big ole comic about adult ADHD diagnosis + big feelings + making sure childhood me is okay
Tags:
#hmm #that’s an interesting way of looking at it #(I don’t have ADHD but there’s a similar dynamic with a lot of lifelong conditions) #art #comics #ADHD #abuse cw?
Not in the normal way that everyone can sense their creeping mortality over their shoulder. I hadn’t really had that problem since I was eleven and learned about freezing brains. After that, I’d always expected to grow up, get old, end up with a popsicle head, and revive after a few years or decades. Sure, the precursor to The World’s Worst Brain-Freeze was going to suck, but it’d all be worth it when I got to stick it to the Post Modernists. Oblivion my ass.
That was until last year. Last year I was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Don’t get me wrong, all cancer is shit, but I’m pretty sure my variety was a special kind of shit. This was the shit you had when you ate week-old Mexican food at a run-down gas station. It was a work of art.
I still thought I could make it, though. I could rely on the medical tradition that had killed smallpox, beaten up measles, and was currently shaking down malaria for its lunch money. With that kind of muscle at my back, who was seriously going to try messing with me?
Well, as it happens, cancer cells are human too – and humans fight dirty. Pretty much any poison that can kill a cancer cell will also kill your non-treasonous cells too. Modern Medicine had rid the world of the Devil’s Kiss but was often outmanoeuvred by the Emperor of all Maladies. I was learning first-hand why armies just shot traitors as soon as they found them. My personal fifth column was cutting off my oxygen supply-lines and winter was coming. I was breathing purified oxygen through a straw and I still felt like I was drowning.
However, that wasn’t when I realised I was going to die. You see, I still had hope that I could save the game and respawn later. There had to eventually come a time when we knew how to kill the Emperor and blow up the Death Star. I just had to bide my time in a cooler. No, what sealed my fate was when my parents found Religion™.
It wouldn’t have been too bad if my parents had just found religion. They’d never been the type to go to church, but it would have been of no consequence to me if they’d started. Unfortunately, when normal medical treatment failed to do more than postpone the inevitable, they turned to Religion™ to solve the problem. Starting with faith healings and making the gradual, winding journey that led to crystals, homeopathy, and “Ancient Chinese Medicine”.
The last of these was annoying for the same reason that names like “the Holy Roman Empire” are annoying. After all, Ancient Chinese Medicine wasn’t ancient, it certainly wasn’t medicine, and it wasn’t even all that Chinese. It was what Mao’s government had started peddling to make people think their Communist Paradise had world-class medicine in the interim while they tried to import real doctors. Did this matter to the people making money off of desperation? Not one bit.
The end result was that, last week Tuesday, I learned that I was going to die. For good. It turns out that, while talk is cheap, woo is expensive. That was the day my folks told me that there was almost no money left in any of their accounts. My parents had used up almost all their money chasing the ancient Chinese dragon, and now they didn’t have much in the budget for anything else. Like, say, cryonics. By then I had two months to live and, when I died, my brain would be warm. I’d join the billions of others who had rotted in the ground before me. Needless to say, I was not pleased.
I was 16 and had no money to freeze myself with. What little money I’d managed to earn and save for myself had been “repurposed” for the greater good of rubbing some shiny rocks on my back. The money I had been able to accumulate probably wouldn’t have been sufficient to freeze myself with anyway, but it still pissed me off that my guardians were allowed to just take away what I had and use it on obvious bullshit. If cancer had been polite enough to wait a few years I wouldn’t be in this mess because I’d have had a job and my parents wouldn’t be empowered to piss away my property. Why couldn’t they have been sensible, like me, and believed in the coming of the Robot Gods, planet-sized computers, pollen-sized factories, and the Great Paperclip Seas?
I’d been stewing in existential angst for the past six days when they arrived. The poster children for prioritising warm fuzzies over actual results. The people that we world-weary grownups knew better than to give money to when there were better ways to donate it. Like, for example, literally throwing wads of cash at poor people. They were here now – right out in the hospital’s hallway.
My mother opened the door and let a man and a woman, both dressed in fancy formal clothes that were worth over a hundred malaria nets, enter my room.
“These nice people are from the Make A Wish Foundation,” my mother said excitedly. She was all smiles for the first time in over a week. I couldn’t help but notice the way they were introduced. Anyone fluent in Parentese knows that “nice people” is a sign of one of three things:
1) You’re three years old.
2) They’re goddamn liars and these people want to rip out your kidneys and eat them. (I learned this the first time I was introduced to a police officer. In my defence, banning painkillers in schools is 130% ridiculous, and distributing them to my classmates doesn’t make me a drug dealer by any sane definition.)
3) You’re dying and your parents seem to think that, if they don’t condescend to you enough, they’ll somehow make your imminent demise worse.
The woman with the ridiculously expensive shoes walked over to the side of my bed and sat in a chair. “We want to know what you’d wish for if you could have anything in the world, sweetie.” I supressed a cringe at “sweetie”. I knew I was a bit small for my age – genetics and cancer did a number on me – but I certainly didn’t look like a three year old. Instead, I contemplated her question. The first idea that came to mind was “I wish for you to pre-commit to saving the lives of any drowning children you may come across in the future, even if it means ruining your hyper-expensive shoes.” Needless to say, I kept thinking.
“I type… faster than… I can speak.” I told them. Lung cancer has been known to impede communication. “Laptop?” I asked pointing at the laptop my parents kept on the nightstand next to my bed. My mother brought it over to me, and I began communicating the way people should. Speaking out loud was so last century.
>Attempt #1 – I wish to not die.
I turned the laptop around to face Expensive Shoes Woman and watched her face go through a variety of interesting transformations as she read and, presumably, reread my request.
“I’m sorry, baby.” She cooed. “We don’t actually know how to do that… But I would if I could, of course.”
Seriously, were these people that bad at estimating age by sight? I was tempted to show them an online profile that prominently displayed my age, but my mother would tell me to stop being passive aggressive to people who only meant well. I bore it and typed a response.
>I didn’t actually expect you to, of course. If all the medicine I’ve ever heard of couldn’t manage it, I wouldn’t expect a non-medical charity to succeed. I asked because checking whether a wish-granting entity is literally magical is some pretty low-hanging fruit and, if you guys actually were genies, and I died because I didn’t bother checking, I’m not sure which would be worse – my death or my embarrassment.
This time Expensive Shoes Woman was reading over my shoulder as I typed and, while this is rude, it didn’t really bother me because I was trying to communicate with her, after all. I eventually regretted letting her do this because, I later learned, her facial expressions as she read this were even more interesting than the last set.
>Attempt #2 – I wish to die before the cancer has a chance to reach my brain (assuming it ever metastasises that far) and, upon my death, I wish to be cryonically preserved. I don’t think these should be counted as separate wishes since the first is merely intended to facilitate the second. I wouldn’t want to carry a brain tumour with me into the future. Hopefully, nature takes care of that by itself so don’t worry about it too much for now.
Expensive Shoes Woman abruptly stood up and said, “James, I think you may want to see this,” waving at my laptop. James of the Fancy Suit walked over to the side of my bed and looked at the laptop’s screen. This time I could see the facial expression. It looked like the gas station’s week-old Mexican food was kicking in.
“First off,” he told me firmly, “we do not kill children.” I wondered if, by Gricean Implicature, he meant to say, “We only kill adults”.
“Secondly,” he continued, “I’ve never heard of ‘cryonics’ so I don’t know if I can give it to you. I’ll have to speak to the higher-ups. This isn’t a standard thing like Disney World or meeting Justin Bieber. Are you sure you wouldn’t want one of those?” I was pretty sure I preferred living long enough to get up-close and personal with Saturn’s rings over seeing a bored employee in a silly suit tell kids he was “the real Mickey Mouse”. I told them as much, and also made sure to explain what cryonics was.
“Well, I’m sorry, honey,” the Expensive Shoes Woman said, “but I don’t think that that’s something we do, right James?”
“No, Sarah, I’m pretty sure it’s not.” James replied. He watched me intently, as if trying to estimate how likely it was that I was completely insane.
“Is there anything else we might be able to do for you?” Sarah asked me. “Maybe not Disney World, but there are tons of thing we can do. We make kids happy all the time and I’m sure we could do the same for you.”
I wasn’t happy, though. I was angry. I’d actually been hopeful about getting my head frozen and now hope was dashed yet again. I was even angrier at the various Alternative ‘Medicine’ practitioners who’d done all manner of nonsense to me. Not only had they swindled my parents’ money, but they’d given them hope and taken it away so many times. Now I knew what that felt like. Now I just wanted a way to express all the anger.
>Attempt #3 – Is there any way I can cash in my wish for some symbolic gesture that would qualify as a great big “fuck you” to death itself? Like, basically, a gigantic middle-finger?
“We are not building a child a derogatory statue!” James declared, clearly appalled at the notion.
>I didn’t mean that literally. I want to order a metaphorical middle-finger. Any ideas?
“None that I can think of, I’m afraid.” James said, still watching me warily. “Where kids these days even get the notion…”
I slumped in on myself. It was clear to all present that this visit had not been particularly enjoyable to me.
“Look, why don’t you sleep on it?” Sarah asked me. “We’ll come back tomorrow to see if you’ve thought of any, um, grand gestures. We’ll see what we can do, alright?”
I nodded a little glumly. Yeah, I’d think. I never give up on a problem without thinking about it for at least five minutes. I’d be ready by tomorrow.
The next day, the same pair came back to my hospital room. However, this time, I was ready.
“Do you have an idea for a wish this time, darling?” Sarah asked me with a bright smile. She clearly intended to provide enough happiness for both of us. I wondered if she called everyone “sweetie” and “darling” and if the others found it as off-putting as I did. Regardless, I had an answer to her question.
>Yes, I do. First, I have a question of my own: what’s your budget for a wish?
Sarah stared blankly at the screen and then at me. “What?” She asked. “You shouldn’t be asking those questions! We handle the financial side of things. Don’t worry about that stuff.”
>Good thing I didn’t count on you being helpful there and did my own research. According to your website, as of March 2012, the average you spent on a single wish was $7,500. I don’t know how much that’s changed but I think it’s safe to assume that $10,000 is within your price range.
James looked at me sceptically. “What do you want that costs $10,000?”
>Your website lists, among the potential wish categories, “I wish to give”. Well, I wish to give $10,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation. That’s my big “fuck you” to death itself.
Sarah bit her lip. “Um, I don’t know exactly what the ‘Against Malaria Foundation’ is, but it sounds like a charity and we don’t donate money to other charities.* After all, we’re a charity, and if our donors wanted to support the Against Malaria Foundation, they would have sent their checks there instead. It was their decision.”
>Yeah, but the point of the Make A Wish Foundation is to use the power of middle class disposable income to make a couple kids who are about to die happy. I’m a kid, I’m about to die, and the thing that would make me happy is for some other kids to not die. I’m already a lost cause but if, in the process of biting it, I save three more lives, that’s sort of worth it, right? Don’t get me wrong – I don’t like dying – but I don’t think the kids in Malawi do either.
At this point Sarah was tearing up a little and had to wipe at her eyes. “You’re really strong, you know?” I rolled my eyes. I knew it wasn’t a nice thing to do, but I was freaking dying. Being strong was immaterial at this point.
Sarah got up from the chair by the side of my bed. “I’ll see what I can do, OK? I’ll talk to some people. They might be willing to bend the policy – but no promises yet.” I was careful to restrain my enthusiasm as they left the room. I didn’t want my hopes rising up and crashing down again. Chances were nothing would come of it. Getting around established policy was an uphill battle and I shouldn’t expect too much from them.
On Friday my mother handed me a local newspaper while grinning from ear to ear. She told me to turn to page four and I did so, feeling a bit confused. That was when I saw it. The article was entitled: “Feisty Young Cancer Survivor Uses Her Wish To Save Lives”. I was too elated to even complain about them calling a kid with two months to live a “survivor”. I read through the article and learned all about how the people at the local chapter of the Make A Wish Foundation had been so moved when they heard about my self-sacrifice – y’know, the usual bull.
It turns out they put up a notice online about how much a certain cancer “survivor” cared about the global poor and asked others to contribute to making her dream come true. Over a hundred people pitched in and the original $10,000 had become $24,000. I’d never expected so much. I hadn’t cried that much since the day I was first diagnosed with cancer. However, through all the jubilation, I couldn’t get one question out of my mind:
Did they seriously just call me ‘feisty’!?
fin
*I don’t actually know if giving to other charities is against the MaWF’s policies, but this wouldn’t surprise me.
If you want to support the Make A Wish Foundation, click here.
If you want to support the Against Malaria Foundation, click here.
If you want to know why the latter is a better choice than the former, click here.
Tags:
#that one post with the thing #storytime #effective altruism #cancer cw #death tw #like really strong warnings here‚ be careful #abuse cw? #illness tw? #embarrassment squick? #I think about this post every time I come across a personal-finance blogger #(or‚ occasionally‚ a personal-finance academic-article-writer) #talking about ~dying with zero~ #dying without having spent all of your retirement fund is not a worse outcome than dying *with* having spent it all! #why the fuck would I want to ride the knife’s edge of broke-ness? #and why the *fuck* would I want to make *Plan As* that *depend on my death*? #Plan A is immortality #Plan B is that if the Grim Reaper wants me‚ he’s gonna have to give up as many plague deaths as I can negotiate for in exchange #adventures in human capitalism
Fire Lord Zuko passing a law that forbids challenging anyone under the age of majority to Agni Kai
Fire Lord Zuko waiting until the day he reaches the age of majority to pass this law, lest anyone think he is a coward
(No one. Literally no one would have thought that, but it’s generally regarded as a very classy move regardless)
Wait but also, until then, if anyone under the age of majority is challenged
Zuko fights it for them.
Which, especially in more rural towns (where Agni Kais are less of a public event and more of a fast and violent duel) is terrifying because you challenge your neighbor’s kid over a stolen chicken-fish and all of a sudden the Fire Lord is showing up???
But, those few who still challenge those who should be kids learn quickly to regret it.
Okay but this implies that Zuko knows whenever someone challenges a kid to an Agni Kai and is there before the battle takes place.
Firelord Zuko: *wakes up in a cold sweat near midnight*
Firelord Zuko: *running down the palace hallways while still struggling to put in his pants, being chased by his team of bodyguards* I’M GOING TO HING WA ISLAND TO KICK SOMEBODY’S ASS SEE YOU IN A WEEK BITCHES
Random spirit: Why’d you do that to him? Isn’t it kind of a stretch for a mortal to be blessed like that?
Agni himself: I felt like it
Tags:
#Avatar: The Last Airbender #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #headcanons #violence cw? #abuse cw?
Not nearly enough “Sirius Black makes himself at home in Privet Drive because there’s nothing the Dursleys can do to get him to leave” fic out there, and it’s a crying shame.
Harry just rolling up like WHADDUP THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FAMILAR HE EMOTIONALLY SUPPORTS ME BY MAULING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN ME. And Sirus dog-charades AND THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COUCH YOU CAN SIT ON THE FLOOR FUCKERS.
You know what else is good “Dudley gets on top of how fucked up his parents are faster” fic, and i feel like “Sirius Lives at Privet Drive” dovetails nicely into this:
Dudley, age 14 and realizing his mother’s Loving-but-Ill-advised cooking is setting him up for some serious health problems, and that he’s tall enough to look his dad in the eye now, so his previous rationale of “If he’s hitting Harry he’s not Hitting Me” doesn’t hold up now, and goes full Eye of The Tiger to cope.
This means Sirus gets dragged along on a lot of Parent-avoiding “Walkies”
So many that one evening after a fight Dudley is trying to round up Harry and Sirius for a cooldown run and Sirius groans “Oh you’re big lads you can jog to the tesco on your own.” from the couch There’s a hot moment of silence.
“He’s a Magic Dog.” Says Harry.
“What do you mean your dog is a 40-year-old man?” “What do you mean your Dad’s BFF?” “What do you mean convicted criminal?” What do you mean WIZARD HITLER WANTS YOUR HIDE??” “..Shit I gotta up my workout routine.”
“You’re not gonna punch Voldermort out Dudley.”
“Not with these wimpy biceps I won’t.”
Shit’s getting increasingly tense in the house so when Ron announces they have tickets to the Quidditch World Cup Harry has to ask “Hey, can Dudley come too?”
Dudley might be short on wizarding skills but one thing he’s learned at Fancy rich boy School is the art of Schmooze. They meet Corneilus Fudge and Dudley charms the hell out of him. Fudge doesn’t even realize he’s not a Wizard. Harry tries to impress upon him the ‘VOLDERMORT’S ALIVE WITH A CULT DIPSHIT” upon him and nearly ends up in tears before Dudley takes his arm and whispers “Let me Handle This.”
Thirty minutes later Corneilus is organizing a Task Force of Aurors.
“What the fuck do they teach you there?” asks Harry. “Oh, buttering egos, Trigonometry, grift, the usual.” “What’s Trigonometry?” Asks Ron, walking with them on a field trip through Muggle London for Nandos. Dudley’s Uncle “Gerald White” is supervising them it’s fine. Dudley stares for a moment. “You guys… are learning math, along with your Divination and Transmorfigication and whatsits, right?” There is an awkward silence. Even Sirius considers morphing back into a dog to avoid this conversation. “Oh for fucks sake.” Sighs Dudley, texting Hermionie to see if she brought her Muggle textbooks along.
(She Did)
IDK what happens when the school year starts but I love the idea of “Well some snitch (Snape) might notice if Sirus is hanging around, so instead he goes with Dudley to Fancy Rich Boy School. Maybe they’re short a teacher there and he can reccomend his friend Remus, currently out of work for reasons that aren’t his fault…
Yassss!
“What’s trigonometry?” some pureblood at the World Cup asks him. “It’s a variant of arithmancy,” says Harry, who’s become somewhat adept at bullshitting translations between magical and muggle things when the incentive was avoiding Aunt Marge’s wrath.
Nobody’s ever heard of trigonometry except for one elderly pureblood witch, who had heard it mentioned once back in school by a classmate who went on to become a famous name in advanced and extremely theoretical arithmancy.
Everybody loses no time in agreeing that trigonometry must be this tremendously advanced arithmancy specialization and Dudley Dursley must be an absolute arithmancy prodigy to the point where even the arithmancy buffs don’t want to risk making themselves look stupid by asking him about his research.
OBVIOUSLY Dudley goes to some extremely foreign wizarding school with an advanced research program available. There can’t be many of them with an advanced “trigonometry” program like that, so nobody asks which school it is because what if there’s only one of them and they look stupid for not knowing about it?
Besides, Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, is giving him the time of day like he’s someone really important, so, yeah.
Oh, yeah, he’s definitely the type of absent-minded brilliance that forgets his wand regularly, head in the clouds with all those theorems.
Dudley actually takes up computer programming at Smeltings. He tried it out because he likes video games, and then sort of fell in love with the process, the building something up out of lines of code, the thrill of success when it works. The awestruck reactions of wizards who see a couple of his notebooks when he sits there scribbling out code on a spiralbound notebook with a ballpoint pen is almost tangible.
The ballpoints and the notebooks take some suspicion for their muggleness until Harry points out that you don’t need to pay attention to how much ink is left and when you need to dip it, so it’s perfect for somebody who might want to scribble out whole pages of that stuff without noticing whether they’ve run out of ink, and the notebooks have pages so you could remember where something is. Pretty soon quill-tipped ballpoints are all the rage and spiralbound parchment stacks are being sold in all the stores.
Somebody asks Dudley about his family history. “Oh, they’ve all been like me,” he says, “as far back as anybody remembers” and he means not-a-wizard, but everybody thinks the opposite.
His father is blustery and yells and prone to explosive bursts of anger, he says, and his mother is obsessed with cleanliness and etiquette, and everyone is perfectly happy to never suggest they’d like to meet them.
Once Dudley figures out that everyone thinks he’s a wizard, he and Harry have a solid laugh over it and Harry teaches Dudley what he’d need to know to continue the deception. Fred and George are brought into the equation and provide him with lots of cool tricks and such so that he can appear to do some small bits of magic now and again.
He eventually marries Daphne Greengrass, who knows about his muggleness at that point and loves the idea of getting one over on her overly bloodpurist parents without them ever knowing about it. Harry and Sirius quietly gift them Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, and the assumption that Dudley has the sort of money that buys a historic Pureblood property as a starter home goes round and round.
Dudley ends up on the Board of Governors, and later Minister for Magic, and in their old age Petunia and Vernon suffer the mingled pride and fury that their son is a Government Minister and they can’t brag about it.
Two other AUs this goes well with:
“all the pureblood dipshits tithed thier land and holdings to Voldemort so when Harry kills him, all the assets go to him and now he owns half of wizarding UK.”
“early on his career as a wizard, Dudley goes to Wales to meet another Famed Arithmancer and becomes close friends with fellow videogame and rugby enthusiast Howell Jenkins.”
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #abuse cw? #embarrassment squick? #oh look an update
Not nearly enough “Sirius Black makes himself at home in Privet Drive because there’s nothing the Dursleys can do to get him to leave” fic out there, and it’s a crying shame.
Harry just rolling up like WHADDUP THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FAMILAR HE EMOTIONALLY SUPPORTS ME BY MAULING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN ME. And Sirus dog-charades AND THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COUCH YOU CAN SIT ON THE FLOOR FUCKERS.
You know what else is good “Dudley gets on top of how fucked up his parents are faster” fic, and i feel like “Sirius Lives at Privet Drive” dovetails nicely into this:
Dudley, age 14 and realizing his mother’s Loving-but-Ill-advised cooking is setting him up for some serious health problems, and that he’s tall enough to look his dad in the eye now, so his previous rationale of “If he’s hitting Harry he’s not Hitting Me” doesn’t hold up now, and goes full Eye of The Tiger to cope.
This means Sirus gets dragged along on a lot of Parent-avoiding “Walkies”
So many that one evening after a fight Dudley is trying to round up Harry and Sirius for a cooldown run and Sirius groans “Oh you’re big lads you can jog to the tesco on your own.” from the couch There’s a hot moment of silence.
“He’s a Magic Dog.” Says Harry.
“What do you mean your dog is a 40-year-old man?” “What do you mean your Dad’s BFF?” “What do you mean convicted criminal?” What do you mean WIZARD HITLER WANTS YOUR HIDE??” “..Shit I gotta up my workout routine.”
“You’re not gonna punch Voldermort out Dudley.”
“Not with these wimpy biceps I won’t.”
Shit’s getting increasingly tense in the house so when Ron announces they have tickets to the Quidditch World Cup Harry has to ask “Hey, can Dudley come too?”
Dudley might be short on wizarding skills but one thing he’s learned at Fancy rich boy School is the art of Schmooze. They meet Corneilus Fudge and Dudley charms the hell out of him. Fudge doesn’t even realize he’s not a Wizard. Harry tries to impress upon him the ‘VOLDERMORT’S ALIVE WITH A CULT DIPSHIT” upon him and nearly ends up in tears before Dudley takes his arm and whispers “Let me Handle This.”
Thirty minutes later Corneilus is organizing a Task Force of Aurors.
“What the fuck do they teach you there?” asks Harry. “Oh, buttering egos, Trigonometry, grift, the usual.” “What’s Trigonometry?” Asks Ron, walking with them on a field trip through Muggle London for Nandos. Dudley’s Uncle “Gerald White” is supervising them it’s fine. Dudley stares for a moment. “You guys… are learning math, along with your Divination and Transmorfigication and whatsits, right?” There is an awkward silence. Even Sirius considers morphing back into a dog to avoid this conversation. “Oh for fucks sake.” Sighs Dudley, texting Hermionie to see if she brought her Muggle textbooks along.
(She Did)
IDK what happens when the school year starts but I love the idea of “Well some snitch (Snape) might notice if Sirus is hanging around, so instead he goes with Dudley to Fancy Rich Boy School. Maybe they’re short a teacher there and he can reccomend his friend Remus, currently out of work for reasons that aren’t his fault…
Hello, yes, I love this. I love the idea of Dudley and Hermione tutoring Harry on Muggle science and whatnot, and Ron is sitting there confused and just going ???? Also, you just know that Hermione is going to read ahead extremely quickly and she’ll be Dudley’s best study partner.
Omg, Dudley and Hermione joining forces to bring the wizarding world into the modern age
Adding: Dudley stays relatively fat, but now he can bench-press Buckbeak.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #abuse cw? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the Gerald White reference)
one time as a kid I forcefully shoved two magnets together, and these were the strong magnets my dad used in his shop to pick-up missing little metal bits, and I held them really tightly in the palm of my hand, went up to this one kid who legit said things like “I think black cats are bad, they should be drowned” and drew crosses on the notebooks of kids if she found out they didn’t go to church, I told her “Hey. I’m a witch. If you don’t stop trying to hurt animals and picking on kids, I’ll use my magic to throw you into the sky”, and when she dared to doubt my powers I told her that I had two “rocks” in my hand that I could send across the playground, then I opened my hand the the magnets shot off in two different directions (we were over in a spot that was empty, so no other kids were around, nobody got hurt), one of them stuck to a drainpipe and the other stuck to a fence. This kid SCREAMED, and ran to the office, and I guess had her mom pick her up from school, and then she wasn’t there for a couple of days, finally her mom called my house and claimed I had “traumatized her daughter by performing a terrifying magic trick”, and when my parents asked what I did I just said “I showed her a magnet and she flipped out. She’s not gonna be happy when she finds out about gravity, either”. eventually this kid came back to school and always made a point to come up to me and say “Hey, my mom told me not to talk to you!”, and would just be like “Good job, you already screwed that up”
did i even mention that my aunt threatened to unplug the wifi at night in order to make me job hunt faster because “I’m not trying to force you to become a morning person, but job hunting is an eight to five thing”? or did that get lost in the FUCKING AUGEAN STABLES HERE
…that is a thing you do to small children, not housemates in their thirties.
Also, it didn’t work when my parents did it (I just stayed up all night reading and playing Nethack), and I see even less reason why it would work on someone who has a mobile data plan. All it would do is…oh, I see, it lets her complain about how dependent you are on Internet access, that you’re still willing to use it even when she jacks up the price by limiting you to mobile data.
(although I suppose you could go over to the McDonalds or something and use theirs, which would probably still get you some aunt complaints but might be cheaper, depending on transportation cost vs number of mobile-data MB saved)
And anyway, job hunting should be done at the hours you are available to work. If a job requires you to come in at 8 AM for the interview, they’re probably going to want you to routinely come in to work at 8 AM, and if you can’t do that you shouldn’t waste your time interviewing with them. (Not that I would expect her to listen if you told her that.)
(Everyone in my family works evenings for a large percentage of their shifts, and ¾ of us *never* start work before 10:30 AM! My dad’s job interview with the delivery people was at 6 PM! It can be done, even (maybe especially) with low-tier jobs! My parents used to joke with the other weirdly-sleep-scheduled homeschool families that they were raising the next generation of second-shift workers, and they were kind of right!)
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#I mean I’ve drifted back some so I’m in an in-between schedule where 8 – 4 is too early and 4 – 12 is too late #of course with the New Economy and all that I might never have to pick one of those to orient myself around #I’ll work when work is available so long as I can arrange to be reasonably awake #(I think if I had to choose) #(4 – 12 would be much easier to adjust to but 8 – 4 would be a bit more pleasant after I eventually got used to it) #(not sure which I’d pick) #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #abuse cw? #(fun fact: back when we had metered home Internet I used to save up large downloads) #(and do them in batches at the nearest coffeeshop) #(sometimes I had so much to download (and our Internet was so expensive) that I could buy a bagel there and it would *still* be cheaper)
They say the *next* stage of brain development is getting *less* susceptible to peer pressure. What the hell is *that* gonna be like?
I have some guesses, I think. Maybe you get so used to full-grown impulse control that you start taking it for granted, go so long without ever being at real risk of snapping that you start projecting your non-violence onto others the same way you once projected your violence onto them. “What will happen if I make this person angry” calculates (as it always did) as “what would I do if I were them and someone made me angry”, and since “I would hurt them” is no longer a serious possibility, you stop taking that possibility seriously in others (at least by default), and so the stakes are lower.
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#oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #violence cw #abuse cw?
Is it just me, or does adolescent brain development feel from the inside like getting better at *fear*?
They told me I’d get better impulse control in my early twenties, and in a way I suppose I did. But what it felt like was that I’d finally cultivated fear to the point that it could consistently outweigh anger, that even in the midst of rage I was still paralysed by the terror of what people would do to me if I lashed out.
They told me I’d get more susceptible to peer pressure in my teens, and in a way I suppose I did. But what it felt like was an acute awareness that literally anyone could hurt me (deprive me of resources, beat me up, potentially in extreme cases kill me) if crossed; I would not be able to stop them until it was too late, and in many cases I would not be able to stop them at all. There’s no such thing as peer pressure because there’s no such thing as *peers*: everyone is potentially dangerous, and everyone must be appeased.
(Ever since puberty, I have never had a relationship† between equals. The closest I’ve come is relationships where each person believes themself to be of inferior rank to the other.
I used to worry what it said about me that my closest friendships are always with people who are scared of me, but perhaps it’s just that *I’m* going to be scared of *them* regardless, and so them being scared too is the only way to even things out enough.)
†in the broad sense
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#oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #violence cw #abuse cw?
Brinens and Things 