#ive tried five by now and every single time i cancel and come back to popup riddled sites

[bitchcake]

no streaming services is as good as piracy feels

[writefinch]

Dear Dairy, Pt.1 (cn: noncon, Mm, kidnap, emphasis on *forced* feminization, induced lactation, milking, bondage, drugging, induction of gender dysphoria in a cis guy, things of that nature)

7th July 2018

Cold day today. I dusted off my scarves for the first time this year. Not literally, they'd been vacuum sealed and packed away when the weather turned in October. I threw out the red and yellow knit scarf, something I should have done last year, as it's far too Harry Potter. I was going to pick out the UMIST scarf but that felt a touch dull for the first scarf of the year. In the end I picked out the green silk paisley, which I felt provided a contrast with the pink shirt. I wore them with the second-hand grey Armani that I've yet to have tailored; I haven't yet decided if it's worth the trouble. I'm leaning towards yes, as I received two compliments today, one from Jason's database administrator, a charming and flirtatious--to say nothing of attractive--lady from Perth. We've talked about the possibility of meeting up for drinks at some point, and I'm increasingly inclined to take her up on the offer.

Experiment C2 is adjusting to his newfound freedom since his release last week. It was sad to see him go, and I'll cherish the time we spent together, our first night especially when he violently objected to the idea of servicing me. Oh, how he kicked and fought, clawing at his neck chain, scratching me, biting, swinging wildly. He bloodied my nose rather viciously and left me in no mood for sex that night, to the extent that I almost let him go entirely.

Of course, his demeanor changed altogether after I bagged him. A clear plastic bag over his head, taped around his neck, watching him gasp and writhe for air that isn't there, screaming his silly little head off until he's sure that he's taken his final breath, then tearing a tiny hole over his nostrils. I let him suck in four generous lungfuls of air before I bagged him the second time, and I went through seven bags before allowing him a rest. After that he became such an agreeable and solicitous cocksleeve you'd have thought he was raised in a merchant marine!

Still, he was unsuitable both physiologically and psychologically for the experimental interventions, and I only have so much space in the cellar, so I had to let him go. Some of my social acquaintances are keeping a close eye on him. He's been told that running his mouth will lead to nothing but the cold grave, and I believe he's a bright enough lad to take that to heart.

I'm beginning the search for his replacement tomorrow.

20th July 2018

I've found him! I've found him I've found him, he is everything I've been looking for, he is perfect, it is as if God placed that boy on earth for no other purpose than my need for him. I can barely contain my excitement.

He is an itinerant surf bum, twenty years of age, single, underemployed, estranged from his family. He has flowing blond hair, a few wisps under his chin that can barely be called a beard, deep brown eyes, and a lithe, rangy figure that seems to be slowly growing into the top-heavy carrot-shaped build of a classic surfer. He's been living in town since May, surfing most days, doing temp jobs, lodging in the spare bedroom of a friend of mine.

What a perfect physique! His body is accustomed to being dashed over rocks and whipped by surf, what fun I will have finding and surpassing his tolerances for pain! Oh, to restrict and ration out air to a boy who has trained himself to hold his breath underwater since he was a young teenager, to see those taut muscles stretched over a rack, I cannot wait, I can't wait.

I won't speak or write his name. I now take every action with the foregone conclusion that he is mine, and that he is already Experiment C3. In my mind, he is already in my cellar.

My friend has kindly allowed him to get behind on his rent, and C3 apparently plans to move to Sydney in ten day's time, driving out across the country in his decade-old Ford Ka, surfboard strapped to the roof. When he disappears a few days before that, people will assume he left to avoid paying his rent.

They won't be wrong, in a sense. C3 won't be worrying about rent for a long, long time...

26th July, 2018

It hasn't been an easy choice, and it is in fact a decision I've been struggling with for some time now, but I've decided to let my hair go grey. I'm almost forty for heaven's sake, and I noticed my first grey a year before the financial crisis. Ever since then I've been religious in my application of dye and toner, carefully concealing each and every one of the pale little buggers that pops up, but it's gone from something I'd do after a haircut to something I'm doing twice a week. I won't rush it, I'm going to ease off the dye over the course of the next year or so, but by next July I'll be au naturelle salt and pepper.

Work remains dull but tolerable. I know I'm blessed to be able to do most of my duties from home given my hobbies, but there's a certain sense of removal from everything, as if it's not really a job at all and I'm back at university doing a coursework-intensive compulsory module. On the other hand, I do enjoy going to the office in a way that I did not when I was going there five days a week!

Experiment C3 is screaming his head off again, I think. It's very faint, and I've turned off the air conditioning in the sitting room so I can hear it coming up from below. I suppose I can't blame the boy, given the circumstances. He hasn't seen me since the drugs wore off, and he's in the same configuration I first kept C2 in: his feet are in snowboard boots and locked into clips in the floor, his neck is in a steel collar connected to an eyebolt on the floor by a one-metre chain, his wrists are cuffed and pulled up towards the ceiling by another chain, he has noise-cancelling headphones strapped over his ears blaring white noise, and he's wearing a blindfold snug enough to prevent him from even blinking underneath it.

He's been there for seven hours now, since three in the morning. He can neither stand nor sit nor lie down, he cannot turn around, he cannot see--though it is pitch black in the cellar even if he wasn't blindfolded--he cannot hear his own voice, and I very much doubt he has any idea how he got there.

As I said, I haven't been down to see him properly yet, so I'm monitoring him at a distance via CCTV and also his pulse and blood oxygen readings. I'm keeping him watered through an IV drip and I'm not at all worried about feeding him just yet, though I'm sure he'll be getting hungry given that I emptied out the contents of his guts with an enema while he was still unconscious. I want him properly good and woozy from sleep deprivation before I introduce myself, either forty-eight hours or until his vitals get a tad skiffy, whichever is shorter. By my word, I am not an impatient man!

Of course, given the close monitoring required, I'll only be getting a few more hours sleep than he will. I suspect I'm getting the better half of the deal. Ah, the poor thing just wet himself. He needn't worry, it's all going into the bucket between his feet, and it'll go to good use later.

I've calmed myself down since his capture, for practical reasons as much as anything else, but I am still abuzz with energy. I am already looking forward to writing my next entry!

28th July 2018

I introduced myself to C3 today.

He spent an impressively long time in the stress position before he was unable to push his legs and instead dangled from his wrists, almost twelve hours, at which point I let the wrist rope go slack and allowed him to collapse. To prevent him from sleeping I intermittently blasted him with high pressure cold water whenever his pulse dropped below 100, for about a further four hours until I decided he'd had enough rest and strung his wrists back up.

He lasted five hours that time, so I let his wrists down again and stood sentry with a paintball gun, giving him a good and proper three-round burst whenever he stopped whimpering. Up again, barely an hour, down again, where I pinned him to the floor with wiring from an electric fence, set to deliver low-intensity zaps across his arms and chest whenever it seemed as if sleep was a possibility. He only got a few shocks, I think the first few put him in such a state of alarm that he didn't dare relax enough to be given another.

I strung him up a few more times, sometimes combining the motivators--his quivering thighs made a delightful target for paintballs as he tried to hold them in a crouching squat--until we reached the forty-ninth hour. I then played my recorded introduction tape through his headphones. It was identical to the one I'd played for C1 and C2, which was itself similar to the one recorded for B4 through B9.

Of course, as the deaf and blindfolded boy was crouch-squatting in place hearing my voice tell him that his old life was forfeit, that he was livestock now, that he would be used as a sex slave, that disobedience would only lead to misery, and the details of the hormone treatments he would be on, I was standing in front of him, masturbating.

My timing was impeccable. Just as the last lines of the recording said "if you're wondering when you'll meet me, I'm right in front of you," I came all over his whorish face. I'm afraid I'm no Peter North, I've no more than four spurts and the first one is always rather watery, but I nailed him right between the lips with one burst and smeared the rest over his face with the tip of my cock. He froze up rather delightfully during the whole ordeal, barely flinching as I cleaned off the tip in his hair.

I took the microphone and spoke directly into his headphones. I told him he'd been in his predicament for two days so far, that he was to obey my simple instructions, and that if he did he would be allowed food and allowed to rest. I told him that I would not require him to speak at any point during these instructions, and that if he so much as whispered I'd keep him strung up without food for another two days. He nodded in agreement, which earned him a hard slap, as I'd not asked him to nod or shake his head. I told him then to nod if he understood, which he did.

I freed one of his arms at a time, telling them to keep them in place and move them only as and when I told him to move them. He obeyed--a far quicker learner than C1--and I put him into the straitjacket. I unlatched his boots one at a time, putting him in ankle cuffs with a short length of heavy chain between them. I injected him in the buttocks with his first dose of anti-androgens, a painkiller, and his hormonal cocktail, and I removed the IV from his arm.

At that point I led him to his cage, a 2x3 metre cell, 1.5 metres high. I removed his blindfold, though it did him little good as it was pitch black in the entire room--I'd switched off the lights and was working via a set of light amplification goggles--and pushed him onto the wipe-clean bedroll.

"Lie still like a good little boy until the lights turn on, and then you can help yourself to some food," I said to him. He made a sound as if to respond, then silenced himself, lying still in his bonds.

The lights were on a timer, and they came on harsh and bright when I was upstairs, watching him through the CCTV on my desktop with a fresh pot of coffee. Three of the walls of his cage were walled off with a tarp, allowing him to see about a fifth of the basement through the remaining wall. Inside his cage was his bedroll, a doggie bowl full of oatmeal and bananas, a small plastic trough filled with fresh water, and a litter tray.

I considered staying up and watching him, seeing the fear grow in his eyes, his first attempt at eating cold food without the use of his hands, the humiliation of pissing in a litter tray, but I was exhausted. As soon as I've finished writing this entry, I'm going to take a well-deserved nap.

4th October 2018

The truffle salt from Coles is a waste of time. Don't misunderstand me, it's useable, it's palatable, and it has the necessary truffle aroma. "Has" is the key word there, it's got the half-life of Fermium and after a week in the cupboard it's now just table salt with black specks in it. I think I'm going to invest in some decent truffle oil at Christmas.

C3 is coming along marvelously. The combination of injections and a high-fat, high-calorie, vitamin-rich diet have had a visible impact on his physique. His skin has softened even further from a clear and healthy surfer's complexion to almost peachlike smoothness and he now has visible jiggle on his thighs, stomach and buttocks. Most importantly, he's now the not-at-all-proud owner of a set of A-cup breasts, complete with sensitive, pebble-sized nipples.

His breasts are extremely sensitive. He's told me as much directly, but I've confirmed it through experimental means. A few light stripes under the nipples with the cane used to bring a wince to his face when he first came under my care, now it brings him to his knees, and the mere sight of the thing leads him to cry and whine rather prettily.

He did have some issues with portion control, in that he wasn’t eating the full servings of food I had prepared for him. This was unreasonable and short-sighted on his part: while plain, I have not asked him to eat anything that I wouldn't willingly eat myself, and while I am not a professional cook I am certainly a talented amateur.

The solution was a simple one: if even a smear of food remains in his dish, I do not feed him for the next two to four days. I only had to enforce this rule twice, and he's finished every meal I've put in front of him for the past two months.

He's gone without sleeping for the last forty-eight hours, he's gone without speaking for the last three weeks, and I've added a low dose of LSD to his drinking water. Tonight he should be somewhat tractable for the induction of a hypnotic state. I am not trying to control his behaviour--there's nothing I want him to do that I couldn't compel him to do through more reliable means--but for an in-depth interview. In concert with a lie detector and a regulated dose of barbiturates, I am going to make him bare his soul to me.

There are a few specifics I'm interested in, such as confirming my assessment of his sexuality and gender identity, and it never hurts to shore up my security by inquiring of any planned means of escape or rescue, but in great part I am doing this for morale effect: I want him to have no respite from me, even inside his own mind. He will learn that he has no more control of his thinking than he does of his eating, sleeping or exercising.

Speaking of which, I had to leave him in an armbinder for a few nights when he insisted on doing press-ups in his cell. The additional restraints distressed him greatly, and he's seemed afraid to even move lest I restrain him further. That was back in August, and I have since acquired an elliptical trainer which I allow him to use daily, good behaviour permitting.

I will write again tomorrow with details of tonight's interview, and I only hope it's more productive than C2's interview was.

5th October 2018

Well, that was elucidating.

I left C3 unrestrained for the interview. It was his first time free of shackles and cuffs outside of his cage since he'd arrived, as I wanted him to be relatively comfortable and I was confident that his drug cocktail would prevent any serious escape attempts.

He is not a natural hypnotic subject and I was only successful in inducing a semi-trance state. I don't think he achieved a trance, but I think he believed he was in a trance, and for my purposes that was more than sufficient. He talked for hours and provided an unabridged history of his life so far. His parents, his brothers, his schooling, his love of surfing and camping, his romantic attachments and rejections, his childhood friends and bullies, his fear of dogs, his earliest memories, his deepest shames, enough to fill a short memoir.

The interview lasted for ten hours, with breaks every two hours to allow him to pee (as I'd also allowed him to drink lime cordial from a cup while he spoke) and to adjust his dose of drugs and deepen his trance state. He cried frequently and easily. He bears a great amount of shame and guilt for someone so young and so relatively innocent--raised by Catholics, naturally--and spent half of the fifth hour in uncontrollable hysterics. I let him rest his head in my lap and stroked his hair as he cried, and he clung on to me like a man drowning. Once he ran out of tears he had a bout of cathartic laughter, and after that a calm passed over him, and he remained in a state of detached, cooperative calm until I ended the interview.

Of course, most of this was filler and background information for the parts that truly interested me: his sexuality and gender identity. Both were perfect. His sexuality is less important but still delightful. He is entirely heterosexual and repulsed by men. He still has nightmares about the one time I have molested him so far, when I coated his face with cum shortly after his chapter. You wouldn't believe how hard I got as he told me that!

He sometimes masturbates in his cage, which he tells me is mostly from boredom than any sexual desire, and he fantasizes about sex with women. He has little interest in sadomasochism, no interest whatsoever about taking a submissive role, and aside from a weak interest in pegging he is plain vanilla. He has fantasies about sex in public, fucking multiple women, being woken up by receiving oral sex, and seducing older women.

His gender identity is much the same: male, through and through. He has insecurities about being slight and physically unimposing--related to bullying in school--and about being insufficiently masculine. He takes pride in the callouses in his hands and the scars on his body from surfing, and wishes that the thin, pale stubble on his face was thicker.

It's of little surprise then that he finds the changes from the hormones to be a cruel and unwanted imposition. His breast growth makes him feel powerless and disgusted with himself, he can feel his muscles weakening, the tenderness in his breasts is terrifying and degrading, and even the topic of penile and testicular shrinkage made him choke up and sob. He says that even when I allow him to sleep, his mind feels clouded and he finds it increasingly difficult to identify the particulars of his emotional state, which swings and changes in ways he is not used to.

Again, I must reiterate how promising this is. My experiments concern the induction of sexual neuroses and physical development on non-consenting subjects. C1 was unsuitable because he--well, she, more likely--was a little too keen to embrace the role I had planned for her.

C3 is sleeping now. I haven't actually left our impromptu "therapy room" and he's drifted off with his head in my lap. He needs the rest. I have big plans for him, after all.

24th October, 2018

I took a trip to the cinema today. Specifically the single-screen cinema in the back of the adult bookshop. C2 is turning tricks for the manager. I don't think it's his first career choice but for some reason he's been unable to get a job anywhere else in town. He tried being an independent streetwalker for a while, which didn't work out well for him as he was quickly picked up by the local police and treated rather roughly. Almost as if they were keeping an eye on him!

The manager of the adult bookshop got in touch with him, I believe he was waiting for him outside the local lockup in fact, and informed him of a safe, reliable means of plying his trade. Now he sucks cock in the back room cinema along with a handful of other whores in exchange for a roof over his head and ten percent of the ticket sales.

He was apparently given a second tour of the police cells for not handing his tips over to the manager in a timely and honest manner, so his left eye was still swollen shut when I saw him today. His garb was delightful: pastel pink yoga leggings with the Adidas stripes down the sides, and a duck egg blue midriff-cut t-shirt with "BOY" on the chest, with a female gender symbol in place of the O.

I sat down next to him in the otherwise empty cinema and flashed him my ticket, which had set me back $84--worth every penny--and he flashed me a charming smile. There was no glimmer of recognition in his eyes, like all of my experiments and side projects he'd never seen me without a mask. He put his hand on my thigh and told me his name, which I've already forgotten. The feature began, a rather energetic video from the noughties with Kelly Wells, Hillary Scott and Layla Riviera, prompting C2 to get on his knees in front of me. He gagged a little when he unzipped my jeans, not because I was unwashed but because I'd applied a generous quantity of deodorant and aftershave so that he would not recognise me via scent.

I enjoyed a slow, leisurely blowjob for the next hour, where he displayed all the basic techniques I'd so painstakingly taught him as well as a few new ones he'd picked up more recently. There's something to be said about consuming porn this way, not just the oral service but also watching the film from the beginning, without skipping forward to my favorite parts or switching between videos, letting myself slowly build towards my climax at the same pace as the on-screen action. I came just before the money shot, pulling out to cum all over C2's face as Kelly Wells guzzled piss on the big screen, and let C2 lick and suck my balls until the credits rolled.

Before he or I got up, I took out $20, waved it in front of his eyes, and then used the notes to wipe cum up from his face. He flinched at the roughness, scowled, told me to cut it out, and put his hand on my leg as if to push away from me. I said three words.

"Punishment position three."

It was as if I'd reached inside him and squeezed. He let out a pitiful squeak, straightened up on his knees, pushed out his chest, put his hands behind his back, closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and let his tongue hang out. I stuffed the cum-soaked banknotes between his mouth.

"Be good, C2," I told him as I stood up. He didn't move a muscle as I walked out of the cinema, and as the door closed behind me, I heard a single muffled sob. It was an enjoyable experience and I certainly needed it after the last few days because C3 has really been a handful.

It began on the weekend when the first signs of lactation appeared. C3 has been getting increasingly upset with the changes to his body, his widening hips, his weight gain, his shrinking musculature, his shrinking genitalia, and his C-cup breasts. The breasts are especially upsetting, he complains that they ache constantly and are tender to the slightest touch. In any case, when the first droplets of milk dribbled out of his nipples something snapped.

Through tears, he told me that he refuses to eat, that he cannot live with the things I am doing to him, and that I should either let him go or kill him. Obviously this is unacceptable. I told him I was not treating his request with any seriousness, and that if he did not eat his meal, he would go without for the next several days. He nodded forlornly, but still refused the food.

I strapped his hands into leather mitts to prevent him from improvising methods of self-harm, and continued as normal. For the next three days, he refused to respond to commands or obey orders, remaining silent and going limp. He wailed in pain when I caned his soles and slapped his tits, but he continued to wallow in self-pity.

He was ravenously hungry by Wednesday, but when I gave him the opportunity to eat, he would not. I left the bowl of food in his cage overnight, and in the morning it remained untouched. He had not thrown it out or despoiled it, he had simply ignored it in an admirable, if misplaced, display of willpower. I gave him one final warning that there would be serious consequences if he did not eat now. He refused, so I applied the consequences.

I fitted him into a padded restraining board, on his back, his arms, legs, chest, stomach, forehead, chin, wrists and ankles held in place by canvas straps. He could not move an inch, not that he was trying particularly hard. A hollow dildo gag with a breathing hole went into his mouth, principally to prevent him from trying to bite off his own tongue. I catheterized him and inserted a hollow plug into his backside, not overly gently in either case, much to his consternation.

Then, intubation. I fed a heavily-lubricated silicone hose into his left nostril. He thrashed and twitched, as is expected when such a procedure is performed without the aid of benzodiazepines. Undeterred, I asked him to start swallowing, lest the tube end up in his lungs. He did as much gagging as swallowing, but after a few eventful minutes I felt the tell-tale glide of it being pulled down his esophagus and into his stomach.

Once the tube was taped in place under his nose, I attached the free end to a pump until it drew fluid out from within him. A few drops of this fluid onto pH paper revealed it to be stomach acid, which hopefully meant that the hose was not in his lungs. I then attached the hose to the feeding machine, and explained to C3 exactly how it would work.

He would have his meals and water combined into a slurry, kept at a cool four degrees celsius, and injected into his feeding tube. The pressure inside the hose would make breathing difficult or impossible while the food was being pumped, and the volume of his meals--around a litre and a half of slurry--meant that each feeding would be spread out in thirty second bursts, delivered semi-randomly over the course of an hour.

As I told him this, I undid my belt and began to masturbate. Despite the obvious temptations, I had not molested C3 in an overtly sexual manner since that first facial at the beginning of his captivity. By combining molestation with removal of autonomy, I wished to impress upon him the importance of obeying me with whatever autonomy I allow him to have.

I pressed the button on the feeding machine as I approached my climax. C3 squealed and gurgled like a drowning cat from the sensation of ice-cold sludge pumping through a tube in his sinuses and down into his throat, choking as the diameter of the tube expanded enough to cut off his breathing. He thrashed in his restraints with such force that he almost moved the gurney beneath him!

Seeing tears stream from his eyes was too much, and his eyes were precisely where I aimed. I landed a good few ropes on each eye, which he scrunched shut in disgust. When the tube stopped pumping I pried open his eyelids with my fingers and made sure a good quantity of my burning, stinging cum got in each eye, then smeared the rest across his face. He tried to blink it out, with little success, and before he could do much else I applied the padded blindfold. He hates and fears the eye-shutting pressure from the neoprene padding at the best of times, and wasn't overjoyed to wear it with his eyes gunked up with sperm.

He's been like that for the last three days, unable to move, speak or see, fed three meals a day through his nose. The only interaction he's had is when I've unrestrained his individual limbs and allowed them some movement, one at a time, to prevent bedsores and deep vein thrombosis, and when I come down to grope his sensitive tits. He is only able to relieve himself through the catheter and through enemas.

After a few days of stick, he's almost ready for the carrot. Tonight I am making pork carnitas with soft tacos, which he has told me is his favourite meal. I have also purchased one of the Harry Dresden books, which he told me he is an avid reader of. When dinner is ready, I will make him an offer: he will ask me for normal food and apologize for forcing me to use the feeding tube. In return he will be allowed out of his restraints and returned to his comfortable cage, along with his favourite meal and a good book, which he will be allowed to read during his spare time as long as he behaves himself.

I hope he accepts, for his sake and mine.

16 November 2018

C3 had his first true milking today! I've been teasing dribbles of milk from his nipples with my fingers for weeks, but today the volume was so high that I had to deploy a handheld breast pump. He whimpered for the duration but was obviously relieved by the reduction in pressure. It was as if he found the whole ordeal rather humiliating.

The milk is rich, a touch gamey, and less sweet than expected. I don't think the taste will be anything to write home about while his stress levels are so high, and I think that will be the case for some time. I've taken half for myself, and I'm mixing the other half into his food.

He's been docile since the force feeding. The intensity and inevitability of the punishment is part of it, but the rewards are equally important. My deal is that he can ask for anything once. Obviously I laugh at certain requests--he's not getting a phone or a two-way radio--and some things require compromise, but otherwise I have been accommodating. His cell now contains a lamp he can turn on or off, two dozen books and graphic novels, an old mp3 player, and a box of wet wipes. His relief from the constant boredom of being confined in a cage for twenty hours a day is palpable, and he has chosen the comfort that obedience brings over the misery that stems from disobedience.

He has asked if he'll ever be free from this basement and I truthfully said yes. One day he'll be walking around outside free of physical restraints and he will sleep at night in a bed he can truly call his own, though I'm unsure if he'll ever truly be free of me. He takes comfort in the fact that he has not yet seen my face or anything that might identify me, as he reasons that I am therefore not incentivized to bury him in a shallow grave to protect myself. His conclusion is correct but his premise is wrong; he'll know who I am eventually and I still won't fear him.

I'm currently milking him once per day regardless of his feelings on the matter, and I think this has hidden from him the fact that he now needs to be milked. Without his daily milkings the pain in his breasts would become unbearable, and soon he will develop mastitis if he's not milked. This will form another important part of his development: begging for things that are distasteful but necessary. With the exception of the wet wipes, there is nothing inherently humiliating in the things he's asking for. I believe he'll find begging to be milked intensely humiliating, and more humiliating still because of the tolls I'll extract from him when he goes down that road.

A brief note on his physical changes: his breasts are bigger but they remain C-cups for the time being. There are now a striking set of stretch marks on the sides and undersides of his breasts, along with some smaller, subtler ones on his thighs and buttocks which have also thickened up nicely. At some point I'm going to give him a regular schedule of retention enemas until he gets stretch marks on his belly befitting a pregnant little broodslut. His skin is delightfully soft and I'm shaving his face daily until the home electrolysis kit arrives. The combination of hormones, daily exercise bike sessions, and a lack of any upper body resistance training has changed his physique from a surfer's build to a more bottom heavy one.

As soon as I have finished writing this entry I am going to give him two gifts. The first gift is an ear piercing. It will be home to a yellow plastic tag, a miniature version of a cattle tag. The second gift is his name. He's not C3 anymore, and he's certainly not whatever stupid name he called himself before I acquired him. He has lovely tits and he's a milk cow, so his name will be Cowtits.

Cowtits. I think it suits him.

[artificialqueens]

Got To Have You All the Time (katlaska) - kamylove

Katya’s hurt. Alaska’s far away. Anxiety, adorableness, and soul-searching ensue.

AN - Somebody asked for sick katlaska. This is not quite that. But it’s close! 

Takes place in the same fictional universe as my story They Don’t Love You Like I Love You, a few years later. The title is from a song by Faye Richmonde. There’s some icky medical stuff, but I don’t think it would qualify as graphic.

Alaska’s backstage, at an early show not far from her house, when she gets a call from an unexpected number.

“Trixie?” she says. “Or did my boyfriend lose his phone?”

“No, it’s really me,” Trixie says. “I mean, he doesn’t have his phone, but he didn’t lose it, we–never mind. How are you?”

“You sound tense,” Alaska says. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. And so is Katya, I swear. She’s damaged. But she’s fine!”

Alaska’s brain fills up with images of Katya ODing in a filthy alley and drowning in vomit, because that’s always the first thing that pops into her head. She knows it’s not true, but her lizard brain is convinced.

She’d bet that Trixie has the same problem. 

“What happened?” she asks, forcing her voice to be steady.

“She’ll be fine! But she kind of walked off the stage. Because we both know she’s an idiot.”

Alaska can’t help it. She barks out a laugh and says, “Oh, no, poor thing!” It’s very Katya to get too wrapped up in whatever she’s doing to notice the edge of a cliff.

“I know, right?” Trixie says. “She was laughing at herself in the ambulance. But she broke some bones.”

“Oh, God, which ones?” Alaska asks, hoping they’re not bones that will keep her from working, or worse, force her to sit still and do nothing while they heal.

“Nothing she needs for sex.”

Alaska shakes her head at how differently she and Trixie thought the same thought. 

“You might have to do a little extra work for a while, but-”

“I think we’ll be okay,” Alaska interrupts.

“Right. Sorry.”

Across the dressing room, an old friend of Alaska’s, a WeHo queen who should have been on Drag Race years ago, laughs loudly. Another slips out the door, letting in the sound of a Shea Coulee song.

“Are you at a show?” Trixie asks.

“I’m at ——-. It’s not a big deal. What did she break?”

Trixie hesitates, probably expecting Alaska to throw a fit. God knows Katya would if it was Alaska who was hurt, though with Katya at least 40% would be for comedic effect. Katya’s actually very calm in a crisis. Alaska’s not.

“Her arm, definitely,” Trixie says. “Probably her knee, and maybe a finger or two.”

Alaska gasps. “That’s awful.”

“Don’t panic!” Trixie says. “I’m at the hospital with her, and they already took care of the arm, and now they’re x-raying everything else. She wanted me to call you right away, but I didn’t want to leave her until she had a distraction, sorry. You know how she is.”

Alaska feels a twinge of irrational anger–it’s been at least four hours. But she knows it’s irrational. “No, it’s fine,” she says. “It’s not like I can do anything to help from here.”

“You’re not freaking out?” Trixie asks tentatively.

“No, you gave it a great intro, thank you.”

“No sympathy pains?”

“Not yet,” Alaska says. “But there’s still time.”

Trixie chuckles. “I’ll have her call you as soon as she can, okay? There’s no signal on the first floor.”

“Give her a kiss for me? With tongue?” Alaska asks, because that’s what Katya always tells each of them, whenever they’re going to cross paths without her.

“Consider it done,” Trixie says.

“Alaska, five minutes,” the club manager calls from the door as he sticks his head into the dressing room.

She’s very glad she has work to do. 

<><><>

Trixie goes back inside and waits impatiently. There’s no signal here, either, and she really needs to upload more books, or games, or something.

She’d lied a little bit to Alaska, and she tries not to feel bad about it. At least one out of the three of them needs to stay calm, and Alaska wins out simply by being a few thousand miles away.

She does feel bad about leaving the show, though. She never cancels shows. 

Also it will fuel rumors about her and Katya, which will be a pain in her ass, but will actually be better for Katya and Alaska, Queens of the Big Secret. 

There are pluses and minuses to everything.

She yawns. The adrenaline from the stage had been pumped up even more by seeing Katya fall off it and worrying about Alaska’s reaction, and now it’s wearing off. She wonders if there’s a cafeteria that sells coffee in the middle of the night.

Before she can investigate, a tech wheels Katya and her IV cart out through the metal doors. She’s groggy and miserable, but when she sees Trixie, she calls up a smile and tries to wipe the pain off her face. So Trixie calls up a smile, too.

“How’d it go?” Trixie asks as she stands up to join them.

“It hurt, but I made a new friend! This is Steve!”

Trixie holds out her hand to shake. “Hi, Steve!”

He grins and says hello.

“Did you call her?” Katya asks. “Did you? Did you?”

“She says I should give you a kiss with tongue.”

“Oooh!“ 

“Not happening,” Trixie says.

“Some support system you are,” Katya says. “Is she okay?”

“Of course she’s okay. You’re the one in the fucking hospital.”

Katya pouts. Trixie can’t tell if it’s fake. “She’s not worried about me?”

“Of course she’s worried about you. But she’s fine. She’s at-”

“I know where she is,” Katya cuts her off.

Right. Trixie knows better than to drop any potentially identifying information. Or she usually knows better. “Sorry,” she says. “Does your shared calendar list when you’re going to take a shit?”

“Of course it does,” Katya says. “We’re not animals.”

The orderly–Steve–snorts and turns it into a cough. “Sorry,” he says.

“Steve?” Katya asks. “Are we making you uncomfortable, Steve?”

This kid has no idea what he’s gotten himself into, Trixie thinks.

“I’m gay, honey. I know who you are.”

Or, he knows exactly what he’s getting himself into, and how to use it to distract his patient. 

“Wow, I did not clock you at all,” Trixie says, looking him up and down.

“It’s the scrubs. You can’t be fabulous in this shit.” He gives them a triple snap.

“And you didn’t even let on that you knew me?” Katya says. “I love you, Steve.”

“So you have a boyfriend? Girlfriend? They-friend?” Steve asks Katya.

“I do,” Katya says coyly, biting her lip. Trixie rolls her eyes. 

“And it’s not this one?” He jerks a thumb at Trixie and winks, making sure Trixie knows they’re on the same side.

“Hell no,” Trixie says. “And if this ends up on Reddit, I will come find you, Steve.”

“Steve would never do that to us,” Katya says. “Would you, Steve?”

“I go there for spoilers, not drama.”

Katya’s mouth opens in a delighted O. “Do you know who makes it to the finale this season?”

“Do you?” Steve asks.

“Oh, no,” Katya says. “I don’t know a single spoiler ever.” She crosses her heart and holds up her free hand. “I swear to god.”

It’s not true, of course. Katya always knows more than she wants to, because Alaska knows more than she wants to, from getting called back to appear in every damn season lately. 

“I don’t believe you,” Steve says. “Don’t you all talk?”

“I only talk to the non-snaky ones,” Katya says.

“Oh, my God,” Trixie says with a startled laugh. Katya’s replaced all of her old addictions with whatever high she gets from skirting the edge of outing herself, and it always catches Trixie by surprise.

“Steve?” Katya says. “My boy-slash-girl-slash-they friend is really pretty.” Even through the pain she’s glowing, like she always does when she talks about Alaska.

“You want to tell me who it is?” Steve asks.

“Never,” Katya says. “Sorry, Steve.”

They’re back in the emergency room now, and Steve wheels Katya into a curtained-off cubicle. A nurse follows them in and helps him get Katya onto the bed.

“Gotta leave you ladies here,” Steve says.

Katya waves goodbye and says, “Thanks, Steve! It was nice to meet you!”

“Thank you,” Trixie says.

“He was nice,” Katya says. “Wasn’t he nice?” she asks the nurse. 

“Very nice,” the nurse says. Her name tag says Mariela, and she looks like she’s at the end of an 18-hour shift but would otherwise be a friendly person. “How’s your pain level?”

“Excruciating,” Katya says brightly.

“You sure you don’t want codeine?”

“Unfortunately, yes, I’m sure,” Katya says. 

“We’ll get you another nerve block, then,” Nurse Mariela says. “Back in a few.” And she walks away crisply.

“Steve was a sweetie,” Katya says. “Boyfriend material?”

“He had a ring on. Are you sure they didn’t give you the good stuff?”

“What? I don’t check anymore. I am a spoken-for woman.”

“You never checked,” Trixie says.

“I did! Most of the time.” Katya holds out her good hand in a grabby motion. “Give me your phone.”

Trixie hands it over. There’s no use objecting.

Katya looks at it, unlocks it. (Trixie’s password is another thing Katya somehow always knows.) She checks the settings, shakes it, holds it up in every direction. “No signal,” she says finally. “Fucking hospital.”

“Katya, she’s fine.”

“I know. I just want to talk to her. I like her.”

Trixie knows they always talk after shows. And before, and often during. Before going to bed, after waking up, during breakfast … It’s cute and Trixie’s over the moon for them, but it does sometimes make her own love life feel like child’s play. A preschool romance, how cute, let’s push each other off the swingset.

She’s not jealous of Alaska. She’s jealous of both of them for this ethereal freaking connection they have, and she can’t even be mad about it. She likes them too much.

“God forbid you should go an hour without making googly eyes at each other,” Trixie says.

“I could make googly eyes at you instead.”

“Please don’t. Please don’t.”

Katya laughs maniacally, wheezes, and slaps her thigh. Trixie knows it’s a mistake as it’s happening, but there’s no time to stop her.

“Ow! Fuck!” Katya says. “That fucking hurt! OW! Oh, my God!”

“I’m sorry,” Trixie says, wincing.

After a few breaths to calm herself down, Katya says, “You should be." 

"I’d really like to hear you explain how any of this is my fault.”

“Give me a minute, I’ll come up with something.”

Mariela returns with a tray of needles and vials. Katya distracts herself by playing with Trixie’s phone in her free hand. She hates shots. She never even did intravenous meth, Trixie’s been reliably informed more than once.

“Hey, you have a voicemail!” Katya says. “Oh, that’s better already, thank you,” she tells the nurse.

“I do?” Trixie says. She takes the phone back as Mariela finishes up and leaves. “But it didn’t ring." 

It won’t transcribe or play, either. She can just see that it’s from Alaska.

"Is it her?” Katya asks excitedly.

“Yes, but-”

A young doctor interrupts by walking through the curtain, introducing herself, and asking Katya to confirm her name and birthdate.

Katya rattles it off, and turns immediately to Trixie. “Go call her?”

“I don’t have anything to tell her yet,” Trixie says.

“Caaalllll heeerrrrrrrr,” Katya says.

“You may need to leave for privacy reasons,” the doctor says.

“No, you can tell him anything,” Katya says quickly. 

“Significant other?" 

"Chosen family,” Katya says, and points at the phone. “That’s my extremely significant other. Caalllll herrrrrr!”

“Okay, I’m going!” Trixie says. 

As she leaves, she hears the doctor saying, “Let me just pull this over so we can take a look at your films.”

She goes outside to call, walking away from the entrance to escape the smokers, and she doesn’t bother listening to voicemail first.

Alaska answers before the first ring ends. “Trixie?”

“I told you not to panic,” Trixie says.

“I’m not!” Alaska says, but her chuckle is rueful. “I was just walking home and I thought it was worth a try.”

“Believe me, she’s dying to talk to you, too.”

“Aww,” Alaska says, just the way Katya says it.

“There’s a doctor with her now. She was about to give her the x-ray results.”

“Oh! Go back in, go back in!”

Trixie has to laugh. “That sounded exactly like her. I’ll let you know what they say, okay?" 

They say goodbye, and Trixie hurries back inside.

<><><>

Alaska’s not panicking. She’s not. But she is worried, and not used to being cut off from Katya; their relationship is founded constant, instantaneous, and frequently sarcastic contact, and has been since before they even knew they were a couple.

It’s not the codependent, drug-fueled separation anxiety she had with Sharon, no matter what Trixie might joke about. It’s more that she wants to tell Katya everything, and having to keep it all in is making both her brain and her fingers itch. 

And lurking at the edge of her consciousness are things they should have discussed by now–in all the thousands of words they exchange every day–but haven’t.

She only has one number to perform, and when she gets home, she has nothing to distract herself with but packing. Which is a lot less fun without Katya’s commentary, in person or on facetime or even in texts.

She makes herself a sandwich and only eats a quarter of it, then stands in the middle of her drag room, lost and staring at the racks. Maybe she can just grab half a dozen dresses and stuff them in her luggage and hope for the best.

She pulls out her phone, knowing it’s pointless.

She puts it away, then takes it out again. Then she goes to the bedroom and leaves the phone there, but goes back and gets it a few minutes later.

She hates the thought of Katya in pain. It’s bad enough when Alaska’s with her. (Katya had twisted her ankle in a fucking Target a few months ago and fully enjoyed Alaska’s coddling.) It’s torture to hear about it through an intermediary, even if the intermediary is Katya’s best friend.

Damn. She shouldn’t have come home. She should have stayed to cheer on the others, or dragged someone back here to talk it out. She’s still in half drag, for fuck’s sake.

She can’t call her mom, or Katya’s mom. It’s too late. All her local friends will be either drunk, in bed, or on stage. She tries her brother, who would make her laugh if nothing else, but his phone is off, and she doesn’t leave a voicemail.

"Dammit, Katya,” she says to the room. “You could have at least waited until we were on the same damn stage.”

That’s a dumb thought to think. Sighing, she lays out her suitcases, and after staring at them for a while, she grabs a random armful of clothes, half a drawer of Capezios, and her three favorite wigs, and tosses it all on a chair. And then she stands there staring at the chair.

Maybe she can fix this mess once she hears from Katya. But she has no way of knowing when that will be, and her flight is in five hours.

“Stop it,” she tells herself. She sits heavily on the floor and starts rolling up clothes and bagging shoes. She packs them, and unpacks some of them because she didn’t do it right the first time, and unpacks some more because she can’t make a single damn decision.

Finally, her phone beeps with a tone that isn’t Katya’s.

“Three broken fingers,” the text says. “Dislocated kneecap.”

Alaska recoils in sympathetic pain. Knee stuff is bad. Knee stuff could fuck up her splits permanently.

“And don’t be mad,” the next text says. There’s no time to reply before the next one appears. “She had a compound fracture in her forearm but they took care of that and sewed it up before I even called you. She’s fine!”

Horrified, Alaska starts typing before she finishes reading. “You didn’t tell me it was a compound fracture!" 

"Sorry. I knew it would freak you out. She’s FINE. They’re keeping her overnight and I think there’s a signal upstairs.”

“She had a bone sticking out of her fucking skin!”

“But she doesn’t anymore! Look, I don’t get to lose it and you don’t either. I can only handle one of us right now and that’s KATYA.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” Alaska replies quickly. “You’ve been great tonight and we’re both lucky you’re there.”

There’s no response, and Alaska can’t blame her. Katya on a good day is A Lot, and while Alaska doesn’t feel overwhelmed by her anymore, she understands why Trixie does. And Trixie doesn’t need Alaska also being A Lot, on the other end of the phone line. 

She stands up, paces, glares at the suitcases, and makes an iffy life decision: she’ll go to sleep now, calm the fuck down, and get up when Katya calls or when her alarm goes off, whichever comes first.

<><><>

Alaska’s subconscious knows Katya’s ringtone, and she grabs her phone before she’s really awake. “Kati?”

“Aaaaaaal, I am a pitiful, broken shell of a biological woman.”

The humor in Katya’s voice improves Alaska’s mood immediately. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too. God, I’m a dumbass.”

“I’d like to disagree with that, but-”

“But you can’t!” Katya says, laughing a much less energetic laugh than usual. “You can’t! It’s demonstrably true!”

“Well, you’re my dumbass, for what it’s worth.”

“Stop it. I’m emotionally fragile today. You’re going to make me cry.”

“I would never. How much does it hurt? Is Trixie still there?”

“Not too bad, and no. They have an early flight. Latrice brought me my phone and some clothes, and then they both had to go.”

Alaska’s heart drops, along with her momentarily heightened mood. “Fuck. I don’t like you being alone in the hospital. When can you leave?”

“Later today, but I can’t fly for at least three days, so I-”

“Three days?!”

“They said a week is better. Something about swelling, or an aneurysm, or-.”

“An aneurysm?”

“No, no aneurysm! That’s just what can happen if you fly too soon, and I’m not flying!”

Calm the fuck down, Alaska tells herself. “No. Okay. You’re fine. Trixie kept telling me you were fine." 

"Stop,” Katya says. “Breathe.”

Alaska sighs. “I’m breathing. I’m just–can you even take a piss by yourself?”

“I’ll figure it out. And I have no shame about pissing myself if necessary, as you well know. And there’s room service!”

Alaska looks at the clock and tries to figure out the math of her flight–when’s the latest she can leave, how long can she continue to put off packing, when does she have to be out the shower–but her brain won’t cooperate.

“I can hear you thinking,” Katya says, “and no, you can’t cancel South America. You have never cancelled a show in your life. I’ll be fine!”

“You’re not fine,” Alaska snaps. “You’re alone in a hospital room on the other side of the country with I don’t even know how many broken bones, I lost count.”

“I’ll keep count. You don’t have to. Al. Are you packed?”

“Half. What do they have you on? Is it working?”

“It’s a Tylenol drip or something, and they keep giving me these shots that I swear are a fucking miracle. I made them write ‘no opioids’ on my chart.”

“See?” Alaska says. “That’s why you need someone with you! Doctors fuck that shit up all the time!”

“Al. Is your flight still at 7:55?”

“I–yes.”

“Then you need to finish packing right now. Oh, no,” she says to somebody else. “No eggs, please. Could you take them away? Thanks.”

“They’re feeding you food you don’t even like!”

“No, they’re not. I have toast and cornflakes and orange juice and I’m fine. Pack.”

Sniffling, Alaska squeezes her eyes shut. They’re burning. “Kataya.”

“Pack.” Katya crunches on something, and then yawns loudly.

“I’m keeping you awake,” Alaska says.

“Fuck you, no you’re not. The lack of research into non-opioid pain relief is keeping me awake.” She stops for a second. “Are you crying?”

Alaska sniffles again. “It’s so dumb. I’m tired and pathetic, and you’re the one who’s hurt.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been entertaining everyone else to keep myself sane for hours, and I know you’ve been ruminating instead.”

Ruefully, Alaska says, “I ruminated so hard I had to go to sleep.”

“I knew it! I have got you pegged, gurl.” There’s a brief pause. “Don’t make a bottom joke. If you make a bottom joke, I’m breaking up with you.”

“I won’t make–oh, my God, you’re still doing it!”

“Huh? Breaking up with you?”

“Entertaining me. You shouldn’t have to worry about that!”

“Of course I should. It’s in the job description. Now pack.”

<><><>

They hang up when a gaggle of doctors and med students swarms into Katya’s room, which frankly does nothing for Alaska’s anxiety level. She goes to splash cold water on her face and finds she never even took off her makeup. So she showers as quickly as she can, throws on some clothes for her flight, and goes back to sigh over the open suitcases on the floor.

Nothing fits the way it usually does; her favorite lashes disappeared somewhere between the club and now; the sunscreen isn’t where it’s supposed to be; she has to check her phone to see how many shows she’s doing, because she can’t keep even basic information in her head anymore.

Frustrated, she throws a Louboutin at the wall and refuses to cry again.

If sleeping earlier was an iffy life decision, the one she’s about to make is unquestionably awful.

No, she corrects herself. It’s a bad decision professionally. But she’s reached a point in her life, and in her career, where she’s allowed to put her personal life first, once in a while. 

Anyone who hates her for it can just send her a million snake emojis again.

<><><>

Katya wakes with no concept of time. There’s sunlight in the room, but she doesn’t know which direction the room is facing. There are loud voices in the corridor, but that means nothing. Her stomach is empty. Her broken fingers are throbbing, but strangely, not her knee or her arm. And she smells…

“Al?” She looks around, and finds her boyfriend curled up in a stylish, upholstered chair that suggests she’s going to pay through the nose for this room.

Alaska’s got one foot under her, and the other leg thrown over the arm of the chair. She’s hugging her old backpack to her chest, with her glasses practically off her face and her neck curled at what can’t be a comfortable angle. There’s no product in her hair–she doesn’t leave the house without product in her hair–so a wisp of frizz is flopping down over her eyes.

Katya’s never been so simultaneously overjoyed and enraged to see someone in her life.

A nurse bustles in, knocking perfunctorily on the door. “Mr. McCook, you’re awake! Let’s change out that drip and get you ready for dinner.” She notices the sleeping form in the corner. “I heard your husband was here. He’s as cute as you are!”

Katya doesn’t react to the word husband–you do whatever you have to do to get into a hospital room–but it seems to wake Alaska up.

“Your wh–Kati?” She jerks up straight and looks right at Katya. She might still have a little purple shadow in the corner of one eye, but Katya can’t be sure.

“Yes, darling,” Katya says. “I’m here, and you’re an idiot, and you have no idea how happy I am to see you.”

Alaska startles when she sees the third person in the room. “Oh, hi,” she says.

“Hi there. Are you Mr. McCook also?”

Katya laughs. Alaska, barely awake, takes it seriously. “No, I–I mean, we don’t have–professionally it’s just-”

“Honey, stop,” Katya says. The nurse changes out the bag on Katya’s drip in a few practiced movements, and Katya squints to see her name tag. “Tina here isn’t going to kick you out. Hi, Tina. I’m Brian, and that’s Justin, and he’s an idiot who shouldn’t be here.”

“Fuck work,” Alaska says. She already looks less anxious than she sounded on the phone, and she starts stretching her long neck, to wake up. Katya knows which muscles Alaska will work through first, second, third, knows exactly where Alaska will be sore from sleeping like that, and she smiles.

“He’s also a workaholic suffering from temporary insanity,” Katya adds.

“Oh, no, I agree with him,” Tina says as she checks Katya’s pulse. “Family comes first, right? There are no meds in that bag. The doctor wants to switch you over to oral administration before we let you go. How’s the pain?”

“It’s actually okay. Did you give me another injection while I was asleep?”

“An injection of what?” Alaska asks.

“I told you about the miracle shots,” Katya calmly reminds her.

“Yes, we did,” Tina says, and explains what they use to numb the nerves, which Katya hadn’t known was possible until they gave her the first one. “Are you hungry, Brian?”

“I could eat a horse,” Katya says. Tina leaves with a smile, and Alaska bursts out in a laugh at the secret innuendo.

“You slut,” Alaska says lightly. “You won her over fast.”

“Hearts and minds, one fracture at a time. Remind me to tell you about Gay Steve. And Luis. And Marie Adeline. Her son’s a nurse here, too! And Kang, she’s my doctor.”

“Everybody loves you.” Alaska finally stands up and approaches the bed.

“God knows why, but I’m used to it. Hi.”

“Hi.” She leans down to kiss Katya on the forehead.

“That is not the kiss I was expecting.”

Alaska winces, and runs her tongue over her front teeth. “I don’t think I’ve seen a toothbrush in like a day, I forgot to bring it. You don’t want-”

“I do,” Katya says, and puckers up. Alaska gives her a little peck. “Ew, that was disgusting,” Katya complains.

“I warned you. The pain’s really okay? You looked like you were sound asleep.”

“I think I was. They gave me an SSRI I used to take a long time ago. Knocked me right out,” Katya says. “Now, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m an idiot, like you said.”

“Also demonstrably true.”

“And what your new friend said. Family comes first.”

Katya’s heart feels like it could jump out of her chest. She reaches for Alaska’s hand. “That is the corniest thing I have ever heard you say, and I’m never going to let you forget it.”

Alaska gives her that soft, crooked smile Katya loves, and squeezes her fingers twice, like a heartbeat.

Then she deflects with a smirk. “You know,” she says, “between Trixie leaving the show with you, and me cancelling six shows-”

“Six? That’s the whole tour!”

“-Reddit’s going to have plenty of things to talk about. I’ll reschedule, it’ll be okay. I’ll make it okay.”

She’s telling herself that, too, not just Katya. Katya rubs the back of Alaska’s hand with her thumb, and lets the subject go.

“Let’s make up a long, complex love triangle narrative,” Katya says, “where you’re the sad but sublimely gorgeous third wheel, and I’m married to a prick who can’t get it up, and I’m the quirky, unnaturally pretty girl you come to blows over.” She sighs happily. “It’ll be beautiful. It’ll be heart wrenching. I’ll cry. And then I’ll dump both of you for Willam.”

Alaska cracks up, and Katya joins her, gratefully. 

“Are you sure they didn’t give you the good stuff?” Alaska asks.

“That’s what Trixie said.”

“Because at your highest level of functioning-”

“-I come off high as a kite. The bird, not the toy.”

“There’s a bird called a kite?”

“I told you you were an idiot. Or maybe it’s like a stingray? I’m an idiot, too.”

“I couldn’t leave you here by yourself,” Alaska says, scrunching up her nose. “Somebody has to keep you alive and entertained.” She thinks about that, and adds, “Maybe the next time you do a faceplant off a stage I can be cold and detached.”

“Maybe next time you’ll be with me.”

“One can only hope,” Alaska says. Then she winces again. “Oh, fuck, I need to send flowers to Trixie. Don’t let me forget.”

“Why? She said you were an absolute gentleman. A credit to our relationship. A credit to the species homo." 

"She did not say that, and you are a lying liar.”

“She almost did!” What Trixie actually said was that Alaska was a grown-up and could handle herself, but Katya could read between the lines.

“I was a credit to the species homo,” Alaska says, “right up until I turned into a scared little goblin. I’ll tell you about it later. Did they say when you can leave?”

“They said they’d check on me before dinner and decide for sure.”

Alaska ostentatiously checks her phone. “It’s 4:30.”

“Be nice,” Katya says. “My mom’s a nurse. We like nurses.”

“I know your mom’s a nurse, shut up. Do you need me to do anything? Does the hotel know you’re extending?”

“Yes, they know.” Katya thinks for a minute. “I’m sure there’s something practical you could be taking care of, but I don’t care. Just squeeze in here, we can watch Golden Girls and you can tell me how much you love me.”

She tries to inch away to make room on the bed, but pain stabs her in at least five different places. “Ow, fuck!”

“Let me help you, for fuck’s sake!”

Alaska was right. Katya would have starved or died of filth alone in a hotel room. She grumbles about moving anyway.

Eventually they get Katya settled and the pain back down, and Alaska sits up against the headboard next to her. “Tina’s going to kill me,” Alaska says, but Katya can feel her starting to relax.

“Oh, the irony. Now shhh, I’ve never seen this one,” Katya says. Alaska’s on her intact side, her hips by Katya’s head and her legs stretched out along Katya’s body. Katya lets the warmth seep under her skin.

Alaska quotes along happily with the first episode, but then goes quiet for the second. Halfway through, she asks, “Do we know a good gay lawyer?”

“Mmm,” Katya says. “Hospital visitations.”

“Power of attorney.”

“Healthcare proxy. All that stuff.” She tilts her head back to see Alaska’s face. “Did they give you a hard time?”

“No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

“Not the most queer-friendly state.”

“No. And the amount we travel…”

Katya nods. “Somebody will, eventually. You up for this?”

Alaska scritches Katya’s scalp, and Katya sighs in appreciation. “I’m in for good. You?”

Katya nods. “Till death. And then I’ll be haunting you, and we’ll have all the kinky ghost sex.”

“Well, if you’re going to haunt me anyway,” Alaska says, slow and deadpan, “it’s only fair that I get to decide when to pull the damn plug.”

Katya laughs until she wheezes, and Alaska resists for a bit before joining in.

“Luckily,” Alaska says once they’ve calmed down, “I’ve got nothing to do for the next week but help you pee, and search for lawyers on the internet.”

“Not nothing. You’ll also be giving me a lot of head.”

“That goes without saying.”

They share a suggestive smile and go back to watching TV. Alaska starts quoting the dialogue again as the last bit of tension leaches out of her body, and Katya virtually melts into her side. One scene later, she gets bored and throws a possessive arm over Alaska’s leg, tapping out a restless beat on the inside of her knee. 

They’ve talked about marriage, and decided it’s too heteronormative for them. But this, the legal shit. The legal shit matters. It’s only luck, and the privilege of having supportive families unlike so many couples they’ve known, that’s allowed them to ignore the odds for so long. 

Nurse Tina returns to find Alaska happily voice acting all the roles in one of her favorite episodes, and Katya happily tapping out a song that will make Alaska laugh when she recognizes it.

“I should make you move,” Tina says. She’s got a cup of pills in one hand and a cup of water in the other. “But you two are just too cute. I guess gay marriage isn’t so bad, after all!”

Katya tilts her head back to look at Alaska’s face. “Your point.” But she smiles at Tina anyway. 

Alaska smiles, too. “Exactly,” she says, squirming to get her phone out of her pocket. “Never mind tomorrow, I’m going to start that search right now.”

[killingamericanhighereducation]

The Dirty, Rotten, Crooked, Broken, Student Loan System and The Immoral Bankers, Brokers, Collectors, and Corrupt Politicians Who Make Billions Off of It While the Courts Garnish Wages and Destroy Lives

Why when I pay the 850.00 or 1100.00 per month payments, the principle amount seems to not move and has gone up. I have been working on this debt since 1996. Got off of welfare as college was the way out....or so I thought. When I retire, I will be living on the streets. I tried. I failed. I raised my kids and they have student loans too as we thought that was the only way to get out of poverty. Never again will I encourage a young person to attend college in the US. Not a good idea. I have a nursing degree, my son has an IT degree and my daughter a business degree. But we barely get by. No home purchases, no car and no giving to economy. What is wrong with this picture? Lisa Powers  December 20, 2019 Manchester   (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

The Killing of American Higher Education - PART ONE

Introduction

The U.S. spends almost double that of anywhere else in the world on higher education and that's before the interest charges are shackled upon the students. Nine million Americans are either in default, deferment or forbearance on their student loans with a million more each year. These students are Democrats, Republicans, African American, Caucasians, Latinx, Asian, Native American, young, old, married, divorced, LGBTQ, fathers, mothers...every single demographic that exists. It's not a political party issue - it's blatant criminal activity by our elected officials, their collection agencies and the Department of Education. They have created a life-long debt sentence for these students for their own profit at the cost of our country's future.

This paper will include politicians and politics but is not pro Democratic Party or Pro Republican Party. The reality of today is that most politicians are arrogant, self-serving assholes and all have damaged our country in pursuit of their own wealth building agendas (this is also not new).

The student loan debt crisis didn't just appear. The warning sirens have been blaring for over a decade with the causes of it going further back than that. The subprime mortgage crisis was also seen years before but again, the people that could have changed it, the politicians, chose to do nothing until it was too late and then they bailed out the firms to the tune of $30 trillion. That same year Goldman Sachs paid out record bonuses to the very people who caused it. Why was this allowed and why is the student loan debt allowed? Because nasty, rotten, bankers, brokers, collection agencies, politicians and billionaires are making a great deal of money off of the dreams and misfortunes of students and the mismanagement of higher education (again allowed). Shame on them all. A pox on them all. There are solutions beyond the news bites and campaign rhetoric but solutions don’t pay as well.

Forced to compete in the higher education war for a job. Now I'm crushed with the weight of student loan payments and no end to the payoff. I've been forced to withdraw from contributing to my retirement fund so that I can make the enormous monthly payments. On a 50k loan, I'll (if I don't expire first) will have paid over 250k for this loan. By the way, my annual income will never match the debt I've accrued in order to compete for a professional hire career! I think it's important to note that community colleges had not yet molded programs to support a full-time employee who would be taking full-time credit hours. This forced many adult college bound students into the private college sector. These colleges continue to price-gauge adult students with inflated credit hour costs, books, and fees. My best option would be to quit working all together! I'll never see the light of day, so why bother making a good living? I support student debt forgiveness! Jennifer  November 25, 2019 Columbus (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

The student loan debt crisis is not new. It wasn’t like a tornado that pops up with the warning sirens giving only minutes of notice before it destroys everything in its path. It has been in the making since the 1970s and touched down on land over a decade ago. It was seen then – sirens blaring and it was projected to get worse. The narrative never changed - do not ignore this or very bad things will happen – and it has. Our elected officials didn’t just ignore it but instead they have actively, albeit quietly, ensured the system remained broken and has supported the loan “servicing” agencies in pushing their boots harder on the necks of borrowers for their own profits.These numbers, including our $1.7 trillion student loan debt figures are always increasing so this is a snapshot of the first quarter of 2019 –

Federal loan borrowers in repayment: 18.6 million.

Federal loan borrowers with loans in deferment: 3.4 million.

Federal loan borrowers with loans in forbearance: 2.7 million.

Federal loan borrowers with loans in default: 5.2 million.

11.3 million American citizens cannot make their payments. Twenty-five percent of all borrowers will go into default and that’s where the true ugly begins. At this point interest begins to quickly pile on and can double, triple, quadruple…more from the original loan amount.

Once in default, the loan is sent to collections - this is also the point where the power finance players make their money. With the blessing of congress and the courts, wages are garnished, social security payments are garnished, tax refunds are taken in full, you are no longer eligible for deferments or forbearance, and your credit is ruined. This can also cost you your job, or prevent you from future employment. This will last until the loan is paid back or until death (except private student loans where they can come after the estate).

How we reached this point can be very confusing (intentionally designed) so I’m going to attempt to deconstruct the main areas that facilitated the fraud and the areas that keep it going and growing. All of these issues have been previously reported by numerous journalists but have not always tied the relationships together of higher education, politicians (all branches of the federal government), collection/servicing agencies, financial institutions, billionaires and how they worked and continue to work together to commit such a monumental deception on the American public.

There are many rabbit holes that they want you to get lost in so I’ll address some of those right now. This piece will not explain all the differences between all the various student loans available today – understanding that like a financial aid officer at a college doesn’t change the corruption. It will not explain in-depth how all the financial tools work involved in this industry – understanding that like a broker doesn’t change the corruption. It will not explain the various loan repayment programs and faulty formulas used by the collection/servicing agencies – understanding these like the Department of Education will not change the corruption. It cannot cover every institution that has operated fraudulently nor all the dirty, immoral, unethical people involved…but I’ll give it the old college try.  

Beware phony advocates for reform that appear to speak on your behalf with partial fixes but do so just to ensure there are no real changes to the system that would result in any financial losses for themselves and the masters they serve. The predatory student loan industry exists because our elected officials are either corrupt themselves, don’t take the time to truly understand all the complex aspects of the abuse and fraud in the system (they choose to listen to the industry’s own lobbyists instead of their own constituents), or are just plain morons. Regardless, all kill American higher education.

The American student loan system – government loansharking enforced with judicial muscle. The mafia never had it so good.

No Good Deed Goes Unexploited

It is important to understand the history of how we arrived at our current crisis, because as I said it’s not new, it didn’t just happen last year. It was not only allowed but designed, fed, and encouraged to be the devious monster that exists today. This is not the complete history but what is needed to bring us to today.

1944. The GI Bill was established to reward veterans who served their country during WWII to catch up with those Americans who remained in college during this time. Prior to this, many of these people would never have been able to afford to go to college before or after their service. This is really the first involvement we see of the federal government assisting citizens who didn’t have the wealth to attend college on their own. There were advocates that wanted this extended beyond veterans to allow more Americans to benefit from higher education but the majority members of congress felt that since they never received that, no one else should either. No free rides was the mantra.

1958. The “Red Menace” swept the country and with Russia’s launch of Sputnik, Congress would sponsor low-interest loans under national security. It’s of interest to also note that the National Defense Education Act also included debt cancellation for those students who became teachers. There was still no support for need or academic based undergraduate funding.

I wanted to go to school to help people, and my master’s degree allows me to do that every day. But with over $75,000 in debt, partially due to ever-accruing interest, it feels like I’ll never get ahead and will struggle with this my entire life. I know God will take care of me; I just don’t know how. Emily August  May 23, 2019 Detroit (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

1965. President Johnson and the 89th Congress enacted the Higher Education Act. Title IV was the first true federal government commitment to providing college opportunity to students in need. This included the Guaranteed Student Loan (GSL) and College Work-Study Programs which also applied to middle-income families. Because the cost of education was somewhat affordable then, any loans to the middle class would have been a small percentage of the program. Enrollments increased and student aid appropriations took the lion’s share of compared to other domestic social programs. 1972. This was a big year in higher education. The reauthorization of the HEA laid the foundation for today’s student loan system including establishing the term “postsecondary” to recognize that not everyone needed a four-year bachelor’s degree but did need further education of some sort. This would allow financial aid for those students attending community colleges, trade schools, vocational schools and students attending part-time. The reauthorization also included:

Pell Grants began here as a way students could directly receive federal aid beyond the campus-based programs.

Private schools were now allowed to participate fully in receiving these monies.

State Incentive Grants which provided matching dollars to help states expand their need-based grants.

Hidden quietly in the darkest corners of Title IV where mold feeds and vermin defecate, they established the Student Loan Marketing Association, aka Sallie Mae, as a publicly chartered corporation to increase funding to guaranteed student loans (GSL).

This was to be a new era in the building of our country. We were the world leaders in almost everything during this time and the importance of education was critical to our country’s growth and future prosperity. It was supposed to be a good thing.

The Old Sons Of Bitches

In the early 1970s, while the protests of the Vietnam War were still in full swing on college campuses throughout the country, legislators became paranoid that these long-haired, lazy, hippie, pinkos would use the bankruptcy system to get out of paying the federal government back for their student loans (this was the early 70s and our government was completely controlled by wealthy, white men who did think like this). This fear had nothing to do with reality and there was no evidence to support this position. At that time their main target was those pursuing medical and law degrees that were higher priced. Keep in mind that the degree costs were a small fraction compared to today’s tuition.

In 1973 the Congressional Commission on the Bankruptcy Laws of the United States issued a report which included that student loan debt cannot be discharged for five years after graduation. Three years later the Education Amendments of 1976, Section 439A, was adopted even though the Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported less than 1% of student loans had gone to bankruptcy. Now, no student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy until five years after graduation, or unless the borrower could prove repayment imposed “undue hardship” (which was never defined by the law makers). While this passed it did have more than a few critics. Michigan Congressman, James O’Hara stated that establishing this “... treats educational loans precisely as the law now treats loans incurred by fraud, felony, and alimony-dodging. No other legitimately contracted consumer loan … is subjected to the assumption of criminality which this provision applies to every educational loan.”

In 1978, with the passage of the Bankruptcy Reform Act, the exception to bankruptcy discharge of student loans was moved from the Higher Education Act to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code at 11 USC 523(a)(8). While Congress sought to reverse the earlier exception, the Senate’s version prevailed maintaining the inability to discharge student loans for five years and adding that it applied to loans back by the government and nonprofit institutions of higher education.

In 1979, Congress wanted to address the problem of lack of participation by lenders (although this wasn’t known to be a problem by anyone) so they quietly passed an amendment giving banks a higher rate of return on student loan by linking them changes in Treasury bill rates. Prior to this the government set a cap on what lenders would make. With banks making more money, the student loan industry was born.

Just because the corrupt say it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s still not corrupt.

The Noose Tightens

1986-92. Loan volume shot up again after the 1986 and 1992 Higher Education Act (HEA) reauthorizations.  In 1990 the Crime Control Act extended the period before student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy from five years to seven years and then a year later the statute of limitations on defaulted loans, six years, was totally eliminated by the Higher Education Technical Amendments. There was a failed push to increase Pell Grants to reduce the reliance on loans and instead Congress raised the borrowing limits of students and created a new unsubsidized loan for the middle-class that was no longer based on financial need. This meant anyone could now take on a

We are being held captive in an 8% pay back on our kids Parent Plus loans. We have tried to re-fi them, and nobody will touch it. This has made our monthly bills higher than our income! It should be illegal to offer these loans without qualifying, and to keep us locked in this excessively high interest rate! Laura MacCormack  May 9, 2019 Green Creek (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

student loan regardless of their income or parents’ income. Smelling more money could be made off of the well-meaning, caring, loving parents they also uncapped the Parent Loan (PLUS) program. Now parents could borrow, on behalf of their children, the full amount of their children’s’ educational costs. Because of these changes, enrollment took off and in a short two year period the amount borrowed increased over $10 billion.The Student Loan Reform Act of 1993 revised how loans are serviced, financed and allowed for more students to take out more loans. This also established an income-based repayment plan stretching out to a home mortgage length of 25 years. The Department of Education responded by creating more than 70 complex rule-making packages further complicating the regulatory process for students, schools and the government itself.

By 1998 the Higher Education Amendments, Section 971 eliminated the seven year period required before a student loan could be discharged in bankruptcy. There had been no debates or hearings on this prior to President Clinton signing the bill into law. This meant there was no longer a statute of limitations nor could student loans even be considered for bankruptcy – ever, unless the ambiguous, indeterminate, undefined “undue hardship” provision could be proven.

In 2005 the final nail was hammered into the hands of student borrowers by Congress with the passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This meant all federal and private educational loans were excepted from bankruptcy discharge unless the undefined “undue hardship” could be proven (note – you have a better chance of being hit by lighting, which would probably be a welcome relief to my student loan borrowers, than having a judge dismiss a student loan in bankruptcy).

The politicians, with help from their financial keepers, knew by now that money, lots and lots of money, could be made off of student borrowers. By increasing funding to everyone, by ensuring every kind of nonprofit and private educational institution was eligible to receive federal and private loans, by supporting the skyrocketing costs of higher education, by removing the only tool that could provide some kind of market correction (bankruptcy), and by placing student loan debt in the financial markets (SLABS) which allowed those on the inside to make billions of dollars, they had successfully created the most devious, destructive system ever in the history of the United States.

I am 31 years old, divorced single mom of 2 with $134,000 + in student loan debt, much thanks to the interest. One loan I borrowed was for $5000, which I have paid roughly $5000 back, but still owe over $7000. So a $5000 loan turned into a $12000 loan after they tacked on interest. The remaining loans I have are private and federal. I can't afford to purchase a home. I can't afford to save towards my retirement. And there is absolutely nothing that I can do but to continue to pay the interest only payments to make it more affordable for me a month, but it will cost me 1,000s of dollars of additional interest to the life of my loans. Life happens, and the fact that we are punished with high interest that balloons our loans to an unrealistic amount is, without the ability to file bankruptcy or have the option to pause our loan payments without ramifications is wrong. Christie  May 1, 2019 Frisco (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

What was originally meant to help those of us with the least financial means attend higher education, breaking the cycle of poverty, was now viewed and constructed by those in power as a money making machine. Success of higher education forever forward was measured by the amount of campaign contributions from this new “industry.” Citizens were cut and bled and the feeding frenzy began.

[xxjaytx87xx]

Better School Daze * I had been dating a girl that same year. I don’t know how I pulled that off, it just kind of happened. I’d bring my acoustic guitar to school and saw she could play too, so it went from there. But man, I was even timid around her. It took me forever to grow the guts to kiss her, much less, hold her hand. Everything was on her schedule because she had to make the first move, every time*. * I was the first in my group of friends to go all the way, sexually, though. So I had that going for me. It felt like real love at the time. I really thought I was (more on that later...).* * I was able to go to prom with her since she was a junior, while I was only a sophomore.* *This was another reason for my experimenting with alcohol. I’d be an idiot kid when it came to prom and the many after parties, if I had never drank before.* So there I was, sitting comfortably in World History, feeling beyond great. I could feel as though my eye lids were hanging on for the dear lives. They descended into two slits in the middle of my face, while my mouth was gaping and giggling. Who knows what was so damn funny, I just had to laugh. I had taken about five swigs in a three-minute period. A tingling sensation grew in the back of my neck, as well as the top of my head. The rest of my body was numb, inside and out. Internally, my conscious revealed that I had just been reborn. I couldn’t remember who or what I used to be, only what I was now. I turned around to Sam, sitting behind me, and whispered, "Oh my God, getting drunk is awesome!” She glanced at me, lifted her eyebrows as high as they could go, surprised, exclaiming, “I know." All the while, nodding her head. I turned back around in my seat—a chair connected with half of a desk, instead of the full ones we had back in the middle school days. I wasn’t able to get that goofy grin off my face. I was permanently, The Joker from Batman. Sensations of confidence flowed through my body and soul like waves on a beach. Filling me with, what felt like, a new power. A secret that I had found. And it was all mine. I took another long swig from the bottle that was now half-full. I sat up a little and took a long look around the room at everybody. It was dark, but I could still see all their faces. Now, normally, I’d be thinking everybody was looking at me, judgingly; however, nobody was looking. Nobody was judging (except maybe Sam, who probably thought I was an idiot for drinking in class). This was what having no worries, no fears, and no inhibitions felt like. This was how I was supposed to be—without a care in the world. I didn’t care what others thought of me anymore. I was able to be my true self. It was an awesome thing our substitute put on some boring-ass movie, otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have had this spiritual and mental revelation. I put on my inconspicuous headphones—my desk was across the room from the teacher’s desk—and pressed play on my Disc-Man. It was a fast-paced punk band known as The Casualties. Their music was blaring inside my head. It seemed like my ears were bleeding. That felt impeccable. *I* felt impeccable. I wanted to jump out of my desk-chair and go wild. Dance in front of everyone like they weren’t watching, and who gives a damn if they were, too. I needed to keep myself hidden though—I still had that sense—so instead, I sat back and slunk down in my chair. Loving myself. Loving life. After all these tortuous years, I was finally comfortable in my own skin. I ended up killing the bottle by next period. * I gotta do this again.* ________________________________________ *Beep, bzzzz, beep, bzzzz, beep*— The radio clock read 5:00pm in digital, red numbers. Our time was up for this session. I turned to look at Gail— "Wow, there's so much more that I gotta tell you." "I'm sure there is. What a story, so far! I am very glad you had the courage to tell me certain things. Thank you. That was very brave of you," she said. I sat up, then glanced down at my black chucks, shaking my head, "that's funny. 'Cuz that is nothing compared to the rest." I looked at her, eyes up but my head down. She jotted down something on her clipboard. Maybe where I left off in the story, for when I'd see her next time. But I wasn't ready to end it there... "Can I at least finish the high school part? It won't take but a minute." She looked at the clock again and asked if I could make it quick. I nodded and began, again— "Ok, well... I ended up breaking up with that girl I was dating back then, after I went to prom with her and her friends twice. She was crushed, heartbroken. Didn't know that would come back and bite me in the ass later. "I started experimenting with pills which went great with alcohol. I remember in Geometry, feeling the Valium kick in with some vodka I drank earlier. As it kicked in, The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" started to play in my headphones. I slowly melted into my seat feeling pure ecstasy—until I later tried real X at a show, which was truly surreal. I loved X. Took it every time I had the chance. I didn't care for mushrooms or acid, though. I had had a bad trip when my parents weren't home and my buddy brought over a gallon-sized Zip-lock bag of shrooms, then told the five of us to eat up. I wish I knew how much I took 'cuz it was horrible, everybody went insane. I tried acid and found it a lot more smoother than caps (or shrooms), until I felt a sharp pain in my lower abdomen. It hurt so bad. I couldn't tell my parents because I thought it was from the acid. A day later, I couldn't bear the pain anymore so I eventually told my parents. They took me to the Emergency Care doctor who said I needed to be rushed to the hospital. My appendix had ruptured," I laugh, "a doctor in the E. R. told me I'd be dead, had I waited another day"— "Oh my god!" Gail stopped me. "Ok, this is becoming longer than a minute. Let me check to see where my next client is." "Sure thing, doll." *Every female nurse or counselor has been a victim of my charm*. After she picked up the phone and waited a few seconds, she started talking. I took glances around the room looking at the different furniture, pictures, and little knick-knacks she had. Of course, she had a full bookcase containing probably every textbook she bought for schooling and counseling. She had two different versions of the DSM, including the most recent one (DSM-IV, at the time). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's used to categorize and determine a patient's diagnoses. It has a list of every single disorder or disease you can think of. If your therapist doesn't have one on their shelf, it's time to find another one. She hung up the phone after a minute and said her client was running a little late so I can continue if I want. "Of course I do. Quickly, though." I gestured my hands in a chop-chop motion. Then stuck out my index finger, rolling it. "I had a band back then, too, where I played drums. Sorta hippy jam band, but we had a decent following. It was right before our last show when my appendix flaked out on me, so we had to cancel the gig. I was super pissed. "So back in high school, I was always at school, high." *I laugh at my corny-ass joke. *"I was drinking everyday or getting tipsy, at the very least. Then I'd have a wicked hangover at the end of the day. That's when the drugs came in handy. I started doing cocaine at parties, then quickly, everywhere. As a senior, I'd sell key bumps to underclassmen for five bucks each. Stupid kids. Then we graduated. When I walked, tons of people cheered. The alcohol was my liquid courage throughout the years, which brought me out of my shell and into life. I became a popular guy, knowing almost everyone in my school and dated some very cute girls. On the other hand, I was becoming an alcoholic, though I didn't know it at the time. Even for graduation, I took some X and drank before our school-run grad party, afterwards. "Out of high school, nothing changed. I kept drinking. Blacking out became a routine thing for me. I felt like a detective the morning after, trying to figure out what I did the night before. I was constantly sneaking out of the house and fighting with my parents. They couldn't take much more of my destructive behavior, so we agreed that I go see a therapist. We tried to keep it a secret, but I didn't care, I was either drunk or high on something. Even when I met up with my new shrink. I could not talk to him unless I had drank beforehand. "This one time I had to pay a bum to get me a pint of whiskey, so I ended up being late. In his office, I would talk and talk and talk, usually about nothing, and always being a smart ass. This lasted a few months, until one day I could see and feel what the drugs and alcohol were doing to me. I had scars and bruises obscuring my pale skinny body. My parents then brought up rehab. Initially I said, "no, absolutely not!" "Until, I finally gave in and told my shrink that I was sick. His eyes were half-closed with his head resting on his hand when I said, 'I think I need help.' "He jumped up as if he'd been shocked by a taser. "Yes, yes, you think?" The expression on his face was of huge relief. I think he was tired of my blabbing and knew I drank every time I saw him. So he called my parents, who had already found a rehab, and two days later... I was off." I took a big breath in and slowly exhaled. "So then you went to rehab," said Gail, confirming. "Yep. The first one." I nodded. "Ok well, thank you for having the courage to tell me all this. I'll see you next week?" "Indeed. And that's when things get juicy."

[profoundgardenertree-blog]

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Before I get my license, I have to get insurance. But I wanna know what do I need to get insurance? What do I have to bring?""

What kind of cars are good for teens insurance wise?

I know it depends on where I live and many other variables but I'd like to know in general what gets the best rates. I'm looking at a 1993 chevrolet s10 5speed with a 4.3l v6 right now but I don't know how the insurance would be on it yet. I'm 18 years old in Canada and I've been driving for 2 years total (1 year g1/permit 1 year g2 class license) and now I'm about to go for my full g license. What should I be looking for? import/domestic? engine size? number of cylinders? cars or light trucks? size of engine in relation to size of car? I thought I might get some relief on the s10 since it's domestic, manual (less people want to steal?), I can make some extra money at work, and since only 3 people can fit (originally a 2 seater) less people would be injured in an accident? I don't know, what do you think i should be looking for?""

Would it be the cheapest sports car for a teen?

Yes I know insurance is not cheap for 16 year olds but I saw the 4 cheapest sports cars to insure I saw a pontiac solstic and a mazda mx5 would these 2 be the cheapest for me to drive then if there the cheapest sports cars to insure I will be 16 soon and I live in nebraska

I wrecked my motorcycle with no insurance in fl help?

So a year ago i wrecked my motorcycle, crashing into another car. I did not have insurance or a motorcycle Endorsement. I live in fl so im kind of familiar with the not at fault law. However the insurance company from the other party has sent a bill for 9k an request i pay it. Some people are telling me to ignore it an others are telling me to pay. Need help would be thankful. Im trying to be a firefighter paramedic an i do not want this to kill my chances. Thank you""

Car insurance question....?

A stray dog ran out in front of my car causing me some damage. My insurance adjuster writes his own estimate so he told me what the insurance would pay minus my deductible. He said the check would be sent to me, that I can have anyone I want to fix it and to shop around. Does that mean if I can find someone to do it for less I can keep the extra to help me toward my deductible????? even though I need to tell them who is doing it before the check is sent to me. (the check will have both names on it) My friend says if I can get it done for less that agreement is between me and who I chose so any extra is mine?????? I don't want to do anything wrong but I also don't want to give money away that I don't have to.""

Is landlord responsible for pool insurance?

We signed a lease that required us to take out insurance for $ 500,000 if we used the pool and planned on having guests use the pool also . They also wanted the insurance to cover themselves . When speaking to our insurer, USAA, they said our renters insurance , which included $100,000 liability, would cover us having anyone besides us use the pool or being on our property in general . The landlord was responsible for having insurance for the pool and the house to protect themselves and they told us we were not responsible for paying for insurance for the landlord . The property was in Norfolk VA . We just wanted to know if he landlord was trying to get us to pay for their share of insurance when it wasn't our responsibility and if we were right to have stuck with USAA advice .""

What company has the best motorcycle insurance in Maryland?

What company has the best motorcycle insurance in Maryland?

What is the cheapest insurance company to switch to for a descent price after a DUI?

I am 23 and have a 2005 chevy silverado single cab. It's paid off in full. I usually like to have basic & Im on my dads plan which is about 3-400 a year. & they are now increasing it to 800$. I would like to switch to a company that I can pay less to.

Where can I get the best Insurance quotes for Home & Vehicle?

I am looking to get insurance on my house and vehicle. I am not satisfied with the present company and would like to research about the same. Can any one tell me where in I can get multiple quotes from different companies. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks

Another car insurance question to British drivers!?

My brother's car was written off yesterday [was the other party's fault]. He was told today the car wasn't redeemable so that's that! So he is waiting to see how much they are going to pay him for the loss, but the question is does he have to keep paying full comprehensive insurance when he no longer has a car to drive? Can he now pay a reduced rate until the insurance is sorted out? It seems unfair to continue paying out for fully comp insurance when there is no car to insure!""

What is multi trip insurance?

going back packing for a year, what is multi trip insurance?""

How will 2 points on my license affect my insurance?

I live in South Carolina and am insured through State Farm. I recently recieved a speeding ticket that cost me 2 points on my license. What is an approximate percentage increase that I can expect in my insurance rates over the next couple of years?

Question About Car Insurance

I know that if you cancel your Car Insurance, or it lapses, the NC DMV will take your tag. BUT, Here is my situation. In order to get your license you have to have proof of insurance, And being i would be covered under my moms insurance, and Her car, What would happen if MY insurance lapsed... Basically, I cannot afford insurance, But i have to get some before i can drive, and i do not know how long i will be able to keep it, Would i loose my license if my insurance was canceled? or what would happen? What are the Penalties to driving Without Insurance?""

Cheapest car insurance?

Cheapest car insurance?

""When it comes to your car insurance, when is it cheaper to let your kids get their licences?

is it smarter to wait until they are 18; if they get their licence before they are 18 do your rates go up higher or lower then if they waited until they're 18.

How much will car insurance be for a 21 year old?

I am turning 21 next week and will be working towards getting my license in a couple months (by April 2011). I was wandering if anyone could tell me how much more would my parents would have to pay for car insurance if they added me in it with another car added (they have two cars currently and they pay about 250-300 ever 6 months). I wanted to pay them the difference of how much more higher the insurance went. Let me know.

What is the average cost of having a tooth pulled?

I may have to have a tooth pulled and maybe a filling. Does anyone know how much this usually costs? I do not have dental insurance. Also, do most offices offer payments or financing? If offered would they have to do a credit check? I do not have good credit?""

Whats a cheap major health insurance plan?

im paying way too much right now and need a cheaper plan

Vehicles with lowest insurance rates?

I live in Ontario Canada. I'm needing a car for work now. I have three tickets about two years ago; two running red light tickets and one for driving ten over the limit. I'm looking for a car that is good on gas and easier on the wallet for insurance. Thanks

Which is better full coverage or liability auto insurance?

I live in wisconsin where it is not mandatory to have car insurance. I'm 26 and been driving since i was 16 without insurance and i'm planning on getting a policy started soon and i have no idea as to which type of insurance to get. I drive a 1997 chevy lumina with around 222,000 miles on it. If i get full coverage will it cover my car damages as well as the other persons damages or will liability do that and will i be required to pay a deductible? I am thinking about getting up to $100,000 in coverage.""

Car insurance question?

My fiances insurance is OUTRAGEOUS on a truck he has liability only on ..due to his driving history. He's paying $300 a month (for liability ONLY now) ..my insurance on my car, for full coverage is not even a fraction of that a month, even though my cars value is at least $10,000 more than his. My question is can we put his truck in my name and I'll go to an insurance company and get liability only on and list myself as the only driver. We are expecting a baby and I'm sick of us throwing away that much money a month for CAR INSURANCE! Is this illegal? I mean if I'M the owner and I'VE insured it what can happen if he wrecks or something while driving it and is not listed on my policy? We live in Georgia if that's relevant!""

Motorcycle Insurance?

Does anyone know of an insurance place in the Niagara region that will insure a 1982 Suzuki Tempter GR650 with a rider being 20, have only M1 and never had insurance before? It doesn't matter if its expensive I just want to know if they will insure the rider.""

Temporary Car Insurance on my Mums car?

Hi, Is it possible to get temporary car insurance on my mums car, even for just a day or two on her current policy, or is it even possible to get temporary comprehensive cover with another car insurance company on her car while she is still on her own policy? Thanks, Boss1996""

Progressive is hiking my Massachusetts car insurance rate by 23% this year! Is that normal?

My policy is about to come up for renewal and they're going to hike up my rate by 23%! I just talked to their customer service person and she said they're doing it all over Massachusetts. Are all the car insurance companies raising their rates so much in Massachusetts? Was there some law that passed which changed their profit margin or something? Is there another car insurance company that will give me a better deal?

Car insurance for a Nissan 350Z?

Would it the car insurance be expensive for the Nissan 350Z if my parents bought it? But its for me. Yes, they're older than 25 :p and they own a car of their own. But this would be my first car, of my own. Not me driving theirs everywhere. lol. Cause i heard something about being a first time driver or whatever, being a teen and under the age of 25 with a two seater car that insurance can be hectic? But im not paying for it. And i can't make up my mind between the Audi TT or the 350Z. But i will start paying for it when i get a job, 16th birthday isn't to far. Which would you choose and why?""

Changing car while paying monthly for car insurance?

I still have like 9 months to pay on my insurance but i want to change car how can i do it or cant i ?

I made a little damage in a car today. Do my insurance pay the fix ?

Hi made a damage when I was parking the car. Little Damage in my car and other person's car. Do my insurance pay it ?

Dental insurance..?

Hi, i am a student so i do not have much money. I am living in Melbourne, Australia. I would like to know if there is an affordable health insurance that cover dental needs. I need to remove my 4 wisdow teeth and also i would like to put some braces...but i can not aford it. Would an insurance be worth in this case?""

How hard is it to have a baby without insurance?

My husband and I are both employed and make decent pay, but neither of our employers offer insurance. We were wondering what options there are for non-insured couples who make too much to qualify for,say, WIC or other government programs.""

Is there affordable health insurance available for fertility: tubal reversal?

Me and my fiancee' are wanting to have another baby. The only problem is that my tubes are tied. I wanna know is there afforable health insurance that covers fertility? Is there ...show more

I need to health insurance but i got laid off work...?

I understand that i need health insurance. Cuz face it, you never know when it's necessary. I've been looking for a job since I got laid off in March. Cobra turned out to be too expensive. What are some low cost health insurances that are good? Since i'm low on cash i dont wanna throw money into a bad insurance company. Are there any programs in California that can assist me? At least until i can find a job.""

Car insurance for teens?

Hi, so I just got my license today and now I have to insure my car but don't really have much information about how to do so. I'm an 18 year old girl and I only drive to and from school, which is about 7 miles away from my house. I have a Toyota corolla 2005 model but it belongs to my grandma. she's planning on completely giving the car to me and insuring it completely in my name and canceling her insurance because she no longer has a means to drive, since she only picks me up from school. My family doesn't really want to put me on their insurance and insist that I have my own separate plan. My whole family uses Geico btw. so if I wanted to insure the Toyota completely in my name, I would have to first get a quote right? if I set up the insurance with a certain amount of mileage, would that decrease the amount I have to pay? what about good student discounts ? if there are any cheaper alternatives please recommend them to me! I'm a full time student so I can only afford so much :(""

Car insurance questions?

Ok so im a bit confused about car insurance! If i claimed on my insurance because say i had a crack on my windscreen and it want my fault, would that mean i lose my no claims? Also, if i was involved in an accident that wasnt my fault, and the other person refused to give their insurance details, would i just ring my insurance company with their car reg? What if i lost the claim? Im very confused about all this!""

Is insurance cheaper with driving school or learning at home?

i want to learn at home.

Why did my car insurance double from last period?

Does it make sense that your auto insurance can double for 1 at fault accident? I just got my renewal documents for my car insurance and my premium doubled from what it was last period. I did have one at fault accident so i knew there would be an increase but I didn't know it could double like that...

Does the mazda 3 have high insurance costs?

just wondering if it would be in the sports car range or the sedan range?

Is it legal to have two different insurance companies for one car?

i am currently leaving my insurance company because they give me too much headaches (ING by the way)... i have to wait a week to offically cancel my policy (its a longg story). i found another insurance company that i would like to join right away because i told my insurance company i am putting ym car away for a few years but i just didnt want to tell them i found someone else for way cheaper and i need insurance now! but im not sure if it is possible to have comprehensive with one company and coverage with another. please let me know. Thanks!! toronto, Ontario""

A good place 2 get cheap car insurance?

A good place 2 get cheap car insurance?

Is affordable (not free) health care a right or a privilege?

There are many constituancies in this debate not the least of which is individual health responsibility. That said the costs are driven in large part by greed. Insurance, hospitals, doctors, drug companies, lawyers, restaurants and the food industry and fraudsters all have a dog in this fight. If affordable health care is believed to be a right (I believe it is) then all of these constituants need to come together. Al Tennessee""

How do you put someone on your insurance policy?

I have been insured for 3 years. My bf wants to get a car but with no no claims bonus he is getting quotes in excess of 3000 on the most basic insurance. I've tried to get quotes online to have him on my insurance but driving seperate cars and it seems I can't do this online. Do you have to actually phone them up? I'd prefer to do it online as it's less hassle.

I'm 17 and have car insurance that i have to pay 240 every month. I live in philadelphia is there cheaper ones?

i got a 2000 ford taurus and my mom bought insurance since she doesn't have a car herself we had to get my own insurance plan and now we have to pay 240 every month because of my age..i need to know of any cheaper insurance for myself. plz and thank you.

""When your 18 and still in high school, does the car insurance company still check your grades for a discount?

My younger sister recently turned 18 and got her license. She's in dying need of insurance but she's a D average student and ashamed to show her grades. Does the car insurance discount still apply to students who are 18?

What is the toll free phone number for Travelers Insurance?

I am looking for a toll free phone number with Travelers Insurance that is dedicated to new customer quotes not existing customer service.

Whats a cheap major health insurance plan?

im paying way too much right now and need a cheaper plan

How much would car insurance be for me?

Does anybody know how much (on average) car insurance is for an 18 year old with no accidents/tickets? I'm thinking about getting my first car by Dec. 2012 (or maybe early 2013). Of course it will be a used car (probably a sedan from somewhere between 2005 - present) since it's my first car (idk if that matters w/ the insurance, i think it does)

How to find a car that will have cheap insurance?

Hey! Im an 18 year old guy thats about to start driving , and as always the case - insurance is a KILLER. Im going to get a used car and i honestly don't care about the looks aslong as it functions fine! Just wondering what i can look for that will minimise insurance price? Small engine , age etc? Thanks :)""

What's the cheapest business auto insurance company?

There are different business auto insurance companies, I've heard Erie insurance is one of the best ones, do you know of any other companies that might be better or similar? thanks""

Cheapest Bike insurance in ontario for sport bike?

I'm looking into selling my cr250 for a street bike something along the lines of a 1998-2001 cbr/gsxr 600. My only problem as I'm sure you can all relate is insurance. I simply cannot afford to be paying 3-4000 dollars upfront. So does anyone know of a insurance company that will do business on a month to month bases insted of anually.

About how much would the average insurance run for a 17 year old male driving a sports car it is a mustang?

About how much would the average insurance run for a 17 year old male driving a sports car it is a mustang?

Is a mechanical failure covered by an auto insurance policy?

is the cost of repairs for a mechanical failure covered by an auto insurance policy? Example: engine or transmission? I have full coverage on my vehicle

Which car would have higher insurance premiums?

I'm trying to figure out what car i want for my 16th birthday.. I've absolutely fell in love with the subaru wrx hatchback. the only thing im worried about is the fact that the insurance rates Might be high. i also like the mazda speed 3 and i was wondering which would be more expensive insurance wise. Also what you think about them being first vehicles. and please no<, you should get a POS for a first vehicle... Thanks in advance!!""

How much does Alstate raise your insurance for a new teen driver?

I'm 17 and ill be put on my parents insurance,How much extra will it coast a month? I took drivers Ed which lowers it too. I have an 06 ford explorer if that matters.""

""What's the average cost of motorcycle insurance say, if you are 20 years old and live in Los Angeles?""

What's the average cost of motorcycle insurance say, if you are 20 years old and live in Los Angeles?""

Car Insurance prices???????????????

I am turning 18 soon and will take the written exam. After that, I will try to get a licence. Now my question is, for a first time driver at 18 years old, how much would car insurance usually cost for a '97 Nissan Altima with I'd say no more than 10-20 hours of driving per week? I also have good grades and I think some insurance companies give you up to 15% off for that. Thanks!""

Is there anyway I can get insurance coverage for a vehicle if I don't have a license?

I am a senior citizen and have never driven. I need transportation desperately. I can purchase a car but find I cannot get insurance for any driver of my car if I don't have a drivers license. I have not been able to find anyone I would really trust to put the car in their name. Any suggestions?

Medicate and your own private insurance ?

A friend of mine stated that even If u have insurance (private insurance at that) that u can sign up for emergency Medicare If your insurance only covers a certain amount of your procedure. Is that true? I find that to be nonsense!

What does an insurance carrier mean?

Is it the person who makes the monthly payments on your behalf if you can't do it? What does it mean?

Can I Sue My Auto Insurance Company?

In 2005, as part of our divorce agreement, my ex and I decided to keep the same auto insurance but under separate policies. We had been with this company for years. My policy was on auto pay meaning that the payments were taken directly from my account. He walked in to pay his. About 6 months after the divorce, I was pulled over for a routine traffic stop and was told I was driving an uninsured vehicle. Without insurance, my registration was also invalid. Both tickets totaled 1K. My car was taken into impound. I checked and found the officer was correct. On good terms with my ex, I told him what happened. He said for the past 6 months, each time he went in to make a payment, the girl HIS was already paid. Realizing what had happened. They were applying my payments to his automobile. I was furious. I notified the agent who initially did not want to accept blame, but since the payments were automatic and my account number was on each payment they took, they were responsible. The error was compounded by the fact that the cancellation notice went to HIS address (how dumb was that!) So I had no way of knowing that I was cancelled. I was without a car for 2 weeks and lost my job. After much haggling and many sleepless nights of wondering what to do without a job or a car, the insurance company finally admitted blame, paid the impound fees of $1,250.00. The agent also said they would handle the 2 tickets totaling 1K. FAST FORWARD TO 2010 in my state, the county did a scofflaw sweep and I was summoned to court with over 5 thousand other delinquent drivers to address unpaid tickets. The order was come to court by April 30th or be arrested. Realizing this had to be a mistake, but fearful of the law, I stood in line for over 5 hours in blazing heat, then sat in court another 5 hours waiting for my day in court. I was immediately threatened with arrest because the 2 tickets were not paid. Up to that moment, I had no idea the insurance company had not paid the 2 tickets. This time, not only was my insurance and registration cancelled, my license was suspended due to the age of the infraction (5 years). In front of the judge, I called the agents' office only to be told by the secretary that they had no intention to pay the ticket. Paying to get the car out of impound was enough. When the judge heard this she was shocked and let me off with a promise to pay in 5 days. She made me promise not to drive. With no way to get home but drive, I took a chance, and was pulled over. The officer informed me that due to the vast number of outstanding cases, tags bearing our county name would be targeted for a while (talk about a police state!). I showed him my documents from the court and headed home. This is a nightmare. Would I have a case if I filed suit against my insurance company for failing in their fiduciary responsibility to a 16 year client in good standing? By the way this company is one of the largest in the country.""

Has anyone used comparisons.org for auto insurance?

i'm looking for cheap insurance and don't know if i can trust them. any suggestion from anyone?

Insurance cost for jeep liberty?

I was thinking about getting a 2005-06 jeep liberty CRD (diesel) as my first vehicle, but wondering what insurance would cost. I'm 24 years old, male and live in a small town just north of Toronto and with only a G2 license.""

Is it any wonder so many 17-30 year olds are driving around without insurance?

This is obviously the fault of the insurance companies for pricing them out of the market with their ridiculously high quotes

Insurance for old work ute?

Hey guys, I have just bought a old 95' toyota hilux ute nice and cheap and im not too worried about insuring the actual ute as its only costed me 2000 and market value is 4000. Just looking for some advice on types of insurance. I obviously would like 3rd party and im not sure if i should bother with covering my tools. Usually my boss brings all the tools, obviously i bring a small amount but never a trailer full. What is the best insurance company for this and what would be a good price for me to look at. Thanks :)""

If I drive a car that has insurance but not in your name in Florida?

If there is a car accident can I get in trouble? Meaning can I get a ticket if someone rear ends me? A friend of mine was in an accident and they were rearended the car owner had insurance would that cover said friend?

How much will my geico auto insurance rates go up after an accident?

If I've had a couple of accidents in years past, currently pay about 1,200/year for geico. I just had a very minor fender bender in which I sustained no damage but the other car (a BMW) got 2 scratches on the rear. How much can I expect my insurance rates to go up when this is all reported?""

Does anyone know how Obamas health plan is going to work?

If everyone will be required to have insurance, will the insurance offered be affordable? Will it be based on your income?""

Affordable health insurance plans?

The company where I work has just informed me that they will be canceling our medical benefits at the end of this month. What are some decent plans that I can get on my own that arent too expensive. I was paying $100.00 per month thru my job and would like to keep my premium around the same. I live in Wisconsin. Thanks for any advice.

My insurance is too high?

I'm 19, in ireland (south) i pay 300 a month and i just changed address to the next county, my ins. has gone up to 450 a month.. Is there a speed restrictor policy i can get or has any1 my age managed to lower insurance somehow? My engine size is 1.2 also is that too high for my age? Thanx in advance ;)""

Can I add my girlfriend to my health insurance if we live together?

Some states allow benefits for partners. Is this the same? I am insured by Humana (Open Choice PPO)

Is there any car Insurance company that doesn't charge interest?

I have heard that insurance companies charge interest if you decide to pay your car insurance monthly, but is there any insurance company that doesn't.""

Whats a cheap major health insurance plan?

im paying way too much right now and need a cheaper plan

Car Rental Insurance?

What happens if you rent a car and decline any coverage? I was told that if you were involed in an accident you would have to make a claim with your own insurance company. What if you don't own a car and thus don't have an insurance company? Are there limits to the amount of responsibility of the renter? I mean if the car is totaled does the renter really have to replace the entire cost of the car out of his pocket as well as damage to the other car and injury to it's occupants? I know i'm not alone in declining insurance. But if I got into an accident I always assumed I would just be responsible for a deductable and not the total amout of damage to the cars and injuries. Serious answers only. I really don't need to hear yes, you need insurance or you're screwed That tells me nothing.""

Cheapest car INSURANCE!!!?

whats the cheapest car insruance company for a 17 year old, the cheapest is ecar that i have found""

Will a reckless driving ticket affect an insurance premium in Georgia?

My husband recently went through a road block after leaving work (playing music in a bar.) He was honest and said he'd been drinking, even though he waited for a while and had not had that much to drink. He blew .07 over the legal limit. He went to jail for 14 hours. We paid a lot of money and got the charge dropped to reckless driving. This was six months ago and our insurance premium has only gone down (good grades and homeowner's insurance with same company.) We are afraid to ask the insurance company for fear that they might not know. 1. Will that info get sent to them automatically? 2. Is there danger that our bill will go up if we speak to them about it? 3. What percentage might the bill go up once they do find out? We are looking to buy a new car soon, so we can't avoid speaking to the insurance company about it forever!""

How does car insurance work? (also whats better buying a car vs leasing)?

well im 16 right now. planning to save up till 18 and buy a car. my first question is, how does car insurance work? i know you have to pay monthly and depending on each car its different but would car insurance be cheaper when the car is leased? or when its bought? also i know each car depreciates alot every year. at first i was thinking of leasing it but now im not sure. can someone tell me what would be a better choice on the long run?""

How much will it cost to insure a 2007 acura mdx?

it has white leather seats and the technology package and 130,000 miles on it""

Any Creative Marketing ideas for Auto/home insurance in California?

I've been trying lots of new ideas for marketing my insurance business. I do flyers, internet advertising and more. What made you chose your insurance agent? What sorts of things are important to you, (other than price)? What sort of promotions would you be interested in seeing?""

Why is Geico Home Owner's Insurance So Much More Expensive Than other Companies?

I have had my home owner's insurance through Liberty Mutual and I pay $865.00 per year for about 110,000 in dwelling coverage plus other coverages as well. However, I just decided as I wasn't doing anything today to check on the competition and I called up Geico. Get this.. Here it is... Geico, for the EXACT SAME COVERAGE I am paying Liberty Mutual $865.00 per year gave me a quote for $4,200.00 per year. WITH ALL COVERAGES BEING EQUAL. I was shocked... The lady told me because I had one claim for roof damage which cost $4,000.00 that justified the increase in coverage. Plus Geico had a higher deductible of $1,500.00. First I don't know anyone paying $4,000.00 for a one year home owner's policy for $110,000.00 in coverage. But does anyone know why Geico is so ridiculously expensive?""

Switching Car Insurance?

Next year when I get married my fiance and I are going to start a new car insurance policy. However - I currently have co-signed the car I own with my mom. She is the primary owner, but my name is on everything too and I make all the payments myself. How will that work with the car insurance? Does it matter that I am not the primary owner? Does it need to be insured under her name?""

""I need cheap car insurance, I'm in college?""

I'm 19, a college kid and need car insurance. I now it's going to be crazy high, but if anyone has any insight or tips to make it cheaper, it would me much appreciated.""

How much impact will a claim of $1400 have on my Insurance rates?

I have a deductible of $500 so the actual payout would only be $900. But someone told me that the amount doesn't matter. Its the number of claims. So in that case would 1 claim matter? I have asked the same question to my Insurance company and they are non comittal. Anyone with similiar situation, please advise..""

Massachusetts car insurance?

I recently heard that MA IS allowing competition with car insurance companies.. YAY! However, Geico and Allstate still don't provide insurance in the state. Progressive DOES. Does anyone else know of some GOOD, reputable (car) insurance companies in MA? THANKS! :-)""

My company was bought out - Can I get unemployment? What about my health insurance?

I need some advice. I am an assistant manager at a small call center where I have worked for around 5 years (3 of them full-time). It was just announced to me and the manager (the only 2 full-time employees), that we have been bought by another call center that is not located in our town. The manager is relocating and has been offered a full-time job at their main office (with what I am assuming is a decent raise) about 4 hours away. I am being offered a possible part-time job at a lesser position some 3 hours away - there is no garantee. Well, I have kids so there's no way I'm doing that for a measly part-time position with no benefits. I will be without a job as of May 31st. Our part-time workers will be finding out about the closure on May 1st. For those employees that would like to stay through until the end, they will be offered a monetary bonus or compensation. I doubt it's more than a few hundred dollars. If I cannot find another full time job by then, would I most likely be eligible for unemployment? If I take the bonus money at the end, does that mean I wouldn't qualify? What kinds of questions should I be asking before this happens? I have health insurance for the first time in my life - when does that usually end?""

How much would my Motorcycle Insurance be?

Basically I'm getting my A1 licence (so I can only drive 125cc and 11kW max). I'd be a new driver. I'm just really looking for ballpark figures as to what the monthly insurance costs would be of (for example) an Aprilia RS125 or a Honda CBR125R that's 5 years old??

Where can i find cheap car insurance for a 17 year old male?

Its really starting to get on my nervse that i can not find any cheap insurance anywhere! Why do insurance companies in the UK want to make life so hard for young drivers? Yeah stasticaly the majority of us crash our cars. But why should the small majority of young drivers like my self have to pay the price and live with this stereotype by paying RIDICULOUS amounts of money?

Online insurance - how to?

Hi.. im looking for information regarding online insurance and how one goes about it??

Health insurance in America?

I'm in Australia and very curious about health insurance! What is medicaid? What happens if you have no insurance or medicaid and you have a baby?

Do you need to have car insurance of your own to rent a car?

I don't have a car right now so I don't have insurance, will I need to get insurance to rent a car? In Canada""

Do I need car insurance to rent a car?

If I have a valid license but do not have insurance, can I rent a car?""

Sports car insurance for a 17 year old with a provisional license?

Someone who will not cost the earth, up to group 14, uk.""

Does anybody know any type of affordable car insurance (South.CA) for a teen who just got his driver license?

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Geena Davis: Thelma & Louise changed everything for me

It was the moment she realised how few inspiring women there are on screen. Now the actor is on a mission to fix that

Somewhere in a parallel universe, Geena Davis is having the time of her life. Yes! Enjoying this new era in American history! As one of the few women to have played a US president on screen, in her parallel universe Davis is having a lovely conversation with me about how fabulous it feels to see a woman finally make it to the White House.

This isnt the first time the actor has found her presidential fantasies preferable to reality. Eleven years ago, she was President Mackenzie Allen on the TV show Commander In Chief. It had been the number one new show, and it was going to run for eight years. I was going to do two terms, Davis grins ruefully. She won a Golden Globe for the role. Then internal studio politics intervened and the show was cancelled after a single season. For a long time after, I felt like, in an alternate universe, I was still on that show. In my mind, she says, laughing, I wanted to set up the Oval Office in my garage and pretend I was still the president.

Davis hoots at her own absurdity, but for the record she did receive a fairly presidential greeting on arrival at the restaurant where we meet. The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills hotel is a fantastically kitsch extravaganza of salmon-pink table linen and bad taste, but a Hollywood institution nonetheless. While I waited, the lunch tables filled with industry types, and my requests for a quieter corner were defeated by the expert indifference of waiters who understand the rules of Hollywood hierarchy better than I do. But the instant Davis arrived, the matre d descended into an obsequious froth Miss Davis! Welcome back! and whisked us off to a coveted booth.

So good to see you again! he purrs, before blanching in horror. Davis has a white napkin on her lap, but her trousers are black. Quelle horreur! The offending item is whipped away and replaced with a black one, while Davis tries not to giggle.

With Susan Sarandon in 1991s Thelma & Louise. Photograph: Allstar

Davis has no publicist in tow, and nothing about her outfit would suggest celebrity: she is wearing a loose white T-shirt and the sort of plain and comfortable black jacket and trousers one might put on for Sunday lunch in a nice pub. Were she not so tall (6ft), I might easily have missed her when she arrived, full of apologies for being all of 10 minutes late. I take the matre ds instantaneous excitement to mean she must be a regular, but as soon as hes gone, she whispers, No! I cant even remember the last time I was here. Its this very weird phenomenon. If I go to hotels, they always say, Welcome back, even when Ive never been there before. That must be rather disorienting. Yes, weird! She nods cheerfully. You have all these people saying nice things to you, and it can really be like, Wow, Im very fortunate, arent I? Im very, very grateful for it, you know?

When lunch arrives, she gets the giggles again: her salad is a strangely regimented platter that looks like someones idea of gastro-sophistication circa 1974. Its so kitschy! I was going to show your tape recorder my salad, but that wont work, will it? When her phone rings, the mother of three murmurs the universal prayer of working parents everywhere: Please dont be the nanny, please dont be the nanny, please dont be the nanny. It feels like lunching with a gloriously irreverent and relaxed old friend.

Davis has been a Hollywood star for 35 years, but at 61 her status now is a curious hybrid of insider and outsider, a bit like cinemas Ofsted inspector. When starting out, shed have been astonished to know shed devote the later years of her career to exposing her industrys flaws. Back then, she admits, she couldnt see anything to worry about.

With William Hurt in 1988s The Accidental Tourist, for which Davis won an Oscar. Photograph: Ronald Grant

When I was first starting out was also when I first started really paying attention to the Oscars and stuff like that. And I remember thinking, wow, everything is great for women in Hollywood, because Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Jessica Lange, Sally Field: theyre all doing incredible work. Every year, fantastic movies were coming out: The French Lieutenants Woman, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sophies Choice. I think I did hear that, for women, when you get older it can be a problem, but these actors were already in their 30s, which seemed ancient to me then. So I thought, whats the problem? I started getting really cool parts left and right and centre, and I was like, well, even if it turns out theres a problem, its not going to impact on me.

After making her debut in 1982s classic comedy Tootsie, Davis averaged a movie a year, and could easily have made more had she not been fussy. She did sci-fi horror in The Fly, comic fantasy in Beetlejuice and literary drama in The Accidental Tourist, for which she won a best supporting actress Oscar. She played a baseball star in the sports comedy A League Of Their Own, a bank robber in the crime drama Quick Change and, most memorably, a housewife turned outlaw in the feminist road trip Thelma & Louise. Then she turned 40 and in the entire decade that followed, we saw her face only in Stuart Little.

By the time she turned 50, she was fed up. The neglect of women in film and TV was definitely happening she knew that but to prove it the Mensa member realised she would have to measure it: Because people just make assumptions, dont they? Even when the reality might be completely different. I remember talking to a woman editor of a magazine about all this a while ago, and she said, Oh no, no, no, thats just not a problem any more. I told her it still was. She said, and Davis begins to laugh again, But it cant be. Look at Meryl Streep, she works all the time! I was like, Er, Meryls schedule is the exception.

So, 10 years ago, the actor founded the Geena Davis Institute On Gender In Media. I am completely obsessed with numbers and data. I have become a scientist in later life. The institute conducts exhaustive research to establish the facts of gender representation in family entertainment, and they are grimly arresting.

Male characters outnumber female in family films by a ratio of three to one, a figure that has remained startlingly consistent since 1946. From 2007 to 2014, women made up less than a third of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing films distributed in the US, of which less than 7% were directed by women. Of the female characters that did make it on to screen, fewer than one in five were aged 40-64. Last autumn, the institute partnered with Google to launch the Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (the GD-IQ), a software program that measures the amount of screen and speaking time given to male and female characters. The results were even more confronting: in the top 200 grossing films of 2014 and 2015, males, Davis discovered, enjoyed literally twice the screen time of females, and spoke twice as often.

Its easy to see why this would matter to Davis, or any other female actor, but why should the rest of us care? This gender bias is so ingrained in us, and stuffed into our DNA from when were little, from our first exposure to popular culture. If kids movies and TV shows have profoundly fewer female characters than male characters, and theres nobody saying, By the way, honey, this isnt real. Thats not how the real world is. From 2006 to 2009, not one female character was depicted in a G-rated family film working in the field of medical science, as a business leader, in law or in politics. Our motto is: if they can see it, they can be it. Completely unconsciously, boys and girls are getting the message that girls are less important and less valuable to our society, because theyre not there. And if they are there, theyre not talking.

Playing the first female president in the TV series Commander In Chief. Photograph: ABC

Another way of looking at it, I suggest, would be that what we see on screen is, in fact, uncannily accurate. In a typical crowd scene, female extras account for just 17% of the faces we see a figure close to this crops up across all sorts of sectors in real life in America. Fortune 500 boards are around 20% female, as is Congress. Fewer then 20% of US legal partners, the military and cardiac surgeons are female.

Yes, Davis agrees, but I think the impact of media images is so profound that we actually could make life imitate art. You know, you see a dog or something and you say, Oh, hes cute? The default is always male, and its because weve had such a male-centred culture. And its because its what we see and hear from the very beginning.

I remember I was once with my boys [she has 12-year-old twins, and a 14-year-old daughter] in a park and they saw a squirrel. I consciously decided to say, Look, shes so cute and they both turned to me with surprised expressions and said, How do you know its a girl? I was like, wow, Ive already failed. They were four years old.

Davis takes all the data to Hollywoods decision-makers and creators: heads of studios, production companies, guilds. Does she come in for a bit of oh-no-here-comes-the-feminist eye-rolling? Oh no. No! If I was going in just saying, Youre making fewer movies starring a female character than male characters, theyd say, Yes, we know that. Were fully aware of that. We hope we can do better. We wish we could do better. And they would probably turn to this myth in Hollywood that women will watch men, but men dont want to watch women, so were forced to make all the stories about men.

Instead, Davis shows them the GD-IQs findings on profitability. Films featuring female leads make on average 15% more than those with male leads, while films featuring male and female co-leads earn almost 24% more than those with either a solo male or female lead. Their jaws are on the ground. She grins. Everywhere we go, its the exact same reaction. They are floored.

***

Had anyone told Davis in her youth that she would one day be an activist and advocate, she would have been equally floored. She grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, a bookish child and church organist, and was constantly shy. Just totally shy, especially about men. I had one date in high school, that was it, and he didnt ask me out again, she laughs, because I was taller than everybody. I was very gangly and awkward, and I wore weird clothes that I made. I think my fondest wish as a kid was to take up less space.

My fondest wish as a kid was to take up less space. Photograph: Amanda Friedman for the Guardian

Most peoples childhood self-image can seem surprising by the time theyre in their 60s, but in Daviss case the discrepancy feels comical. She is 6ft and appropriately proportioned, so occupies as much space as you would expect someone with the dimensions of an imposing man to fill. Her voice is gutsy, soaring from throaty depths to gales of laughter, and her beauty is unlike anything Ive observed in an actor. Beautiful women who have lived their life in the public gaze tend to convey an awareness of others admiration that can sometimes seem self-conscious, and sometimes almost pointedly detached. Davis, on the other hand, reminds me more of my cat, a ludicrously gorgeous creature who seems to take as much pleasure from its beauty as any admirer ever could. If I picture Davis looking at herself in the mirror, she isnt frowning anxiously but smiling back at her famous dimples.

And yet she goes on, I think I really wanted to take up less space. It seemed like every time I was exuberant or free, I would get pointed at. Things that really stand out from my childhood were incidents where people told me to tone it down. Like my beloved aunt Gloria, who was a role model and just everything to me, and who adored me, and would say things like, Youre really going to have to learn to laugh more quietly, because boys arent going to like a loud lady.

She knew from the age of three that she wanted to act, and studied drama at Boston University. But the most important thing was that people like me and think Im no trouble. It was as if I lived in some bubble of extreme femininity where you must never say your feelings. I had people who wouldnt date me because I couldnt even decide what restaurant I wanted to go to, literally. I never said my opinion about anything. I was afraid to.

Everything changed in 1990 when she made Thelma & Louise. Davis played Thelma, an unhappy wife who takes off with her friend Louise, played by Susan Sarandon, for a two-day road trip in an old Thunderbird convertible. When a man they meet in a bar tries to rape Thelma, Louise shoots him dead. Convinced the police will never believe their account of events, because Thelma had been drinking and seen dancing with the man before he attacked her, the pair take off. Liberated from the constraints of social convention and the law, they embark on a raucously anarchic adventure from which they will never return.

With then husband Jeff Goldblum in 1989. Photograph: Getty

Davis had her agent call Ridley Scott, the films director, every single week for a year in a concerted campaign to land the part. So it was really, really a passion project for me. And I was aware of womens position in Hollywood by then. But then, when the movie came out and I saw the reaction women had, it was night and day: completely different from anything that had ever happened before, you know? Women wanted to really talk about how it impacted on them. Theyd tell me, This is what I thought, this is who I saw it with, this is how many times Ive seen it, this is how it really changed my marriage. Sometimes Id even hear, My friend and I took a road trip and acted out your trip. Her eyes widen as she laughs. Im like, I hope the good parts? But that really struck me, and it made me realise how few opportunities there are to feel inspired by the female characters we watch. That changed everything for me.

Working with Sarandon changed everything, too. Every day on set, I was just learning how to be more myself, you know? Just because she was such a role model to me. Davis would arrive each morning with her notes tentatively framed in the apologetic, would-you-mind-awfully register of regulation feminine decorum. Sarandon would bustle in, open her mouth and speak her mind. Davis still beams at the memory, and credits it with revolutionising the way she operated.

Her institute is now in its 10th year, but has yet to generate any measurable change in onscreen representation. I feel very confident thats going to happen in the next five to 10 years, though. I know it will. Theres one childrens network that tells us, every time someone pitches a new idea, someone asks, What would Geena say? She roars with laughter. Which is exactly what I want! The parallel between her work and recent increasingly successful campaigns for greater ethnic onscreen diversity in Hollywood speak for themselves, she says. Its exactly the same problem, with exactly the same solution. When a sector of society is left out of the popular culture, its cultural annihilation.

Davis does still act; in recent years, she starred in the TV shows Greys Anatomy and The Exorcist, and appears in the forthcoming sci-fi thriller Marjorie Prime. Shes also in Dont Talk To Irene, an indie film about an overweight cheerleader, which premiered recently in Canada. But its very clear that acting is no longer her driving ambition. She gets much more excited talking about the film festival she co-founded in 2015, the only one in the world to offer its winners the prize of guaranteed distribution, both theatrical and through DVD. The Bentonville festival explicitly exists to champion and promote female and other minority film-makers, and last year became the eighth biggest film festival in the world; this year, it will open in early May in Arkansas and more than 100,000 people are expected to attend.

With husband, Reza Jarrahy, in 2013. Photograph: Getty

The most conventionally starlet thing about Davis these days is probably her marital history: she is now on her fourth marriage. The first, in 1982, lasted less than a year; her second, to the actor and her sometime co-star Jeff Goldblum in 1987, lasted only slightly longer, and was over by 1990. In 1993, she wed the director Renny Harlin, but divorced again in 1998. She has been married to her fourth husband, Reza Jarrahy, the father of her three children, and an Iranian-American plastic surgeon, for 16 years now. Giving birth for the first time at 46, followed by twins at 48, is not an entirely advisable maternal strategy, she laughs. I dont know how I assumed I could wait that long, and I wouldnt recommend it. Id always known I wanted to have kids, but somehow, before then, there wasnt any time I was planning it.

When we part, she gives me a great bear hug and her phone number, and it strikes me that she must be one of the happiest movie stars I can remember meeting. The parallel universe she inhabits appears to have much to recommend it. I had assumed she would put Hillary Clintons defeat down to her motto If she can see it, she can be it so ask if she thinks America would have voted a different way last September had the notion of a woman in charge of the country looked more familiar.

You know, she surprises me, I dont know. I like to just think that she won the popular vote by an enormous amount. She was not this horrifically flawed candidate everyone wants to paint. I mean, OK, she didnt win the electoral college vote. But, in another way, she did win. In Daviss parallel universe, the popular vote determined who would move into the White House, and all is well with the world.

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from Geena Davis: Thelma & Louise changed everything for me