and honestly I couldn’t hide how happy I was. Not that my parents bother me, but I really liked having freedom and whole house for myself.

I was planning to be lazy on Friday, just to ready fanfictions and so, but of course my best friend Daehyun had some other plans for me. She wanted us to go on some house party, but how she explained, it won’t really be a house party, only few people. So in short, a small house party.

Honestly, I didn’t want to go at all, but looking at her so disappointed and sad, not willing to go alone changed my mind.

I didn’t want to wear anything special, so I wore my black skirt, pastel pink shirt and I took one simple choker.

On our way to the house, Daehyun told me that there will be some people I know and of course her long time crush Jooheon will also be there.

And she was right, I did know almost everyone there and even tho I expected a boring night, I actually had fun, we were drinking and joking all the time and since there weren’t so many people, the atmosphere was really cool.

,, Hoseok my man’’ Hyungwon yelled jumping form his place.

,, Oh, oh, look what we got here’’ I heard Hoseok saying and I knew immediately that he was talking to me.

,, You again’’ I said already annoyed by his present.

,, you attract what you fear’’ Hoseok said as he sat on the sofa beside Shownu.

,, Well, I’m so scared of 10 Billion €, but I don’t see them anywhere around’’ I said and Daehyun slapped my arm lightly while holding back her laughter, hoping I will stop arguing with Hoseok. I didn’t want to ruin the night so I just ignored his reply and continued drinking.

I didn’t have any plan in getting drunk, but me and Hyungwon were drinking way too fast and in very short time we were getting tipsy.

,, We should do something ‘’ Jooheon said as he took a sip of his drink.

,, Why don’t we play 7 minutes in heaven ?’’ Minhyuk said and everyone else cheered. I wasn’t so excited about it, but I also didn’t give a fuck since I was kind of drunk.

Minhyuk took a bottle and started spinning it, the first couple the bottle picked were Haera and Changkyun. They weren’t shy or anything, they immediately stood up and went in another room.

I took a sip from my drink and leaned back in sofa. Hyungwon placed his one arm around me and I could feel him rubbing his hand on my thigh. We were usually so close, so no one didn’t mind us.

After short time, Changkyun and Haera came back and the next couple to go were Daehyun and Jooheon, and of course it ended like that because Minhyup spin the bottle so lightly so it just had to end up on Daehyun.

I could notice that she was a little bit uncomfortable, but not that much to back off. Being honest, I didn’t expect that much will happen in another room, but once they were back, you could definitely see that they had some wild season in there.

,, No way, I’m not doing it’’ I said looking Hoseok directly in eyes. I couldn’t believe that we were the next couple and that no one didn’t want to change a thing even if they all knew that we hate each other.

,, You gotta be drunk off your ass if you think that I’m going to do it with this pompous dickhead’’ I added fast.

,, Of course you are not doing it, you are a coward’’ Hoseok smirked as he stood up, ready to go in another room.

,, Come on, don’t act like that’’ Hyungwon said tapping my ass a little bit as I stood up. Coward? I wasn’t a coward for sure and that dickhead didn’t have any right to hurt my pride.

I took a shot of tequila and made my way toward the room, not saying anything anymore and since I could hear others whistling, I knew that Hoseok followed me immediately.

Just when I was about to turn on the light, I was pushed against the wall and my hands were pinned above my head.

,, You are really playing a game with me ‘’ Hoseok whispered. I knew that his face was really close to mine, because of his breathing.

,, Why ? Did I do something wrong ?’’ I asked, I wanted to push him away, but my pride didn’t let it happen, I wanted to show him that I’m not a coward and that I can also win in this game.

,, You are trying the whole night to embarrass me, plus, letting Hyungwon touch you in front of everyone. Daddy doesn’t like that’’ Hoseok said using my weak spot.

,, I’m sorry daddy’’ I simply said and I could feel that Hoseok was taken aback, he probably thought that I would freak out, but since I was already drunk and I didn’t want to back off and be the coward he called me.

,, Fuck’’ he hissed and just in second I felt his lips on mine. He pushed me up, making me wrap my legs around him and his hands were on my butt squeezing it roughly.

I pulled my head back, leaning it on the wall and Hoseok took that as opportunity and attacked my neck immediately, making me moan quietly.

Hoseok was about to kiss me again but someone was knocking on the door giving us a sign that those 7 minutes are done.

,, Get away from me you freak’’ I said going back to my old self somehow, Hoseok looked at me surprised and he was about to say something but I was already out making my way back to others.

,, And ?’’ Hyungwon asked me wiggling his eyebrows.

,, Nothing’’ I said and sat beside him again, taking one shot of tequila.

,, Nothing ? You went in room without any marks on your neck and now you are having one’’ he said and I almost choked on my drink. I totally forgot that he was kissing my neck. I looked at Hoseok and he just smirked at me.

,, I need some water’’ I said to Hyungwon trying to avoid the topic and honestly I really needed some water, choking on drink strong as tequila isn’t something nice.

,, You and your water’’ Hyungwon said rolling his eyes at me. I could notice that Hoseok’s attention was all on us, not giving a shit who was next to go in the room anymore.

,, I’m a slut for water, an h2hoe if you want’’ I said making Hyungwon laugh a little bit.

,, Go, go, I’ll make you another cocktail, tequila is hitting you way too much’’ Hyungwon said still laughing and I just ignored his comment and went to kitchen to drink some water.

I took one cigarette, giving myself a little bit time away from others. I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened inside the room. Every time I had sex with someone it was vanilla, even tho I always liked kinky stuff, but I never trusted someone so much to ask for more. And there was Hoseok.. we didn’t even do much, it was only a small make out season, but he was so dominant, so rough.

When I was done I made my way back and thanks god Hyungwon was already done with my cocktail. I was already totally drunk and drinking the cocktail he made for me wasn’t such a great idea, but I did it anyway.

,, Are you alright ?’’ Hyungwon asked me when I finished the drink.

,, Si, esta bien’’ I said and lied on the sofa totally done. I didn’t feel like vomiting, but damn galileo was right, the earth is really turning around.

,, You are so drunk’’ Hyungwon said, smiling at me. He looked at Daehyun, but he saw that she was drunk as much as I was, if not even more.

,, Let’s get you home’’ Hyungwon said rubbing my back lightly, I just nodded my head and tried to stand up somehow.

,, I can get her home, we are neighbors anyway.’’ Hoseok said with serious look at his face.

,, I am going home right now anyway, no need to go earlier because of it’’ Hyungwon said with serious look too and honestly I didn’t understand shit, I just wanted to go home.

,, Well I’m going home too, so it’s alright’’ Hoseok said and smiled a little bit.

,, Okay then.’’ Hyungwon said, placing his arm around me helping me walk a little bit.

,, We are leaving then’’ Hoseok said while Hyungwon was helping me wear my nike shoes. We made our way toward Hoseok’s car and Hyungwon opened the door making me sit in the back.

I immediately made myself comfortable and lied down, while Hyungwon was greeting Hoseok. He told me to text him when I arrive and then he closed the door and went to his car.

The ride was weirdly so silent, none of us talked until he hit his brakes.

,,The fuck are you doing ? Who gave you the driving licence ?’’

,, There was some animal on road’’ He simply said before driving normally again.

,, Oh sure, I would also say that’’ I hissed on him.

,, After all why did you stop Hyungwon to drive me home, you are not sober’’ I added being mad without any actual reason.

,, Can’t you just shut up and be grateful? I am nice enough to drive you home and after all Hyungwon is also drunk as fuck, what makes you think he would drive better then me ?’’ he was talking madly fast, I guess I was pissing him off slowly.

,, You think being nice one will make up for all the year you bullied me ?’’ I hissed once again.

,, I’m not bullying you, you just can’t take a joke’’ he said.

,, Guess we don’t have same sense of humor ‘’ I said slowly. I didn’t even realize that Hoseok parked his car somewhere, until he managed somehow to get from front seat to the back.

It happened fast, in just one second Hoseok was hovering over me while I was trying to get away from him.

,, What do you think you are doing ?’’ I yelled at him trying to push him away. But it wasn’t so successful, he took my wrists with his hand and he placed his one leg over mine, stopping all my moves. He was heavy and strong, I wasn’t able to do shit anymore.

,, You are always making it always so hard for me’’ he said and I just gave him one confusing look, honestly I didn’t understand him at all.

,, The way you always fight back makes me like you more and more’’ he said making his grip around my hands stronger.

,, I tried billion times talking normally with you, but you always pushed me away. Your answers makes you bigger bully then me’’ he said and smirked.

,, You never tried to talk to me normally, all you ever did was just trying to embarrass me and make fun of me.’’ I said trying to calm myself a little bit, but it was so hard with him over me.

,, Because you always saw me like I was nothing, like I’m some piece of shit. That was the only way you kept your attention on me and pay you back ‘’

,, Because you are piece of shit’’ I hissed and all of sudden Hoseok’s hand was grabbing my hair and pulling it harshly, making me yelp in pain.

,, See, you are literally asking for it.’’ He said gripping my hair stronger. ,, You’ve been a bad girl the whole time, I think it’s time for daddy to punish you’’ he added.

I would lie if I say that I wasn’t turned on, with him on top of me, being all that dominant, I was probably already wet. Maybe if I was sober, I would push him away, but after he told me that he actually likes me and with him calling himself daddy, it was impossible.

,, Let me show you how much I care about you’’ he said as his let my hair and he slowly placed his thumb on my lips, slowly pulling it down along my bottom lip.

,, Open your mouth babe’’ he said, I don’t know what took over me, alcohol or Hoseok’s dominance, but I did open my mouth making him smirk a little bit. I don’t know what did I expect when he placed two fingers inside my mouth.

,, Suck’’ he simply said, playing with my tongue and it took me a second before I did as I was told. I closed my lips and started sucking his fingers , without breaking the eye contact with him. His smirk was now gone and I could see that his eyes were getting darker. Hoseok’s another hand let go of my wrists and he pulled the part of my hair behind my ear before he started moving his finger in and out of my mouth, literally finger fucking my mouth.

,, Good girl’’ he said as he pulled his fingers out of my mouth.

Hoseok changed his position, allowing me to put my legs around him and then he slowly gave me a small peck on my lips. I thought it was sweet for a second, but then he grabbed my chin making giving me a sign to open my mouth again, then he kissed me roughly, he slipped his tongue inside my mouth and deepened the kiss.

While sucking the air out of me, his hands were all over my body, pushing my shirt up and squeezing my boob with his right hand. I moaned into the kiss and he shortly pulled away smirking, before he attacked my neck.

,, They know whit whom you went home’’ Hoseok breathed while kissing my neck, leaving wet marks on it.

,, So?’’ I moaned, when he pushed my bra up and pinched my nipple roughly.

,, They’ll know now to whom you belong’’ he said while kissing and biting my neck.

,, I don’t care’’ I breathed out while Hoseok was making his way down, kissing my chest, leaving marks all the times.

Hoseok got up, checking me out while breathing heavily. He slowly took my skirt and pushed it up, he placed his hand on my tight and slowly rubbed it one time before his hand made its way toward my clothed pussy.

He slowly started to rub his index finger up and down my clit, while staring at me. I just threw my head back and moaned quietly, wanting more and more.

,, You want daddy to make you feel good ?’’ He asked me, still rubbing my pussy very slow, only this time doing circular moves.

,, Yes daddy’’ I said, holding back my moans.

,, Beg for it babe’’ he said and his fingers stopped moving.

,, Please daddy’’ I begged without hesitation.

,, Good girl’’ he said and he pulled my panties to the side. ,, You are so wet for me’’ he  mumbled, before he spread the wetness all over my core with the help of his fingers before he slammed two fingers inside my core, moving them fast and rough. He was pulling his fingers out and slamming them harshly back in all over again.

Then he suddenly stopped, making me whine because of the empty feeling. Hoseok didn’t waste any time, he pulled my black panties down and positioned himself between my legs. I could feel his hot breath and then without any word or warning, he pressed his tongue against my slit, licking it and sucking it aggressively.

I moaned loudly and grabbed his head as he gave my core one long and pleasurable lick. Hoseok’s one hand reached for my breast, squeezing it roughly while his tongue continued to pleasure me.

I let out a loud moan when he suddenly inserted his two fingers inside my core again thrusting them faster and deeper then before while his tongue continued flicking my clit. I started moving my hips trying to get more of him, but he placed his hands on my hips stopping me from doing anything.

He curled his finger upwards hitting my g-spot while his tongue continued assaulting on my clit, flicking it fast.

,, I could do this all day’’ Hoseok said adding third finger. He didn’t wait for me to adjust or anything, he immediately started to slam this fingers in and out incredibly fast, curling them sometimes, making me moan loudly.

Hoseok moaned too and the vibrations shoot my body up, cursing through my veins as he sucked harshly on my clit.

,, Oh God’’ I moaned loudly as I released on his tongue. He licked me fast, collecting all my  wetness. He slowly pulled his fingers out and smirked at me while squeezing my thighs as I tried to come to myself after the strong orgasm.

He sat beside me and pulled me up, before giving me one sloppy kiss.

,, Now be a good girl and suck daddy off’’ he said rubbing my neck gently. I didn’t have to pull his pants down, he already did it on his own. His  hand was around his dick, which was painfully hard.

He didn’t need to tell me twice, I positioned myself lower and placed the tip of his dick inside my mouth while he was jerking himself off. He moaned loudly and let go of his dick, letting me do the work.

I took as much as I could, until I felt his tip hit where my throat started. I started bobbing my head up and down, while my hand was pumping the rest of his length that I couldn’t fit easily in my mouth.

Hoseok slowly placed a strand of my hair behind my ear and for a moment I thought that was really cute of him, until he gathered my hair into a ponytail and grabbed a hold of it, pulled it down making me take every inch of his dick in my mouth.

I was literally choking on his dick and he just moaned loudly. He let go of my head for a second, letting me get some air before he placed his hands back and held my head still, while moving his hips up and down, fucking my mouth.

,, Babygirl, you take my dick so well’’  he moaned while thrust in my mouth, making me start to deep throat him. Hoseok was getting louder and then with one deep thrust I could feel thick ropes of cum being shot down my throat

,, Swallow it’’ Hoseok said as he took his length out of my mouth. I nodded my head and did as he told me, then I opened my mouth and pulled my tongue out, showing him that I swallowed it all.

,, Good girl’’ he said slowly patting my head. He pulled me up and lied me down on the back seat, slowly taking of my skirt and telling me to take off my shirt for him.

Once we were completely naked, he hovered over me once again and started rubbing his cock on my pussy, teasing me.

,, Now listen babygril, you can scream and try to push me away as much as you want, but I’m  not stopping.’’ He said while still rubbing his dick over my clit and core.

,, I’m going to fuck you however I want until you pass out. But don’t think that I’ll be done with you, you’ll wake up with my face between your thighs ready to fuck you again and again’’ he said and then he roughly he pushed his whole dick inside me.

Hoseok had absolutely no mercy, he was pounding into me like no one ever before, repeatedly hitting my g-spot. I arched my back and moaned loudly, I couldn’t control my moans at all.

,, Oh God, daddy’’ I moaned while Hoseok was rocking his hips, getting deeper and deeper.

,, You like having daddy’s cock inside ?’’ He asked and he placed his hand around my neck,  squeezing it before thrusting back in me.

,, Yes’’ I cried out somehow, fighting for air as he kept ramming in and out of me at a super fast pace.

,, Tell me, who’s your daddy’’ he commanded as he held my chin tighter while fucking me roughly.

,, You. You are my daddy, Hoseok’’ I breathed out. Hoseok’s fingers grip a little tighter around my neck and I opened my mouth as he pushed himself deep inside me looking into my face.

His moves were getting stronger and deeper and his grip was getting tighter. He didn’t have any mercy at all, I wasn’t even sure if he liked me or if it was some hate fuck, getting out on me for all these years. But I didn’t mind, I loved every bit of it.

Hoseok’s let go of my neck, giving me a chance to breath normally, but he didn’t stop moving fast, he didn’t stop, not even for a second.

,, I’m so close’’ he moaned while his hand got back around my neck. ,, Daddy’s gonna cum inside you’’ he added and that was it, I couldn’t hold it anymore with his hand on my neck and his dick tearing my pussy apart. He didn’t stop fucking me fast until he finally came, then he pulled slowly out of me and pushed it all back in roughly filling my core with his sperm.

We were both breathing heavily trying to come to ourselves. When I was somehow alright, I tried to grab my bra under the seat, but at my surprise Hoseok stopped me.

,, You think I’m done with you?’’ He hissed as he grabbed my hand stopping me. He sat beside me, while I was still lying on my back, breathing heavily.

,, Touch yourself’’ he simply said, his voice was so deep and every time he told me to do something, I did it without thinking twice. He sounded just so dangerous and it turned me on even more.

I slowly started to play with my self, spreading our sperm all over my pussy. Our mixed sperm made me much wetter then I already was and once I started fingering myself there was a sound that obviously drove Hoseok crazy. He was jerking himself off while looking at me, his breathing even heavier then mine.

,, Hands and knees. Now.’’ he said and he stood up. Once I was on all fours, a harsh slap landed on my ass. Hoseok started spanking me, giving me the reasons why I was spanked. For ignoring him, for fighting him back, for flirting with Hyungwon and so on.

,,I love your  ass baby girl’’ Hoseok said while he played with my ass, he was squeezing it, pushing it together, pulling it apart.

,, Daddys dirty little slut, do you want your ass fucked?’’ I felt another smack. ,, You want daddy to fuck your ass?’’ He asked me with a nother smack.

,, Yes daddy, please’’ I said pushing my ass further up into the air and he slapped my ass again, then he pulled my ass cheeks apart and licked up to my hole spreading all the wetness around. I felt like I could cum right there again when he pulled his tongue away and pushed one finger in.

,, Such a tight ass’’ he said slowly adding a second finger, stretching me out a little bit. He pulled his fingers out and once again slapped my ass.

He gave my ass one last smack before slowly pushing his head in.

,, You good babe?’’ he asked making sure I was alright and I just moaned in response, trying to nod my head somehow.

Hoseok pushed the rest of the way in and I didn’t even think it would feel so good. His dick was even three times bigger while being in my ass.

He grabbed ahold of my hips and slowly started to thrust in and out of me. Hoseok didn’t waste any time, he started thrusting into me faster hitting all of the right spots.

,, So tight’’ he moaned before smacking my ass again. I felt his cock twitch inside me and I could tell that he was close. Hoseok reached down in front of me and started to rub tight circles on my clit. I started shaking and my vision started to blur before I felt myself release again. I arched my cack and road out my high.

Few seconds later I felt Hoseok’s hot cum inside of me, he grabbed my hips and pulled deep inside before he released himself inside of me.

We both fall on the back seat, breathless and tired from what just happened. Hoseok changed our positions, making my back rest on his chest and his arms wrapped around me.

,, You feeling ok ?’’ he said as he placed his lips on my shoulder.

,, I feel amazing’’ I said still breathing heavily.

,, Sorry if I was too rough, I just wanted to fulfil your tumblr needs’’ he said and I could feel him smiling. ,, Didn’t know you were into choking, daddy kink and all that’’ he added.

,, Are you not ?’’ I asked surprised.

,, I am, but I was surprised when I found out that you also are’’ he said as he kissed my neck once again.

,, Yeah, I was also surprised when I found out that you like me’’ I said looking at him. ,, You could simply just tell me, you know ? I mean, who does that ? How could I know ?’’ I said making a face at him. Hoseok took my chink gently and placed his lips on mine, making me shut up.

,, You do now’’

I’ll edit it some other time

 time for sleeping now lmao

Requests are open 

love ya all

[pseudonymfox]

Life as we know it (6)

Sebastian Stan x Reader

Summary: As  your best friends passed away due an car accident You and Sebastian Stan become the God Parents and Caregivers of the little Baby.

This Part: You change a few things and learn how to life together that it works for the both of you, Sam shows up again...

Warnings: slowburn, little bit of angst, mostly fluff, jealousy

A/N:Again one day later. Sorry. That is a kinda a filler chapter but hope you like it anyway :)

Masterlist  -  Series Masterlist

<<Previous Part

After Sebastian shut the door behind him, he instantly drove with his motorcycle towards New York. It was always some kind of place for him were he didn’t have a toddler, were you didn’t complained about something, were he wasn’t an actor, just a normal person with an amount of problems. The cold air calmed his nerves and he stopped just as he came near the city. It was some random bridge with a good sight. He took his helmet off and just paced up and down, he didn’t have much of an choice to go. Either he would go in a bar and drink as much as he can or he would go home to you where you would probably start again. Why even did you care about him. He knew it’s his fault that he didn’t looked on the plan, that he didn’t found a babysitter and that you have nothing to do with this. The problem was probably that he saw you know everyday and he has a baby with you. The time flew by but it’s still weird for him to have a family now after he mostly just had his Mom or his friends. After he just stared at the buildings he decided to drive back home and apologize to you and Sophie even if she didn’t really understand most of the stuff that was going on around her.

While Sebastian drove around you sat down on the couch and thought about Allison and how you would call her now and tell her every detail of what is going on but that wasn’t possible anymore. You missed her and Peter, you missed having a best friend and someone you could talk to. Everyone needs a person like this in your life but now she is gone and you are sitting at home with her baby and waiting for Sebastian to come home. He hurt you with saying those things, of course he is right somewhere but Sophie is now his and your baby and yeah it’s kinda fucked up but he has to learn how to live his life with you and her and besides that, you worried that he would have an accident with his stupid bike or that he would go drink something.

If he would do this than he could at least text you but you guessed he wouldn’t do that, he hates you and right now probably everything. As you looked around your house which mostly still was Allison and Peter’s house, where still hung their photos, their memories and all of the other stuff. You just felt like an guest in here. Since you couldn’t talk to Allison or Peter anymore you decided to watch these little films they took to save the memories of Sophie’s life. You saw the video of her wedding were you cried most of the time because you were so happy for them, the pregnancy videos of Allison and just as you started the video were Sophie brought back home for the first time you heard the familiar sound of his motorcycle. You didn’t even expected him at home so soon or at all until tomorrow maybe but you felt relieved as he came to the front door, not drunk and without an accident. He send you a small smile and sat besides you bu he didn’t say anything.

“What are you watching?“ he mumbled resting his arm behind your head on the couch. You hesitated because you didn’t know if he just wanted to forget what happened or thinks that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

“These little videos they made for Sophie.“ He nodded and you pressed play again as you watched together how they brought Sophie who wasn’t bigger as a stuffed bear back then in her new room.

“I think we wanted to paint the room in pink?“ Allison said looking around the still pale room with Sophie in her arms.

“Yeah but I thought that purple looked nice and I painted kind of in last minute“ he chuckled and looked proudly around the room. Peter was always like this, kinda childish and always had his own mind about thing while Allison always wanted to plan everything out. She hated it if anyone destroyed her perfect plans.

“Peter if this is fresh painted Sophie can’t sleep in here! Besides that were are the furniture for her room“ she asked.

“She can sleep with us for some time and I didn’t manage do it in time” he rubbed the back of neck.

“Peter. You wanted to do that months and still didn’t manage to do that?!”

They continued to fight until Peter decided to turn the camera off. You turned to Sebastian who was still looking at the black screen.

“They had their Problems too. We can do this Sebastian, I know it“ you took his hand and he turned to look you straight into your eyes.

“I know but it’s weird...It’s weird to live here and that they are dead and anyway I am sorry (Y/N) for what I said“ he replied and squeezed your hand.

“I am sorry too Seb“ you smiled at him and you reminded in silence for a while until a idea popped into your head. The problem wasn’t Allison and Peters death, Sophie or one of the both of you well maybe a little but the main problem was the house you lived in. It’s always going to be their house but now that you live in here means you can change it like you want to and Seb could have a room since he’s still sleeping on the couch.

“I think we should change the house a little bit“ You spoke up again and looked at Sebastian who furrowed his brows in confusion and asked.

“Like what?“

“Since we live here now, we could change the furniture and take a photos down and..-I dunno maybe even paint a little and we could change one of the rooms that are full with boxes into your room? What do you think?“

He just smirked at you and the next few days you changed the pictures of them into a few of yours, hung the photo from the three of you up, you helped Sebastian to decorate his room and changed a few small things in the living room and your bedroom. It was now finally a place that both of you could really call home. After some convincing you managed to lock his bike away. After two months of managing to get the house the way you like it and a stable plan with the two of you and Sophie you found sadly another perk of living together with Sebastian Stan. The girls you found home every morning in just one of his shirts in the kitchen, not like you and a baby is living with you or that she could at least put some pants. You aren’t jealous of them but you don’t like them either way. Maybe a little jealous but that doesn’t matter. Over this time you texted with Sam too, sometimes even called but nothing more since you were a little caught up with this life. Sophie tried in the last few weeks to take her first steps but she keeps stumbles backwards until one day were you took a bath while Seb watched tv with her downstairs.

“You really like that stuff? Why are you crying if you watch my movies, it’s not fair. Do you-“ he spoke with Sophie who of course couldn’t talk but he liked her smiling or giggle in response too, just as he wanted to continue she stood up from the couch and looked like she was going to take her first steps. He instantly thought of you and shouted from downstairs like the whole neighbourhood could hear it.

“(Y/N)!!!Come down! Sophie is taking her first steps!!!!“ 

“Wait what?“ you shouted back but you began to realise and jumped out of the bathtub, snatched a towel and ran downstairs. You almost fell a few times but you just made it in time in the living room as Sophie fell back on the ground. 

“You missed it..“ he said taking an sad glance at you.

“Did you at least record it?“ you sighed and pointed to the recorder who was besides him.

“You know she will walk again“ he gulped harshly and tried to make it up with his stupid grin which you hated and loved most about him.

“Seb. Really? You have a phone with a camera and there-“ you pointed to the camera.”right there is the recorder“ you said disappointed. He sighed and picked up Sophie from the ground that she stood again. She of course started crying instead of walking. Great you thought. You missed her first steps, what else you gonna miss?

The next week Sophie began to walk again and with that she learned how to run and boy..she ran around the house all day long, she started to try to climb the stairs and other furniture in the house. Seb and you made the house baby save so that she couldn’t hit her head on anything or climb the stairs up. She also ate your self made food for the first time and she loved it. Everything is going well for the first time and you loved it. Today you are going all grocery shopping together and you noticed how almost every girl in this store winked or just stared at Sebastian like piece of meat.

“Ok tell me your secret Seb“ you asked him as he pushed the cart through the aisle.

“What secret?“ he asked curious and stopped walking.

“Why are you always lost?- I mean why are you such an womanizer. I don’t get it. Yeah you’re attractive and famous but that’s it or not?“ you should have thought about what you say, of course he took it wrong.

“You find me attractive?“ he smirked at you.

“That’s not the point“

“I guess they just see what you don’t and besides that I have a cute baby with me“ he pointed to Sophie who giggled non-stop.

“You are using our baby to hook up with girls?” you asked disgusted and thought what’s wrong with these girls who want to have sex with him because he has a cute baby and little charme. Sebastian just shrugged and began to roll into the next aisle where you pumped in with a another cart.

“(Y/N). It’s so nice to see you again!“ Sam said surprised.

“Hey Sam, you too!-“

You continued to chat a little bit while Sebastian just looked at you bored out of mind and asking himself why you even like this guy. He looks really boring and just because he is a doctor doesn’t make it better. Sophie looked just like the way Seb looked to Sam. He started push the cart away since you paid much more attention to this guy.

“What does this guy have, what I don’t? Seriously what does she like about him?” he started mumbling to himself or mostly Sophie. He managed to get the rest of the groceries alone and met you again at the checkout. 

“You done flirting?“ Seb asked annoyed.

“Yup and I have a date tomorrow“ you giggled excited and helped Sebastian with the groceries. You noticed his attitude and of course you didn’t really mind about all the girls he brought home but you couldn’t have a date?

>>Next Part

Feedback appreciated :)

xoxo Sophie

Tags(If you want to be added or removed from the taglist let me know):

(Those with strike through didn’t work sorry)

Life as we know it:

@void-imaginations / @kawaiispacepriincess  / @contagious-smile69 / @butifulsoul125 / @selenasoftly / @cutebaby99 / @alina-barnes /  @emilieklemloenn / @impalatobakerstreet / @pao-prazz / @mimaligrl /   @severuined / @be-amaziing / @ultrasilentwhispers / @kindnesswins / @mkd215 / @torntaltos / @randomwrittenpages

Permanent:

@bitchsike1

(Gif is not mine!Credit belongs to the owner)

[tertiovitae-blog]

— TASK 001. STATISTICS

BASIC INFORMATION.

Full Name: Simon Chun, as far as federal documentation says.

Nickname(s): Sy, if he has any beyond that, he doesn’t know about them.

Age: 32

Date of Birth: September 22nd, 1986

Hometown: New York, NY

Current Location: Dertosa, CA

Ethnicity: Korean

Nationality: American

Gender: Cismale

Pronouns: He/him

Orientation: Purposefully emotionally unavailable tbqh

Religion: Raised under a Presbyterian mother and an apathetic father. Currently swings between atheism and agnosticism: he’d like to believe there’s some higher power but fails to see much evidence for the presence of one - at least in the form most modern religions teach. There’s no proof in Simon’s eyes of a God that’s both powerful and benevolent. 

Political Affiliation: Independent. Mixed liberal and conservative attitudes. 

Occupation: Former assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, MA, current owner of Pulp Kitchen and Pulp Vintage, his side business in the rare book & documents. PV specializes in early editions, maps, signatures from significant persons predating the 21st century, and the ever-popular vintage movie posters, as well as a few specialized items (architectural blueprints, maps, letters) from Dertosa’s history. Only a handful of these precious items he actually displays: in the very back of the store, close to his office and locked behind a delicate metal gate. Walk-in purchases are not welcome, though interested customers may contact Simon through PV’s website or by phone to make an appointment to examine the collection in person.   

Living Arrangements: The second floor of Pulp Kitchen is dedicated to Simon’s living space, accessed through the stairwell connected to his backroom office, which also empties out into the alley behind PK. He likes the simplicity of an all-in-one building (as well as the feeling of security afforded by elevation and insulation from other people and structures). He’s managed a mish-mash aesthetic of spare industrialism and coziness: exposed brick walls and steel beams, a dark floor but the living room popping with a deep goldrod-yellow carpet and anchored on a large, buttery, reddish leather sofa. There’s a knit throw blanket tossed over the back of just about every seating surface that isn’t the chairs at the kitchen island. All doors are sliding and usually left open for the feeling of greater space. The apartment is blessed with the same wall-to-wall windows of the cafe downstairs and Simon enjoys having his morning coffee with a chair pulled up to them to soak in a little sun and watch the street wake up below. There’s a surprising lack of bookshelves considering the man himself, but less surprising considering the abundance of them downstairs. 

Language(s) Spoken: English, Korean (less frequently than he knows he should). 

Accent: Fairly neutral American, a very clear, well-enunciated way of speaking.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.

Face Claim: Steven Yeun

Hair Colour: Black, slightly wavy, usually brushed back or curling over one side of his temple, just a little too short to tuck behind his ears. It tends to not bother him enough that he lets it do what it wants

Eye Colour: Dark brown - call it coffee. 

Height: 5′9

Weight: 145-150 lbs

Build: Closer to slim than wiry or bulked, he pushes himself to stay in shape but he ain’t out to get buff.

Tattoos: N/A

Piercings: N/A

Clothing Style: Man’s got a big spectrum. Take your normal urban book-keep stereotype and add a few more colors and much nicer shoes. Almost always in a collared shirt of some kind, sleeves rolled up above the elbows and leather bracelets on his wrist, or maybe under a well-cut blazer with a discreet watch. You’ll never see Simon in a simple t-shirt if he’s got any choice about it, but at work he’ll range anywhere from this level of fancy jacket to this level of relaxed everything. If he’s going to go casual, it’s definitely in a hoodie with a some kind of weird reference plastered on the front. 

Usual Expression: Neutral and a bit removed, he tends to look ten levels deep in daydreaming even when he’s just sorting shelves or making a cappuccino. There’s pretty clear tells as to whether was he’s thinking is upsetting or pleasant: pinched brows or the smallest upward quirk to his lips.

Distinguishing Characteristics: A rigid scar above his left hip from the struggle three years ago that nearly cost him his life. Simon thanks the bullet scraping his side for giving him the panic-adrenaline to even survive it. A single dimple in his left cheek. Oh -- and we can’t forget the goddamn glasses. He felt like a jackass at first with fake lenses in, but over time he’s learned that they generously contribute to his fulfilling a certain stereotype within this new identity, and he’s now happy to hide behind the thin extra layer of protection granted by longer hair and a useless pair of wire frames. 

HEALTH.

Physical Ailments: None.

Neurological Conditions: His move to Dertosa came with a government-recommended psychologist, though Simon only met with her for a month before dropping out of his appointments with the stubborn belief it was better to take care of himself. There’s a bit of a self-stigma in Simon’s mind regarding mental health: depression and paranoia are emotions from his point of view, not conditions, and he expects himself to manage them like an adult, regardless of whether or not that’s a realistic goal. 

Allergies: Lower level lactose intolerant, but the kind who just pops a lactose pill, says ‘fuck it’, and has his latte anyways.

Sleeping Habits: A pretty solid seven to eight hours a night, in bed before midnight and out before eight 90% of the time. Structure is something Simon actively works for, in the hopes it’ll encourage stability. 

Eating Habits: Somewhat of an accidental vegetarian, his typical diet skirts close, but he lacks the moral rigidity on that particular stance. He’s weak once a really good smell hits his nose, meat be damned. Tries to keep his eating habits as regular as sleep, breakfast is a cup of coffee and any fruit he can grab and take downstairs, lunch is grazed from whatever’s on the menu at PK, dinner thrown together before after seven and before nine, always with some sort of fresh green veg involved. It’s tempting sometimes to revert to old college ramen-and-microwaveables habits, but he’s grudgingly taking care of his body with the full knowledge that the work of cooking is worth pushing him for.

Exercise Habits: Swims laps for an hour and half at the YMCA three times a week and tends to bike or walk for groceries, errands, ect. 

Emotional Stability: Mmmmm, let’s say 6, 7? There’s plenty of emotions tugging at Simon’s sleeve, but he’s simmered down to a more stable center as time has passed and he’s proven to be good for better or for worse at systematically approaching, sorting, and stuffing down what he thinks is useful to acknowledge or not. He purposefully tries to keep away from situations of high emotion, he knows himself well enough to know once he is propelled to extremes, it’s hard to get himself down from them.

Sociability: Simon definitely needs his alone time to refuel and recenter, but he also needs the stimulation of other people or he’d go stircrazy. He keeps an arm’s length, but he’s also too curious about what’s rattling around in other people’s heads to be a true isolationist and can be very warm with the right crowd. It’s a pleasure to have social connections, as long as he can keep the frame of mind that they can only go so far as PK’s front door. 

Body Temperature: Cool-natured, there’s a reason he can get away with wearing suit jackets in summer.

Addictions: Lil bit of a hoarder of sentimental objects. Does not matter is the memory is positive or negative and he doesn’t need to be able to lay eyes on it, just to know it’s within his care.

Drug Use: None.

Alcohol Use: Strictly self-enforced as social. He doesn’t bring booze into his house unless it’s for cooking or a guest. No point in tempting a bad habit.

PERSONALITY.

Label: The Advocate, The Enduring, The Cynical

Positive Traits: driven, educated, perceptive, disciplined, curious, conscientious, discrete, generous, steered by an inner moral code

Negative Traits: dogmatic, detached, stubborn, overly self-reliant, impulsive and bold in matters of principle, deeply buried vulnerability to self-criticism, and the capacity to be truly venomous

Goals/Desires: Stay in his own damn lane while making a life for himself he can actually enjoy. 

Fears: Having to start over again, any form of his past biting him in the ass, having an opportunity to do something just but being rendered unable to because of his situation, forgetting the past.

Hobbies: Cultivating Pulp Vintage’s collection is as much hobby as work, swimming, snapping up new posters for the wall of the cafe, listening to podcasts, reading, handheld puzzles, volunteer work. He hasn’t been back to his self-defense course since his first year in Dertosa but his teacher is slowly attempting to wheedle him back into other classes at the gym. Monthly trips back to Dertosa’s legal indoor gun range to keep himself sharp.

Habits: Cleaning those useless glasses as a way to stall a conversation or action, drumming his fingers, the two-handed mug hold, reading behind the cash register, skimming the paper every day from front to back and impulsively checking the news bar on his phone, covering his mouth with his hand while laughing, doing the lazy half-tuck with a shirt, tapping his foot when he’s jazzed up. 

FAVOURITES.

Weather: Daytime summer rain, that perfect crisp winter day when the air is frosty in his lungs and the ground is coated in snow. Real winter is one of the big things he misses about the Northeast.

Colour(s): Green, blue

Music: He started playing classic jazz/oldies in PK for the sake of that bookshop aesthetic, but he’s gotten genuinely into a lot of it. Nina Simone, Cab Calloway. Longtime listener to The Black Keys, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Vivaldi, Andrés Segovia.

Movies: Clever comedies or character studies, psychological thrillers, old Hollywood experimental movies, all the campiest of 80s horror. ‘Nightcrawler’, ‘the Exorcist’, ‘Metropolis’, ‘In the Mood for Love’. 

Sport: Basketball & fencing. He was a pretty damn good at the latter in high school and he’s entirely self-aware of just how pretentious a thing a boarding school fencing team is to be an alumni of.  

Beverage: Water with a few lime slices, sue him for being boring. Guilty pleasure is those stupidly sweet matcha green tea lattes from Starbucks.

Food: Hit him with that spicy shit. Fuck it up with savory flavors. Finish it with good n’ sweet. There’s definitely love for Korean, but he’s big on Thai and Southwestern cuisine as well. 

Animal: Panther. Just about any big cat, tbh.

FAMILY.

Father: Jeong Yung-sik, aka Howard Jeong. Incarcerated since 2003, age 67. Eligible for release 2249. 

Mother: Jeong Su-jin, aka Sujin Jeong. Deceased as of 2015, aged 56. Official cause of death: craniocerebral ballistic trauma aka a gunshot to the head. 

Sibling(s): Jeong Min-chul, aka Erik Jeong. Deceased as of 2002, aged 16. Official cause of death: exsanguination aka prolonged and fatal blood loss.

Children: None, despite liking kids he doesn’t realistically see a future where it’d be wise to have them. 

Pet(s): His cats Darlene and Mister Meowgi have the run of Pulp Kitchen, the first named after a character from Mr. Robot, the second by an ex-girlfriend. The pun stuck; Simon still can’t bring himself to rename him. He had to give up his boxer, Odin, when he moved to Dertosa and he misses that damn dog every day. 

Family’s Financial Status: Raised very upper class, currently a comfortable upper-middle. Technically, he has none of the money left over from his family’s generous supply, but some of his earnings from his work as an ADA came with him to start him off in Dertosa and fund the opening of Pulp Kitchen.

EXTRA.

Zodiac Sign: Virgo - reliable, practical, critical, seeking goodness while expecting disappointment, prone to overthinking

MBTI: INFJ, ‘The Advocate’ - creative, decisive, perfectionistic, incredibly private, “INFJs have strong beliefs and take the actions that they do not because they are trying to advance themselves, but because they are trying to advance an idea that they truly believe will make the world a better place”.

Enneagram: The heart of Enneagram 8 (the Protector) under a strong shield of Enneagram 5 traits (the Observer) - a conflict between the desire to be confrontational and assertive in issues of justice and protecting the weak and the knowledge that oneself is the person who must be protected first, as well as tendencies towards hoarding and intellectual pursuits. 

Temperament: Melancholic - thoughtful, schedule oriented, economical and perceptive, interested in the philosophical and poetic 

Moral Alignment: Neutral Good - belief in the intrinsic rights of all beings, drive to help the innocent, desire for justice but a willingness to defy the law and do usually immoral things in order to see that justice happens

Primary Vice: Wrath

Primary Virtue: Charity

Element: Water - evolving, inward, empathetic

[kriskebob-blog]

Day 6: Lots of prep, and maybe turning a corner?

EHi friends. I’ve fallen a little behind, whoops. So I left off with Sunday night. If you recall, on Saturday I felt kind of sleepy and beat after hitting the gym but my energy improved as the day went on. Sunday I honestly felt pretty good all day even with the hike and the heat from being out by the pool. 

Monday, though, I woke up and I just felt so clear-headed. I felt focused and just ready to take on the day. The way you wish you felt every day when you wake, you know? And I was going to need the energy, because it was once again going to be a grocery shopping day. Not only that, I had to thoughtfully meal plan for the first time since I’d started this project, e.g. refer to Dr. G’s two-week meal plan and make sure that his suggested meals for each day would more or less work with our schedule. 

It didn’t take nearly as much time as the first time I’d done it, and what’s more, I had a few produce items I wouldn’t need to purchase because I still had enough left over from the week before. I checked out of Big Y with my smallest bill yet. I went to the farmstand and had a <$5 charge for the first time in weeks - all I picked up were an onion, a couple huge carrots, and a new pint of berries. However, I did have an exotic ingredient that was going to warrant another trip to the Asian grocer and/or Whole Foods: I needed dried dulse, aka seaweed flakes that would be added to a miso soup recipe. 

I got home and ate some gumbo for lunch. There was still enough left for more leftovers the next day; that recipe seriously had made a lot. Then it was off to the races to find my dried dulse. This week, I decided to go to the Asian market first, because I figured if they did have the dulse it’d be a lot more reasonably priced there than at Whole Foods. There were quite a few varieties of dried seaweed there, but no dulse flakes. However, I did spot an 8oz bag of dried shiitake mushrooms for only $10.99. 

...

Do you want to know how much I paid at Big Y for a mere friggin’ HALF OUNCE of dried shiitake mushrooms?? Do you??? 

I paid $5.99 for half an once at Big Y for a product I could buy at the Asian food market for less than twice that price and SIXTEEN TIMES the amount. Let my failures be your lesson, friends: go to your local ethnic grocery stores to stock up on pantry items like dried mushrooms, spices, rice, etc! It is SO MUCH CHEAPER than what the same item will cost at a corporate grocery store, and you’re supporting a small local business at the same time. Like literally you can buy tubs of spices like turmeric, cumin, cayenne pepper, etc. etc. for a fraction of the cost you’d pay for a comparable amount at a place like Stop & Shop for Big Y. It’s totally worth the extra errand for any staple ingredient you use often. 

Anywho, I hadn’t found dried dulse but I still emerged feeling triumphant thanks to my renewed supply of dried mushrooms. I use those suckers all the time to make the veggie stock. I headed over to Whole Food’s. It was every bit as crowded as last time. I’m starting to realize that Whole Food’s is probably just literally always super busy, because there’s relatively few stores in our area that offer the amount of specialty cooking products that they do. And, clearly, there’s a rising demand for that kind of thing! Consumers want to cook in more healthful and interesting ways. And I can’t even be upset that I’m continuing to perpetuate Jeff Bezos’ evil empire when my Amazon Prime membership means I can buy two cartons of organic raspberries for $5. I want a Whole Foods on the other side of the CT river ASAP, honestly. Or maybe Sam and I will move in that direction soon enough. We’ve been considering it! 

Ahem, sorry. A lot of deviations today. Somewhere out there every English teacher I’ve ever had is bowing their heads, ashamed of me. So at Whole Foods, I found dried dulse no problem. I also found a product that had eluded me at Big Y and the Asian market - 100% buckwheat soba noodles. All the other brands I’d found until then had been a combination of wheat and buckwheat - but Dr. G had stipulated 100% buckwheat and, as you know, I’m trying to avoid half measures! 

I checked out and headed home. The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about how different this day felt compared to last Wednesday, in spite of how I was running basically all the same errands under similar conditions. Except one condition wasn’t similar at all - the food I’d eaten so far that day. If you remember, when I got home last Wednesday (the last day I’d allowed myself eggs, meat, cheese, sugary snacks, etc.) I was literally so exhausted from my multiple grocery trips that I collapsed onto the couch for a two hour semi-vegetative state in front of the TV. But on this day, I felt calm and clear-eyed the entire time I was running my errands. Sure, it helped that I had a better idea now of where some things were - but not everything. I still had to hunt down unfamiliar ingredients, and while certainly nothing had challenged me so much as the miso, I had still been on the go from pretty much the minute Sam had left early that morning. I’d stopped quickly for lunch but this was typically when I felt an afternoon slump in my energy levels and focus. But I didn’t feel that slump as I headed back into my apartment. Instead, I felt ready and even excited to do some cooking. 

I looked at that night’s recipes. Because I’d be making miso soup, I was going to need veggie broth again - a lot of it. More than I had left over from yesterday’s batch (I’d used a lot of that to make the rice). So for the second time in two days, I was going to need to throw together some veggie stock. I got that going and then took inventory of the recipes coming up. In addition to the miso soup, I was going to be making soba noodles with chopped veggies and an almond butter sauce. One ingredient for the almond butter sauce was “umani sauce,” which of course was a sauce to make in itself. It wasn’t too hard to throw together - more veggie broth (I was literally going through the stuff like water), minced garlic and ginger, a bit of molasses (Dr. G specified “blackstrap molasses” - never heard of it - I just used normal molasses), date sugar, tomato paste, pepper, miso, lemon, and rice vinegar. It made plenty more than I would need for that night’s recipe, but I tasted it and am looking forward to using it in more recipes in the weeks ahead - it’s really tasty.

Behold, umani sauce. 

I figured so long as I was at it getting all this stuff prepped, I would finally make the date syrup I’d been substituting with agave or maple syrup in several recipes so far. This was super easy - I just needed to boil a cup of water and put the dates in to soften for an hour. It got blended at the end with a bit of lemon. Again, not actually hard at all to put together - you just need to have the foresight to do it before you actually need it. 

Ta-da: date syrup. You can see my (terrible) stove in the background with the veggie stock simmering away. 

At this point, I was on a roll. I was still feeling good and buoyed by how much energy I had that day compared to the previous week. So, in spite of how no upcoming recipes called for the “healthy hot sauce” I had wound up not making for the burritos, I still had a couple of bags of habaneros and other red chiles in my fridge. The recipe called for 12 ounces of fresh hot chiles, which is quite a lot of chiles. They were taking up a lot of room in my produce drawer and I wanted them gone, but I wasn’t willing to throw them away... especially not when Dr. G stated that the healthy hot sauce could keep in the fridge for up to six months. I was already on a food prep kick that day - might as well make it. 

Dr. G. advised wearing rubber gloves for prepping the chiles. Great idea in theory, but the only rubber gloves in my apartment are used for cleaning the bathroom, and I wasn’t about to use those on food. So, one by one, with my delicate bare hands, I painstakingly seeded and chopped dozens of habanero peppers and a handful of red hot chiles. This kind of sucked at first (the anxiety that I might accidentally touch my face/eyes is real), but eventually I relaxed and got into the flow of it, and it was satisfying to see the initially giant mound of unchopped peppers gradually go down. They went into a medium-sized saucepan with some water, a chopped onion, and garlic. It simmered for about 20 minutes and then Dr. G said I should let it cool down to room temperature before blending it. Why exactly? Not sure, but I do what the man says (or try). He said to add between 1/2 cup and 1 cup of apple cider vinegar, basically to taste. I started with 1/2 cup and tasted it. And... yup... very hot. It would have to be used very sparingly, but it wasn’t so hot that it was totally inedible, at least by my standards. I wasn’t sure whether or not to add more vinegar. Would that make it hotter? Less hot? More acidic, obviously, but peppers are so acidic already... I wasn’t sure what the true purpose was in terms of taste but felt like more vinegar would dilute the habanero flavor a bit. Maybe? I tried it out and added more vinegar before tasting again. I think it had the effect I wanted in taking back the habanero flavor a little. Who knows. Looking forward to trying it out in the future, even if we wouldn’t be needing it for that night’s meal. Here’s what it looked like:

It was around 4pm by then and a little too early to start dinner. I wandered off to relax for a little while and around 5 I got back at it to prep the miso soup and soba noodles dish. 

I made the almond butter sauce first. Like most things in this cookbook, it was easy so long as you had the ingredients on hand - things like the umani sauce, blended lime, etc. Some garlic, ginger, miso, and red pepper flakes and that was it. I thawed some frozen edamame and chopped some carrot, red bell pepper, and scallion. I actually stopped and read for a little while, because Sam was at the gym and the miso soup looked so quick and easy that I didn’t want it to be ready too soon. Eventually I heated up 5 cups of the veggie broth and added some more edamame to that. Next came a couple handfuls of sliced shiitake mushrooms and scallions. In a separate bowl, I mixed a small amount of hot broth with 1/4 cup of miso - by far the largest amount of miso I’d used at one time yet, but then, it is literally called miso soup. Dad, here’s another shout-out for you - you probably haven’t had miso soup but I think you’d like it! It has a nice salty, mushroomy flavor. This one though was definitely heartier and thicker than the kind you’d be served at an Asian restaurant, mostly thanks to the pureed veg in the broth. When you’re out to eat, miso is mostly a thin broth with a few tiny scallions and mushrooms mixed in here and there, but this was a hearty soup with tons of mushrooms. And then, as is the Dr. G way, you had to add a bunch of greens too - 4 cups of chopped spinach, to be exact. And of course, our friend the dried dulse was added in at the end to get that extra seaweed flavor and nutrition.

Once I knew Sam would be ready to eat soon, I tossed the soba noodles in a separate pot to boil. You then run them under cold water and mix the cooled noodles with the almond butter sauce and chopped veggies. No heating it through - apparently it’s a pasta salad meant to be eaten cold or at room temperature. 

Here’s the finished products:

The verdict? For both of us, the miso soup was our favorite of the two. The soba noodles were decent but I think in the future, I would go for the cheaper (and much easier to find) buckwheat/wheat soba noodles. These 100% buckwheat noodles were particularly chewy and had a stronger flavor than I’m used to from a pasta, it was a little distracting. I’m sure you could get used to it, but eh. The almond butter sauce was decent, although it’s hard to say how much I really liked it when I was a bit distracted by the buckwheat flavor. I think the sauce could’ve used a little more spice but then, I like my food to pack a big flavor punch. The miso soup, though - totally delicious. I probably wouldn’t change a thing if I made it again.

So, a busy Monday of a lot of shopping and prepping food. If it sounds time-consuming and like a lot of work... it is! But a big part of that is just my learning curve with these ingredients and recipes, and also creating my own pantry items that now will hopefully last me for a few weeks or even months (the date syrup, umani sauce, hot sauce etc...). I haven’t minded because this is a hobby and an interest for me, but I can see how it’d be a barrier for the average American working full-time and trying to juggle 4873286 other responsibilities and commitments on top of that. But honestly? This cookbook is designed with ultimate maximum health benefits in mind. Dr. G wrote this thinking of the sort of person who’s been told he probably has 6-12 months left to live due to the progression of their cancer, or the person who’s had to have multiple bypass surgeries due to the advancement of heart disease. That’s why there’s no oil, no added salt, and no store-bought sauces or condiments in this book. But does that mean you couldn’t cook this way yourself? 

I think not at all. This book shows you what the absolute ideal would be - according to Dr. G’s nutritional philosophy, anyhow. There are other big names in nutrition who agree with him but there are others who don’t - a topic to get into more on another day. But if you think you’d be willing to try making a few plant-based meals, or even make a complete switch for a week or two as an “experiment” like I’ve been doing, but the homemade sauces and condiments and milks sound like too much work and you also refuse to give up your EVOO and kosher salt - then don’t! It’d be so easy to adapt these recipes to your own preferences. As I’ve written multiple times, I’ve tried my best to follow Dr. G’s instructions as faithfully as possible just because I’ve been curious about what it’s like to cook that way. If you think all this extra legwork isn’t feasible for you but are curious about the idea of incorporating more whole-food meals into your diet, you can absolutely use these recipes but substitute in your own hot sauce. Your own sweeteners. Your own vegetable stock. Add salt or oil if you want to. Your own pre-made Asian condiments that you know are loaded with salt and sugar. Heck, I’ve done almost all of those myself multiple times already on this journey. At the end of the day, you’re still getting a lot more vegetables and fiber into your diet, and you’re also significantly reducing your carbon footprint for that day - did you know every pound of meat you consume takes several hundred gallons of water to produce? 

The reason why I titled today’s post “turning a corner” is because Monday is the day I first started to really think - Maybe I really do want to live this way. Not just as an experiment. The recipes have been delicious, honestly not that hard to prep (especially if you opt for pre-made condiments!), and I feel more energetic and focused than I’ve felt basically ever - and that’s after only 6 days. How will I be feeling by the end of Day 15? Still remains to be seen, but right now I’m definitely feeling more and more each day like I’m moving in the right direction. I feel like I’m taking control of my health and my life in a way that’s extremely satisfying. 

Oh, and for the record - there won’t really be a Day 7 post, because I had so much leftover food at the end of the day on Monday that there was no need for me to cook yesterday! I’ll still aim to have a blog post up again in the next day, but will just skip ahead to Day 9. 

Happy hump day, friends! See you on the next post. 

Today’s music rec: “American Boy” by Estelle

[simplesnacking-blog]

Eating Healthy on a Budget

Hello hello and welcome back! This week we ar egoing to be diving into one of the biggest concerns when eating healthy! MONEY! This blog is going to talk about more ways to saving money while eating healthy AND what options are actually beneficial to buy organically and which are not. The controversy of whether organic foods are a noticeable difference has been discussed for centuries. We will touch on some of these areas and what products are and aren’t beneficial in buying organically.

When it comes to saving money and eating healthy, these two almost two can very much go hand and hand believe it or not. What was that? How? Everything I buy is so much more expensive when I buy healthy food items at the grocery store! These might be the thoughts going through your head right now... however I am going to tell you a few ways you can save money while knowing exactly what goes into your good. Can you take one of the first guesses yet?!

MAKE YOUR OWN FOOD. Simple. Whether that is cooking your own meals or making your own sauces. There is no genuine way to know what ingredients are in your meals if you are not making it yourself. This does not mean slaving away in the kitchen every night to make fresh made bread and your own almond milk, this simply means high caloric and foods of concern can easily be made in your kitchen with simple ingredients that will ensure you that you’re getting the right ingredients. 

For starters, it is so simple to make your own dips, sauces, salad dressings, condiments, etc. When making these at home there is going to be a serious decrease in sodium and fat intake from these preprocessed alternatives that are sitting on shelves at stores. These items are inexpensive and allow you to be creative with your own style. Likewise, consider making your own soups and spreads for wraps for similar reasons. One of my favorite ways to get started with these easy steps is to make dressings in my “dressing jar” (similar to below) which gives you a few healthy vinaigrettes to steer you in the right direction of trying some new flavors!

 Along with... 

Look for creative ways to add veggies, fruits and alternative grains into your normal food.

Examples:

spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes in your omelet

lettuce wraps instead of tortillas

quinoa with peppers and onions instead of rice with soy sauce and olive oil

Simple things to incorporate more vegetables are so cost savvy! Most vegetables are inexpensive and are great at filling you up!

Try alternative grains

Mentioned above to try quinoa as an alternative, quinoa is one of the many “super grains” because it has such high protein yet low caloric intake! PLUS, if bought uncooked quinoa has a very long shelf life, is inexpensive, and you can use it in so many different dishes- a savory breakfast, as a pasta dish, or with a light vinagrette mixed with veggies of your choosing. This alternative from traditional white flous products is booming into a HUGE industry because of the immense amount of benefits. 

Grow your own food!

There are so many areas or produce that you can make yourself at home with simple steps! After purchasing foods at the grocery store next time and save your scraps to re grow yourself. 

Produce is often one of the most expensive products that you are purchasing at your grocery visits. Cutting down just a little bit every week can add up and create a nice hobby along the way.

The following foods can regrow after cutting the ends or bottom base off with just water and sunlight. After a few days and noticeable growth these foods can be transported into soil to grow the rest of their potential in just a few short weeks!

Lettuce- romaine, bock choy, cabbage

Celery

Lemongrass

Bean Sprouts

Other examples of easy kitchen scraps to grow are:

Avocado- use toothpicks to suspend over a glass or bowl in direct sunlight, after a root appears plant in soil with about half of the pit above ground

Potatoes- plant the “eyes” facing up in soil for a few weeks

likewise, sweet potatoes

Pineapple- cut tip off and insert in container of water. After a week or so roots will form and you can transplant to potting soil.

Onions- cut the root off and cover lightly in potting soil and keep in sunny area.

These are just a few of the simple and easy ways to make your food from scraps at home!

As heard very often, plan.

Planning is the number one way to be able to stick to a healthy routine and schedule. It is essential to plan ahead considering your schedule and time available to make sure you have healthy options to keep you satisfied throughout the day. Before doing so, scan the fridge before making your meal plan list. See what options were thrown in the back and forgotten about to potentially use from your upcoming meals this week. Using food before it goes bad will be less wasteful and give you a unique set of meals weekly. Bottom line is to plan out your meals and snacks for the week and make a grocery list. Only buy what you know you’re going to buy! If you know you hate kale and actually won’t eat it, don’t buy it! This plan and prep will help you stick to your schedule and feel good about yourself when you do. 

Going along with how to eat healthy while on a budget, I am going to move into what foods to actually spend the money on with organic produce. Knowing what organic fruits and vegetables you can buy while still on your budget can be good to know for your next grocery store visit. 

Overall, I am going to cover what to spend your money on and what to skip. First, I will define what organic is so we are all on the same page. Organic is defined as growing a product without the use of any chemicals, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, genetically modified organisms, radiation, etc. Specifically, I will be talking about produce today because meat and other areas of organic is a whole other story!

Foods to buy organic

Leafy greens- romaine, spinach, collard greens

Have a lot of surface area for toxins to stick to

Heavily sprayed with toxins and pests

Berries- blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries

Eat the whole fruit- skin susceptible to a lot of pesticides

Apples- if peeled, okay to not buy organic

White potatoes- if peeled, okay to not buy organic 

Red, Yellow, and Green peppers

Celery

Tomatoes

Cucumbers

Peaches

Pears

Cherries

Foods not needed to buy organic 

Asparagus, onions, and cabbage- don’t require much spraying of pesticides to grow 

Broccoli and Cauliflower

Melons- honey dew, cantaloupe, and watermolon- thick skin= harder to get affected 

Avocadoes, bannanas, pineapple, eggplant- thick skin which are most often removed before consuming

Kiwi, grapefruit, mangoes

Carrots

Mushrooms

Oranges

Papaya

Brussel sprouts

Sweet potatoes

Most often when you’re peeling something or it has a hard and thick surface there is a high chance that you will be fine with consuming it conventionally and not organically. The foods listed above are safe to go with conventionally purchased over organically.

How to eat ORGANIC on a budget

Now that we have covered a few ways of how to eat healthy on a budget and which organic foods are worth buying we can look at combining the two. Combining the two, we will look at how to eat organically on a budget!

There are a few staple rules to go by when wanting the organic lifestyle but not wanting to break the bank. Including:

Find organic coupons

Join social media pages

follow coupon sites-- Mambo Sprouts, All Natural Savings, and Organic Dates

Simply Organic, Kroger, Whole Foods, Earth Fare are stores that always have various products with coupons throughout the store

DIY and Plan

Stay organized- plan meals for the week

Budget- weekly/montly

Do it yourself- granola bars, juices, smoothies, etc.

potion and prioritize

Use your freezer

Most often your produce is going to go bad before you can eat it all, especially when you’re living on your own it is hard to shop for one.

Freeze leftovers 

Freeze homemade cookie dough or almond butter for a treat when having a sweet tooth

Buy local and freeze for when in season

Double recipes and make leftovers

Great with soups and stews

Freeze core kitchen staples- breads, cheese, butter, croutons, spinach, fruit

Buy in bulk

Take advantage of BOGO sales

Best foods to buy in bulk- oats, flour, grains, nuts, lentils

Bring measuring cups when buying in bulk to know how much you’re getting for a specific recipe or week and not over spend

Find out what foods in season and buy in bulk- so much cheaper

Buy local

Cheaper most often that food from miles away 

Utilize farmer’s markets

Be the last to leave- throughout the time of the market, farmers will continually reduce their price as it gets closer to closing time

Ask farmers about their practices- pesticides or not?

Listed above are a few of the ways we can combine the ways of eating on a budget while still being able to eat organically and healthy.

Thanks for reading (:

Facebook: @SatisfiedSnacking

Twitter: @simplesnacking

Instagram: @satisfyingsnacking

[winterbuckytho]

The Assassin Who Loved Me (Part 2)

Pair: Stucky

Wordcount: 3841

Plot: AU of CATWS events via prompt supplied by the fabulous jewishcap

Warnings: NSFWish sexual activity mentioned and implied, Violence mentioned and implied

A/N:  I am primarily an erotica & horror writer so in a few weeks I’ll begin reworking and telling the story making it much longer and adding more detail in those elements (Because Winter Soldier being a terrifying insane yet competent murderer when Steve isn’t looking MUST be done)

5

In the SUV, Bucky became more talkative without strangers around, even if he still sounded fuzzy in the brain department.

“I was such an idiot. I’m not gonna mess this up.”

“Mess what up, Buck?” Steve said absentmindedly.

“Us. We were trying to do what normal guys do and make our families proud. I’m blessed so I’m not going to miss my chance to love you the right way.” Bucky said completely determined.

The car went silent for several minutes. Then Steve said, “Never said it out loud, even to myself. I thought I’d just love you from afar and that would be that. I didn’t know you…”

“Felt the same? Like I said, we were idiots. But I remember. I remember how you looked at me sometimes, how your hand would brush mine and our eyes would be drawn to one another’s. I remember what you did on New Year’s of ‘42.”

Steve who had been taking a left accidently jerked the wheel in his surprise but recovered quickly. “You remember?!?!”

“Steve, you said you had something to show me in a pantry then got on your knees and-”

“You never said anything! Do you know how bad I felt about taking advantage of you?!”

“You idiot! I had to act it didn’t happen. We didn’t have time to stop saving the world from Hydra to have dramatic assessments of each other and our relationship, Steve. People needed you to kill Nazis and you needed me to keep you from getting sniped in the back of the head!”

Once again the interior of the SUV fell silent until this time Bucky spoke again.

“Didn’t you hear and feel me that night? Why in the world did you think I didn’t want it? Did you really think I was so drunk I didn’t know what was happening?”

“…The next day when nothing changed I just thought, either you remembered and only let me do it because you didn’t want to make me feel bad about being…or worse you didn’t remember and hadn’t wanted and I just went ahead made you…” Steve answered.

“You think the kiss after was me going along to get along or doing something I didn’t want to?”

“Not now, of course, no.”

“So it’s like I said, we can’t waste what we’ve been given. As far as I know, the future has been pretty weird, what with this arm thing and the glowing thing in that guy’s chest and I don’t know if people still die, I may be the only person who has ever come back from the dead. Of human history, this is probably the first time a dead soldier has returned to his beloved. I would be insane if I just kept the charade going. I’m gonna be true to you if it kills me, if anyone has a problem they can take it up with me anytime.”

6

When they finally settled in a bit Bucky wandered through the house eventually arriving at the fridge where he realized he was the hungrier than he had ever been. But many of the things in there confused him. He went to find Steve who had been digging out some clothes for Bucky so he could have a shower.

“Steve, what’s wrong with this cucumber?”

“That’s not a cucumber. That’s a zucchini.”

“A what? Speaking fake Italian is rude. That goes for other languages too. Why is there a green pepper that is red? How much has food changed, do cows and chickens still look the same?”

“These things aren’t new. They have a better way if food preservation and distribution so more foods are available.”

“We didn’t need more vegetables. We needed to be able to buy them in the first place. We used to only need just a few. Corn, carrots, potatoes, onions, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, garlic. What more do ya need?”

“Nutrients. We grew up barely hanging on. Now more people can afford to eat more diverse foods.”

“If you say so. Another question what’s the thing that looks like a lizard and a pear mixed together?”

“An avocado. It’s a vegetable.”

“Listen, I’m too hungry to even remember what it’s name is, can you show me how to eat something in there?”

“Sure. I can whip you up a snack. Later I’ll make some dinner.”

All things considered, while it was important to Steve to eat well, he chose to feed Bucky some of his leftover steak bomb calzone. Bucky exclaimed loudly the entire time he ate. When Steve told him it was the last four pieces of a 16 piece calzone that had cost $24, Bucky dropped his food on accident and said “What was wrong with it? ”

“Pardon? "Said Steve.

"That much food for $20, there had to be something wrong with it. Were the ingredients going bad when it was made?”

“No. A 5 lb bag of flour at the grocery store is about $3 now. So you can imagine these other things in it are priced similarly.”

“What!? No!”

“Yes. Food is so abundant people have a hard time avoiding stuff that’s no good. Turns out too much sugar is like consuming poison. It can give you health problems that go from rotted teeth to lowered liver function.”

“That’s horrifying. Is there anything that bad in this currently killing me? I’m still gonna finish it, tastes too good not to, but I’m just curious.”

“Worst thing in that is the dough since it’s high in carbs which turn into sugar in your body and arguably the meat and cheese. Also turns out the meat and dairy industry is great for us not but so much for the animals. Old fashion farmers were way more respectful of animals. Now it just a lot of huge companies making money as fast as possible be damned the cruelty to the animals those faster practices are based in.”

Bucky who had once had to kill his own chicken to eat it, could see how that was a problem. Still, that calzone was just sooo good. He had to figure out a way to not feel like a piece of shit the next time he ate something like it in the future.

After Steve showed him how the shower worked, what bottle was soap and what was shampoo, by 9:30 they had eaten then Steve had taken a shower as well and they began to talk about going to bed. They sat on Steve’s couch watching a bit of Laverne and Shirley.

“Listen I’m trying here. I know you didn’t want to hide how we feel anymore so… Would it be weird if you… slept in my bed or are we not at that-” Steve began nervously.

Bucky had turned to steve balled up his fist in the collar of Steve’s sleeveless tank and pulled him forward into a kiss. He didn’t use tongue at first. Steve was in such shock he went entirely still when their lips touched. Bucky wanted to be sure he had read him correctly. When Steve relaxed more then Bucky slipped him some tongue between his lips for a long languid yet heart stopping French kiss. It felt to Steve like they were slowly melding together lips first.

When he was done he said “I think we’re close enough, we’ve shared a blanket and a mattress before. Am I moving too fast for you?”

“NO! Ehem, I mean I just wanted to offer the place that’s most comfortable. It’s not like I wanna get fresh with you.” Steve stammered.

“Well, what if I want you to? What if I’ve wanted you to every time we slept in the same place since we were 15?”

“Huuh!” He gasped as if Buck had just kicked him in the balls. “That explains- uh, OK. My bed is open to you.”

“Are your legs too?” Bucky whispered pulling Steve to meet his lips again.

This time the kiss was filled with pure electricity. Sparks flew mentally emotionally and sexually. Steve whined like a puppy unsure where inside him such a noise came from.

Steve tried to say, “Well I wouldn’t put it so bluntly.” Instead, he made a shuddering groaning sound that ended in a high pitched gasp.

Then he grasped Bucky pulling him onto his lap, arms a sliding down his back pulling each of Buck’s legs around his hips. Bucky locked his ankles behind Steve back, threw his arms around his shoulders and held on for dear life. Then eyes closed, hopelessly blissfully finally lost in Bucky’s embrace, Steve vaulted over the couch and sprinted to his bedroom with Buck in his arms.

Once in his room, he pulled something that looked like a dance move. Dipping Bucky low as he did a roundhouse kick, he hit the door slamming it without letting go of Bucky, completing the turn and slamming Bucky’s back against it. Pressing up against him Steve reached around Buck’s legs and began pushing his sweat pants and boxers down.

                                                            ****

The Asset cried in the middle of the seduction. It hadn’t been planned. It was just a culmination of all the things that had been happening all day coming to a head.

He had planned meticulously every minute detail of his interaction seduction and persuasion of Rogers. Everything he said and did throughout the day had yielded maximum positive effects on the target. Manipulating his own thoughts to induce a panic attack, for instance. Speaking to Rogers of an event that happened between the two no one other than Barnes himself, made evident from his personal journal, knew of. With every pre-calculated response from Rogers, the planned moved inevitably forward.

But all day things had happened which were not planned and derailed The Asset momentarily from his objectives. During the panic attack, he felt and saw things… There had been real pain. Had the personality imprint worked so well he had created false memories of an event he had never even heard of till 3 months ago?

When Rogers spoke to him sometimes words, images, things he thought he didn’t recognize yet somehow did came to his mind. Being small running down the sidewalk in the rain whooping and cheering for the cool blessing breaking up the heat of the day. Fighting? No, dancing. Many people dancing, exuberant and energetic joyful movement. “32557038…”

The final straw had been while he was using his body as a sexual weapon as opposed to a violent one. Rogers working over him, moonlight spilling in through the window with the breeze, a voice inside said clearly undeniably “I’m Home…” It had been confusing. The Asset wondered who was “I”? Doesn’t home mean 'resident address’ or 'shelter’? The Asset had neither of those things. He tried to not react to the confounding event but a physical malfunction occurred and water began leaking from The Asset’s face.

“Oh, no, are you crying? I’m sorry, I-” Steve worried.

The Asset thought fast and tried to tell the first lie that came to mind but first, nothing came and he started to wonder if something was going wrong when words came out. “I’m so…happy. I’m here with you and I’m happy.” Again, he did not understand the usage of “I”

It didn’t matter. No, his mission was almost complete. Two hours after Rogers fell asleep, The Asset awoke, got out of bed and rummaged the house in stealth. He found a gun and a large kitchen knife. He now stood at the foot of his targets bed. He slipped forward in silence. He planned to first blind Rogers then shoot him. If he shot first there was too large a chance Rogers could brave through the pain like no other human could and would have a chance to fight the gun out of the Asset’s hand. If he only slit his jugular Rogers may still retain energy enough to fight to live. So The Asset would stab him in both eyes, incapacitating him with pain, slice his throat and put a bullet in his heart then his head.

He stood beside the bed a long time before he understood he was doing it wrong. He was supposed to act a long time ago. He had walked over here from across the room and when he arrived he was supposed to begin the assault. But he hadn’t for some reason. He had raised the knife over Rogers’ head and now nothing could make him attack.

He thought he wanted to. A failed mission means a lot of punishment and deterrents and he didn’t want that. No, he wanted to complete the mission and go back to the ice, the only place he knew solace from the mad loud terrifying world. He felt nothing stopping his body from moving. He tried and brought the knife down within a millimeter of Rogers right eye. He could not press forward. He realized nothing in the known universe could make him do it. He tried the gun. He pressed it in as close as he could, as close as he dared without waking rogers. The result was the same.

He returned the weapons to their rightful places in the house. he returned to the bedroom and kneeled on the carpet. He looked at Rogers’ face and the longer he looked, the more images and thoughts came to his mind. It became very distressing. For hours he sat, experiencing ideas and feelings, things that had been absent previously, and when he next asked himself who “I” referred he noted with horror he almost knew. Because “I” could never hurt Steve. “I” would always love him and protect him. “I” knew now that Steve and home had been found and would never let them go again.

Unable to stand it any longer he retrieved the gun. he knew what had to be done now.

7

When Steve opened his eyes he looked down the length of his arm, he saw Bucky holding his right hand. With both of his hands.

Bucky was holding Steve’s fingers around a Glock. It was aimed at Bucky’s forehead. He cried silently and said to Steve “Kill me… You have to…”

Steve’s heart leaped into his throat. He fought down his initial fright to stop himself from accidentally shooting and said “Bucky!? No, stop! This is dangerous! Let go of me-”

“Kill meee! "Bucky hissed not raising his voice but still speaking over Steve.

”-you have to let go of me-“ Said Steve trying to pull his hand and the gun away from Bucky.

”-you have to kill me-“ Bucky insisted pressing the gun barrel into the skin of his forehead. His eyes were open but they were blank in a way Steve had no care for. They looked almost dead, like corpses.

"Bucky, what are you doing?! Please, stop, let me-” He said struggling to stop Bucky pressing his finger into the center of the trigger guard with one of his own metal ones. His finger was just a millimeter or two from the trigger and it scared him more than anything.

“-kill me-!!!!” Bucky growled. His stare was losing its sick emptiness, but that was scarier, having him seemingly to getting close to panic with a loaded gun with it’s mother -CHRIST!- fucking safety off right up against his head where, unless he dodged, he would surely take the bullet in the brainpan.

Unable to take Bucky’s misery and fear anymore Steve shouted “Bucky STOP IT NOW!!! Why are you doing this?! What wrong with you?!”

Holding Steve’s hand in a literal death grip Bucky was saying “Can not do this… I won’t kill you… but I can’t stop SHIELD…” never raising his voice yet quieting the room all the same.

“Bucky… SHIELD? Did you think you would kill me? Why would you do that? Let’s just stop for a minute ok? Just tell me what’s wrong, baby, tell how to help you! Were you…did you think you would kill me?”

“Yes. ” He moaned like a person trying to pass a kidney stone. He was looking at Steve in a way no one ever had. Like he wished he couldn’t and that Steve couldn’t see him either.

“Why? I don’t understand. Why are you doing this, what’s happened?”

“No, no, no! Just pull the trigger, Steve, pull and let’s be done, I can’t pretend to be him anymore. God… let you love me like him, it was wrong, so wrong…never…” Was all Bucky would say.

“What are you talking about, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me put the gun dow-”

Bucky’s breathing became erratic and escalated until he shrieked at the top of his lungs. His mouth now opened he presses forward placing the barrel of the gun in his mouth. Looking obscenely as if he were going to give it fellatio like he had done Steve’s cock the night before.

Steve leaped out of the bed and only just barely wrenched Bucky’s hands up and over his head. He pulled dragging Bucky off his knees and pushed him down to the floor on his belly.

Bucky allowed the gun to be wrestled from his fingers. He let Steve restrain him. Steve looked on too stunned and keyed up to do anything else. “Buck, I don’t understand what is happening. Please talk to me, make me understand. I promise you, whatever this is, you don’t have to struggle alone. I will help you, no matter how hard or how long the fight.”

Through his tears, Bucky moaned in despair “….Air frequency attack and low dosage hallucinogens released shortly before hand… Mass hysteria meant to mask the drop. You didn’t see the clear pvc harness at all, didn’t feel me unhook it. It was easy to discard in the chaos. I thought I knew every step like the back of my hand. I trained good. I did good… I just didn’t expect to feel anything, I’m not supposed to feel like this!!” He screamed this last as if he were talking about feeling like he was dying. “I wasn’t "I” until last night. I was and now I can’t go back… I can’t complete the mission and when I go back they are going to hu-h-hurt me, but I won’t hurt you. I’m “I” not him, not Barnes… I lied because they told me to! Now it’s breaking me, knowing how good he would have it, how I can never have it again!“

"Bucky, what are you…Bucky why do you keep saying that? Who is…why do you keep speaking like you aren’t who you are??” Steve asked still holding Bucky down but losing his grip somewhat as he tries to process the things Bucky has just said.

“I told you, because I’m-” His speech breaks off there then for a few minutes though Steve is asking him “What? You’re what?” he doesn’t respond nor blink nor breath.

                                                            ****

With so much pressure in his psyche, something under him broke and Bucky fell momentarily into a pit in his own mind. He falls like he fell off the train that day so very long ago and every memory of every moment returns to him as he’s falling. The images sensation and feelings rush up at him from the dark and every scar he’s had since that fall is now evident to him.

He sees his arm replaced and sees himself trained first like a dog. Naked and starving, scrambling to obey for the smallest comfort or met need. Soon he sleeps, eats, breathes only when he is told to. He is a fast learner. Good doggy, now die inside. Then he is trained like a machine. He is taught to fight his biology, to take control from his own mind and to hand it to them, so they can program him, tell him when to shit or cry, when to fuck or slow his heart rate and play dead. What a good boy. Next he’s trained to be a toy, he learns how to assume identities the way one collects toy cars or figurines. They teach him how to be a whore or a child or a killer. When he plays their party game he plays it well, goes for the high score as Rumlow says.

He remembers every horrible thing, all the killing, destroying, betraying, violating. They program his arm to feel as if he has been flayed for weeks if he tries to disobey in any way no matter how minor. Soon he became one with all of his training, it was the only way to survive, every name crossed out was his only reason for existence. He had no question nor desire, or dream.

Lastly, a mirror becomes visible at the end of this tunnel of tormented memories.

The carefully crafted lenses through which they made him experience himself has cracked, is shattering and has begun to fall away. At first, he saw the image they surrounded him with, the face in the mirror while unwelcome, was familiar, he had seen it sometimes and didn’t like to look too long. Because something, some shadow, lurked behind it and now he could see through the cracks: not a shadow, a man.

Himself.

                                                          ****

Steve shakes Bucky’s limp body, beginning to beg, “No no no, no he’s just come back to me…No no, please God in heaven, no! Bucky! Bucky, baby, you have to breath…say something…Jesus lord, Bucky! Bucky, you have to breath, baby! Please, no, oh God no..!”

He has rolled him onto his back and is attempting to do a medical run down while in full on panic. He tries to listen for Bucky’s heart but he can’t heart it over his own thundering away inside his chest. His breathway isn’t blocked. Steve can see no reason why this is happening. The only thing he can do is breath for him and if it feels to long run to his phone on the other side of the bed to get help.

Steve is doing his best when on the third time of trying chest compression, screaming at Bucky to "Fucking live, breath, Bucky you fucking live!” as if he can intimidate Buck back to life, Bucky’s lips start to move.

Steve leans down and listens to see if he is saying anything Steve can hear.

“It can’t be. It can’t be. It can’t be.” he says over and over so many times on one breath Steve is sure he is still technically not breathing.

Then with absolutely no warning at all Bucky throws Steve through his own bedroom wall. As Steve goes flying backward he witnesses Bucky vault up from the floor, turn on a single toe and dive across the room out of the bedroom window. There is a horrible crunch of metal. Steve struggles to his feet as quickly as he can, runs and look out to see a car smashed nearly flat with a hole in it’s roof in the shape of a hand and no Bucky in sight.

~

Part 3 the end