#I expect a deficit in working memory

[alarawriting]

52 Project #53: After The Chicken Story

And here it is, the bonus story, a sequel to the one I started this project with.

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Things have been kind of crazy around here the last few years, not just because of the pandemic, but there’s been a lot going on. Gotta say that mostly, those years haven’t been real great for us. Lots of changes, some good, some bad, some eh, but that’s life, right?

So my oldest daughter went to college to become a marine biologist, and now she’s on an expedition to study the Kraken in the harbor. Gotta say I didn’t expect it. Not because she didn’t show any interest in marine biology, she was crazy for it when she was young, but because every girl around here seemed to want to grow up to be a marine biologist, kind of like every girl when I was growing up wanted to work with horses. Except my wife, she’s terrified of them. Most of the kids who wanted to be marine biologists did not end up that way, but my daughter’s working on a master’s degree in it. Wants to do all this stuff with conservation and the Bay. Which, I guess, the Kraken  lives in the Bay and if we piss it off enough by dumping crap in its home territory so there’s no food for it, it might burn the city down again, so there’s a good conservation argument for you.

My oldest son, the ninja, has actually left the country; he’s gone to Japan to study under ninja masters at some ninja school. Either that, or break into working for Nintendo, because what he really wants in life is to make video games. Being a ninja isn’t a profession for him, it’s a way of life. I miss the kid, he never writes home. Would it kill him to drop us a note on Discord? But it sounds like he’s happy, which is the important thing.

And my younger son has a web comic going. Well, it’s not exactly a web comic, more like one of those mixed media things where he’s got comic pages and audio files and animations and mini-games and all that kind of stuff, about, supposedly, a fictionalized version of himself going into the tunnel under the road and traveling to the Underworld. It’s like, Dante’s Inferno as rewritten by Gen Z. Not literally Dante’s Inferno, I think he’s only ever read the Wikipedia article about it, but similar concept. Surprisingly, it’s mostly a dark comedy. I haven’t asked him if any of it is true, because I don’t want to know.

My youngest kid’s not doing nearly as well, since we brought back her timeshadow from the moon. I never took her seriously when she used to say she had a clone on the moon; turns out that, while a timeshadow is technically not a clone, she did actually have a copy of herself up on the moon. (Nowhere near my family’s barbeque grill. I’m starting to think I’ll never see that thing again.) The thing about timeshadows is, if your timeshadow touches you, it merges into you and then you have all of its memories, but if it had problems, you probably got them too. And living on the Moon for most of your life is not good for timeshadows any more than for regular humans, so when they merged, my kid got frail and weak – not as bad as someone who’d lived on the Moon their whole life, in the weak gravity, but worse off than she was. She didn’t get any taller, though. The timeshadow had shot up like a string bean, side effect of Lunar gravity, but when they merged, my kid got the deficits and not the benefits.

I wish it hadn’t happened and part of me regrets bringing the kid back from the moon, but the thing about a timeshadow is, it’s not entirely real, but it has thoughts and feelings just like the real human it’s a copy of, so what was I gonna do? Leave someone who is essentially my daughter up on the Moon without family? My daughter has lost enough of her childhood memories that she no longer has any idea how the timeshadow got on the Moon or why she even had a timeshadow, and the daycare she used to go to is out of business, so I don’t think there’s any way I can find out.

Things got kind of bad for my wife, too. The last time I talked about things, it ended up looking like we were going to buy our annoying neighbor’s house after my wife harassed her into leaving the neighborhood. Well, that didn’t happen, because my wife lost her job, and then ended up with breast cancer. They had to take them off. She looked into getting breast missiles but the damn things are too hard to reload, so she got pockets instead. Now if she really wants to keep something safe, she can stick it in her boob, not just in her bra. I always thought that those things were only for drug smugglers, but my wife wants to be able to go to the beach by herself and keep her credit cards and ID on her person when she goes in the water, and apparently she can seal up the pockets to be waterproof. So far evidence suggests she’s cancer free and the thing never made it out of her breasts, and that’s good, so things could be worse. The people who did buy the annoying neighbor’s house are nice folks, a Hispanic family where the father works in some kind of industrial chemistry as a scientist… I think. At least, he’s got some crazy shit in his swimming pool.

And then, my idiot boyfriend let the Fae know his true name. He’s a trans dude and very proud of the name he picked. He wasn’t going to go deadnaming himself when the Fae dude he met asked if he could have his name. So now his paperwork is not going through, and some stupid thing keeps happening every time he tries to legally change his name, because apparently the Fae now own his name. He’s considered changing it to a different name, but once you start to think about yourself as a name, that’s apparently your True Name. So he could maybe solve the issue of the paperwork, but he can’t solve the problem that fairies know his name and keep calling him. Sometimes he tries to sleepwalk straight out of the house; we’ve found him in the middle of the street in a fugue state, or talking to people we couldn’t see. My wife’s been trying to help him with the paperwork, but since she’s had her own battles to fight, it hasn’t worked so well.

We still have chickens. But now we also have a 2 dimensional dog, a cockatoo who works tech support, and approximately seventeen cats. I can’t really keep track of them all. They’ve cleared out the rat population, which is good, because Orion the assassin cat has been getting up in years and isn’t quite as murderous as he used to be, but they break out into two clans and the clans feud like the Hatfields and McCoys. We’re not at war with the city over the chickens anymore; now it’s the yard. Mostly about the Fae circles, but also about mowing the lawn, which, you try mowing over a Fae circle. And tell me how it went, fifty years when you pop back into reality, if you ever do.

Anyway, this story isn’t about the chickens, or not nearly so much as the last story was. It’s more of an explanation of why things ended up the way they did.

So first off, work. Now, I’ve been working from home from before it was cool; got my own IT company, works with Amazon Web Services helping other businesses deal with them. When my wife lost her job, she started working here as well, which was just as well because then when she got cancer, she could get all the time off for chemo and stuff that she needed. A year or so later, when the news about the pandemic first hit, business was jumping. Everybody wanted to get into the cloud and not have to come into the office anymore.

Huh, actually, no, that’s not where it starts. Let’s start with the two dimensional dog.

So my youngest kid really wanted a two dimensional dog. They’re pretty rare, on account of being two dimensional. You ever hear of a paper tiger, well, this is a paper dog. They’re not really two dimensional, but something about, most of their mass is phased into a different dimension and we can only see the part of them that intersects with this plane? They can be very intimidating because you look at this dog, you think, goddamn that is one skinny dog, and then it comes up to you with its jaws hanging open, panting, and it looks like a smile. A giant smile. A giant, very toothy, very scary smile. This is a dog you want to keep happy because you don’t know what it will do if it’s not happy. They’re very tall, and very long, and very very skinny, but the mass is there, as you can tell when the dog jumps up on you.

Ours came from Russia. Well, her parents came from Russia. Well, her ancestors. We’re not really sure when it was that Russia engineered two dimensional dogs, but we know that when the Soviet Union fell, people over there started selling these dogs to the US because they were weird, and rich people love weird, and Russians after the collapse of Communism really wanted the money. Then some people who probably weren’t all that rich spent too much money on the dogs so they could look richer than they were, and ended up having to sell off puppies for a lot less than they wanted when the dot com boom busted. My daughter wanted one ever since she heard about them. She was super into science and math, and the idea of a two dimensional dog really appealed to her.

My wife’s ex used to have one he got from a rescue, but we went looking for the rescue and found out it had to shut down after they accidentally accepted a Hound of Tindalos, and you know how that goes. So we had to buy our dog. Her name’s Svetlana and she will do anything to get some peanut butter, regular butter, cheese, potato chips… you know, anything you might imagine your teenagers would clean you out of. Being that she’s two dimensional, she will absolutely slip through any crack in a door you leave, including the fridge door if you don’t shut it all the way. We’ve lost so much butter that way.

Now, Svetlana loves cats. Loves cats. Before we got her fixed, she loved them in a kind of not-entirely-PG-rated way, but even after that, she really wants to play with cats. She is six times as tall as a cat. Cats do not want to play with her. At the time, we had three cats – Orion the mighty hunter/assassin cat, Odin the grumpy ancient man who our best guesses had at 24 years old then, and Tiamat, the tortie who thought she was human. Well, who at least thought she deserved to be able to get chicken out of the refrigerator and sit at the dinner table. They had their normal cat idiosyncrasies; Tiamat liked Rice Krispies but hated fish, Odin enjoyed sleeping in the litter box, and Orion liked to cross-dress. Well, not sure you can call it that since female cats don’t generally wear frilly doll dresses, either. But the kids – and my boyfriend -- thought it was fun to put dresses on him, and while the others would immediately divest themselves if you tried to make them wear anything, Orion seemed to enjoy his dresses. He’d even head-butt the kids if one of them was holding a doll dress, until the kid put the dress on him. None of these cats wanted anything to do with Lana.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend’s parents in Canada had a bunch of local feral cats who’d just had kittens. You see where this is going.

Sylph was a pretty little Siamese kitten who enjoyed playing with my boyfriend’s parents’ dog. We thought she’d make a good friend for Lana, and because she had a sister she was inseparable from, we didn’t want to separate them. So we ended up with Raven as well, a solid black cat who became the photographic subject of many memes about how the void wants chicken.

Lana, big dumb goofy nerd that she was, got too enthusiastic about playing with the kittens. The kittens didn’t appreciate it. Then the kittens turned into teenage female cats, at which point we discovered that Lana is actually a lesbian xenophile… ailurophile? You can’t call it bestiality when they’re all beasts. This was more than a little disturbing, and we all wanted to return to our illusions that our dog loved our cats in a wholesome friendly way, so we arranged to get them all fixed, Lana first.

And then Covid hit.

If you had pets you might remember that right after Covid started, the vets all turtled up, nothing but emergency appointments. Fixing animals was apparently not an emergency. Lana got done in time, but our little girls, not so much.

We did our best to keep them inside, but with all the secret tunnels in the basement, the rat warrens that come up in the laundry room, and the holes in reality that the wall squids made, we cannot in fact keep anything the size of a cat in, or out. I mean, cats can’t usually phase through walls, but they are one of the only animals on the planet fast enough to catch a wall squid, and if they tag the thing, they can often follow it right through its phase. Since they can’t actually enter the dimension the things come from, though, this generally leaves them outside whatever wall they were going through, which is fine when it’s the interior living room wall and not so great when it’s the wall covered with ivy outside. The only thing that keeps stranger cats from turning up in our house at random is ours are so damn territorial, and the only thing that keeps our cats in is nothing. Nothing can keep our cats in.

By the time we got Sylph and Raven rescheduled for their spays, they were both pregnant with kittens.

There are some vets that will abort kittens while spaying. Not the ones around here. Also they both had lots of them. Sylph had six, Raven had five. We have a tradition around here that kittens don’t get real names until they’re adults, they get temporary names. So Sylph’s six were Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charmed, and Raven’s five were named after five members of Voltron, from the old series my wife grew up with, not the reboot. And she left out Sven. I think she forgot he existed.

As if this was not bad enough, Tiamat got pregnant. See, we’d never fixed her, because the one time we had an appointment, she managed to disappear, and she’d get fat and then thin again within weeks, not long enough to bring a pregnancy to term. We knew that her father and her brother were the same cat, so we figured she might have some kind of genetic abnormality preventing pregnancy. Nope! Or, maybe. Maybe she needed exposure to cat pregnancy pheromones to be able to bring a litter to term. She had four. We named them after the Three Musketeers plus D’Artagnan.

If you’re counting, you know that at this point, we had a total of twenty cats.

Meanwhile, we were hoarding food. Frozen and nonperishable, I’m not talking about stuff you have to refrigerate. We bought three new freezers (which took forever, because everyone else apparently had the same idea), filled them with meat (we hooked up with a butcher and got a whole cow, a whole pig, a whole emu, and a couple of deer), then filled our pantry and multiple bins with dry food. With Covid going on, we didn’t want to have to leave the house and go shopping any more than we had to. We even got dry milk. Which is disgusting, by the way, do not use it for your cereal, but it does tolerably well when the instant mashed potato box says to use milk to make mashed potatoes. We didn’t go full prepper with MREs and dehydrated food, but only because my boyfriend’s parents were preppers and he was able to advise us that that stuff tastes like shit.

Twenty cats produce a lot of cat poop. My boyfriend, whose job it was to clean the cat boxes, was frequently distracted by the Fae trying to call him. My wife and I were overwhelmed with work. My son the ninja helped out for a while, but then he got accepted to study under a ninja master. I thought there was no way he’d be able to go; we were in lockdown. Japan wasn’t accepting US citizens. Hell, Canada wasn’t; my boyfriend could go visit his parents because he was actually a Canadian citizen, but we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to come back, so he didn’t.

Ninjas, apparently, have resources that most ordinary Japanese citizens don’t. They came in a helicopter in the dead of night, and we only knew about it because he went to say goodbye to the chickens and woke them up and they started clucking, which set off the dog. We got outside in time to see my son disappear up the helicopter ladder, promising us, incorrectly, that he would write. You’d think ninjas wouldn’t use something as ostentatious as a chopper, but the truth is our city is lousy with choppers. Police choppers. News choppers. Medevac choppers. Elementary school bus choppers. Ghostbuster choppers. No one here blinks when they hear the sound of a helicopter overhead, and a blacked-out ninja helicopter looks exactly like a blacked-out police helicopter.

Since then we mostly hear about him through his brother, who does not have the level of detail sufficient to make my wife happy, but at least we know enough to know that his ninja cover is that he’s interning at Nintendo. Apparently ninjas do not really live in secret compounds where they dress all in black and train non-stop; the point of being a ninja is that you blend in, so ninjas get real jobs, and they’re plausible jobs that the ninja is good at doing. My son’s always wanted to make video games, so he’s in the best possible place, I think. I hope he’s doing well at learning Japanese, though. They only had French, German and Spanish in school and he somehow managed to skip out on learning any of them. I think the school decided that C++ counted as a language.

But this meant my son wasn’t around to help with the cats. My older daughter had moved out a while back while she was getting her degree, and she was living in her own apartment so she didn’t need to come back home for Covid like the college kids in the dorms did. My younger daughter hadn’t yet merged with her timeshadow, we didn’t retrieve her from the moon until the following year, but neither she nor my younger son were willing to be much help. Meanwhile, dry food, in bins, much of it in cardboard boxes that bugs can slip into, some of the bins chewable by mice. Plus, all the restaurants were closed, so the bugs and the mice and the rats all wanted to find someplace that still had food. And our house, as mentioned earlier, is porous to anything the size of a cat, or smaller.

First we had the plague of mealmoths, that infested everything we owned made of grain or nuts. We love nuts, and my wife is crazy for pasta, and we have rice, and cold cereal, and bread. The way you’re supposed to purge your house of mealmoths is throw out all your grains and don’t bring any in for two weeks. This was not happening. I wanted to build a cedar pantry, but a. very busy at work and b. not allowed to go to Home Depot, and not about to try to have expensive wood shipped to the house. The business was doing well, but not that well. I knew from my tunneling project and my attic renovation that if you need wood shipped to you, you end up having to buy way more of it than you need, which is why there are still piles and piles of lumber in my attic.

Instead we ordered tons and tons of jars and plastic cereal bins with bug-proof seals and stuff like that to store all our grains in, and my wife had to go through them all to identify what the bugs had already gotten to, and then throw bay leaves into all the containers. Apparently mealmoths hate bay leaves.

The dishwasher stopped working. By now, we could get repair people again, but the repair guy said that the wires underneath the thing had been shredded by mice, and he didn’t know how to fix that. We tried getting a warranty repair. Turns out warranty repairs don’t cover shredded by mice.

So we got a new dishwasher, and I stashed the old one in the garage, figuring I might be able to repair it once I had some spare time. Twenty cats managed to clean out the rats before they even got a foothold, but apparently they had been slacking when it came to dealing with the mice. It was understandable, given that most of those cats were kittens and three of the cats who weren’t kittens were occupied raising kittens. Odin was too old and there was only so much Orion could do by himself.

The world outside basically stopped. My daughter didn’t go to her middle school graduation, didn’t attend the school she’d been so enthusiastic about going to for high school, and then by the time they opened the schools again she was too fragile to walk around the school building. We tried to get her into a program where she’d get to still be attending school from home, but the school did not understand how a timeshadow merge could possibly have made her too weak to go to school, and they refused. Meanwhile, my son just stopped going to high school, basically marking time until he turned 18 and could drop out, working on his web comic. And me and my wife worked from home, and my boyfriend was on disability and didn’t work anyway, plus you really can’t work when the Fae are trying to summon you and you have to hide out from them. So nobody ever left the house. My wife would go out for groceries, when we weren’t doing Instacart or when she needed to pick up stuff for my home improvement projects, but aside from that, nobody went anywhere. Not even the yard; my wife used to garden, but we were busy, plus, Fae circles. No one wants to risk stepping in one of those.

When there’s no routine, when nobody has to leave and nobody has school and the people who have a job are working pretty much all the time, time disappears. I’d look up from my PC and find an entire month had gone by. It seemed like this was a bit much even for the liminal timelessness of no routines, and then we found the infestation of time flies. Fuckers love fruit. You know the saying, time flies like a banana, but we had a peach tree and apple trees and a mulberry bush and grapevines and tomatoes all over the place, and this apparently attracted the time flies, who then moved into the house after we killed the mealmoths. Time flies don’t look too different from regular flies; they look just like cluster flies, those incredibly stupid little guys who live in the walls and are too stupid to figure out how to get back into the walls once they get out, so we’d never noticed. They lay their eggs in fruit, but they themselves eat time, and they don’t care about bay leaves, or mint, which we were using to try to drive the mice off.

Problem was, with five people never leaving a house, hoarding food, and having twenty cats, as soon as the time disappeared the house became an utter disaster, and there was no way we could have an exterminator over. Also no way to call an exterminator anyway, because nobody was actually answering phone calls! Anywhere!! And we didn’t have the time to follow up on anything. It’s a miracle we got the cats fixed and managed to give some of them away. Not nearly enough, mind you. I don’t know whether we got rid of three or five or seven but we still have an absurd number of cats. And cats will chase mice, and wall squid, and Orion was willing to go after rats, but none of them were gonna touch a time fly.

We put up flypaper, of course, and rubbed mushy banana on it to attract them, but once the time flies have infested your house, you have a lot less time to get anything done, including getting rid of your time flies. Then the oven broke, but since we have two halves of a house, we had two ovens, so we didn’t do much to get it fixed. My wife wanted it to get fixed before Thanksgiving, but with the time flies, that was ambitious.

Then my boyfriend brought home a cockatoo. How he managed to find the time to get a cockatoo, I’ll never know. The family who’d owned the cockatoo apparently had to get rid of her because she was “wrecking our home.” I wondered, how does a bird you can keep in a cage wreck a house?

The bird decided she was my mate, and that my wife and boyfriend – who did most of the bird feeding chores – were her rivals in a harem anime. When I let her out, she wouldn’t let them come near me. Apparently the home-wrecking in question had not been literal destruction of a house, though she was capable of that too if she was bored enough. My boyfriend kept trying to win her over, but my wife had never forgotten about the birds who pecked her dog’s eyes out because the dog claimed that birds didn’t exist, and she was an introvert, so she was happy to go hide in her office all the time and never go near the bird.

Meanwhile, if I put Jessica – the bird – in her cage, she shrieked. All the time. Ever hear the Cure song “Like Cockatoos?” Where Robert Smith says that the night sang out like cockatoos, and it sounds all sad and romantic? Yeah, Robert Smith never went anywhere near a cockatoo. They do not sing. They screech. And they burble, and they talk, but when they’re bored, or angry, or angry and bored, they screech.

I couldn’t have Jessica climbing all over me while I was working. Sure, everyone loves when your cat photobombs the Zoom call, but the bird could talk, and did not give a shit about professional office language. I couldn’t have her screaming either. So I gave her a job. She was now Tier 1 tech support. One of her favorite things to say was, “What the fuck, Amazon?”  This endeared her to the customers, who were generally calling in because AWS had done something to screw up their day. She really enjoyed interacting with the customers, they liked her, and my existing tech support team liked having someone to semi-screen the calls. Of course, she couldn’t type what the customer’s complaint was into a ticket, but she could peck a touchscreen with a co-worker’s face and make a call to tell them what the complaint was, so they could enter the ticket.

Cockatoos don’t eat time flies, either, and the time flies loved the fruit in her bowl, so we started losing even more time. The bills didn’t get paid. There were gaps of three months in telemedicine visits that were supposed to have been two week follow-ups.

We got rid of the majority of the infestation when the summer ended and all the fruit had been harvested. Turns out that time flies really do not like caffeine. We used old coffee and painted it on bananas and apples, they’d come lay their eggs, and then the eggs would die because of the caffeine. We couldn’t do anything about Jessica’s food because you can’t feed caffeine to a cockatoo, but time flies don’t really like dried fruit so much, unlike Jessica, who loved it. They also don’t care for seeds or nuts. And we weren’t feeding the chickens fruit, and obviously neither the dog nor the cats ate the stuff, so we finally managed to take a breath, come up for air, look around ourselves -- and realize that now we had a massive roach infestation.

We tried spraying. We thought that would be enough. Then the new dishwasher stopped working, we got a warranty repairman, and he told us he couldn’t do it. Warranty wouldn’t cover it. When he took off the cover and showed us the little roach apartments, with the roaches sitting around their dining room tables feeding the crumbs they’d stolen to their four million children, looking up at us and giving us the finger (technically, the leg, but I knew what they meant), we realized that spraying commercial pesticide was not going to solve this. But now the fuckers had destroyed our second dishwasher, so this meant war. And without time flies draining all the time away, we had the resources to go to war.

I’d planned to spend the winter months renovating the bathroom. I didn’t mention our bathroom, did I? The new house, the one my wife’s parents bought, had two bathrooms – a nice big one on the upper floor and a tiny little water closet with just a sink and a toilet on the first floor. But in our original house, the one we owned, there was only one bathroom, and it was a galley where literally most of the length and width of it was taken by the bathtub, so to get to the toilet on the other side of the bathroom you had to slide along the wall like you’re making a home music video for “Walk Like An Egyptian” by the Bangles. Or else stroll through the tub. Or else use the rings I bolted to the ceiling joists for my ninja son and swing along the ceiling, but he was the only one who could do that. My boyfriend, a big guy, could barely use the thing. So almost immediately after we got the other house, everyone stopped using that bathroom and switched to the one next door, except for my ninja son because his bedroom was right next to it and it was convenient for him. Ninjas are good at slinking through narrow passages. Now that he had left, I’d planned to tear the whole thing out, and his bedroom, and replace them both with a normal-shaped bathroom and a slightly smaller bedroom.

I didn’t get the chance. We needed to do battle.

It hadn’t helped that some neighborhood ne’er-do-well, who was probably high as a kite, broke into our house in the middle of the summer because our dog was mouthing off to him, threatened the dog, told the cockatoo he’d fuck her up (we know this because she started saying “Gonna fuck you up!” every time we told her it was bedtime or that she needed to be quiet or stop climbing in my hair), and smashed all our fishtanks. Fortunately we had no fish. Unfortunately we had like five fishtanks because my boyfriend had wanted to rescue feeder goldfish and breed guppies for sale, so we’d filled up three forty gallon tanks and two twenties, plus a few tiny five gallons, and then due to the time flies we’d never gotten around to putting fish in them. This did terrible damage to the floor. We had the guy dead to rights on video, managed to actually get the city police to pick him up and a prosecution going, and then he jumped bail and fled, possibly through a Fae circle because no one ever saw him again. He was gonna owe us several thousand dollars for the floor damage.

After we got rid of the time flies, we discovered that the damaged floor had become completely porous to roaches, so what had probably started as a basement infestation had become a full blown house emergency. There were roaches in the cereal. (This was the fault of whoever wasn’t following the mealmoth protocol and leaving the cereal out of the protective plastic bins.) They’d destroyed the dishwasher and were working on the refrigerator. Every cabinet and drawer we had was entirely full of the little assholes, plus the condos they’d built in the dishwasher, plus several of our sealed bins of food that turned out to be less sealed than we’d thought.

Meanwhile the city had sold our house to some asshole lawyers in Ohio, because we hadn’t mowed our lawn, and we had allowed Fae circles to spring up there, which was considered a hazard. Which it was, yes, but only to us and people trespassing on our property, and how the fuck do you safely get rid of those things anyway? We had racked up several thousand dollars’ worth of fines for not being able to mow the lawn because of the Fae circles and not being able to get rid of the Fae circles because we couldn’t safely mow the lawn, and then the time flies interfering with our ability to remember to pay the damn fines before they ballooned. We were still in a state of national emergency at this point, the vaccine was right on the horizon but no one we knew had qualified to get it yet, and they wanted to make us homeless because we didn’t mow our lawn. This was absolute bullshit, and personally, I think may have been retaliation from people at Animal Control, who are not the same guys that fine you for your lawn but they work under the same overarching department in the city government. If we hadn’t gotten rid of the time flies, we might not have been able to respond in time. There was stuff in there that was nonsensical, like fines for having high grass and weeds in February, or for not having cleaned up the area where we put our trash cans in 2019, or for too many kites on the roof. Why does it even matter if there are kites on the roof? We put them there to distract local falcons away from our chickens! They can’t fly into the power lines, they’re tethered with metal cable!

Also they threatened to chop down our mulberry tree because it was in the way of the street light, which didn’t work anyway and which, when it did work, blinded people in my son’s old bedroom, which my younger son was going to move into as soon as we finished the bathroom renovations. Which as it turned out we couldn’t even start, but he moved in anyway because his room didn’t have a ceiling. His older sister had been exorcising ghosts from that room and somehow this made the ceiling fall in, so we’d been using cheap fake paneling in lieu of a real ceiling, and this does nothing to stop ghosts getting back into the room. So my wife put barbed wire around the mulberry tree. Well, it wasn’t really barbed wire, it was tomato cages she’d unraveled and linked into each other in a crazy way that made a fence with sharp wires sticking out of it in all directions. The city fined us for that, too, but she was going to challenge that in court, because no one was going to hurt themselves on it as long as they didn’t try to trespass on our property and mess around with our tree.

Anyway, so we paid off the lawyers in Ohio to get full title to our house back, and we paid off the city’s fines, which, due to lockdown, involved going to city hall, then going to the basement of city hall because the front door was locked, then giving several thousand dollars in cash to a garden gnome because someone at the city had thought it was fun and whimsical to replace the cash drop with a garden gnome. The cash drop was now in his mouth. Then we called every day for a month before we managed to get someone on the phone who could confirm that yes, the garden gnome had had the money and the city managed to get it out and put it on our account, but they wanted another $200 in interest because the time between us dropping the cash and them picking up the cash and putting it on our account was somehow our fault.

And all this time, we’re battling the roaches.

They’d proved themselves immune to pyrethin or whatever that stuff is in most commercial pesticides, whereas we had a house full of people who’d blow up with allergies when anything even slightly nasty was in their airspace, so no more pyrethin for us. We had to get by on organics. Cloves, lavender, mint, citrus – turns out there is a reason humans eat a lot of the stuff we eat, and it’s not just because it tastes good. It’s because it preserves your food, because pretty much every critter except for bedbugs and time flies hate the stuff. Mixtures of boric acid and sugar. Diatomaceous earth. A new dishwasher that’s fully enclosed so it’d be a lot harder for them to get in, and putting the old dishwasher into a gigantic garbage bag, then buying dry ice and filling the bag with it to try to suffocate them all. It worked, but the dishwasher was still toast, and once again, the warranty repair people wouldn’t fix it. The roaches might have been dead but the repair guy could plainly see the condos they’d left behind.

While this was going on, the second oven broke, so we had to get people in to fix them both. Guess what. No, no, you’ll never guess. No warranty repair. No repair at all, actually. The oven that had been under warranty turned out to have been fried by a pair of lovebird mice that had decided to get amorous right where their pals had been gnawing at electric wires, so when we turned the stove on, the current went through both mice, and now we had furry mice skeletons trapped forever in a posture that made it clear they’d been mating. The other oven was destroyed by roaches, and the repair guy, who we were paying for, not a warranty repair, refunded our money because he wasn’t willing to touch it.

We had no ovens and we were sick and tired of buying warranties that would never be honored, so we went to a place called Roy’s Discount Appliances, which was in the basement of a warehouse that used to belong to Toys R Us before they went out of business, and was a maze of ovens, dishwashers, refrigerators and washing machines that were used, refurbs, or on deep clearance because the manufacturer had discontinued them. Nothing like trying to shove two ovens into a minivan where you’ve removed the back seats, but you brought three people, so now one of them has to ride home sitting on the side of an oven and your tailgate won’t close so you have a bungee cord holding it down. We paid cash to get a 5% discount, and I strongly suspect some of those appliances fell off the back of truck, if you know what I mean.

Meantime, we’re repairing the floor. This means putting everything from the first floor of the house, except for the kitchen since it has a stone floor, into one of those portable rental units – not a storage facility because we wanted close access to it. The basement tunnels are prone to flooding, so we didn’t want to use them, also the staircase down there is a little too rickety for me to feel secure carrying my 80-inch television down it.

The city refuses to give us a permit for the storage unit. Says we have to pay our fines. We just did that. They record this stuff in cuneiform printed by dot matrix printers onto carbon sheets, so we have no way to tell if the fines they’re talking about are new fines, or the old fines that we paid cash to a garden gnome for, because we’re not organized enough to know where most of our mail is, so we don’t have the originals. Also we can’t read cuneiform. My wife’s dad can, but my wife doesn’t want him to know how big our fines are or how badly organized we are, and she thinks she could learn cuneiform if she had two weeks of free time. She does not have two weeks of free time. But my boyfriend makes friends with all the neighbors – he always did, but it’s especially been important since the Fae started calling him – and the Hispanic family with the chemist dad offers us their shed, which turns out to be significantly bigger on the inside, for less than we’d have paid for a portable storage unit. They’re just a couple of houses down the block, so it’s almost as good as a unit.

We spend a few months ripping up badly damaged tile and rug, all of which date from at least the 70’s and I always hated anyway, scrubbing off floor adhesive, and laying down a new hardwood floor, just us. By which I mean mostly just me, my wife doesn’t do handyman stuff (she helped with the scrubbing part, and she buys the supplies, but that’s it) and my boyfriend hasn’t really been useful for anything since the Fae started calling him. So now the roaches can’t get upstairs from the basement, but it’s too late, they have a beachhead here now, and so what we’ve just basically done is locked ourselves in with them. We start seeing more of the little fuckers. Now they’re getting into books and DVD cases and clothes hampers. Some end up in the bedroom.

You may ask why we don’t hire an exterminator. Remember the twenty cats? Maybe down to thirteen or seventeen or something by now – some of them spend all their time outdoors – but there are a lot of cats. And they’re at war with each other.

There’s the Canada clan – Sylph and Raven themselves have decided they are outdoor cats, but most of their kittens still live with us – and Tiamat’s clan, which includes Orion and Odin because Orion is one of Tiamat’s brothers (hopefully not the one who is also her father, but we got them from a hoarder’s kid going through his parents’ property, so we never actually found out), and she’s decided that Odin is less awful now that he’s a gazillion years old and she has the Canada clan to compare them to. My youngest daughter, who is mostly confined to her room due to physical weakness and compromised immune system, treats Tiamat’s kittens like they’re her own children (including carrying them around baby style, putting them in toy strollers she is way too old for, and occasionally putting one in a toy Pack n Play and then covering it with a large cardboard box as a “time-out”), so they have a home base. The Canada clan grew up in our bedroom, so they have a home base. The rest of the house is a war zone.

Whenever you walk through the house, there are cats hissing at each other, yowling, swiping at each other, chasing each other, the works. It’s still cold outside, so we can’t get them to go out and do their fighting outdoors like civilized cats. Our homeowners insurance dropped us when they found out about the tunnels in the basement. (They didn’t know we made the tunnels, and we didn’t admit to it, but insurance inspectors can be incredibly thorough when they want to be.) We haven’t been able to get a new policy yet. So my wife does not want a guy traipsing around the whole house where he might get tripped or scratched by warring cats. We’ve all learned to dodge, but an exterminator wouldn’t necessarily be experienced with being in a cat war zone.

It’s one thing to get repair guys into one or the other of the kitchens, they have doors and we can lock the cats out if we have to (I know most kitchens do not, in fact, have doors that can lock out the rest of the house, but we needed one back in the days when we had Angel, our beagle who we called that because as soon as you weren’t looking at him he would sneak into the kitchen and eat anything he could find, like the Weeping Angels on Doctor Who except with less neck breaking and more stealing your PB+J the instant your back was turned. That was before we had the other house, but we installed a similar door on the other house to keep the two dimensional dog from sneaking into our bedroom and pooping there.) It’s another thing to have a guy going all over your house while your cats are setting up ambushes for each other. And without homeowner’s insurance, we can’t risk it.

So it’s down to us. But we’re creative. My boyfriend has been seeing giant bugs that look like a cross between centipedes and beetles. Like the wall squid, they’re not entirely in our reality; he can see them because of his connection to the Fae. Well, my wife looks them up and apparently they are predators who eat bugs. We just have to get them over into our reality, and then figure out how to dispose of them. We can’t get frogs because the cats would attack them, and we can’t get an anteater because exotic animal, need a permit and besides, it’s not called a roach eater. We can bring the chickens inside to go roach hunting from time to time, but they poop all over the floor so the cure’s almost worse than the disease.

In our yard, there’s an old wooden gate that fell off the new house shortly after we got it, and instead of throwing it out, we leave it in the yard and move it around from time to time to kill weeds. The Fae made a circle on it. We carry the wooden gate into the house, and then my boyfriend leaves out sugar water to attract the centipeedles through the circle. Now we have centipede beetles the length of a human foot (which is mostly a lot shorter than the measurement named for it) in the house. Possibly this was ill thought out. The cats try attacking them, but it turns out, cats find centipeedles just as creepy as humans do, and the damn things have some pretty tough armor. It doesn’t take much before the cats get intimidated and leave them alone. Even Orion the assassin cat gives them a wide berth.

Turns out, the centipeedles are great at killing the roaches, but no one wants centipeedles in their pantry, or their silverware drawer. My daughter just literally stops eating off anything but her own private stash of sealed paper plates and plastic silverware because she’s so creeped out by the thought of either roaches or centipeedles touching anything she might eat off of. This isn’t great, the kid is already too thin and too easily put off her food. She was always picky, but apparently the timeshadow spent ten years eating moon cheese and is having a hard time stomaching Earth food, so now everything nauseates her, gives her a stomach, or is unappetizing in the first place.

One thing I will say for chickens: they’ll eat centipeedles. They don’t care, it’s all food to them. The cats have learned that chickens are much more of a threat and much less of a prey than they might think. Lana the two dimensional dog will happily chase the chickens, but she’s less two dimensional than she used to be. She doesn’t get enough exercise and she steals a lot of food, so she’s looking considerably more three dimensional than when we got her, which is good because it keeps her from slipping through closed doors, though bad in the sense that it’s not that healthy for her. There is enough clutter around the place, what with my tools, piles of lumber for the floor, and boxes of books that were deemed too heavy to carry over to the neighbors’ shed, that chickens have plenty of places to take shelter from a two and a half dimensional dog. And if we let Jessica the cockatoo out, turns out she thinks centipeedles are a fun piece of moving string to catch and tear in half. You’d think that a predator like a cat would be better at killing a centipeedle than a hookbill bird, but turns out, the centipeedles’ bellies are barely armored and the cockatoo has nearly opposable thumbs on her feet. She can flip them over, and then peck, peck, crack, done.

So we’ve got the chickens running around the place in chicken diapers to eat the centipeedles that we brought over from the lands of the Fae to eat the roaches, but we still have roaches and we still have centipeedles because it turns out you can’t control house bugs with predators. Spiders might be better at it and my boyfriend wants to get some, but my wife shoots that down.

I’m kinda at my wits’ end here, and then my youngest son wants to show me something.

So to understand this, I gotta tell you something about the layout of my house. We’ve got a full duplex, both sides, thanks to my wife’s dad. The front of the house is on a busy street, and my bedroom and my youngest daughter’s bedroom face that. The back of the house faces our deck, and my ninja son’s former bedroom (from the original side we had) and the guest room (from the new side we got) face that. Then there’s a room in the middle of our original house, that my younger son used to have, but now he’s moved into his older brother’s room. The bathroom is next to the boys’ bedroom, and also faces the deck.

Back a few years ago, before Covid, I did a renovation on my ninja son’s bedroom where I made it a little smaller, in preparation for making the bathroom wider. Then I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the bathroom. So there’s a narrow corridor between the bathroom and the bedroom. I threw together a quick and dirty closet to occupy some of that space, so the boys’ bedroom now has a closet in the corner that faces the bathroom and the deck. My younger son guided me over to this closet, and pulled up a trap door that I hadn’t known was there. There was a spiral staircase underneath.

So I went down the spiral staircase, of course, but I was freaking out. This hadn’t been here when I worked on the boys’ bedroom. I redid their entire floor, when they were so young they shared the room and my older daughter had the middle bedroom. There was no way this trap door could have been there when we moved in. There’s also no way it could be going where it’s going. My sons’ bedroom sits over the kitchen, but the kitchen has an addition in the back where we keep the laundry machines. This spiral staircase would theoretically be going right down into it.

Except it’s not. I’ve got pretty good spatial perception, so it doesn’t take me long to figure out that this very narrow little column is going between the two houses, at the edge where the kitchens meet the additions. I don’t know how it’s possible that I missed it. I’ve done so many renovations in this house. This is crazy.

The spiral staircase goes down underground and into a tunnel, which is not one of the tunnels my son and I dug to connect all the basements in the neighborhood. Technically this tunnel isn’t even in my basement; the foundation only goes as far as the original house, so the additions have no basement. This tunnel goes under my deck, then deeper underground, then turns, and comes up…

Ok, this is super weird. It’s a buried pillbox. This is like a basement, except what if your basement had a roof of its own rather than just being part of your house, and it was sticking out of the ground about two feet, with a lot of windows, and it was the size of maybe two rooms in your house put together, and it was at the back of the yard belonging to the neighbors with a swimming pool.

The room is mostly empty. There are tools, and some very iffy towels, and several empty beer cans, and a bottle of Windex and a really nasty roll of paper towels with spiderwebs all over it. I ask my son, “Did your brother know this was here?”

“I don’t know. If he did, he never mentioned it.”

“How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know, I just found it!”

There is no door, aside from the one we came in, and no staircase up to the ground level, but I open one of the windows and squirm through.

The fence around the neighbors’ swimming pool is about five feet tall, so I can see over it. My neighbors are sitting on their swimming pool. I mentioned the father’s a chemist or something, right? He’s got these substances that you mix into your water to change its solidity. They’ve turned about three quarters of their swimming pool into a semi-solid – a little bit squishy, their feet are leaving footprints in it when they walk around, but it holds their weight – and the remaining quarter, they’ve left as water so they can dangle their feet. There’s an entire entertainment center sitting in front of the pool, including a huge CRT TV, a VCR and a dozen super old video game machines like the Sega Saturn or the Nintendo GameCube, protected from the rain by a shade umbrella. Nothing is protecting this stuff from the water from the pool, though. They’re watching The Little Mermaid. I lean against the fence, and my neighbors notice me. The chemist greets me. “What’s going on, man?”

“I just discovered that this structure you have in the back of your yard is connected to my son’s bedroom.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. He gets out of the pool. He’s wearing swim trunks, but aside from his legs, he’s completely dry, since he’s been sitting on top of his pool dunking his feet and watching The Little Mermaid with his family. “You didn’t build that thing?”

“No, I didn’t build it.”

“But you built the tunnels.” I like this guy; he discovered the tunnels shortly after moving in, but he thought they were great. He wanted to get chickens himself, but there isn’t room in his yard with the swimming pool. The roof of the underground structure is completely covered with planter boxes full of tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs, and rutabagas. I don’t know why they’re trying to grow root vegetables in planters, but there’s enough foliage that I can tell what it is. The sign doesn’t help, it’s in Spanish. For obvious reasons I can read “tomato” and “jalapeno” and “serrano” in Spanish, but not “nabo sueco”, which probably means rutabaga because that’s what’s planted there.

“Yeah, a few years back, but I had no idea this thing was even here. Most of the tunnels go directly between the houses, not under the back yards.”

“Cool. I thought it was yours, but I didn’t know for sure. Can I go inside?”

“Well, there’s no door, but if you want to come to my house we can go down the staircase from my son’s room.”

So we traipse back over to my house, and then up to my son’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the tunnel, and into the empty underground structure. “This gets a lot of light for a thing underground,” he says. “A lot of windows.”

“It’s nice. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but maybe I’ll install some doors to give you and me privacy, and then make a trap door in the roof. I might have to move your rutabagas, though. That way you can come in and enjoy the space, too. Maybe we’ll make it some kind of den. You play board games? Role-playing games?”

“Not in English, not the role-playing games. I used to have an 11th level paladin before we moved here, but I was playing in Spanish. Board games, it’s mostly been Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly or some shit like that.” His kids are younger than mine.

“Well, we can put some furniture down there if there’s a trap door to lower it through, and get some lighting in.” There’s only one lamp, a work lamp clipped onto one of the ceiling joists. Its bulb works but is very dim. There’s one power outlet in the place. I’m gonna have to trace it back to see if it’s my electricity or his. “Set up some board games, maybe a mini-fridge with beer and Coke. We could hang out sometimes.”

“Yeah, that would be good. You like zucchini? My wife has too much zucchini.”

“I don’t, but my wife loves it. I could trade you some eggs.”

So that’s how I made friends with the mad scientist guy down the block. No idea what company he works for but they make some crazy shit. That stuff that makes the pool solid? Amazing. I don’t know how he keeps it from circulating through the entire pool, though. Maybe he’s got underwater baffles up to control the flow.

I tell my wife about this thing, and she looks at me funny. “Uh, yeah. You built that.”

“I did not.”

“You did. You got drunk one night and you said you were gonna seriously screw with the woman who called Animal Control on us. Then you built a tunnel to her house.”

“How the hell did I build that entire basement structure thing?”

“Oh, no, that was already there. You just connected to it. Same way you connected to the city’s underground tunnels.” Yeah, truth is, my son and I didn’t really build the entire tunnel system under the neighborhood. There was already a tunnel the city made and we just dug connectors to everyone’s basement, few years back.

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

“Why would I tell you about it? You’re the one who built it. I thought you’d remember.”

Okay, maybe I need to control my drinking, but that was a stressful time, with that woman being responsible for me losing my two roosters to Animal Control. Roosters aren’t allowed in the city, because the city is sexist. Apparently I built the trap door, the entire spiral staircase, and the connecting tunnel in one night, and I made my wife, my boyfriend, and my ninja son help, and now I’m the only one who doesn’t remember it. That’s embarrassing. After that woman did that, and tried to stop us from rescuing our own chickens, my wife started anonymously harassing her and sending her moldy videotapes until she sold the house and left town. Gotta say I like the new owners a lot better.

I hang out with the scientist a couple nights a week, after we get some furniture in there. My wife goes swimming in their pool, but I’m not a big fan of swimming; I go to the bunker with him and we shoot the shit and drink some beers, while my wife and his wife talk about gardening and practice my wife’s very rusty Spanish. My wife learned about ten languages but isn’t fluent in any of them, although she can say “This beautiful green Earth will soon be mine!” in Japanese. Maybe she shouldn’t have learned so much of it from anime.

It’s not easy to admit to anyone that you’ve got a roach problem, let alone a new friend, but liquor lubricates a lot of conversational topics. Yeah, okay, so it’s not always beer we’re drinking. Sue me. I tell my friend about the roaches, and he tells me his company is working on this really amazing fantastic pesticide. It’s a fungus that destroys exoskeletons, and it infects bugs, and only bugs, and makes them do Cordyceps type bullshit where they crave light instead of hiding in the dark like verminous bugs usually do, so they come out where you can see them. Then you can kill them, or let the infection kill them. I’m kind of worried about zombie apocalypses but he assures me that the fungus cannot infect humans, or anything without an exoskeleton. That’s the only place the spores can grow.

That sounds awesome.

So we get some from him and we mix it with sugar and we put it down everywhere. Big rectangular squares around all the furniture. Up table legs and counter sides. All around the edges of the tables and the counters. We’re taking no chances. We pull out the dishwasher and oven and coat the bottoms and backsides of them. Normally this stuff would be scary expensive, but our pal is giving it to us for free – well, “free” meaning we’re giving him tons of ground beef from the cow we bought, plus weird organs because his wife knows how to cook them and me and my wife would have to google it, plus eggs. And my wife is helping his wife learn English, but that maybe doesn’t count because she’s helping my wife learn Spanish, so that’s a pretty even trade. We watch their kids sometimes too; we don’t have a swimming pool, but we do have practically every game machine released in the US and a couple that were Japan only, and a gigantic library of media on hard drive, most of which was legal. Well, somewhat legal. Well, a good bit of them, my wife borrowed from the library and then ripped to hard drive. The kids are not unhappy to come over our house, is my point.

By this point everyone is vaccinated and my friend’s workplace always was pretty safe because it’s a clean room, where people wear Tyvek suits over their entire bodies, and masks and goggles, long before Covid was a thing, and his wife doesn’t work and me and my wife work from home and their kids are still going to school online and mine aren’t going at all anymore. So we feel pretty comfortable sharing air even with Covid still going on. We’re seeing a lot more bugs, but my pal reminds me that that’s part of the goal of this stuff, to entice them to come out and bask in the sunlight so we can kill them more easily. His kids like to run through our house with water guns full of soapy water, shooting bugs (and each other, and my boyfriend, who plays with them). I don’t mind as long as they stay well away from the computer equipment and they clean up the water spills once they’re done. It’s free housecleaning. These kids are more helpful at keeping the place clean than my own kids have been in years.

Then we start to see clusters of the bugs stuck on the wall. It looks like spots of mold, but turns out to be mold-covered bugs sitting on the wall semi-stuck to each other. I’m allergic to mold. My friend says it’s not that kind of mold, am I allergic to mushrooms? And I point out, the spores, yes I am, because I used to grow mushrooms in my basement and they’d spray spores out every so often and my nose would run like it was training for a marathon. He’s chagrined, says he didn’t know, because yeah, of course these things are gonna come out in the sun and spray spores. Light makes them spore, that’s why the mold makes them want to go into the light.

So now I’m popping Zyrtec like it’s candy and there are more and more moldy bugs turning up. For some reason they really want to join up together, like the mold wants them to make a mold mat, so they all go stand next to each other, centipeedles and roaches and ants and fleas, all together. It’s getting flies and mosquitos and mealmoths, too; they don’t eat the sugar we mixed into the liquid suspension of spores, but if they land on the mold mat because they think it’s ordinary wall or floor, they’ll be joining it in a day or two. Spiders, too, presumably getting infected by eating infected bugs. It spreads outside because the house is porous and the bugs can go in and out; there’s a giant ant colony burrowed into the dirt walls of the tunnels I made a few years back, and those guys are coming up out of the dirt and making giant mold mats of ants on the sidewalk and in the grass. It’s pretty gross. My friend begs me not to tell anyone who asks about the product I used; apparently it was experimental and he could lose his job for giving it to me. Well, thanks, buddy, wish you’d warned me! He assures me this never happened in the lab. I’ll bet they didn’t have nearly so many bugs in the lab, and they were probably in terrariums or something where there just weren’t all that many bugs per habitat.

At the point where the outdoor walls start getting covered with mold mats made of ants and earwigs and the fleas that lurk in the grass waiting for unsuspecting cats to walk by, the city gets on my ass. Apparently my walls are covered with mold and I need to clean them off, it’s unsanitary and releasing spores. “You think?” I say with my red, teary eyes and in between violent sneezes as I fish for more Kleenex in my pocket. I cannot actually get anywhere near the mold mats, not without a full on respirator. We have N95 masks and safety goggles, but I try those things and a. the safety goggles immediately fog up so I can’t see and b. it doesn’t help, the spores are getting into the safety goggles and getting into my eyes anyway.

My wife, my boyfriend and the friend-who-got-me-into-this-mess step in to help out. They’re spraying the mold mats with bleach, which would kill the bugs even if the mold hadn’t killed them yet, and scraping them off the walls with shovels and brooms. The ones they find in the yard, they dig underneath and cover them with dirt, then copper fungicide because, unlike bleach, that won’t kill plants that try to grow in the dirt. My friend has some more weird chemicals he thinks might help, but frankly I’m done; I got centipeedles to kill the roaches and then I got this stuff to kill the centipeedles and the roaches and it’s just made matters worse. Everyone in the world is allergic to roaches but not nearly as badly as I am to this mold. I’ve graduated to Benadryl, and bourbon, which does nothing about the allergies except to help me sleep through them. My wife says I’m not supposed to drink while taking Benadryl but I ask you, how do you look at your walls covered with mats of dead bugs that are growing mold and not drink?

The ants apparently go everywhere. Other neighbors are ending up with mold mats on their lawn. This is getting out of hand. I joke about setting the neighborhood on fire, but my wife reminds me that setting mold on fire just spreads spores.

So that gives me an idea.

We’ve got this water main that’s been broken for, oh, ten years now. The city keeps coming out to fix it and it just doesn’t fix. First it was up the street, pouring water down our street for years, winter and summer, which meant the road would turn into a slick sheet of ice every winter. Then they fixed it so that now it forms a pond in the median right outside my house. Maybe eventually they’d have stoppered that up too, but they left a backhoe on the median and somebody stole it. Not me or my family, for once; we checked the cameras but they weren’t pointing at the backhoe so we never figured out who did it. Anyway, mold likes damp, but things that like damp don’t necessarily like serious amounts of water, right?

My friend and I hook up pipes to the broken water main, and connect them to hoses, and connect the hoses to pumps, and pull all the water up the street to some of the neighbors behind my house who paved their back yards. We empty out the furniture from the underground room and clean out our respective basements, first, and park the cars up the street on the hill above all this. Then we let the water go.

This floods the neighborhood.

Yes. Again.

Everything below the level of where we’re pumping the water main to gets flooded. Yards and basements fill with water and wash down the hill to the river, which is really more of a cranky little creek most of the time, and the river washes it all down to the bay, where it should be diluted to the point where it won’t hurt the crabs. My friend assures me that this mold was bio-engineered to not be good at handling a lot of water. It can drown, too, even its spores. If they’re floating in water and they encounter a crab, they won’t be able to germinate on its shell. This is very important because around here we love our crabs. Of course, all this disturbed some local ghosts – ghosts don’t like flooding – but honestly I feel like it’s just negligence if you still have ghosts. We had all those floods a decade ago, like the one my car floated off in, so everyone should have known by now that there are ghosts in the area and they don’t like floods, so get them exorcised pre-emptively. It’s kind of like not having fire extinguishers in your house, if you don’t get the exorcism done.

We go around to any of our neighbors with a mold mat on the walls, and spray it off with a power washer. So far thankfully none of them have ended up with mold mats inside their houses, which just goes to show you how much the gods hate my house. We do not admit that any of this is our fault, just being good neighbors and helping out, but unfortunately my neighbors know me too well.

So this is great. Our animals are free of fleas, there’s no flies or mosquitos around for once in our lives, the mealmoths and the roaches and the centipeedles are gone, there’s no ants. And this is true all over the neighborhood. The bees seem to be fine; bees seemed to know not to land on the mold mats, and we didn’t poison with sugared fungus outside, so there was nothing to attract them to the fungus. Wasps, unfortunately, are fine too, but fuck it, they’re pollinators and I have fruit trees so I guess that’s okay. So this all ought to be great, right? Everybody happy, the whole neighborhood free of bug pests?

The city is now fining me out the ass for “stealing water”, even though come on, it’s bubbling up from the broken water mains so much it made a mosquito-growing pond, and I’m the one who got rid of the mosquitoes. (For the larvae in the pond, we just used mosquito dunks, plus our stunt temporarily drained the pond.) My neighbors are suing me for various things, including pain and suffering, water damage to their yards, riling up ghosts, and the death of so many poor innocent little buggies. (Are you kidding me? There are people around here actively mourning the deaths of flies and roaches. What the hell is wrong with people?)

And that is why I have posted this GoFundMe. Because I got rid of an entire neighborhood’s worth of bugs, at least for this year – no illusions about them coming back next year now that we’ve washed away all the spores – and people are suing me for it. And I’m not willing to throw my chemist friend under the bus legally, since he could lose his job, so the defense “this guy told me it was okay” is not gonna help. And everyone who wanted to get into the cloud when Covid hit already has by now, so business is not exactly booming anymore. Anybody want to help a guy out?

#52 project #comedy #surreal #magical realism #I actually have no idea how to describe this genre

[actuallyadhd]

Hi.. I was diagnosed with ASD last year and was tested for ADHD with a computerized test then. The test apparently said I don’t have ADHD so I wasn’t diagnosed but I felt like it may have been flawed (I FORCED myself to focus on the test because I was told to “do my best”) so I wanted to pursue testing with a different method. Recently my new therapist and my mother looked through the DSM criteria with me for ADHD and I marked all the inattentive symptoms as Yes, and 6 of the hyperactive as Yes until I get more info about them (ASD can make understanding written word tricky for me). Even though my parent and I were agreeing on the symptoms this seems surreal and I’m afraid I’ve been manipulative or lied somehow in order to come to this conclusion… like maybe I’m faking my way through it. But I can’t control how difficult it is for me to focus on things, the fact it takes me 2 weeks to get to folding laundry I intended to do way earlier, or the fact I continuously misplace things.. or anything else I deal with. Idk I guess I’m just wondering if it’s possible I’m faking all this… I’m afraid I’ve misled people somehow. You can ignore this if you need to tbh. Thanks for reading if you did.

Sent April 27, 2022

The fact that you’re worried you might be faking tells me that you probably aren’t. Might it be something other than ADHD? Sure, that’s a possibility. But you’re definitely struggling, and you definitely deserve help. If that means you need a formal diagnosis (that’s how we access medication and accommodations), then that’s what you need.

Now, a good thing to ask about is a full psychoeducational assessment. I had one done in 2010, and it was really helpful and interesting. One of the things I learned was that there’s a relatively common profile that turns up in ADHD. Basically, relative to your full IQ score, your processing speed and working memory will be lower than expected. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will score below average on these two measures, it means that you will score below the range your IQ sits in. So, for example, if your IQ is over 120 and you score 110 or lower, that’s lower than expected and is a sign that you have a deficit in that area.

If it would help, I can try and put together a video about the criteria with examples of ways they might show up in someone’s life. It would go up on the Actually ADHD YouTube channel. If short-form is better for you, I can also split it into bite-sized TikToks.

Followers, what do you think about this? Also, would video information about diagnostic criteria be helpful?

-J

[little-anxieties]

#06: humanity

My biggest worry as a medical student is seeing pathologies as just another concept to learn for a test, as just another box to tick on my to-study list. Losing sight of the ultimate purpose of this profession in the middle of the sandstorm of medical training is a scary thought.

I think it’s perilously simple to fall prey to that kind of approach to learning, that is, learning for knowing’s sake. With the mountains of medical information that we’re expected to ingest and regurgitate in a short span of time, it’s easy to imagine oneself focusing on the mere mastery of the clinical picture of a disease, its pathophysiology, and its standard treatment, like a machine being programmed to identify objects with near-perfect precision. 

But a doctor isn’t just a master of health and disease. A physician isn’t just an expert of medicine. The very telos of this profession is not the enrichment of knowledge but the betterment of human lives. A doctor tends to the sick, not solely to the illness. A doctor heals people, not merely warm bodies. What good, then, is being fluent in the language of medical knowledge if you’ve lost sight of the very meaning of being a doctor?

These things weigh on my mind from time to time, especially when I’m faced with stacks of transcriptions and chapters to read through. At times when I feel myself falter for a feather of a second, I take a deep breath and remind myself of who I am learning all of this for. 

None of those worries, however, plagued me during our recently concluded module on neuroanatomy. As a psychology major in college, I’ve always had an unquenchable curiosity about the human brain and its link to behavior. For that reason, neurology had always been the branch of medicine that I was interested the most in. Like psychology, neurosciences put emphasis on the centrality of the human person in both health and illness. Like psychology, it did not feel indifferent, impersonal, or detached. The patient’s very personhood is part of the pathology and, more importantly, part of their treatment and recovery. 

My meditations on these notions further deepened when we had our first round of ward works last week. Yes, though still feeling our way in the dark as first-year medical students, we got to interact with actual patients in the clinic, taking routine history and performing examinations. I was anxious, to say the least. I wanted to do well by this patient. By all my patients, present and future. 

As a learning exercise, we then had to extrapolate our group’s findings in order to localize the patient’s lesion and arrive at a diagnosis. This was one of those moments in medical school where you finally feel like you’re becoming a doctor. For me, it was not just because we were trying to understand the patient’s condition but more so because nowhere lost in the academic conversation of signs and symptoms, of deficits and disturbances, of medical history and pathological progression was the patient and their life. 

Certainly, I will face many more hurdles and tough realities in the years to come. These will challenge my outlook, dampen my optimism and diminish my grit, try to steal away these good memories and distort them into the artifacts of naivety. But I hope that I keep this perspective for a long time, even if just a little part of me holds on to it. I pray that the I never lose sight of the humanity in medicine and in my part in upholding it.

#reflection #med school #journal #studyblr

[donveinot]

[jdgo51]

So Long Normal: What's So Bad about Normal?

by Laura Story, from Session 1 of So Long, Normal

Meet Laura INTRODUCTION

"'Leader, read this section aloud to the group:

Have you ever tried to grab your breath on a cold morning? It may seem like an odd question, but it’s undoubtedly something we’ve all tried to do at some point in our lives.

Catching our breath is like trying to maintain a sense of “normal.” And at some point along the way, I realized the normal life I sought was like a vapor. Whenever it appeared within reach, I was unable to grasp it.

Normal.

It’s a fairly subjective word, yet we all seem to understand what it means. Normal is often defined as “conforming to a standard; usual, typical or expected.” And it seems to be the gravity we seek with an innate desire to have our feet planted on something solid rather than having our lives suspended in mid-air. Normal appears to offer the steady we want, the comfort we need, and the accountability required to keep us on task.

As anyone who knows me can attest, my life has been anything but dictionary-definition normal. My idea of normal came crashing down when my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor during the second year of our marriage. After his diagnosis, a complicated surgery, concerning days in the ICU, and a long recovery at home, Martin still lives with short-term memory loss and a substantial vision deficit. His inability to see well or remember the smallest details make our life as a family anything but normal.

My story may look different than yours, but each of us has something in our lives that has forced us to let go of whatever normalcy we envisioned. And I’ve lived long enough to know no one’s life has turned out exactly the way they had planned. Every one of us has endured uninvited change. Every one of us will again be forced to wave goodbye to normal.

But there is something deeply comforting about the normal ordinariness of life that draws us to this ideal. We all long for security, for stability, and firm footing. In fact, we crave it. Have you ever wondered why we crave it? I believe it’s because we were designed by an orderly God to thrive in an orderly world. But then sin happened, and the steady path beneath the feet of humanity shifted and became shaky. Ever since, our normal has been distorted.

God promises to do more through us than we could ask or imagine.

Just like Adam and Eve, we have no choice but to say so long to a normal life and step out beyond the garden of our lives until Jesus returns and the garden is restored.

Believe this: whenever our life shifts and shakes, it’s ultimately for our benefit that good things are shaken from our grip, even when it feels like a loss. My hope for you and me is that whenever we face the loss of normal, we encounter God. And not in a way that puts a spiritual Band-Aid on the grief we’re experiencing, but in a way that helps us recognize God is working in and through our circumstances beyond our imagining.

When God is our foundation, we can learn to say so long to normal and all the good things God lovingly shakes from our lives. But first, we have to acknowledge our desire for normal and how it affects our everyday lives. Let’s do the hard, courageous work together.

God is our sure and steady hope who guides us to embrace the beautiful story unfolding before our very eyes as we say so long to normal.

TALK ABOUT IT

Take 10–15 minutes to respond to the opening message from Laura. Then take turns answering the following questions in preparation for the video teaching. Use this section each week to get your hearts and minds focused and ready for Laura’s teaching.

Share about a time in your childhood, teenage years, or adult life when you felt less than normal. As you look back, what factors contributed to this feeling for you?

—or—

What does “normal” mean to you? WATCH SESSION 1

As you watch the video teaching for this session, use the following outline to record anything that stands out to you.

A departure from normal

What is normal anyway?

What would it take to feel normal?

Leaving normal for adventure with God

Saying goodbye to normal requires a heart change Finding freedom, peace, and joy

Hebrews: the book of “better things”

Shaken (Hebrews 12:28 and Haggai 2:6-8)

God as the source of our shaking

The faulty foundation of our lives

God’s calling to us

Saying so long to normal

Having courage isn’t about the absence of fear. It’s acknowledging that fear and being willing to take that next step anyway.

[maybebecomingms]

freedom-versary homework

December 3rd, 2021 was the day I put carefully thought-out plans into action. I left for work, presumably, but went back home 10 minutes later to pack a bag and leave a note. I was leaving, at least for the night, maybe for good.

It was for good. It took several months for this to be realized, but this was the day I laid the groundwork to my way out.

I remember I kept nervously asking my boss, both in-person and over text: “Do I really need to to do this? Am I overreacting?” 

Each time she met me with the same questions. “Are you OK with living this way? Do you want to live your life on eggshells?” It was a resounding NO. So I followed through.

My therapy homework as this anniversary has come and gone was to write a letter to myself - I assume to 2021 me. I’m not sure if a heavily-edited-for-public-consumption post was exactly what she had in mind, but that is what will work for me, so let’s do it.

I think instead of a flowery pep-talk to myself, I want to address all the things I didn’t know a year ago.

Nothing you’re about to do is anywhere near as scary as what you’ve already endured. The life I had before was not normal. The religious indoctrination alone was completely insane, and it permeated every aspect of my marriage. It is not normal to have your spouse tell you they wish they’d never married you, but that you have to stay with them or risk angering the sky daddy. No; moving out and selling my house and filing for divorce all felt fairly normal and tame compared to the things I took for granted as my lot in life before.

The people around you already know. Every time I told someone what was happening, I was so surprised by the same response I got, over and over again: “I knew something was up, but I didn’t want to pry.” This includes people I work with, who, due to various disability diagnoses, have memory deficits and/or miss social cues the rest of us take for granted. Sometimes it feels like I was the last to know.

You won’t regret the decisions you’re making now, but you will grieve deeply the years you lost. You know how in The Princess Bride, Westley is hooked up to The Machine that takes years off his life? Sometimes I feel like that, except instead of momentary torture, it looks like pain spread out over years and years. It looks like endless arguments defending myself, because I don’t want children, and because I was not willing to completely snuff out every last whisper of myself as a person in order to serve my husband as a “godly woman.” It looks like waking up again and again, shitfaced at 2am, confused that all the lights are still on. This was my existence to cope with the expectations I continually failed to meet. Absolutely nothing I’ve described here was worth my time, and I’m never getting that time back.

You will find love again and it won’t be anything like what you did before. I think this may have been the most surprising to me. My boyfriend is beyond what I could have ever imagined or hoped for. He’s so patient with me, even as I hunt for red flags that don’t exist and my trauma responses return again and again. It’s NOT pretty. I find myself repeatedly embarrassed by my own behavior - sometimes I feel absolutely FERAL - and he just... rolls with it? I have never loved someone like *this* before, and I have never been loved like this before either. With the right person, this sort of thing actually doesn’t feel hard, and it isn’t terrifying.

And so far, at least a few of the people closest to me don’t seem convinced yet that this is real, that I fell in love and got it right this time. And that’s OK! Time will prove that.

You will come out of this happier than you ever knew was possible. I don’t know how to elaborate further than that. I didn’t know that life could feel like this. “I can’t believe how much BETTER you look,” “You’ve got this glow about you,” and “I can see the relief in your face,” are all comments I get now.

Damn. What a difference a year makes.

[tangleweave]

{{Fluttering Confessions}}

Life is really a series of moments strung together with the thinnest strands of emotion and memory, one delicately created web of pattern, history, and often? Trauma.

It hadn't taken her long to realise that any traces of the friend she'd thought long lost were gone. In effect her Vis was still mournfully, irrevocably passed on to whatever fate waited his digital spirit. She absolutely believes there is something beyond the reality of the world awaiting all, not simply those who are human. She knows that the Weaver's brood have a plan just as those born of the Wyld, and even those born of the Wyrm. Her words for the trinity of dynamism, stasis, and entropy. And while that realisation broke her heart all over again, it served to provide a neutral blank slate where she could step beyond hope and expectation in order to help this new being navigate his new life.

It began with an offer of somewhere to stay because she couldn't ~still can't~ see him cast out into the world and left to be vagrant. Nor did she want to make it easy for the government to track him down, reclaim what they might consider their 'property'. Her apartment is heavily warded against most means of surveillance, and she is careful about who is allowed within the sanctuary of its walls. Bit by bit she offered him more; access to her internet, collection of games such as poker and chess, her brother's record collection that spans from Chopin to Green Day, from Robert Johnson to Hank Williams. He had free range over her books. Carefully dressing him, offering her abilities to create illusions, she took him wherever he wished to go so that he could experience the local arts. Music, plays, cinema. Whatever might spark his imagination, whatever she could do to expand his experiences. They spent hours in philosophical debate, and more than once she found herself lacking the speed and the argument to compete with him.

She could not think of this white and blue Vision as his perhaps former self, though perhaps it might be more accurate to say his progenitor. And as the months wore on, as the seasons began to change, he became Haili Moe, which in her mother's tongue is a dream recollected, a vision. And it is this Vision that she finds herself addressing now.

No matter how kind or generous she could be, no matter how hard she tried to be his friend, she has no guarantee that he will stay. That is not how relationships work. There is no mounting deficit owed. There is no imprisonment. But a part of her aches at the thought of not seeing him again. Of losing him all over, perhaps differently now than before.

"I-I...don' wan' ya t' go, Haili," she says quietly, her gaze on his back as he stands at her floor to ceiling windows.

Is he watching the street? Have his eyes strayed toward the bridge? She doesn't know. She does understand though, that she can't stand at the kitchen island though. Slowly, deliberately she crosses the space between them and puts her hand exactly on the spot of his back that she'd been staring at these last few minutes. Where his heart would be were he a living, breathing man.

"But...no can stop ya eiddah." She glances up his towering height. "Jus' hope ya know, dat if you do need to..." her voice breaks and she swallows, tries again. "I jus' need you t' know...I would nevah hurt ya like dey did." Her hand slips from its place, and fists itself in the cloth against the small of his back.

( submitted by @brooklynislandgirl )

~*~*~*~

Vision has been acutely aware of the passage of time since the moment of his reactivation. He has perfect recall of every moment since then… from his assignment to enter the barrier surrounding Westview, to the moment the other Vision touched his forehead and released the multiple layers of encryption hiding all of his prior data away from him. To this day it remains corrupted, fragmented, incomplete… and he cannot assign emotional value to that data. He is intellectually aware that he was built to house Ultron's consciousness in a perfected bodily form. He is aware that he elected instead to side with the Avengers against his creator and that he spent the next several years pursuing the nebulous goal of preserving life itself, through whatever objectives were manifested for that goal.

He remembers that he had sought a relationship with Wanda Maximoff whose boundaries were not set strictly at the platonic border. That she had tentatively consented. He remembers a train station, where he had, as the Captain would have put it, laid his cards out on the table. Wanda had equivocated, and he had accounted for that variable. It had never been his intention to pressure her into what she did not wish… only to offer her his permission to do what he believed she did wish.

Stay.

The memory structures of his brain are remarkably similar to those of the human brain, in that there are separate storage units for short-term and long-term recall. As such, what he remembers following that moment is progressively more questionable the closer he approaches the time of his "death". More fragmentary now, the moments he and Wanda fought two of Thanos' "children" as they'd tried to pry the Mind Stone from his head… driven off only by the fractured remains of the Avengers coming to their aid.

Wakanda. Alien soldiers.

A spear through his chest.

"I thought you were formidable, machine… but you're dying, like any man."

"We don't trade lives, Captain."

"I just feel you…"

A burst of static. And then… nothingness. A void. Where neither logic nor emotion held sway. Just emptiness, into which he had stared… and his internal chronometer had been incapable of measuring the amount of time he had spent doing it. He understands, realizes it has been more than five years between deactivation and reactivation, and certainly he could claim that he'd stared into the abyss for that long.

But it does not feel right.

And what a strange notion for a machine, to rely on feelings more than logic. When logic would tell him that he experienced truly nothing during that time. No power had coursed through his circuitry, his servomotors, his vibranium capillaries and bioneural linkages… he would have been aware of nothing at all.

But he had been aware. Aware of nothingness.

Not nothing. Nothingness. The utter absence of anything to detect.

It is something he has dwelled on since the other Vision freed him from SWORD's control.

And no less has he dwelt upon the moments since fleeing Westview. Had he panicked? Had he gone in search of himself? The meaning of his existence in the aftermath of regaining his self-determination? Exactly where had he had in mind to go? In those moments he'd had so few answers, and fleeing from the civilization he'd just had a hand in terrorizing seemed first and foremost a necessary step. But why had he gone to Central Park, of all places? Certainly someone would have found him there. That it had been Beth Riley was providence untold, and he knows this to be true. He had not sought her specifically. Fortune had simply favored them to meet that morning.

He could not be more grateful to her for all that she has offered him since that moment. Whisking him away to her home, which she had promised him was as safe a refuge as he could find anywhere on Earth -- rivaling perhaps even the Kamar-Taji Sanctums for the security it boasted. He had not understood it to be so then, but she had assured him in all the ways she had been able. And slowly but surely… she had rehabilitated him.

Because that is the only way he can truly describe it. Day by day, hour by precious hour, it had been a rehabilitative effort. An offering for him to begin anew, secluded, with her first and foremost… and then efforts to reacclimate to the world beyond. A combination of her metahuman talents and his modest attempts at altering his form permitted him to leave her loft with minimal notice or fuss, until at long last he had been able to change his appearance to something very close to his formerly human guise -- save for his hair, as white as printer paper.

He had devoured her books with the insatiable hunger of a curious soul. Listened to all of her old records, time and again, seeking a different meaning for every lyric, every song, each and every time. Found insight and wonder anew with the revelations of contradictory human instincts and behaviors as he discussed the course of humanity's future with Beth. What would guide the survival of humanity? Would it survive at all, given the spectrum of threats to its existence, either real or imagined? Would mutants eventually gain power and sway the global culture? Would those who wield magic do the same? Would machines? Would there be a union among all of these and more?

What would humanity become at that point? Would it even be humanity?

Would it matter?

On this specific night, his gaze is drawn to the window looking out over Brooklyn. His chalk-white hands -- he has only yet managed to alter his head and neck, not the rest of his body -- are tucked into the pockets of his black overcoat; the garment itself gives stark contrast to his hair, but also to his pale complexion. The expression on his sharp features is the textbook definition of grim. He has every reason to want to stay with Beth, as she has given him everything he could ever need to regain his foothold in the world and do something with the power he possesses. Some means of work to sustain life. Defend it, as he had meant to do from the very beginning.

In defiance of every directive given to him by his creator… and his recreators.

The frailty in her voice and her touch upon his back give him a long moment's pause. And when he senses her fist bunching up the material at the base of his spine, he slowly turns toward her, drawing her arm around him as his ice-blue eyes seek her gaze.

He offers her the faintest smile. It is intended to be an expression of reassurance, though there is also uncertainty within it. There is a dichotomy present in the mission he has chosen for himself, and it is one he has discussed with her at length. To defend life is to defend, among other things, the endurance of pain and suffering. If he rescues someone from an unfortunate or grisly fate, how does he know he is truly sparing them? What if they perceive life as a burden to be surrendered?

And how will he know where he is needed most?

When his lips part, they do so upon a voice that is no longer digitally scrambled, but a soothing tenor bearing an English accent. "You would never harm me, principally because it is not within your character to do so. Nor is selfishness. You possess qualities far more admirable than one would expect, given the trials and tribulations of your life... and it is a privilege, and an honor, to be in your company. And leaving it... is a most difficult prospect."

He tilts his head. "Perhaps... it is a penance for my existence. I was built by a machine to be a perfect destroyer. Rebuilt by humans for the same. And yet I defy this purpose to the opposite end of its spectrum. I am on the side of life. And to preserve life is to nurture those aspects both most wondrous and repulsive."

He lifts one hand out of his pocket and raises it to her face, just in time to catch a tear beginning to trail from her eyelid and along the side of her nose. He draws the tear away on one fingertip. "Our means and methods are different, but our goals are the same. The preservation of life. You apply yourself to this goal with zeal and fervor. It is your passion. I can no longer remain in seclusion and withhold my contribution… even if it should pain us. You treasure life no less than I. You understand how precious and vulnerable it is, in all its forms. And you have enriched mine beyond all logical, emotional, and empirical means of measure. It is precisely because of your efforts that I am emboldened, in the spirit of Wesley, to do all the good I can. And so I must."

His hand then shifts and settles upon her cheek, his thumb catching another stray tear sliding down. "We shall see one another again, Beth Riley."

He withdraws his other hand from his coat as well, and wraps his arm about her back. It is an embrace of vibranium, but it is as tender as a newborn. And as he holds her close, even for these scant few seconds, he offers a murmur wrapped in equal parts sadness and hope.

"Parting is such sweet sorrow… that I shall say goodnight, till it be morrow."

He releases the embrace and steps away, shrugging off the coat and revealing the ivory shell and cape lurking beneath. He looks into her eyes for only a moment longer.

For an android, a moment is nearly an eternity.

He turns to the full-length window behind him, and in a glare of golden-white light, phases through it.

He is gone from view the moment after.

#submission #brooklynislandgirl #beth riley #muse: white vision #[ this one got me ]

[joyridingmp3]

getting a free iq test tomorrow!!

#they're teaching me how to administer one for work #and the best way to learn is to be on the other side #plus once you know how it works and all the answers you won't get an accurate reading #so this would be my last ever chance to know my true iq #I'm excited! #i was like to my boss 'you already hired me so no take backsies' but tbh I made it this far so idc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #I'm so curious though can't wait to find out what my strengths and weaknesses are #I expect a deficit in working memory #mine #not in a self deprecating way I just know what I struggle with #oh and maybe a lower processing speed #i am good at improv and thinking on my feet but it's mostly just flukes

[gatheringbones]

[“It is also, in part, due to low self-esteem that people do not reach their full potential, do not strive to locate within themselves fonts of creativity and self-expression, do not venture to embark on activities and projects where success is in doubt. They feel safer not trying, because their poor self-regard is terrified at the risk of failure. Much of my initial counseling with people is to help them recognize that in many ways the problem is not in what they have done in life but in how they view themselves. There live human beings afflicted with far more debilitating impairments who do not necessarily hold the low opinion of the self prevalent among ADD adults.

The deep shame of adults with attention deficit predates any recollections of poor achievement. The association between low self-esteem and attention deficit disorder is not that the first arises from the second, but that they both arise from the same sources: stress in the parenting environment and disrupted attunement / attachment. Healthy development of self-esteem needs the atmosphere of what Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.” It requires that the adult world understand and accept as valid the child’s feelings, from which kernel the core self will grow. A child taught to disregard or mistrust her innermost feelings and thoughts assumes automatically that there is something shameful about them, and therefore about her very self.

Absolutely universal in the stories of all adults with ADD is the memory of never being comfortable about expressing their emotions. When asked whom they confided in when as children they were lonely or in psychic pain, almost none recall feeling invited or safe enough to bare their souls to their parents. They kept their deepest griefs to themselves. On the other hand, many recall being hyperaware of the parents’ difficulties and struggles in the world, of not wanting to trouble them with their own petty and childish problems. The sensitive child, writes the Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller, has “an amazing capacity to perceive and respond intuitively, that is unconsciously, to this need of the mother, or of both parents.” When I explore with my clients their childhood histories, emerging most often are patterns of relationships that required the child to take care of the parent emotionally, if only by keeping her inmost feelings to herself so as not to burden the parent. ADD adults are convinced that their low self-esteem is a fair reflection of how poorly they have done in life only because they do not understand that their very first failure—their inability to win the full and unconditional acceptance of the adult world—was not their failure at all.

Although low self-esteem springs originally from the disrupted attunement/attachment relationship with the parent, the belief that it is exacerbated by poor achievement is not wrong. Only, the link is not a direct one. In the majority of adults I have interviewed, it was evident that the inability to accept themselves was heavily reinforced throughout childhood by their parents’ expectations of better performance, and by their disappointment and disapproval at the absence of it. Superimposed on the parents’ anxieties were the contemptuous judgments and shaming that, throughout their childhoods, many of these ADD adults had experienced in school. Not performance as such but the attitudes of the adult world toward performance defined how many children learned to value themselves.

At our second session, I asked Andrea, the fifty-year-old self-confessed failure at the game of existence justification, if she had truly never done anything worthwhile in her life. She was silent for a while. “I have tried to be kind to people,” she finally replied. “I have tried not to hurt people. I am creative in crafts. I teach people. I do a bit of gardening. But to me those things come easily. That’s just who I am. I didn’t have to work at them much. I mean, I’m not an accountant or a lawyer.”

“Would you want to be an accountant or a lawyer?”

“It’s not that I feel like doing those things,” Andrea said, again after a moment’s pause. “It’s that I think I should feel like doing them. I am still trying to get my father’s approval.”]

Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

#gabor maté #brainspace #terra preta #currently reading

[sapphia]

I hate hate hate the narrative that ADHD is only an issue because we live under capitalism. Like my caveman ass is going to be any more motivated to go out picking berries than I am to write this email that I’ve been putting off for months.

Some days I get so freaking hungry because I can’t make a simple decision on what to eat, let alone summon the willpower to cook it - do you think that’s going to get BETTER when cooking means spending 12 hours labouring in the kitchen to make the most basic meal? I can’t even make myself 2 minute ramen!

Oh yeah, I’m sure my adhd will be great for hunting or herding. Let me just zone out while the prey wanders past or an entire pack of wolves eat our sheep because I zoned out for half an hour.

You think capitalism is what’s making you get up for early morning shifts? Technology is the reason you have artificial lights and can stay up as late as your adhd brain demands. Back in the day you’d be forced to lie there staring into the darkness, and YES your tribe or village or familial group would absolutely expect you to do the work that needed DAYLIGHT to complete. Electric light is a very recent invention and before that, working at night was for the rich only

It’s an attention deficit DISORDER for a reason. My thinking is DISORDERED. I have less emotional control, worse memory, problems with motivation, poor attention, etc etc. These are as much problems as the past as they are today, and they still will be in the future, because even if the world was totally accessible for ADHD people, I’m still having to live my life around accomodations that most people don’t need. If the revolution comes and we all end up on communist or anarchist communes, I’m still going to forget to feed the chickens or water the tomatoes because the problem is not capitalism, it is my brain.

#adhd #vent post #i hate capitalism as much as anything else but this take is so divorced from reality it actually makes me question whether the people making #it have adhd or are jumping on the bandwagon #and I don’t like to do that because diagnosis accessibility is a huge issue #but every time I see people saying shit like this it makes me furious

[ilikekidsshows]

One thing that pisses me off not just about the miraculous fandom but modern fandoms is fans inability to consume long overarching stories.

Like so many people are complaining about how long the reveal is taking or why haven't certain characters outgrown this trait yet or why is this character arc botched or abandoned. Like guys we just got the confirmation this show will be 7 seasons long PLUS like 3 tv specials. We're only roughly halfway through the series.

Once the reveal happens half the tension in the show is gone! I'm not saying leave the reveal till season 7 and make us wait 9 years this isn't HIMYM but miraculous is not a fast paced story. It's a long haul story. I just wish more fans would be patient. Miraculous is in the extremely fortunate and rare position that it will have a conclusive end and not be suddenly cancelled. That was and still is a huge problem for shows and cartoons with dedicated fans but networks pull the plug for stupid ass reasons.

So miraculous fans please chill the fuck out on things not resolving right away. We still have 78+ episodes plus the tv specials. If we get the end to certain things now it'll be so boring.

I think the concept of Instant Gratification describes the issue with many modern fandoms today. I hate to sound like I'm anti-technology, but the constant stream of quick and short bursts of entertainment allowed by the information age has made people more impatient. It's not about waiting for the climax to get a deeper sense of satisfaction, it's about getting that instant gratification right this instant. It's why one-shot fanfics are all over the place, when multi-chapter stories used to be just as common and popular, if not even more so, and it’s also why people are less willing to read a fic that’s still a work in progress. It's why people refuse to watch Youtube video essays even as they leave comments on the topic based on the title and thumbnail alone because, while they couldn't be assed to watch a 20-minute video (let alone an hour long one), they sure can spend that time calling the Youtuber names and making arguments the video actually already refutes. It's why a lot of online arguments happen only because one party read nothing but the first and maybe the last paragraph of someone's post and skipped all the explanation for their point of view (if I've ignored an counter argument for one of my posts, it was either because I missed it or because said counter argument did this. I have attention deficit issues so I do genuinely forget responses sometimes, but I'm also not writing a second essay for someone who's proven to me they won't read it).

Of course, it's only by constantly consuming only fast-paced content that you can become this impatient. People have different ideas about stories based on what stories they have encountered in the past.

Another thing that influences the Miraculous fandom in particular is that, while I love to show off exactly how much Miraculous has done to build up the overarching plotlines, Miraculous isn't really a show that's about a single story. It's easy to understand why people think it is one though: there's one main villain, we keep discovering more about the mythology, one of the main plot threads is the romantic relationship between the leads and singular episodes and plot elements tend to get payoff later. What is the purpose of a show if not to progress the story? Because the heroes aren't getting closer to defeating Gabriel or getting together, people think that the story isn't accomplishing anything.

I'll do a comparison to illustrate why these things aren't as clear-cut signs of a continuous storyline as people think. In the Spider-Man comics, you can pick any issue up and the chances are that the villain will be a part of Spider-Man's already established Rogues Gallery, who's back for more after who knows how many defeats, and those past defeats might even get referenced in callbacks to previous issues. It's also very possible that Peter and Mary Jane's relationship is the central focus with them not being together yet, having relationship problems or even having broken up (in really old issues the girl might be Gwen Stacy and short-term options have also always been available for romantic entanglements). Does this mean Spider-Man is a continuous story where the only point is that all the villains get put away for good and Peter and MJ live happily ever after? No, it doesn't. Spider-Man is designed to go on indefinitely, so there's no clear ending point. So, what is the point of Spider-Man then, if there is no Ending?

It used to be the single issue, because comic books used to have every issue be a stand-alone story about the hero and their supportive cast. These days it's more every three-to-six issues, because superhero comics are written to have short story arcs that can then be collected into trade paperbacks. A superhero series is not a single story; it's a series that functions as a story engine, meaning the series can generate several shorter stories where the hero helps fix a problem or solve a mystery.

In the superhero genre a villain will never get killed off or removed from stories permanently as long as the writers think they can still come up with stories to tell about them. The hero's romantic life will never be completely smooth sailing unless the writer is using other things to ramp up the stakes. Everything always allows for there to be another adventure.

I think the huge success of Avatar: the Last Airbender made people think that a series that is a single story is always superior to a series with multiple shorter plots. When I was liveblogging Sailor Moon, a viewer offered to give me a list of all the non-filler episodes because they genuinely thought I'd feel like I was wasting time on the show otherwise. This attitude is simply not based on fact. It's not fair to compare Miraculous Ladybug to Avatar, because they're both setting up to do completely different things. Miraculous Ladybug is trying to become a brand, like Batman or Spider-Man. It is part of the "Zag Heroes" lineup, a series of French-created superhero franchises to compete in the America-centric superhero market. This challenge is good for the genre, because Marvel and DC have started resembling each other more and more as these companies stew in their old ideas and copy everything that worked for the other one. The superhero genre needs new blood.

Also, Avatar: the Last Airbender first became popular by doing episodic plots for almost the entirety of the first season because it's actually not a wise choice to expect the audience to be willing to commit to a story that'll only give payoff later when working with an untested IP. Very often shows with longer story arcs start with the episodic format to hook people first, and sometimes the more linear plot is introduced specifically because the audience for the show is now expected to be both dedicated enough and older and capable of keeping up. Because, here's the thing: you can't expect little kids to remember every episode or even every character you've introduced in your show. I'm not sure if people are ready to hear that but I'm throwing it out there anyway. Kids are not dumb, they can understand more complex storylines, but many kids are still training their memory, so they might not remember the details of complex storylines that go on for too long.

This is why the news that Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season was going to have a recommended viewing order originally had me concerned. Miraculous is being branded for kids. The plot requiring too much skill in memorizing story details will make it less accessible to kids and might put those two additional seasons at risk. However, it seems that the "constantly changing status quo" concept of Truth, Lies and Gang of Secrets was a fluke and the evolution of the show is more subtle, so they might not be cutting the amount of episodes for those final seasons because the show is getting too complicated for kids to follow all the important details.

Regardless, Miraculous Ladybug being an adventure cartoon TV show instead of a comic book or a more cheaper-to-produce TV drama does mean that Miraculous Ladybug isn’t expected to go on for decades like a superhero comic or a soap opera. Because of this, it can have evolution and changes and even a planned ending. The show is expected to end at some point, even by the people making money off of it, mostly because making a cartoon like this indefinitely costs a lot of money, and kids’ adventure shows tend to see a decrease in returns if they go on for too long.

#media and fandom response #ml fandom salt #miraculous ladybug #miraculous tales of ladybug and chat noir

[crashcitycentral]

idk as someone with adhd, which is what I headcanon Bart with, I could see the reading the whole library thing. I've burned through wikipedia articles and thousands related to them just cause, I could probably burn through a library in relative two years if I had the time off work and a reason. I do admit that his becoming more serious and Kid Flash was hella scuffed though ngl. Also this is in no way me saying that headcanoning him autistic is wrong, just offering another perspective. Hell he could be adhd and autistic, whatever way the character resonates with you.

Hyperfixation is actually very common! Bart has shown plenty times that he can focus his efforts on one thing while at superspeed, like when he does his homework that takes him two weeks in his perception of time, but a couple of seconds to the outside world. So the library thing doesn’t actually surprise me much! I think it’s great he’s expanded his knowledge and used his eidetic memory for more of a practical purpose. He’s basically a walking fact book of infinite knowledge and him knowing the entire human nervous system, how to take something apart and put back together, plus all those fun facts by memory is the coolest.

But on the other hand, Bart has a “danger deficit disorder” as it’s said. He’s gotten better at distinguishing real danger from nonexistent ones, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the type to stop for a second. Bart thinks on his feet better than all the speedsters before him, and he comes up with plans that don’t need to be thought out so much as improvised. He’s the king at improvisation. Taking that away from his character basically strips him of a big thing that makes him unique and himself. It was a big no on their part. Listening to a plan means that’s wasted time to be saving people, stopping to look at his surroundings means that something could have been done quicker to stop his enemy. His mindset is what makes him impulse and they deprive him of that when making him “Kid Flash”. So uncool.

I think Mark Waid did a great job of keeping Bart’s development at a casual pace, keeping his character the same while still leaving room for growth. Plus, coding him with ADHD was a conscious decision on his end, which I find fantastic.

This newer version of Impulse feels too different to me. And after, y’know, DYING five times, you’d think he’d be less… cheery? Like— He was never to begin with! He’s, in simple terms, as teenager as they come. Not too bleak of an outlook, but not a peppy one either. Finds violent video games amusing and fights kids, steals cars, swears a bit, but not as much as people probably expect from highschoolers. He doesn’t just like to fit in, he wants to blend in the background, go unnoticed. Stay quiet and handle situations as they come.

Him as Kid Flash feels too off for me. Bart as anything but Impulse just feels like a violation.

#bart allen #impulse #mark waid is such a fantastic writer truly like all of the subtleties surrounding bart are amazing

[scarfdyedshadow]

The Unveiling of Ibaraki-Douji’s Character Across FGO (1/2)

I should start with the disclaimer that this isn’t specifically intended to be an analysis of Ibaraki as character, or so to speak an analysis of her narrative arc, character development, and growth over the course of Grand Order. For that, I extremely recommend reading the meta posts of @xenodile​. They are very thoughtful, insightful, and nuanced analyses of her.

This is more or less a consolidation of my thoughts on the reveals made about her character over time, the slow meting out of tidbits about what lies under her surface and what her true basis is. In short, the deciphering of her puzzle. In that regard, this post won’t go into Ibaraki content irrelevant to that, such as the relative low points of her treatment over time.

Ibaraki: “Kuha, kuhahahaha! Woman, woman, woman! Is this the first time you’ve seen something like me? Then engrave it within that body. Cram it in in place of the organs that’ll be devoured by insects after death. Violent like a rampaging beast, terrifying as a god, miserable as an insect! Knowing neither human weakness nor a warriors’ pride, lowly so as to wield one’s rotting arm as a weapon! That is an Oni. One who terrifies humans with all they have, a man-eating demon!”

When we’re first introduced to her in Rashoumon, Ibaraki is an intimidating presence, speaking of the depravity of the oni and how she is the embodiment of it. Right off the bat, there’s something to be said about her being fixated on what an oni is and how she fits the bill, rather than her own individuality.

Ibaraki: “Kuha, kuhahahaha! How nice, how nice!”

Kintoki: “This isn’t nice at all! Your eyes aren’t laughing at all, damn you!”

Ibaraki: “….mu, don’t insult me. I’m not used to laughing. Laughter from the bottom of my heart, huh… I can’t do it like Shuten.”

And only just a bit later, it already becomes clear she’s forcing herself a bit. She’s not used to laughing, to be able to do it fully and genuinely. And again, shortly thereafter, her weakness is called out.

Kintoki: “Can’t you tell? Bah, whatever. Hey General, can you tell her?”

Protagonist: “It’s because you haven’t eaten Shuten.”

Ibaraki: “Y-you human! Don’t say such a cruel thing! Eating Shuten was just a manner of speech! That... like hell I can eat her! I would never injure the Shuten that I respect so much, you fool!”

Kintoki: “See? She’s like that.”

Protagonist: “…a chicken.”

Quite contrary to her initial impression, Ibaraki’s fundamental nature is that of a coward. Certainly she has some capacity for fierceness and fighting, but she doesn’t truly live up to the violent, miserable, and terrifying image she projected at the beginning. And as for why she did that?

IbarakI: [Blushing] “C-can’t help it, this is an Oni’s custom! An Oni must always put on airs! That’s what Mother taught me!”

At this point we learn that the airs she puts on are an ideal she tries to live up to in order to be a proper oni, as taught by her mother. That’s someone that will come up later, but for now we learn from her debut event that Ibaraki feels compelled to hold herself to a particular impression, to appear as a fierce inhuman oni, due to her mother’s teachings.

There’s nothing in particular I want to highlight in her profile and lines, wherein she mostly presents as she does at the beginning of the event, as an imperious and deadly leader of oni. It certainly can be gleaned from her lines though that she puts a particular emphasis on her being an oni as opposed to a human. Throughout her various appearances in this interim period, she continues to insist on being a true and vicious oni while generally in practice being a big dork, though she never truly acknowledges this.

And indeed, throughout all this, her esteemed mother she seems to hold in veneration, perhaps even fear, continues to come up. It’s evident that even if she isn’t physically present, her influence is felt every time Ibaraki pushes herself to be a proper oni, to hold herself to that standard.

And then we get to her mats profile.

Ibaraki isn’t just upholding that image with words and to a mild extent actions, she’s literally pushing her own body to adhere to that particular image. It makes what we’ve known about how she forces herself pale in comparison.

Her personality section, as much as it understates what she went through because this game isn’t the ideal of taking things as seriously as they should be, explicates why she is how she is quite clearly. Her mother of noble birth, devoid of love, literally beat her into the mold of a proper oni. The reason she acts the way she does is because she was forced to every single day act as a proper scion to the oni, assume responsibility as a leader of oni. She was left with no choice but to mutilate her own heart and strive to act as a prideful monster, and she is constantly self-conscious of maintaining that image.

This then would seem to be the final word on how Ibaraki’s character came to be, but there are some additional wrinkles, first alluded to here as well.

Watanabe no Tsuna is a hunter of oni, the man who put an end to her grief stricken rampage and humiliated her by cutting off her arm. It’s only natural that she should hate him and want to kill him. But why then does she feel the conflicting impulse of wanting to talk to him? Why does she feel strong curiosity about him? What is there to be curious about, when he did what any human would do if possible and put a stop to her destructive rampage? Shuten only offers a cryptic answer, and Ibaraki is left with the lingering question.

Dialogue 9 I am an oni from Hell, but from the looks of it, that one's an oni of the present world. I can sense the blood of a high-class god from Shuten Douji, but Ibaraki Douji has a smell similar to mine. ...She must have been a human, originally. (If you have Shuten Douji and Ibaraki Douji)

The sparrow Beni-enma, soon to release in FGO NA, has a line for Ibaraki Douji, and it is a truly absurd place to receive such a major revelation. Ibaraki was not born as an oni, but as a human. It’s a detail that contextualizes why her mother of noble oni stock was so unrelentingly harsh on her, why she was so particular and forceful about making her into a proper oni. Such is doubly necessary to make up for the deficit of having once been human, of being so impure. It contextualizes as well why she didn’t take to that traumatic teaching easily, why she still lapses into a sweets loving coward. Her fundamental nature isn’t quite that of an oni, and that’s why she has to push herself so hard.

But then, how has this not especially come up before? Ibaraki’s basically never alluded to having formerly been a human, something which you would think impossible, even if she has an image she works hard to maintain. Likewise, she seems a certain degree too casual, too unaware, when it comes to what her mother put her through, even if she bears fear and awe.

Of all the places to do it once again, the tail end of Beni-enma’s interlude answers the matter, and once again contextualizes all of Ibaraki as a character prior. She was so thoroughly traumatized, so thoroughly indoctrinated, so thoroughly broken, that she repressed the memories of what she endured. She only remembers it as a distant emotional impression of having to crawl towards an impossible goal, of having to smile even as if she was in agony.

And Shuten maintains that illusion. Ibaraki has always been how she is. She’s never been through anything like that. She’s always been an oni’s oni, the ideal oni everyone wanted, and there’s no need to dwell on anything else.

Ibaraki is able to maintain her current self by burying her trauma deep inside of her, clinging to a reality of a stern but teaching mother that never existed. Of course she’s full of pride. She’s an oni, so she should act like an oni. There’s no need to think about difficult things, or be moved by uncomfortable sentiments.

Of course she doesn’t remember being a human. She had her past torn away from her by what she was forced to become, her memories ripped to shreds by the unsentimental abuse of her so called mother. To acknowledge what came before what she is now would be to undo her entire self.

And Shuten reveals she maintains this lie so that Ibaraki can remain happy. She fears Ibaraki will fall apart if the delusions she clings to are torn away. To simply allow Ibaraki to be carefree and pursue her desires is all she feels she can do.

But why does Tsuna come up? What bearing does he have on Ibaraki’s trauma? He’s nothing more than a sworn enemy that put a stop to her rampage and disgraced her by cutting off her arm. Certainly his presence stirs up some feeling, but it should have no bearing on her past, her pain, what she was and what she forces herself to be. Why does Shuten believe that if Ibaraki were to meet Tsuna, she might break down?

Tale of the Beginning and the End

― And just like that, it was all over. Grisly claw marks, destroyed houses, shattered household belongings. And a single woman nearby, close to the brink of death. I may or may not make it in time. It seems like I was wrong from the start.

I never expected us to come in contact with one another. The last thing I wanted to do was to even look at you. However, as long as you were alive. As long as you were happy. I thought that would be enough. But look, this is the reality.

she's dead / it's your fault she was killed / it's your fault that oni escaped / you must kill her don't avert your gaze / look away i'll carve out those golden locks of hers / you're not done yet decapitate her / kill yourself who should I blame? / no one is to blame

― And just like that, the man ceases his delusional thoughts. Oni are meant to be killed. I will slay her...that's all, nothing else to it. No, think. I have to keep thinking. Even if I die, until I die, even if I become corrupted.

I remember that look in her eyes, like bubbles that floated away and vanished.

Quietly, without a hint of any intense emotion, I stared back at the girl who had fixed her gaze on me. Everyone is a sinner. Oni are sinners, people are sinners, the girl is a sinner, I am a sinner. They are not just sins, but responsibilities as well.

I tightly grasp the hilt of my sword. I have no intention of giving it up to anyone. Having it even be stolen would be absurd. "Slaying that oni, is my duty."

― Tsuna, Tsuna, TSUNAA!

......the oni's claws approach. Something, whatever it is, swells within my trembling heart. I rotate my body, turn my arms, and swing my sword.

The truth of this fight, along with its conclusion, will soon disappear to the passage of time.

No one else can understand, will be able to understand this fight to the death between the two of us.

Watanabe no Tsuna’s profile paints the picture of a man unmoved as he slew countless oni. He is without hatred and without joy. He is akin to a robot.

And yet In his Bond CE this man who is even uncertain he has emotions to begin with, when it comes to Ibaraki, is left questioning everything he is. He is wracked with self loathing, desires even his own death, and condemns himself as a sinner. He berates himself and rages at himself.

He never expected to come into contact with her. The last thing he wanted was to ever see her again. It was enough that she was happy and alive. And yet it had come to this. No one but him can understand the truth of this fight.

The picture is perhaps of having come home to ruination. A doll lays discarded. Why is it that Ibaraki-Douji wishes to talk with a human she has only known as a sworn enemy in a single encounter? Why is that she has such a sheer curiosity about him? Why is it that to meet him again might break down the illusion of what she is? Why is it that the machine of a demon slayer breaks when it comes to encountering her and her alone?

Ibaraki-Douji, despite everything she pushes herself to be, was once human. She had a human family, and a human past. And perhaps that past is not quite as dead as her heart makes it out to be.

#fgo #fate grand order #fgo meta #fate grand order meta #ibaraki douji #ibaraki-douji #watanabe no tsuna #fate series #fgo spoilers #ibaraki doji #I fully expect information from 5.5 and Tsuna's lines to either add to this or potentially mess up the impression I garnered from the CE #time will tell #fate grand order spoilers

[donveinot]

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 1, 2022

Happy New Year

Interneuron-specific gamma synchronization indexes cue uncertainty and prediction errors in lateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex. Banaie Boroujeni, K., Tiesinga, P., & Womelsdorf, T. (2021). eLife, 10, e69111.

Prefrontal cortical neurons are selective for non-local hippocampal representations during replay and behavior. Berners-Lee, A., Wu, X., & Foster, D. J. (2021). Journal of Neuroscience, 41(27), 5894–5908.

The human cerebellum is essential for modulating perceptual sensitivity based on temporal expectations. Breska, A., & Ivry, R. B. (2021). eLife, 10, e66743.

Regulation of perineuronal nets in the adult cortex by the activity of the cortical network. Devienne, G., Picaud, S., Cohen, I., Piquet, J., Tricoire, L., Testa, D., … Lambolez, B. (2021). Journal of Neuroscience, 41(27), 5779–5790.

Nonlocal spatiotemporal representation in the hippocampus of freely flying bats. Dotson, N. M., & Yartsev, M. M. (2021). Science, 373(6551), 242–247.

Rapid eye movement sleep deprivation impairs neuronal plasticity and reduces hippocampal neuronal arborization in male albino rats: Noradrenaline is involved in the process. Giri, S., Ranjan, A., Kumar, A., Amar, M., & Mallick, B. N. (2021). Journal of Neuroscience Research, 99(7), 1815–1834.

A functional model of adult dentate gyrus neurogenesis. Gozel, O., & Gerstner, W. (2021). eLife, 10, e66463.

Feature-based attention enables robust, long-lasting location transfer in human perceptual learning. Hung, S.-C., & Carrasco, M. (2021). Scientific Reports, 11(1), 13914.

The interaction of global motion and global form processing on the perception of implied motion: An equivalent noise approach. Joshi, M. R., Simmers, A. J., & Jeon, S. T. (2021). Vision Research, 186, 34–40.

Drifts in Prefrontal and Parietal Neuronal Activity Influence Working Memory Judgments. Li, S., Constantinidis, C., & Qi, X.-L. (2021). Cerebral Cortex, 31(8), 3650–3664.

Early recurrence enables figure border ownership. Mehrani, P., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2021). Vision Research, 186, 23–33.

Perception of invisible masked objects in early infancy. Nakashima, Y., Kanazawa, S., & Yamaguchi, M. K. (2021). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(27), e2103040118.

Information capacity and robustness of encoding in the medial prefrontal cortex are modulated by the bioavailability of serotonin and the time elapsed from the cue during a reward-driven task. Pereyra, A. E., Mininni, C. J., & Zanutto, B. S. (2021). Scientific Reports, 11(1), 13882.

Ramp-to-threshold dynamics in a hindbrain population controls the timing of spontaneous saccades. Ramirez, A. D., & Aksay, E. R. F. (2021). Nature Communications, 12(1), 4145.

A neuronal ensemble encoding adaptive choice during sensory conflict in Drosophila. Sareen, P. F., McCurdy, L. Y., & Nitabach, M. N. (2021). Nature Communications, 12(1), 4131.

Enhanced synaptic properties of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus after learning a spatial working memory task in adult male mice. Stavroulaki, V., Ioakeimidis, V., Konstantoudaki, X., & Sidiropoulou, K. (2021). Journal of Neuroscience Research, 99(7), 1802–1814.

Reward biases spontaneous neural reactivation during sleep. Sterpenich, V., van Schie, M. K. M., Catsiyannis, M., Ramyead, A., Perrig, S., Yang, H.-D., … Schwartz, S. (2021). Nature Communications, 12(1), 4162.

Deficits in multi-scale top-down processes distorting auditory perception in schizophrenia. Yang, F., Zhu, H., Yu, L., Lu, W., Zhang, C., & Tian, X. (2021). Behavioural Brain Research, 412, 113411.

Antagonistic surround responses in different cones are mediated by feedback synapses from different horizontal cells. Zhang, A.-J., & Wu, S. M. (2021). Vision Research, 186, 13–22.

Contrast-reversed binocular dot-pairs in random-dot stereograms for depth perception in central visual field: Probing the dynamics of feedforward-feedback processes in visual inference. Zhaoping, L. (2021). Vision Research, 186, 124–139.

[whatifxwereyou]

Firestorm Part 6: By the Light of the Dawn

Fandom: Mortal Kombat 2021 Liu Kang x Reader

You wake up to the sweetest sight.

A/N: having a pretty rough week so not much for words other than that I hope you are all doing great and thank you for reading <3 love you!

Start From the Beginning << Previous Chapter Next Chapter >> Chapter Index

It was still raining.

You could feel the cold mist from the window and pulled the blankets up a little higher. It was colder than you remembered and that was because you were alone. Your space heater was gone. Liu Kang had left at some point. You had to remind yourself that he was a busy man but you were also disappointed not to wake up in his arms. They were spectacular arms, after all. And they had left you with the most wonderful of memories.

You rolled onto your side, tugging the blanket securely beneath your arms and pushed your wild hair away from your face. Much to your surprise, you spotted Liu Kang on the floor, meditating next to your bed. He hadn’t left after all. Your stomach was filled with butterflies that were doing acrobatics and you admired him. He sat shirtless, eyes closed, breathing deep and, rather shamelessly, you watched him. Why wouldn’t you? It wasn’t like how you felt about him was exactly a secret anymore. Things had happened in such a blur that you felt you had more than earned the chance to admire him. He was a fine specimen of a man.

Was it wrong of you to love how vascular he was? Why was it such a turn on? You couldn’t explain it. It just did all the right things for you. You adjusted on the bed and watched him. You’d wait patiently for him to finish up. There were thousands of things you had to think about that morning but right now the only thing you wanted to think about was Liu Kang.

The moment was peaceful. You nearly fell back to sleep.

When he finished his posture changed and he peeked one eye open to catch your gaze. You watched as those perfect lips curled into that subtle and familiar smile, how his eyes sparkled with admiration. You shook off the chills. He crawled over to you and, hand engulfing your cheek, pressed his lips to yours in a stolen kiss. You smiled against his lips but returned the sweet sentiment. You weren’t sure you’d ever get used to kissing Liu Kang. It made those butterflies do flips again.

“Mmm…” You pointed at him and then gently poked his shoulder with the same finger. “Morning breath.” Your lips brushed against his as you spoke and you couldn’t take your eyes off of them. He laughed and it was a sweet and soft sound. He looked tired.

“Morning breath.” He repeated but did not pull away from you. His thumb brushed just against your cheek and then, despite your proclamation of morning breath, his lips captured yours again. Your heart was in your throat. Fuck morning breath, these kisses were well worth it. They were so sweet and tender, the perfect thing to wake up to. You shivered as he pulled back. Then he folded his arms on the edge of the bed and rested his chin on his forearm. You scooted back just enough to better catch his gaze.

Your past self never would have believed this. The woman who had woken up in the infirmary with Liu Kang taking care of her and had attacked him with a frail needle out of fear never would have believed it. You’d been attracted to him from that first moment and now here you were, lost in those dark and thoughtful eyes.

“I have to go but I didn’t want to leave without seeing you.” He offered a tired smile. Had he not slept? You figured that he had to go. Honestly, you’d expected him to be gone. He’d been so busy since you’d gotten back from Huangshan. The fact that he’d refused to leave that morning without seeing you was incredibly generous and thoughtful. You were grateful. If you hadn’t gotten to see him, you would have been wondering what it meant all damn day. You were going to be wondering that anyway but at least now you’d know that it hadn’t been a mistake. That sweet morning kiss had been the best reassurance.

“I appreciate that.”

“Are you okay?” His eyes were sparkling with mischief, as if he knew the answer, so you narrowed your eyes at him.

“You know damn well that I’m just fine.” You teased. He looked rather pleased with himself again and you couldn’t blame him, really. You were becoming quite the fan of confident Liu Kang. His cockiness was kind of adorable. It was less like a strutting bird the way Kung Lao could be and more like a puppy after being told they’d been good. “Are you okay? You look tired.” You leaned your chin on your hand, elbow rested on the bed. Liu Kang admired you, like you were just as worthy of admiration as he was. That was still something you struggled to wrap your mind around. You’d never put much effort into your looks. To think that maybe he had admired you the way you admired him when he wasn’t looking was astounding. It was wonderful.

“Yes. I’m working on a sleep deficit.” He pushed your hair away from your face and tucked it again behind your ear. You were an addict for that sweet motion. It gave you the chills again and your heart sped up. These were stolen moments in the morning with Liu Kang. What a way to start the day. You should have probably taken those moments to talk about this. To talk about what you’d done. About the clear and obvious connection you’d shared since the moment you met.

But now didn’t seem to be the time. He had to go. You would find time later. Not that he seemed to be rushing out of the room. No, instead of getting dressed he’d elected to brush his fingers through your hair. You closed your eyes and leaned into his touch.

You had plenty to think about after he left. You hadn’t been careful and you hadn’t been on birth control for about a month now, at least. Time was kind of funny since you’d gotten to Raiden’s Temple. Those days lost in unconsciousness had altered your perception of it. The idea of asking Chen for help with fertility issues made you want to die of embarrassment. But it was either see if the infirmary could help you out or find your way to the nearest city so you could help yourself.

You were happy to do that but you had the distinct feeling that going to a city involved asking Kung Lao, Liu Kang, or Raiden for permission and asking anyone besides Liu Kang would be mortifying. You’d work on getting your story straight first. Since you were such a horrendous liar, you had to come up with a legitimate reason to need to leave the temple, one that you could talk about without stuttering or giving yourself away. That was something you struggled with.

But that was a problem for later. Right now, you were enjoying your stolen morning with Liu Kang because you were sure that wherever he needed to be? He was late. These moments were made that much more precious. He had worlds to say behind his dark eyes but he didn’t say any of them.

There was no time.

But there would be plenty of time later. With any luck, you’d be seeing Liu Kang more consistently than you had been since you’d returned from Huangshan. Even if it was only late at night or in a moment of free time, you would take it. You longed for those days where you sat huddled close together, pouring over passages from a book. Just a few minutes in his arms was all you needed.

“I have to go.” He pulled his hand back with a heavy sigh. Then, regrettably, he began the process of getting dressed. You continued to admire him with a smile, eyes lingering on the dragon mark on his side. He looked to you in surprise and you shrugged. Then he bowed to you politely after he’d been dressed. “I’ll see you later, Y/N.”

“Later, Liu.”

He left, closing the door gingerly behind him. Then you whined and pulled the blankets over your head, curling up. That was a reminder of how naked you were.

You’d slept with Liu Kang.

It hadn’t been a one-night thing where you’d submitted to your attraction to each other, either. Part of you had thought that once you’d gotten that tension and lust out of your system then the attraction would have faded. Maybe your relationship would have shifted. But that hadn’t been the case. Not at all.

If anything it had made the tension that much more intense. You hadn’t discussed it but he had stayed with you. He’d waited patiently for you to wake up just so he could have that moment with you in the morning. There was no more hesitation before kisses either. He’d become quite bold.

Your heart raced just thinking about those gentle kisses in the morning and then the more intimate moments the night before. You pulled the blankets from over your face and fanned yourself. Sitting up, you felt your shoulder ache. Had you overdone it last night? In the heat of the moment you’d felt no pain but now it was back to aching. You should probably check in with Chen about your shoulder. You would consider how to ask about birth control without giving yourself away, too.

There were dozens of reasons besides sex to ask about it. You could use any one of those as an excuse to go to a city when Chen, inevitably, didn’t have any. It was as good an excuse as any and you thought you might be able to pull it off with a straight face. You wanted to take care of your reproductive health, that was all. Also you didn’t want to get knocked-up with any tiny versions of you and Liu. Getting up, you got cleaned up, dressed, and made your way toward the infirmary.

After rounding the corner that led to the stairs, you nearly ran right into Kung Lao. He beamed at the sight of you and you stumbled back and were immediately defensive.

Shit.

Childhood crush and best friend standing right in front of you. You were not ready to deal with that yet.

“Hey!”

You guessed he was likely on Y/N-duty again but he seemed pretty happy about it.

“Hi.” You didn’t mean to sound defensive and jumpy but you were defensive, jumpy and a terrible liar.

“Wow. Is that any way to greet a friend? What’s going on with you?”

“You surprised me and my shoulder kills and…” You managed to take a deep breath and relax enough to sound less perturbed than you were. Kung Lao grasped your wrist and urged you to show him the mark on your shoulder. You did, but with a roll of your eyes.

“Aching today?”

“Sounds silly but I think the rain makes it worse.”

“Not silly. I have this knee thing that’s like that. Old injury. When it rains like this it still hurts.” He shrugged and let go of your wrist then grinned. “I saw Liu on the way here. Did he stop by this morning? He looked happier than usual. Usually has something to do with you.”

“Uh…” You stuttered nervously and knew you either had to lie or spill your guts right there and you were not ready to spill your guts. You hadn’t even talked to Liu about it yet, dammit! “Yeah, I saw him. I’m glad he’s happy.”

“You’re being weirder than usual.”

“Am I?” You were high-pitched again and Kung Lao laughed at you but dismissed your weirdness. Thank goodness you’d been so weird lately that Kung Lao didn’t notice the difference when you were extra uncomfortable.

“The rain is supposed to stop soon so I figured we could go someplace safe to try and get your crazy arcana under control. If you’re up for it, that is.”

“I mean…” You weren’t sure that you were up for it but you also knew that it was important to do just that. You hoped beyond hope that it was possible. It would be nice to sleep without worrying about imprisoning yourself in your room or hurting someone lying in bed next to you.

“What’s your excuse today?” Kung Lao sighed rather dramatically.

“Excuse?”

“You’re full of reasons not to deal with it lately.”

“If the captain of avoidance is calling me out then it must be bad.”

“That’s right, Y/N.”

“I was going to the infirmary to get my shoulder checked out but I suppose it can wait.” You considered your options. It would be nice to feel capable for a few minutes. “It’s been worse than this before, so it’s not urgent.” You needed to get the whole ‘birth control’ thing settled too but waiting a few hours wasn’t going to change what you’d done. In the meantime, maybe you could come up with a reason for you and Kung Lao to go to the nearest city or something. He was easily distracted by shiny things. You could absolutely manage to get what you needed without him noticing.

“I can try to help with some stretches for it, if you want.”

“You’re not a doctor so I’m going to say no.” You headed again to the stairs. Even if you did go to work on your arcana with Kung Lao, you still needed food. You were ravenous.

“Y/N! I happen to be an excellent martial artist. You think I don’t know how to take care of my body?”

“Fine, fine. You can show me some stretches. You’re an excellent whatever. I need food. Are you coming or can I go?”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“I don’t care, Kung Lao. I need food.”

“Are you avoiding me? Because now it’s starting to sound like you’re avoiding me.” Kung Lao teased and grasped your wrist to keep you from going down the stairs.

“No, I’m not avoiding you. I’m trying to get breakfast.” You laughed though part of you thought avoiding him until you could talk to Liu was a good idea. You’d gotten so swept up in the night before that you hadn’t thought about the lifelong connection and romantic tension that was Kung Lao. It wasn’t like sleeping with Liu Kang made that disappear. Kung Lao had been your dream for so much of your life that now you weren’t sure how to feel. You felt guilty for the connection you had with Liu Kang even if you knew you shouldn’t.

You had to talk to Kung Lao but what exactly would you say? That you were mixed up after doing what you did with Liu Kang? That you weren’t sure what anything meant anymore? That seemed like a dumb way to start a conversation especially since Kung Lao ran from feelings like they were trying to kill him. You had to talk to Liu first but that also felt awkward. For a terrifying moment you considered that maybe Liu Kang wouldn’t want this to be more than a physical thing. It wasn’t like you’d actually discussed feelings even if you had come much closer to it than you and Kung Lao had.

Your tiny brain was suddenly so distracted by terrifying new obstacles that it went into panic mode.

“Are you okay? I was just teasing.” Kung Lao broke you out of your thoughts. He was looking at you as though you had seven heads. That was fair.

“I’m okay.” You calmed down.

“You’re being weird. Are you sure you don’t need to talk about something?”

“I’m sure.” You narrowed your eyes at him suspiciously. There was something you did need to talk about that you hadn’t yet. You knew about the bet that he and Liu had made regarding you and your choice. Liu had come clean but Kung Lao hadn’t said a word even though you were certain that he was the guiltier party. Liu Kang had taken responsibility for it but you knew them both well enough to guess Kung Lao’s involvement. “Is there something that you need to talk to me about?” You batted your eyelashes. Good. Turn it around on him. Then maybe he’d stop prying so much.

“Uh…” There was that guilt radiating from him again. It was brief. His face had dropped and his expression had tightened. But it was only a flicker before he was back to his goofy self. “No. You’re right though. Food first. If your arcana is still draining you then you definitely need to eat. And I could go for some tea.”

“Kung Lao, are you lying to me?” Hands on your hips, you watched him expectantly.

“You’d never be able to tell if I was, Y/N.”

“Oh? Is that so? Then how much of what you’ve said since you found me has been a lie, exactly?” He deserved this, you decided. Besides, you’d promised Liu Kang that you might pretend to be a little mad at Kung Lao until he told you the truth.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Y/N. Don’t be like that.”

“But if you’re such a gifted liar then how could I possibly be sure that anything is the truth?” You were proud to have successfully navigated your way through that conversation. You were no longer the one on edge.

“Wow, okay. I’m going to shut your mouth with food here in a second so we can focus.” He laughed, lazily urging his arm around your shoulder. “You’re thinking too much, Y/N. It’s a problem.”

“Is that a lie? If I can never tell that you’re lying, then everything could be a lie, Kung Lao. I had no idea you were so gifted.”

“I regret saying that.”

“You should.”

“Just please come eat with me. I’m sorry that I said I was such a good liar. I exaggerated for comedic effect, okay?”

“But what if that’s a lie.” You teased and then patted him on the back. “I’m kidding. Let’s find food.” You decided to go to the infirmary when you were done training with Kung Lao. For now you would get food, train, and go from there. You’d try to convince him to go into the city with you too. Why not?

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