#hence why theyre more dramatic looking while hes just. sitting there. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

psychosassicvampire · 3 years

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ok the people want details about the skate park au

@pixeliis @futuristicwormsociety come get your food

its all very fast and loose but these are a handful of my concepts [proceeds to unfurl a scroll about as long as todd is tall]

- yes dirk actually skates and he’s not tony hawk but he’s decent

- todd is mesmerized by this anyway because we are starting off on s2 levels of “dirk is so important to my life” adoration. in reality dirk is fairly awkward and dorky but todd just has sparkles in his eyes about it. also dirk has cool jackets which more than makes up for a lot of awkwardness especially in the eyes of your bi peers

- todd does NOT skate (yet). he takes an adolescent amanda to the park so she can skate because she’s badass and cooler than her brother and he sits on a bench nearby to draw or carve mindlessly into things or does some spray paint graffiti and tagging while he ‘babysits’ per their parents’ request. eventually dirk rolls around and befriends amanda as his fellow skate park buddy and todd is starry-eyed about him from afar. he secretly draws dirk in his sketchbook sometimes.

- amanda catches on to her brother’s crush and she keeps trying to set them up. she’s 11 or 12 and it becomes one of her personal missions. young girls are extremely tenacious in their goals. meanwhile todd is shy and has dreadful self esteem with both girls and guys so he resents this.

- dirk occasionally leaves his jacket with todd at the bench and asks him to watch it for him while he skates with amanda - dirk gets along with kids well. todd can almost never speak in response to his requests but he usually nods his head hopelessly about it. at some point dirk asks todd why he doesn’t skate too. he’s just embarrassed to try something new and says he can’t. dirk calls bullshit and takes it upon himself to teach todd and get him used to being on a board. they do have to hold hands for this sometimes. todd falls a lot. hence the pink bandages. amanda gets a habit of yelling “KISS HIM” across the concrete at random intervals of their nearness which todd apologetically waves off as his sister being weird, oh you know how sisters are, and please shut up amanda.

- neither of the siblings have pararibulitis at this time nor have either of them lied about it yet. they can skate and get injured to their heart’s content... for now.

- i have to credit theo @drawyourgunsr5 for the basis of the family feud which adds our romeo and juliet flavor. dirk’s family has recently come over from england and are wealthy enough to have bought out the business that the brotzman’s parents used to work at, and they have since lost their jobs. the brotzman family has been falling on hard times for it since, and the parents resent the gentlys for it. when they find out dirk is a gently, and that he frequents the local skate park, they are furious. eventually the brotzman parents bar either of the kids from going back to the park, though todd blows them off and does so anyway. dirk hates his own family and their claustrophobic expectations on him as their heir and would rather run away and be a rebellious skater wannabe, spending ridiculous amounts of his parent’s money on leather jackets they dont approve of and spending time with the mall rat kids. so he is on tenuous ground with his own family.

- todd is 18 so he technically could just run away from home and the tension therein but he’s sort of a third parent to amanda because the parents have to work so much at various part time jobs to make ends meet they’re almost never around and he doesn’t want to abandon her.

- dirk could also run away from home and nearly has plans to, though his consequences for doing so would be costly. later on when dirk and todd are finally in the realm of acknowledging their crushes on each other under flickering lamplight on the concrete, still warmly radiating the heat back from the summer sun, dirk admits he would give up everything his family has to offer him, all of the money, all of the influence in high places, to be with todd, and that todd is the single most important thing that has ever happened to him (spoken with all the naive drama of tragic teens in love and also sound of nothing).

- todd isn’t so confident about a dramatic escape being the best move, and he’s especially not thrilled about giving up a potential for security. his family struggles a lot and in the back of his mind he knows he or his sister could have a pararibulitis onset attack any day, and being out of money doesn’t bode so well for any of that. he loves dirk for dirk, but he also knows that while money doesn’t buy happiness it sure as hell can make life more possible. he’d rather try to keep things copacetic with the families if he can, at least initially.

- they meet in secret often, and on one or more occasions dirk has climbed into todd’s window unannounced. separately, dirk has invited todd over to his place and had the bright idea they both climb in through a window there too, whereupon dirk tells todd to push his bum to make him go up. (his own house is harder to climb into and he is a fool.)

basically theyre obsessed with each other and theyre stupid and i was like yeah but what if our boys had more piercings and looked like they woke up after sound of nothing more often (because this look changed me)

and then i realized i could do what i want so i did and i am

thank you for attending my self indulgence

#dirk dyes his hair black and todd bleaches his hair every now and then #dirk does it because he wants to rebel in a very passive and classic way against his uptight british parents #todd does it because he's queer and insecure and alternative and what else are you going to do when you can't get more piercings every time #you wish you could change yourself #you bleach your hair.#also todd helps amanda do ombre dye kits from the convenience store to her hair in their bathroom sometimes because he's a loving brother #it's the little things. or the extremely grandiose gestures if you're dirk.#he lives large even if he tries to blend in with the other kids in suburbia.#he skates to the park but he does have the 'vette. he leaves it at home to not draw attention to himself #todd sees it in the driveway the first time he sneaks over and freaks out behind the hedges about it #dirk says he traded in the car his parents DID buy for him to have this and they hate it but the title for the gift car was in his name so #they couldnt stop him. but they hate the decisions he makes.#they think his bright blue wrapped vette is a gaudy immature eyesore and theyre right and i fucking love it #alright im shutting up now #but thank you for your comments i live for these kindnesses #dghda skatepark au #dghda au #brotzly #todd brotzman #dirk gently #amanda brotzman #replies #futuristicwormsociety #pixeliis #.txt

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vitalmindandbody · 7 years

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What’s the world’s loneliest metropoli?

In Tokyo, you are able to rent a fondle. Loneliness is a health edition in Manchester. And perhaps nobody is as isolated as a migrant worker in Shenzhen. But can we really just knowing that makes a city lonely?

New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabiliser, wrote Henry Miller after gotta go back to the city following almost a decade in Paris. It could be expected that the Brooklyn-born novelist would have been happy to return, hitherto something didnt sit right:

In New York I have always experienced lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which fetches on misdemeanour, sexuality, alcohol and other madness. Miller didnt hurt for friends or allure he was married five times but he saw himself as an interloper, forever and ever the laughable guy, the lonely mind, and it was his hometown that brought on this delirium of loneliness.

Could Millers paroles be proof that New York where countless parties have gone to find honour, work, affection and even themselves is the loneliest metropoli in the world? Or is it possible that the person , not the place, was different sources of Millers discontent? And if so, whatisthe loneliest metropoli?

Urban life is more traumatic than rural areas, but whether its lonelier is a place at the end of the debates among social scientists. A 2016 report by Age UK mentioned there are higher incidences of loneliness in metropolitans, but precisely what delivers it on is surprising. The same report found that gender and education are predominantly irrelevant except for those with the highest level of education, who are often lonelier and that household income and caring for a pet too have little effect.

Isolation is one of the biggest problems faced by Vancouver tenants. Photograph: Ben Nelms/ Reuters

So what impacts loneliness, and how does that play out in municipalities? The sizing of a household inversely affects how you feel: the smallest private households, the more lonely it tends to be. And people who rent or own a residence are lonelier than those with a mortgage, perhaps because municipalities with lots of renters such as London, which is expected to have 60% of inhabitants hiring by 2025 have greater transience, and potentially lower parish action. New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco have rental representations hovering in the mid-5 0s. Renters reign in German cities, extremely a long-term trend assigned to low-pitched leases and housing programmes, but one that are able to be brought to an end forcing neighbourhood engagement.

One thing is certain: the percentage of those who live alone has increased dramatically. In the US, 27% of beings live alone, up from 5% in 1920, and in New York City its approximately one one-third. The same veer is evident in Canada, and even more pronounced in Europe 58% of people in Stockholm live alone, a figure that is considered the highest in Europe. In numerous metropolis, the trend is here to stay. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there will be 1.3 m more single-occupancy households by 2025, a jump of approximately 60%, and one who are able to audience major metropolitans and affect better access to cheap housing.

Obscured by those figures, nonetheless, is the assumption that were alone have contributed to loneliness two things the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, columnist of Disappearing Solo, replies are often conflated. In knowledge, theres little proof that the rise of living alone is responsible for establishing us lonely, he wrote in 2012. Research shows that its a better quality , not the quantity of social interactions that best prophesies loneliness. What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we detect alone.

The demographic that most reports appearing lonely are older people, and they do often lives alone. In Stockholm, 35% of beings over the age of 75 experienced loneliness, while in Bristol 10 -1 5% reported the same.( Hence the slogan Bristol: a brilliant region to grow old .) Older people are likely to be more lonely in metropolitans, especially if they are poorer, have physical or mental health issues or live in underprivileged countries.

Campaign to Objective Loneliness suggested that 7% of older persons in the UK are lonely, while age investigate Thomas Scharf saw that 16% of older persons in expropriated neighbourhoods in English cities has been seriously lonely. Manchester fared worse than Liverpool or London, which may explain why it is considering loneliness as an city health issue: it developed the Valuing Older People programme in 2003 to address, among other issues, loneliness and quarantine. Similar campaigns have jumped up in other metropolis which recognise that loneliness scampers tandem to topics such as discrimination, housing, healthcare, and quarantine among elderlies and others susceptible citizens.

The networks of migrant workers in China might help to stifle isolation, but living and working conditions can be difficult. Photo: Andy Wong/ AP

But its is not simply older people who suffer from quarantine. In Australia, city dwellers have fewer acquaintances than they did two decades ago. In the US, a troubling one in five people said they had only one close friend. Or consider idyllic-looking Vancouver, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, which contends is not simply with affordability( it was recently crowned the most expensive city in North America ), but also with friendliness.

The Vancouver Foundation thinktank questioned community leaders and kindness to identify the biggest editions facing Vancouverites and were to say it wasnt homelessness or poverty; it was isolation. Of 4,000 parties from 80 -odd ethnic groups “whos” polled, one third of respondents noticed it hard to make friends something I detected firsthand when I expended a rainy, gray-haired wintertime working in Vancouver, strolling Stanley Park alone with my dog at weekends and sitting in army cafes by myself. In this young, diverse municipality, the newly arrived conflict most: among people who had been in Canada for five years or less, nearly half( 42%) had just two close friends.

A dearth of friendship doesnt afflict only recent immigrants. Many Tokyoites long for pals so affectionately that theyre willing to hire them. American columnist Chris Colin, plotted by Japanese affection for hire manufactures such as cuddle cafes and cat rentals, spent age with a service that provisions temporary acquaintances. The clientele was run, he wrote: widowers, shy single categories, that one buster who just wanted a pal whod do him the solid of waiting seven hours outside Nike to snag these fresh sneakers for him when they went on sale. The largest of the rent-a-friend organizations, Client Marriage, has eight chapters in Tokyo alone.

Japanese cat cafe have become popular with those who live in urban areas, as has the idea of tendernes for hire. Picture: Junko Kimura/ Getty Images

Across the Sea of Japan, theres a different trouble: large-scale migration. As urban Chinese move to big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, they encounter separation on an epic tier. As of 2012, a astounding 230 million people had migrated from the countryside to cities.( More than half the countrys population now live in municipalities, up from one one-third in 1990.) Known as the moving population, they can find themselves in low-quality, high-density housing, subject to discrimination and at risk of low-pitched social participate, especially if they move frequently.

Researchers canvassed Chinese reports on community social networks, neighborhood connects and marginality and determined that migrants were more neighbourly which may used to help offset quarantine but faced discrimination and, in a number of cases, grisly living conditions: one corporation in the factory metropoli Shenzhen rooms more than 200,000 hires in dormitories, which theres been an epidemic of suicides. The report memorandum: The vicinity for them is likely to be the factory. Yet in Beijing migrants had greater neighbouring intensity in other words, theyre better at connecting with their home communities suggesting that migrants may accompanied much-needed hamlet qualities to the lonely urban jungle.

If life in Chinas megacities shows anything, it might be that loneliness is often due to event. This wouldnt bombshell Olivia Laing whose brand-new journal, The Lonely City, chronicles a post-breakup stint in New York.The concept with cities is we are absolutely surrounded by beings, Laing recently told the Globe and Mail. We can see other people living richer, more populated lives than our own. At the same epoch, we can feel very uncovered there are lots of gazes on everyone. That is why the loneliness of the city has a particularly distinct tang to it. Loneliness, however, is often like bad weather, it transfers through our lives.

So are parties in Shanghai or Berlin more lonely than those working in Stockholm or Vancouver? I set the question to one of the fields resulting researchers, the University of Chicagos John Cacioppo, who wrote the book, Loneliness. His research quarrels the idea that urban life is inherently lonelier than rural areas, and he declined to play favourites and select merely one city. You invoke an interesting question, he reads. Regrettably, we have no data with which to address it. Maybe Laing is privilege that city loneliness is ephemeral. Or perhaps we are in a position learn lessons from Henry Millers struggle with New York; in 1944, he packed his handbags and endeavoured to sunny Big Sur, California.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion