#life anecdotes

[lazodiac]

Yesterday I went out for a doctor's appointment. The clinic is in this strip of buildings, and near it is a pizza hut. It was around 8:25 at the time, and when we arrived I noticed a seagull standing patiently at the door. I left the car and approached, observing, because birds doing things that are slightly atypical of regular birds is a fun thing to watch.

The seagull was just standing there. No other gulls were around. There were people about, making noise and cleaning up trash revealed by the snow finally being gone. One rather rude lady did a racism at someone for daring to drop a candy wrapper. Very unpleasant, especially since I knew the lady from previous moments of my life. The person she was racist against later tried to spit on her car but didn't know which one was hers and got the wrong one.

Anyway, the customer. He just sat there. Occasionally he honk, occasionally he bonk. It wasn't a classic gull noise you'd hear at the sea-side, or from later seagulls that will show up. It was more of a honk, definitely, sometimes extended in length. His pecking usually focused at the divide between winder and glass, but sometimes was up on the glass, and always a double-rap of "th-thok".

Intrigued I decided to approach to take a better picture. Once I got up to the pizza hut's bespoke sidewalk area, the seagull began to leave- not in a flurry of wings and rush and panic, but in a tentative sort of waddle away from the door to get a better look at me (I was attempting to hide behind the architecture of the building so as to not spook the customer).

I then returned to my initial safe distance, and the customer immediately got back in line to continue his task of honking and bonking. He really wanted that pizza, and near as I can tell simply was trying to perform the human ritual. The pizza hut is no longer an eat-in restaurant, instead just a massive building that has had all of its seating area blocked off and reduced to a singular kiosk window. People go to the door, knock, come in, get pizza, leave. So the customer was attempting to do similar, and clearly confused about why it was not working. No za! Why no za!? He do the thing!!

My medical appointment was at 10, so I had some time to kill, and as such I saw no reason not to sit down with my back to one of the strip-mall's pillars and just kinda watch.

Some highlights from this endeavor include;

1: Another gull appeared at some point, and got close to the customer. The customer swiped him away with a dismissive wing swing that held the clearest "yo **** off" I've ever seen from an animal. 2: Another gull appeared at some point, got close, and straight up started screaming in the customer's face. The customer ruffled up about it and screamed back and when their near total scream-argument ended, the aggressor left and the customer got back into position. 3: Another gull, a more normal gull, appeared and briefly roosted up on one of the lamp posts that don't have any light sources. He seemed far more normal as far as birds go.

Finally, as 9:40 rolled around, I got up to go, and bid the customer farewell. I took one final picture, and then told the customer I hoped he got his pizza. I picked up the soda bottle that was present on the ground before the litterer showed up that the racist lady was mad about- notably she didn't pick it up herself, instead just being racist about it- and took it into the dollar general to throw it away. When I left the dollar general the customer was gone, having left as I turned to leave myself.

Someone elsewhere asked if the seagull was actually my familiar, but sadly I didn't recognize it.

My girlfriend also (jokingly) suggested letting it in to help it get pizza, but sadly I do not control the Pizza Hut.

[thebrideofreanimator]

TODAY in my german class we did conrad veidt trivia and i got every single question right (nobody else in the class knew who the fuck we were talking about)

[inbabylontheywept]

the house i grew up in was a little bit of a fixer upper. for the first 19 years, my dad just sort of slowly fixed it, but pretty early on in college, he came into a large amount of cash and decided to just do the whole thing at once. so he rented a different house for like, 2 months that was just a block down from us, and then got a bunch of contractors to fix original house ASAP. it was kind of crazy, but it compressed many years of work into like, three months.

the sitting in a new house for three months was actually pretty fun. and i shouldnt really complain at all (staying at home while in college is a sweet deal)

but.

but. my parents are fairly hard of hearing, and their bedroom in the old house was in the furthest possible annex from everyone else. wheras in the rental it was just in the middle of the house. so without going into details, i was extremely aware that my parents were having sex like, eight times a day. my dad had just retired and i guess they were celebrating, which is great i guess, having parents that really like each other is way better than the alternative, but also, it did make me envy their deafness. i kept headphones on for so long that year i got literal ear calluses.

at the same time, the house my buddy from the shoe incident grew up in flooded. turbo flooded. they burst like, two pipes at once and the damage was so severe they had to redo all the flooring and all the drywall. his family actually had homeowners insurance, which is either incredible or suspicious for a family that used the drained pool in their backyard to store rusty scrap metal. so insurance was handling the work, but in the meantime, they were crammed into a very small hotel room space. we did the math on it then, it averaged about 80 square feet a person.

so one day i got home, and i was chilling, and then six rolled around, and apparently six o'clock was sex o'clock because my parents decided to flex their cardio. i grabbed my headphones and prayed that god would do for me what he did for beethoven, but that failed to work, and then seven rolled around and my parents were still at it, which again, very impressive, but was pushing me to swap out judas for mozart in those prayers. there's a definitive point where you stop praying to be deaf and instead pray that god could take you to a nice field and pop you like a gore-balloon.

i was about five minutes away from that point when my friend called me and basically said i have been stuck in a 500 square foot space with 6 people and i didn't have many marbles to start but what few i had are gone. please. if we are friends, if we were ever friends, take me out of here just for a moment.

and i was still pretty mad at him, but i had pity on the poor guy. also helped that i was desperate to leave the house. so i drove the chickenshitmobile to the hotel and i picked him up, and then we did our normal hangout activity, which was go to food city and buy produce. his normal house was, on a good day, nasty, and his backyard was, as i stated before, mostly used to store mosquito larvae and rusty metal, so what we'd always done before was just walk to the grocery store a half block away and leer at vegetables.

so we did that and it was like old times again. they had some radishes that were expired, so i could buy like, literally an entire grocery bag of them for about $5. so i did. i really like radishes. he got a coconut because he liked fruit and beating things with hammers.

which probably would've been great except we didn't have a hammer, so instead we spent about 30 minutes stomping itike it owed us money. when it finally cracked we cheered like we just got the winning touchball at the superdome and then he ate some of the flesh, and i ate some of the radishes, and we admired the black, starless sky of the city before i took him back to his hotel room.

and then we got pulled over.

i forgot to turn my lights on because the street all around the food city was ludicrously well lit. so it went from being pretty bright, to pretty bright and flashy, then i pulled into a parking lot and a cop came to ask us for IDs which is where everything went to shit:

i’d forgotten my license at home. 

the cop was was actually kind of chill about it - he said he could get by with just an address. except i did not know my address. i hadn't memorized the new one yet. so i told the cop, my house is getting remodeled, i don't know my address right now. and then he went to my friend, and my friend said the exact same thing. house getting remodeled, staying somewhere else, no address, sowwwwwwy.

now the cop genuinely didn't know what to do. he went back to his car, and i was stressed that i was about to get into HUGE trouble so i started eating the radishes and my buddy started eating more of his coconut, and we actually managed to eat like a quarter of both before the cop came back. we ate enough produce that he could smell something weird in the air, and he asked what the smell was, and i said radishes, and my buddy said coconut, and the cop said which, and then we produced a large bag of droopy radishes and an absolutely brutalized coconut, and the cop was just like

so my buddy tried explaining how he was sharing a 500 square foot apartment with 6 people and wanted a fruit he could fight with power tools, and i tried explaining how i'd actually tried buying my parents like, board games and puzzles and stuff but nothing worked - the only thing my parents seemed to like doing right now was each other, and we both went on long enough and pathetically enough that the cop eventually went:

ok. stop.

and we stopped.

and he said do you know why i pulled you over?

and i said, because of my headlights, and my friend (who is hispanic) and the cop both looked at me like like i was the dumbest person in the entire world. and then the cop said no. that's why i'm allowed to pull you over. i checked your car because this neighborhood has a terrible sex trafficking problem, and i pull over every car i can to make sure no one is buying or selling sex. and you two are obviously doing neither. now i could give you, like, four tickets right now, but that would do nothing to make this area safer, so just turn your lights on, go home, drive safe, and try to be less stupid in the future.

and i said okay but i was thinking, you know, damn, this is just how i live man, i don't have a hidden third gear i can shift into. people can't just get smarter because it would be convenient. it's always convenient to be smart. i am literally trying my best.

but i didn't say anything because i was, slowly, learning how to filter what i said. instead i nodded and the cop left then i dropped my buddy off, and the last thing he said was said he owed me for responding to his SOS. I said he owed me for a lot of things, and he agreed that was true. then i drove home with my lights on, 5 under the speed limit, and arrived to a peaceful quiet home. I could’ve wept with relief but instead I went to bed.

the relief was short lived. i was woken up at 6 am by my parents. i swore, and then i prayed, and when i did not explode, i swore again. then i got up to make breakfast before my first class.

[portraitoftheoddity]

One time in my early 20s I got really drunk at a party where someone handed me a stein full of what turned out to be moonshine from a barrel in some guy's garage and said "try this it tastes like pie" and a) it DID taste like pie, but b) only on the way down, not on the way back up, given it was something like 120 proof -- so my memories of the next couple hours are very vague but involve a bunch of ex-football players from South Boston walking me around the block in circles handing me bottled water trying to sober me up, and eventually because I was too shitfaced to get home but no longer puking my guts up and dying I crawled into the back of my car to sleep it off in a sleeping bag I kept there; but there was a guy at the party who was also sleeping in his car and this was Boston in the fall so it was like 40ºF out at night and anyway this other guy I met at this party who was a middle aged mercenary from liverpool who had served in the french foreign legion or something ended up knocking on my car door asking if he could huddle with me for warmth and I said yeah okay but there's only room for me in the sleeping bag so don't be weird about it, and to his credit he was not weird and we just slept in my car and in the morning he asked if I wanted brekkie and bought me dunkin donuts while I nursed the worst hangover I have ever had in my life then or since and trying to figure out whose heavy metal hoodie I was wearing and how I managed to leave this party with more clothing than I arrived in.

So if someone singing pirate shanties hands you a stein of mysterious liquid and tells you it tastes like pie, probably don't chug that shit.

[steakout-05]

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

[sualne]

have some trans swan lake barbies

[annabelle--cane]

I was at dinner with a friend the other day and they said something about me being bisexual and the girl beside me said "well your water bottle says otherwise," pointing to a sticker I have of some crystals in the colors of the asexual flag. I then turned my water bottle around 180 degrees and, bam, showed the sticker I have on the other side of a flower in the colors of the bisexual flag, and said "I contain multitudes." that might have been the greatest moment of my life thus far.

[sparklecarehospital]

how many times have i just drawn sly standing around like this. its fine. /silly

[doloneia]

speaking as a fatherless son here i think both telemachus and diomedes got fatherless son behavior but its in different ways. like diomedes is old enough to remember his fathers death he probably wandered his household and fields looking for him because he knew something was missing but telemachus. telemachus always had that missing yknow? there was never a time from his childhood where he remembers his fathers voice or embrace and so its both less noticable and more isolating if that makes sense. diomedes could remember tydeus as a larger-than-life, blurry figure faded in his memory but telemachus had to rely on stories and himself to cobble an imagined man out of scraps. he literally does this in book one. do you think he tried to find odysseus in his face? in himself? and always coming up short?

[hanakihan]

an anecdote about a philosopher who asked a conqueror to move away and stop blocking sunlight

listen I spend too much effort on this shit which is basically a scene from a fanfic that I just wrote in my head I sure am doing things in wrong order ain’t I

ANYWAY for those unaware it’s based on Ancient Greece anecdote about Alexander the Great meeting with Diogenes and later completely disrespecting the great conqueror himself without actually offending him

Diogenes’ philosophy honestly gives me such strong Ratio vibes (or more like other way around) AND I encourage people to create more AUs involving Ratio and Ancient Greece stuff

[thebrideofreanimator]

the other day i was wearing a Bauhaus (the band) shirt and some guy pointed at it and asked me if i’ve ever been to the “BOw-House” and i think that’s the most interesting way i’ve heard bauhaus mispronounced.

[schneiderenjoyer]

Aracnist's UDIMO

There's not many conversations about it and what people mostly chalk their UDIMO (animal/item suitcase form) up to is that it represents the arcanist as a person. Like symbolism to their personality.

But I also like how it also reflect how they're raised and what their upbringing is like.

The main ones being people raised under the Foundation, or taken it at a young impressionable age, are all dog UDIMOs. Sonetto, Horrorpedia, Medicine Pocket. Arcanists that are likely taken in by the Foundation before their arcanum has fully manifested. They're all dog UDIMOs so far. (It could as be a jab at Pavlov reference to having experimented on mainly dogs, which is fucked up) And even arcanists like X is a lil lab rat UDIMO.

I find it fascinating that UDIMO has so much more symbolism to them than just their nature as a person, but also reflects their upbringing and overall viewed by a greater narrative.

[pandemic-info]

‘This isn’t a life’: The crushing burden of Long Covid | RNZ News

Ashleigh was saving up to travel overseas in the near future. Now, she's housebound at 28, sometimes even bedbound, unable to drive or walk more than a short distance.

"My mum has had to take care of me a lot this year, and I feel a bit bad for her experience as well."

Michael, 32, was a busy Crown prosecutor. Now he's been disabled for more than 18 months, taking long stretches off work and struggling with his mental health and damaged relationships.

"It's probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

Renee was elected as the first Samoan and first female Pasifika on the Palmerston North City Council in 2019.

"It felt like I was just reaching the top of my career, with loads of future potential."

Then she spent a year living on the couch, with a commode toilet next to her because she couldn't walk to the toilet. More than a year later, she can now take a few steps from her chair to the toilet. She can chat with people, if she paces herself, and use the internet. The rest of the time, she sleeps or rests.

"This isn't a life. I'm only hanging on for my kids."

These are just a handful of the heartbreaking stories of New Zealanders with Long Covid, uncovered by a new research project into the extent of what has been described as a "mass disabling event" in New Zealand.

[peachdoxie]

Kinda weird that Nickelodeon in the 2000s had a minimum of four protagonists that were unintentionally trans coded: Danny Phantom, Fairly Oddparents, My Life as a Teenage Robot, and Back at the Barnyard.

[freakurodani]

The parallel between Sokka and Tenzin as their fathers' sons.

Sokka, left at 13 as his father and all the other men head off to war. Hakoda tells him "being a man is knowing where he's needed the most" and he needs to protect his sister, his home.

Tenzin is the second airbender. He is also half water tribe, he's a man. When Aang dies, he will be the last airbender. He understands what he needs to do.

Untold amount of pressure and responsibility have been thrust upon them by their fathers. Though, I believe it is not all intentional, but the unfortunate circumstance of being the fathers of sons who take responsibility incredibly seriously.

In Sokka's case, "protect your sister" is a vague instruction. It was meant to give him purpose, to help him feel okay about being left behind, He is too young for war, his father does not want to bring his child to slaughter. But Sokka will die with purpose. He will train the children of his tribe so they will be protected, he will face a fire nation ship until his last breath. He cannot go to war, but Hakoda did not see that war was all around them. In trying to give Sokka purpose, Hakoda put their world on his shoulders.

We do not get to see Aang be a father (in the TV shows), but we know he had hopes for the future. All his children were air nomads, and the air acolytes brought his culture back, but Tenzin could bend. This part of their culture is one ONLY they share. I do not think Aang would hide this, he is joyous that he gets to share his culture. When he feels respected, he always is, he taught the air acolytes after all. Off handedly, he could say, "I'm hopeful for a future where there are lots more air benders," and that, which feels mostly innocuous to him, is the nail in the coffin of Tenzin's fate. He is Avatar Aang's son, and the future of the air benders. It would not matter that Aang meant a future in generations. Tenzin sees the responsibility and it's his. He is his father's only air bending child, he knows what he needs to do.

Being a parent is not understanding the way the things you say harm your children. Even those things that feel innocuous in the moment can be life altering. Especially the more the child respects the parent. Purpose and Hope for those with a broader perspective, can be death sentences to a life that could have been when expressed to those who idolize the former.

[ficoandleo]

"So there's something I've noticed when I'm walking around campus sometimes. My hearing's kinda sensitive even when I'm not using my stigma--super annoying since I hate noise. But sometimes, even if there's no one around or I can count the people around I hear someone I can't see.

"Not talking but like. Their heartbeat. Or their breathing. Or their footsteps. Or some combination. It's way more obvious when I'm using my stigma but I swear I hear it even without it, if it's quiet enough. Feels like I hear it more if I'm near that gross forest--but it can be anywhere on campus.

"Obviously you'd think it's just one of the cats or some anomaly or whatever but human heartbeats and breathing patterns are different from animals' and anomalies'. Some anomalies can imitate them yeah but this is way too consistent to be some anomaly. There's definitely someone there, especially when it's dark. Creep.

"Thing is I don't think it's me they're after. I think we just happen to be around a lot of the same places. A lot of paths crossing wherever it's interesting, you know? Like we both wanna know what's going on but no one will tell us. So we just figure it out ourselves however we can.

". . .I don't think that Cap or that coiffed up three-eyes would like me getting involved there~ But what choice am I gonna have if they keep leaving me in the dark? Oh, pun! Didn't even catch it.

"If they don't start letting me in on their little game I might have to see if the heartbeat in the shadows would wanna do a collab~ I don't need to hide in the dark, after all. I just need to be close enough to hear--and that really doesn't have to be all that close."