i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam
This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…
Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.
“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”
Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”
The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.
On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.
There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice.
Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.
Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.
Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.
The WIRED article explains why:
CISD misapprehends how memory works…. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant.
…the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge.
Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.
Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient.
Sometimes I say to myself “I had a pretty normal and boring childhood” but then I remember that 11-year-old me may have accidentally convinced some other kids that I was kidnapped by a shady government agency.
Care to elaborate?
WELL, SINCE YOU ASKED
2006 was the year that I
discovered the internet. I spent most of this time doing nothing but watch
Harry Potter fanvids and tracking down so much Harry/Ginny fanfiction that it’s
probably the reason I hated that ship for so long, kind of like when you were
in fourth grade and you realized that bologna was actually Really Bad and you
started aggressively avoiding it? Yeah, it was like that. Harry/Ginny was the
bologna of my formative fandom years.
So I’m eleven years old and
for the last two months or so I’ve been just shoving my brain full of all kinda
of mature narratives that I really, probably, should not have been putting my mind
to at the time. My parents knew that this was how I was occupying my time but I
think that they thought, since Harry Potter was a kids’ book series, the people
who were writing the fics were…kids. And they eventually did wise up to
the fact that I was reading Really Very Adult Things and put kid blocks on the
computer for all of five minutes. But, y’know, that’s another story.
It wasn’t really porn that I was reading, per say, as
much as writing that just…wasn’t meant to be consumed by an eleven-year-old.
For instance, stories about government espionage and criminal crime. Things that
the HP books touched on, sure, but in a way that was consumable by the very
young and very naïve. These fics weren’t for the uninitiated. And I take full
responsibility for exposing myself to those things. I very purposefully did a
few things that I should not have in order to access this content. One of those
things was making myself an email, without my parents’ permission, at an age
two years younger than the Yahoo terms of service allowed at the time. I listed
my age as eighteen on the email account because that was the age you needed to be to get into some of the archives
I wanted access to and I had no idea that the administrators had literally no
way of checking if my email was registered to an eighteen year old person or
not.
So, I don’t know if it was because
of being registered as an adult or because of the forums I was visiting, but I
got a lot of very weird spam. And since I was eleven and I had no idea how any
of that stuff worked, I thought it was real people…sending me emails.
Thankfully my parents had only raised a little
fool, not a big fool, so I never clicked any of the links or anything. I was
just quietly upset that people thought I cared about car insurance and online gambling
when all I wanted was to read the Marked Mature Chapter Of That Harry/Ginny
Wedding Fic. A fic in which ‘glass of water’ was used as a euphemism for orgasm,
which was something that I did not pick
up on until I suddenly remembered that line when I was sitting in a lecture
hall ten literal years later.
Yes, I know.
So one day I’m looking through
my email to see if I have any new reviews on my Harry Potter/Hannah Montana crossover
fic (Yes, I know) when I come across an email the subject line of which is just
“Confidential.”
“Cool,” says little Maggie,
who maybe at that point didn’t really know what confidential meant, and clicked
on it.
This was a very long time ago
so I really don’t remember the content of the email, let alone the exact warning,
but the gist of it was something like:
WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID SEND 10,000
DOLLARS TO THIS BANK ACCOUNT OR THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE NOTIFIED.
This is very obviously
recognizable as a scam to somebody who isn’t eleven years old. It’s not even a
very good scam. It’s the kind of
thing that only children and elderly people with dementia would react to.
Unfortunately, I was a child.
A child with a guilty conscience because I had been reading Things I was not
supposed to for several months now, and had also lied about my age by some
SEVEN YEARS to access the very email account by which I had been sent this ominous
message.
Predictably, because I was both
an overreactive child and apparently an idiot
child, I freaked out. I deleted the email and panicked, very quietly, in
the corner of my dad’s home office for a good ten minutes. Then, for reasons
that are completely unknown EVEN TO ME, I retrieved the email from the trash
bin and printed it out. I then slipped
it into my backpack and brought it to
school the next day.
Even worse, the first thing I
did was drag my two friends into the situation.
“Meet me in the bathroom,” I said
to them, because some part of me seemed to think that my life had now become a
Cool Spy Movie. We huddled into a stall in the bathroom and stared at the
paper.
“I don’t have ten thousand
dollars,” I told them.
“What did you do?” asked one
of my friends.
“That’s none of your concern,”
I said.
“Do you think it’s the FBI?
Or the CSI?” (Not a typo—she said CSI)
“Yes,” I said, and did not
elaborate.
“What happens if you don’t pay
it.”
“I’ll be kidnapped,” I said,
with utmost conviction. “That’s what happens when the government doesn’t like you.
They make you disappear.”
We eventually returned to
class. I was pretty jazzed at being the center of our friend group’s attention
for the day. It was a Friday, and the height of my concern for the actual situation
had waned and, by the time I got home later that day, I had mostly forgotten
about my fear of being violently kidnapped by the CSI.
Something that I’ve not mentioned
to any of you—and something that I had not mentioned to my friends at the time,
either—was that this was my last day at
that school. I was due to start at a new school that coming Monday. I hadn’t
told anybody because I was switching to a public school from a private school
and I thought that telling people would make them think I was dumb? I don’t
know, but I hadn’t told literally anybody
that I was switching schools. Not even my teachers. I assume that my parents
informed them at some point but I still have the middle school-level math book
hanging out in my closet that I never returned because I never told anybody I was leaving.
I had no way of contacting
any of my friends from the other school. I wouldn’t get my first cell phone for
probably another six or seven months. I also
stopped going to the Youth Group that I was in with one of them because my dad
got spooked when I dropped some Knowledge About Christ on him at one point and
decided that the group was way too fundamentalist. (It was, but I was very
upset about being pulled out at the time.)
So please imagine. Friend
comes to school with ominous email from ~the government~. Friend stops coming
to school. Friend stops coming to unrelated
activity. Friend doesn’t ever contact you again. You’re eleven years old.
I’m not saying that there are
two girls out there who still remember me as “That girl who might have been kidnapped
by the government.” I like to think that they probably came up with a more
reasonable explanation as they got older. But it’s a possibility that, for a little
while sometime in 2006/2007, I accidentally convinced my friends that I had
been kidnapped by a shady government agency.
my favourite thing about hercule poirot is that once he solved the murder he just makes everyone involved sit in a circle and dig shit about everyone before telling who’s the killer he’s like “i know we’re here because someone is dead but lemme tell you susan is the illegitimate child of paul and bethany is in love with her step brother. this had absolutly nothing to do with the killing but i thought yall should know tbh. now about the murder”
Poirot the king of #receipts
You have to read this in his voice, especially “I thought yall should know tbh.”
I was home watching TV and cutting up a steak when I got the call at 8PM. A friend of mine worked at a famous hotel in LA and one of the guests made a last minute request for a DJ to play the hotel bar. Someone that could get there and start playing in an hour. The bar frequently had live bands play, but never a DJ. So with little to no time, my wise and generous friend thought to throw a gig my way.
“Yeah, I can get there in an hour. Am I getting paid?”
“Yes, you’ll get paid.”
“What kind of party is it? What am I playing?”
“Someone’s renting out the bar for a private party. And that someone is… The Artist… formerly… known… as… Prince.”
That sentence was not real to me. Still not real. I had no time to really think or say anything but, “What? You serious? Yes. Be there as soon as I can.” Got off the phone and my stomach turned. Only a handful of people in the world have imprinted their music that much in my brain. And couldn’t he just call up any of the best DJ’s in LA to come play for him? Why’s he gonna trust someone who is by all means an unknown? I’d been DJing parties and bars for years but going from that to Prince is an Olympic leap.
The next half hour felt like a panic attack. I made a list of songs to play for Prince and his private Prince party. Ok, no Prince songs. He doesn’t want to hear himself. No MJ. I don’t want to insult him or anything. Didn’t they have beef in the 80’s? No hip hop. Can’t picture him rocking out to Kendrick. I thought of who he was influenced by and dragged some James Brown and Stevie songs into the playlist. Isley Brothers, Curtis. Great. 8:20PM. I still have to get ready even though I could spend the next month picking songs. I quickly close my laptop and get dressed. Pack up my turntables, mixer, cables and run them all to the car as I’m sweating through this black suit.
I get to the hotel with about five minutes to set up. The bar is completely empty aside from a couple of servers and my friend who made the call. And the room is almost lit exclusively by candlelight. I’m told to set up my turntables on the grand piano, which is also covered with candles, making me feel like hip hop Liberace. A waitress tells me there’s like an 80% chance Prince doesn’t show up. He just likes to rent out the bar in case he and his friends wander through the hotel and feel like stopping in. “But you should start playing music anyway in case he comes in. Who knows.” So I start playing songs to the very empty bar. The anticipation is a killer. My friend gives me a much needed glass of whiskey before taking off.
A giant spread of appetizers is covering the bar and getting sweaty. Spring rolls, cheese, orange juice. An hour goes by. Then another hour. A no-show. I’m kind of bummed out but also very relieved. I don’t know how I’m going to react if he walks in that door. So I’m just playing the set of my life to nobody. It’s like I’m getting paid to practice and listen to whatever I want on the bar’s sound system.
At 12AM the door opens and some guy walks over to me and without a greeting he says,
“Hey man. He’ll be here in 15 minutes. What are you gonna play when he walks in?”
“Oh I got some stuff lined up. Some older Stevie Wonder, the JB’s.”
“Yeah. Yeah, he likes that. Anything like that, Earth Wind & Fire, Chic.”
“Yeah I got Chic! I’ll play that.”
“And he wants to hear Janelle Monáe when he walks in. You got that?”
“Yup. Yup. Janelle Monáe.”
“Cool, he’ll be here in 15 minutes.”
I didn’t have any Janelle Monáe. I ran out to the concierge desk in the lobby to get the wifi password, ran back and started downloading a bunch of Janelle Monáe off of iTunes. Right on time as I cue up the track, the door opens and I catch a quick glimpse. Full on afro, turtleneck and a gold chain. I want to say he had a cane, but I was trying not to look directly at him. I didn’t want to throw him off or maybe infuriate him by making eye contact. Prince was in the room. I was just musical wallpaper. He and a friend sat down at a couch about fifteen feet away from me.
The grand entrance song blended straight into James Brown’s Talking Loud and Saying Nothing. I played Ike & Tina Turner, Charles Wright, Omar’s The Man, and Gust of Wind by Pharrell. My head was pretty much glued to the turntables, sticking to my no look philosophy, but I could hear bits of conversation. Hearing that Prince voice in person was something strange. It just belongs on record or on microphone. I start dishing out some other favorite tracks of mine, Think Twice by Jay Dee and Alicia Myers I Want to Thank You. There’s zero reaction to the songs I play. I’m still worried I’m not playing what he wants to hear. Is he gonna throw a spring roll at me?
A little later that guy from earlier comes back into the bar and walks straight over to me.
“Hey man. Just want to let you know, they love your music.”
“Oh really? Thanks. Do they want to hear anything in particular?”
“Nope. Just keep playing what your playing.”
Oh it’s on now. I can finally breathe and I’m getting props from the man himself, or from the middleman himself. And then it hits me. There’s only two people in there. Prince and a girl. I’m not there to DJ a private party. I’m there to DJ a date. Prince is on a date and I’m the entertainment.
I saved my set list from that night and I don’t remember playing half the songs on it. All I know is I was in deep concentration, mixing out of my mind. Messenger man came in one more time and said Prince might try to play the piano. When it was time, he would pop his head in the door and give me the cue to stop DJing. I had never seen Prince perform, so a private piano ballad to his woman and myself sounded alright. I stayed looking at that door for a while until Prince’s date walked over to me.
“Hey, so what’s the name of this song? He likes it and wants to know.”
“It’s a Smith’s cover. This Charming Man by Stars.”
She sat back down and relayed the info, to which he nodded his head. Now I’m stumping Prince with cool music. I play another track. She comes over to me again and asks, “What’s this one? He wants this on repeat.” Blacker 4 The Good Times by Ballistic Brothers. So I play that song a couple more times in a row. It’s now 4AM and I’m just a little delirious from being on my feet DJing for 7 hours. And I’m running out of music. My song selections are all over the map at this point. Esperanza Spalding, ESG, Broken Bells.
At around 4:30 Prince gets up off the couch and walks floats right over to me. He looks me in the eye, starts shaking my hand and says in a deep Prince voice,
“Thank you. That was very enjoyable.”
“Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.”
In my mind it was that smooth but there’s no doubt I was speaking gibberish.
And just like that he left the room with his date. He didn’t put any moves on her in the bar, but I like to think I helped him out by setting the mood for whatever happened next. I stopped the music and the lights went on.
And that was the best night of DJing I ever had or ever will have.
Diane Duane Is in some financial difficulties and is asking people to take a look at her ebook store, which has her and Peter Morwood’s catalogues (or at least the stuff to which they have the rights.) The prices are very good, so if you’ve wanted to get a Young Wizards box-set, you can get them now for ~$2 a book.
boost!!
Diane’s books were really formative to a lot of my early reading experiences, Young Wizards in particular, and while it looks like their immediate financial crisis has passed (looking at their blog post) I’d like to boost this to make you, my lovely followers, aware of Diane’s (And Peter’s!) work and how you can get your mitts on them in a way that directly impacts the author for the better.
Her and @petermorwood very kindly sent me a lovely message when Max the Beagle died, and I was incredibly touched, if too distraught at the time to manage a coherent reply. So if I could get a boost over this, family, I’d really appreciate it. They’re good kind people and deserve it.
Plus, y’know, the Young Wizard series is currently $19.99 instead of $39.99 and if I didn’t already own them, I’d be all over that like hot butter on toast.
I bought the whole young wizards series, because I’ve always meant to read them!
So uh. I finally got the job I’ve been wanting, but it’s going to be another 3 weeks before I get my first paycheck, and while I’ve got enough to get me through for a while, I’m pretty drained and can’t really swing the cost of a physical therapy appointment for my subluxated rib that forced me to stop binding. It’s not urgent, but I’ve been putting it off for months and it’s getting hard to ignore, and I’d like to start treating it sooner rather than later. I feel awkward about having a ko-fi and weirder still for posting about it, but if you want to and are a financially-secure adult, I’d, uh, be grateful for any small support via ko-fi if you’re willing and eager to swing it.
Welcome to another family Lore! Content warnings for Insects, drug use (medical, not illicit), aliens, alcohol mention, really poor life choices and leather.
As usual, all the names have been changed to protect people’s privacy. If you want to share this story on other sites, PLEASE include a link back to the original post! Thank you, and enjoy:
A couple Octobers ago, I had to do some yard work.
One of the side effects of mom keeping a stocked bird feeder is that the sides of the driveway and entire section of front yard that touches the street have been seeded with several hundred sunflowers by the birds, who like lunch to go apparently. It’s really nice- they don’t need any more water than summer thunderstorms bring and make a pretty privacy shade between my parent’s house and the street. It’s full of birds and butterflies and local bees and is just generally awesome.
Until about October.
Once we have the first frost, the sunflowers start to die, slowly collapsing under their own weight and the lovely birds and butterflies all scarper because the yellow jackets have realized that they can chew holes in the stems of the dying sunflowers and lap up delicious sugary plant juice. Being big fans of Sugar water, the wasps then defend their sunflower stalks with the vigilance and aggression to rival a dragon on it’s hoard. My family is pretty live and let live when it comes to wildlife but ALL of us are very allergic to yellow jacket stings, so this is a bit of a problem.
Since the Yellow Jackets are very territorial and tend to just stick with their favorite snack, we theorize that if we just lop the stems off and pile them in the back corner of the yard, all the wasps will stay over there and we can use the driveway again in peace. It’s a family plan of action, but since mom was recovering from hip surgery, dad is even more allergic than most of us and my sister was in the Philippines, it was a job for Me, specifically.
The Yellow Jackets would be angry with me moving their sugar buffet, naturally. I could barely go out the get the mail as it was, God help me if I started thrashing the sunflowers. So I did some research, and came up with a plan.
Firstly, Yellow Jacket stingers aren’t that long and can be repelled with sufficiently heavy clothing, like my mom’s old motorcycle jacket, gloves and chaps. If it can repel gravel flying at you at 70 miles an hour, it can probably stop an angry wasp or twenty, right? Lacking her helmet, my choice of facial protection is a plastic respirator, reflective swim goggles and a gimp mask from the props closet.
My parents do political comedy theater. The gimp mask isn’t even in the top 10 of weird shit they have in the props closet.
Next, they’re sensitive to strong odors and most bug sprays, so I douse my idiot ass in high-grade DEET, completely failing to read the warning label about not exposing yourself to fumes for extended periods of time OR remembering that I am on bipolar medication that leaves me supremely fucked up when exposed to DEET.
Additionally, it’s widely recommended that you take benadryl beforehand if you think you’re going to be exposed to an allergen. It’s NOT recommended to take anything like benadryl at all, ever if you’ve got any kind of dopamine/serotonin problems, like the aforementioned Bipolar Disorder.
Also, the best tool for hacking hundreds of overgrown sunflowers off at the base is a Machete. That’s like, an actual fact, not me being an idiot, for once. I collect my machete, Brutus, from his usual place in the back of the Ford POS.
Finally, Yellow Jackets are exclusively Diurnal and sluggish when it’s cold out, so I’m gonna take my stoned, leather-clad, machete-wielding ass out there in the middle of the night to do this. Since my hands will be full of Machete and Sunflowers, I won’t have a free hand for a flashlight, so I take my dad’s oversize book lamp and clip it to the back of my jacket collar.
So, you know. Totally Normal sight if you happen to be up at 3 AM.
And for about the first… half hour or so it actually goes great. The DEET hasn’t leaked into the respirator yet, I’m slashing away and making good progress on the sunflowers and the wasps are sluggishly crawling over me, half-hearted buzzes of rage, but can’t find a way in through the head-to-toe leather. Most of them are distracted by the light, crawling distractedly over the lamp and occasionally across my goggles, looking as bufuddled as an arthopod can look. I’m a fucking genius.
I start to feel giddy with success. I have outwitted an entire swarm of insects! I am engaging in successful terraforming! Given that one sting could send me to the ER, I am dancing with death iteslf! It’s 3AM and nobody else is out, so I decide to start singing. I have the voice of a tone-deaf crow and I pick Bean Pháidin by Planxty to sing, probably for the tempo. My half-assed attempt at gaelic and off-key corvid voice probably sound extra hilarious through the respirator.
It is at this time that Todd comes out.
The more sensible among you were probably wondering earlier why the hell my family just didn’t ask a neighbor or hire a service to come clear them if we’re all allergic.
1. Absolutely nobody short of an exterminator will come out once the word “wasps” is said and that’s expensive.
2. My neighbors consist of:
Mr. Drossel, the Lawyer who while a legal genius, is somewhat lacking in the physical coordination department can’t be trusted with anything sharper or larger than a spoon
The Stoffels, who are good and competent people but were away in Uganda at the time.
An old folks home full of Alzheimer’s patients
Todd
Todd is in his forties and probably reasonably competent with yard tools but there is little love lost between my family and Todd- He’s trained his dog to shit in my parent’s yard so he doesn’t have to pick up after it, parks his horse trailer in the middle of the road so traffic can’t get through, throws semi-weekly house parties that have to be broken up by the cops and leave broken glass everythwere and mows his lawn at 11 PM.
Additionally, Todd is prone to the mental complications of many a mediocre man, namely that he would much rather live in a paranoid an dangerous constructed reality wherein he is the subject of many fictional persecutions because that means he’s Important rather than admit that his life is pretty ok and that he’s not doing anything that would warrant men in black suits chasing after his ass. If there’s a conspiracy theory out there that could potentially be worked into a victim complex, Todd believes it hook, line and sinker.
I am alerted to Todd’s presence by a soft, awed “Oh my god.”
I turn around to find him standing in the middle of the road wearing a t-shirt, boxers that need adjusting to hide his penis better and a single flip-flop. I can smell nothing but DEET and my own marinating flesh but it’s a fair bet he’s been into the Pabst Blue Ribbon again. We stand in silence for a moment, one of the several dozen wasps swarming on me making the best go it can at my respirator in a misguided effort to sting me inside my nostrils. I am about to speak up and assure him that I am only doing horticulture and not felonies when he interrupts.
“You’re an ALIEN.” He gapes.
I stand there for a minute. I’m nearly done, but the fumes are getting to me and I’m covered in impotently furious wasps. It’s 4 AM now and I haven’t slept in close to 30 hours. I don’t want to try to explain this to Todd.
“Sure.” I shrug, before going back to the Sunflowers. Why deny this poor man a drunken fantasy?
“I- I’m an important human.” Todd says, still wearing dirty boxers that are falling off his ass and a single flip-flop. “Lots of connections. Government connections.” I slash faster.
“Maybe you don’t speak english.” He realizes after a few more minutes of standing in the road. “You’re from like. Quasar or something.”
He drunkenly watches me for a few more minutes. Normally this would be a cause for worry but I have a machete and he has inadequate footwear so I’m feeling good about my odds. He wanders off, and I take the next load back to the far corner of the yard.
When I come back out he has a camera. Like, one of those cheap disposables that still has film. It’s 2016. I don’t even know where he GOT that thing. And he’s standing out in the road, still in his shorts and a single flip-flop. Man can locate a goddamn kodachrome but can’t find two shoes.
So I do what any chemically altered and sleep-deprived person does, and strike a pose.
Todd goes BANANAS, and starts snapping away on his crappy little camera, and we have ourselves Milkyway’s Next Top Model shoot out there in the yard. I pick up random objects and pretend to be confused by them. I stand on the roof of the car and hold a USB up at the night sky like I’m looking for a cell signal. I fucking vogue because why not.
Todd is crying with happiness. “I KNEW YOU WERE REAL.” He sobs, snapping away. “I’M GONNA BE SO FAMOUS.” He loses his flip-flop in the excitement as I climb on top of the mailbox and make a Peace sign at him.
It’s 4:30 AM and we’re out in the middle of the road and I’m doing my best Tyra Banks despite the fact that I’m 5’2” and wearing motorcycle gear that’s three sizes too big for me when the guys who deliver the paper roll up.
Jamie and Miguel stop the truck, leaning out the window and over the cab (Miguel drives, Jamie stands in the bed and tosses papers out the back because fuck OSHA) at us two morons in the headlights.
I pull the mask and goggles off and walk up to the truck. “I was doing yard work and didn’t want to get stung by wasps. I dunno what he’s on about. If you have my paper I can take it in.” I probably look like hell and am still covered in wasps, but I don’t care.
Jamie hands me my paper, I wave bye and go into the house, leaving three extremely confused men in the road.
And that’s how I made, then completely destroyed my neighbor’s night.
If you got a laugh out of this story, please consider Donating to my Tip Jar or PayPal, as telling stories on the internet is my primary source of income.
Evening re-blog to thank everyone who’s donated so far and answer questions.
When I say this is my primary source of income, I mean that due to health concerns, I can’t work a normal job, so this determines whether or not I have money for groceries. So thank you everyone, from the bottom of my heart.
to answer questions: YES, the sunflower stalks were all moved to the back yard and the wasps followed, and nobody got stung. We like having them around, in spite of the allergy, becuase they’re amazing pest-control predators and one of the few things that eats ticks.
Evening Reboggle! Thank you again to all 19 people who have donated so far, so have an Update:
Called Parents to with them happy Valentines, and it’s been so hot this winter the Wasps are already awake and buzzing around the house, and Arwen The Dog has been catching and eating them for funsies. She’s good and spitting out the stingers. Or she’s eating them and doesn’t care. Given that this is the dog that eats snakes and deer bones, probably the latter.
There are also sunflower seedlings out by the driveway.
knitting in the dark 