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krinndnz · 11 months

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An Ad-Hoc, Informally-Specified, Bug-Ridden, Single-Subject Study Of Weight Loss Via Potassium Supplementation And Exercise Without Dieting

Here's the short version: I lost 30 pounds in 6 months by chugging a bunch of potassium salt and exercising a lot. My subjective experience is that cranking my potassium intake way up made it possible to do a lot more exercise than I had been doing without also eating a lot more. Exercising more without also eating more led to weight loss (as one would hope!). I did not diet: I ate as I had been doing and as it pleased me to do. Do with the raw data as you please.

Losing weight this way is unusual and worth paying attention to because many things about increases and decreases in weight and obesity are very poorly understood. Many people would like their personal weight and obesity levels to be different, so anything that improves our collective understanding of how to make that happen is valuable. However, losing weight this way is an experiment: it's not necessarily safe to do what I did! Part of why I did it was to find out what would happen, and if you have any kind of existing kidney problems then you definitely should not do what I did. Note to other transfemmes: if you're taking spiro, that counts as a kidney problem.

I also don't want to overstate the significance of this experiment: what I've been up to in the last 6 months amounts to a single data point that happens to also be 1,100 spreadsheet cells. It's a data point that is highly suggestive, sure, but it would be extremely ambitious to say that it proves anything beyond "this worked for me" and perhaps "it's not impossible for this to work". I am writing about it because as far as I know, this particular experiment is something that nobody else has tried, and, again, anything that improves our collective understanding here is valuable.

The long version comes next: how I came to be doing this experiment, what I did in the experiment, what I plan to do next, and finally what I think about it all. The really long version is the ongoing conversation that this post is part of, starting with A Chemical Hunger, which is a book-length literature review about the 1980s–present global increase in obesity prevalence, also the posts about single-subject research where the same authors discuss the limits of what can be learned from experiences like mine, also the Experimental Fat Loss guy and his wide variety of diet-only experiments, also some critics who disagree.

How I came to be doing this

At the tail end of 2022, I noticed both that my BMI had hit 30 and that I had become very unhappy about my weight. There's a specific photo where I didn't realize until I saw the photo that my belly was hanging out over my waistband and it's vividly unpleasant in my memory. Around the same time, I happened to find the potassium-supplementation community trial that the Slime Mold Time Mold folks were running. The value proposition was "this will be easy, cheap, and safe, but also it might not actually work," and that sounded good to me, so I signed up for it and took a modest amount of potassium all through December and January. It kinda-sorta worked: I lost 6 pounds. Not nothing, but "it kinda-sorta worked" is the most one can really say about losing 6 pounds in 60 days.

The low-dose potassium delivered on all of what the SMTM folks promised, though. It was easy, cheap, and safe. So I kept doing it and, since I was already doing the potassium, decided that I should get an exercise habit going. I am a big believer in the idea that it's a tremendous amount easier to go from doing Something to doing More Something than to go from doing Nothing to doing Something. The low-dose potassium got me through the first step: once I was doing Something about my weight, it was relatively easy to do More Something. When the community trial ended in early February, I didn't have to worry about messing up its results by departing from the trial's instructions, so I started taking more potassium and building my own experiment. I also kept in touch with the SMTM authors, who were very encouraging. 🐯💕

By late March I had brought myself up to daily amounts of potassium and exertion that seemed good to me, and I stuck with those. This is the first time in my life I've focused on trying to lose weight, and I was not fully prepared for how demoralizing it is that the weight change from day N to day N+1 sometimes seems perversely unrelated to what you were doing on day N. Fortunately I have experience with spreadsheets, so I put together a tracker for myself that focused on the trailing-week average of my daily weight and exercise measurements as well as long-term graphs. Three months of data were enough to put together a chart whose trendline said very, very clearly, "what you are doing is working — keep it up!" With any kind of long-term project it's very important to create and sustain sources of feedback. All else being equal, the longer it takes before you can get a read on "is this going well or poorly?", the worse it will go.

I decided that my goal would be to get my BMI from 30 (the lower limit of "obese") to under 25 (the upper limit of "normal"). Happily, the math is very easy there: for my height, a BMI of 25 rounds off to 200lbs. I further decided that I was willing to spend all of 2023 working on this. That decision is why I'm writing this post now: halfway through a project is a natural time to pause and take stock.

What I did

By the end of March, my regimen was firmly settled and I kept at it through the end of June without further tinkering. The daily goals I settled on were 10,000mg of potassium and 1,200kcal of exertion. That amount of exercise worked out to be 90 to 100 minutes per day. For contrast, in 2022 my average amount of exercise per day was 15 minutes and my average exertion was 500kcal.

I used my smartwatch's exertion number ("how many calories are you using above the amount you need to burn to be alive at all?") and gradually walked up my daily goal, settling at 1,200kcal/day partially because it was working and partially because one hour of watch face equaling 100kcal was helpful for being able to read "how close to my goal am I?" without thinking hard about it. Most of the exercise was treadmill time, usually a brisk walk or light jog. Over the months I also did some running, some bicycling, and some hiking, but treadmill time was the reliable, unremarkable, do-this-every-day core of my exercise regimen. It took a while to ramp up to that amount of exertion and there were definitely days when I stumbled, for good reasons and bad. However, in general I hit the exertion goal and in particular had it absolutely dialed from early March to mid-April.

It was easier to be totally rigorous about the potassium-intake goal — it helped that that part only took a few minutes per day, instead of 90+ minutes! I used potassium chloride powder (whatever came up first on an Amazon search since all KCl should be alike) mixed with regular Gatorade (i.e. not the sugar-free kind) to make it taste okay (I recommend blue Gatorade, it's the closest to appealing when kaliated — the yellow lemon-lime was meh and the fruit punch red was awful). I added two heaping teaspoons of KCl powder to a 20oz. bottle of Gatorade and drank that. KCl is about 52% potassium and a heaping teaspoon of it is about 6500mg, so I rounded up a smidge and called that 6600-and-a-bit milligrams of potassium per bottle. On Thursdays and Sundays I drank 2 full bottles and on other days 1.5 bottles. I recorded this as 10,000mg of potassium on regular days and 13,500mg on Thursdays and Sundays.

Is 10,000mg of potassium a lot? It's a lot more than average! The SMTM potassium trial post contextualizes it helpfully:

For a long time, the recommended daily value for adults (technically, the “Adequate Intake”) was 4,700 mg of potassium per day. But most people don’t get anywhere near this amount. In every CDC NHANES dataset from 1999 to 2018, median potassium intake hovers around 2,400 mg/day, and mean intake around 2,600 mg/day. In this report from 2004, the National Academy of Medicine found that “most American women … consume no more than half of the recommended amount of potassium, and men’s intake is only moderately higher.” Per this paper, only 0.3% of American women were getting the recommended amount. Similarly low levels of intake are also observed in Europe, Mexico, China, etc. But in 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine changed the recommended / adequate intake to 2,600 mg/day for women and 3,400 mg/day for men. They say that the change is “due, in part, to the expansion of the DRI model in which consideration of chronic disease risk reduction was separate from consideration of adequacy,” but we can’t help but wonder if they changed it because it was embarrassing to have less than 5% of the population getting the recommended amount. In any case, recommended potassium intake is something like 2,500 to 5,000 mg per day for adults, and many people don’t get enough. Potatoes are exceptionally high in potassium. A single potato contains somewhere between 600 and 1000 mg of potassium, depending on which source you look at. They are the 6th highest in potassium on this list of high-potassium foods from the NIH, and 9th on this old list from the USDA. If you do the math, this means that someone on the potato diet, eating 2,000 kcal of potatoes a day, gets at least 11,000 mg of potassium per day, more than twice the old recommended intake.

This explanation is most of why I decided to stabilize at about 10,000mg per day: because that's about how much potassium people were getting during the SMTM potato diet community trial. Because that community trial involved around 200 people, it was unlikely that there would be any truly heinous health effects from knocking back that much potassium, especially together with the anecdotal evidence that inspired the trial. Aiming for that amount also meant that it would be easier to compare my results to something that worked decently well and to ask questions like "is there something special about whole potatoes, or is it mostly the potassium?" If it's mostly the potassium, you'd expect my results to be closer to the full-potato-diet results than to the low-dose-potassium results — which is what happened.

I measured those results in a very basic way: ordinary bathroom scale, first thing in the morning, every day. Considering how much noise there is in weight measurement, there's just no advantage to measuring it more often. I kept the circumstances of the weigh-in simple and stable, trusting that that was good enough. I also measured exertion in two other forms — step count and exercise minutes — but that was mostly for my personal curiosity because both are basically downstream of exertion as such. Similarly, I tracked my sleep but didn't expect that to matter a whole lot.

While I was affirmatively not dieting, I want to make sure to talk about my food habits because I could be missing something that's easy for others to see as unusual but seems totally ordinary to me. My meals are heavy on pasta, rice, bread, and granola. I work diligently to get enough dietary fiber. I eat some meat but not a lot (eating a pound of meat in a week would be above average for me), and I enjoy coffee but not a tremendous amount of it since usually I make Chemex-style coffee and having a bunch of that in a day would be too time-intensive. My go-to snacks are cashews, pistachios, cherries, and granola bars. Like most people, I should eat more dark leafy greens than I do. I use a generous hand when measuring out olive oil. I believe that if you need either milk taste or milk fat, you shouldn't half-ass it, so when I need milk taste or milk fat, I rely on whole milk and heavy cream. Fats, generally, taste good. I eat more whole food and food I personally cook than I eat packaged and processed food, and I only infrequently eat restaurant food (weekly pizza night, maybe twice a month other than that). I really like sour candies but basically stopped eating them last autumn after some very patient coaxing from my dentist. Once in a while, dark chocolate, usually with the nuts and fruit.

I ate as I had been doing: I ate the food I felt like eating and ate as much of it as I felt like eating. If I felt like eating more or less, I did that. Since I wanted to keep the exercise habit going regardless of whether or not I lost weight, it was very important to me to not make the exercise any more difficult than it had to be. Going hungry would definitely make it more difficult, so I avoided doing that. One way in which I'm very sure my experience generalizes is, it's much easier to persuade people to try "add this supplement to what you're already eating" than to get them to try "replace all of your current food with potatoes," especially when talking about long-term or indefinite-duration changes.

What I plan to do next

I'll be thrilled if I can recapture something like the 7-week March/April streak I had going. Most days in this period (44 out of 49) were PB days (i.e. a day where my trailing-week-average weight was the lowest it had been since the start of the year) and no two consecutive days in this period were non-PB days (i.e. if a day wasn't a PB day, both the day before and the day after were PB days). I was losing almost 2lbs per week and exercising a lot and I felt great. However, my intuition is that that was the honeymoon period of going from mostly-sedentary to exercising regularly, and that I should expect further progress to be more difficult, to be like the less impressive results I got in May and June.

Still, the thing as a whole has definitely been successful enough that I'm going to keep at it until the end of the year, re-evaluating again in December (and maybe when I hit my weight-loss goal, which should happen around halfway between now and then). Since I'm using January 1st as my anchor date for the start of the experiment, it lines up nicely with the calendar if I just keep going all year and see what happens. Besides, I only need 6 months more to generate a year of data, while someone going from a cold start would need a whole year.

Given that I have a setup that is working pretty well, I'm reluctant to tinker with it. I might add one more high-potassium day in addition to Thursdays and Sundays, and I might start tracking some extra data — even though I'm not trying to change them, recording my food habits seems like the most helpful additional thing I could record.

If I develop health problems I'm gonna pull the ripcord (and post about it). There are already too many shitty fake weight loss regimens in the world that fuck up the health of people who try them, we do not need more.

What I think about it

Since I'm the one doing this experiment, I get to be excited about how it's working out for me personally, which is to say, very well indeed. Right now it seems pretty certain that I'll be able to reach my goal of losing ~50lbs in a long-term-sustainable way and just as importantly, getting myself to a much better baseline state of physical fitness. I feel pretty great about that part!

The experiment is not just for me, though: the reason it's an experiment rather than just "I'm trying to lose weight" is that I am keeping track of things carefully such that other people could carry out the same steps I did and get results similar to or different from mine and ideally everyone eventually comes to pretty firm conclusions about whether this — losing weight via potassium and exercise without dieting — works or not. My chugging potassium and Gatorade for six months to a year is the very beginning of that process, and I expect that the difficult parts of the process will be carried out by people with more expertise and resources than me.

I also expect that I have not tumbled to the One Weird Trick for weight loss that everyone else just overlooked. As someone with plenty of programming experience, I have a hearty suspicion towards "well, it worked on MY setup" stories. One obvious alternate explanation for my successful weight loss is "well yeah, you doubled your exertion and kept your food intake the same, of course you lost weight" — but I don't find that explanation satisfying. To start with, if it were that easy, people would do it more often. There are a tremendous number of people who would like to lose weight and a tremendous marketplace of devices, services, and professionals to help them use exercise for that purpose, and yet in a 20-year NCHS study, average exercise rose without obesity falling. It's also very, very easy to find fat people who exercise plenty — you will find them more or less anywhere you find lots of people exercising, as well as in places like sumo stables. A member of my family has taken up powerlifting in the last year, making him both fitter and heavier by quite a bit.

Additionally, there's studies like Keating 2017 concluding that short-term exercise intervention doesn't do enough to matter, or like the Wu 2009 work concluding that exerise-and-dieting isn't meaningfully better than just dieting over periods of 6+ months, and then there's the STRRIDE study, Slentz 2004, concluding that jogging 20 miles a week can get people to lose about 7 pounds over 8 months. The STRRIDE study caught my eye because it's pretty similar to what I did: they took obese mostly-sedentary folks, had them exercise more, and forbade them from eating less. However, once you do the math the results are much less similar: the average STRRIDE participant did around half the exercise I've done for at most a fifth of the weight loss (i.e. around 1lb/month vs. around 5lbs/month and around 3mi/day vs. 7mi/day). If someone else told me "Krinn, your naïve just-hit-the-treadmill exercise regimen is 2.5x as effective as an exercise regimen supervised & measured by professionals," I would want them to provide some compelling evidence for that.

If you tell someone you want to lose weight and would like their advice, it is overwhelmingly likely that the advice will involve exercising more. Everyone has heard this advice. And yet, as Michael Hobbes observes in a searing piece for Highline, "many 'failed' obesity interventions are successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions" that simply didn't result in weight loss. Even if we as a society choose to believe "more exercise always leads to weight loss, most people just fuck up at it," that immediately confronts us with the important question, why do they fuck up at it? and its equally urgent sibling, what can we learn from those who succeed at it to give a hand up to those who have not yet succeeded?

I find the SMTM authors' metaphor for this helpful:

[exercising more and eating less] is not an explanation any more than "the bullet" is a good explanation for "who killed the mayor?" Something about the potato diet lowered people's lipostat set point, which reduced their appetite, which yes made them eat fewer calories, which was part of what led them to lose weight. Yes, "fewer kcal/day" is somewhere in the causal chain. No, it is not an explanation.

Since I've been doing this for six months, I feel pretty certain that the potassium is doing something positive for me and I'm entirely willing to put in another six months to find out what happens for me. Finding out whether that generalizes is beyond my power: all I can do is explain what worked for me, one middle-aged Seattle housewife, and hope that it's useful to people who are in a position to do serious work about it.

One kind of serious work that's available is the very cool analytic techniques that other people in this conversation have used while looking at their data. If you are the kind of person to get elbows-deep in R or Matlab, feel free to grab my day-by-day measurements for that (I release this data under Creative Commons' CC0 if that's relevant to you). I'm not going to do that, though, partially because it's been a long time since I last used R but mostly because of the thing I said earlier about my whole experiment basically being one data point. If you have a data series, then yeah, get in there with some numeric interrogation, but if you only have one data point, that data point is what it is and statistical analysis can't really add to it. All I can claim here is that this is a new data point: people going about their everyday lives do not spontaneously increase their potassium intake severalfold and the background work from the SMTM potato diet and potassium community trials tell me that no-one's run a study looking directly at what happens if you do increase your potassium intake that much.

Do you want to increase your potassium intake that much? If you do, I have to re-emphasize the potassium community trial's safety warning: if you have existing kidney problems, do not try this. Also I'm gonna deploy the boldface again to make sure I get this across to other trans women: on this topic, taking spiro counts as a kidney problem! I am not a doctor and I'm extremely not your doctor, you should talk to your actual doctor if you have any kind of potential kidney issues and even if you're in good health and want to try chugging a bunch of potassium, you should titrate up gradually the way the SMTM writeup suggests (which is also the way I did).

In addition to a general spirit of responsibility, those warnings are important because otherwise just telling you that this is easy would sound like a recommendation. Did I mention that the experiment was easy? Easy easy. Piss easy. Lemon squeezy, etc. Of course building an exercise habit wasn't easy, but the potassium part didn't make it easier or harder, and the potassium part itself was pretty trivial. Mix this powder into Gatorade a couple times per day, drink it, done.

That said, if you do want to try this, godspeed and please write down how it goes for you. I recommend building positive reinforcement into whatever you use to track it; my personal spreadsheet for this is adorned with color-coding and happy emoji. I also recommend at least thinking about the following questions, whether you're going to do this, evaluate the results of this, or both.

How safe is it, in general rather than for me particularly, to chug this much potassium? This is the big one: "just mix potassium salt into Gatorade and drink it a few times a day" is so incredibly easy that even if the effect size is small, it could benefit a huge number of people, but of course it doesn't benefit them if it's not actually safe to do that.

Does this replicate? If it's not safe it matters a lot less whether it replicates, so the safety question comes first, but if it is safe, then one would immediately want to find out whether it works for 1% of people, 10% of people, or 50% of people.

How much do other mineral nutrients, particularly sodium and magnesium, matter for this? Maybe they need to be combined in some specific way, as this Twitter thread suggests.

Do sex hormone levels matter? I'm a trans woman and I've been having problems with access to HRT in this timeframe. Given how many things in one's body testosterone and estrogen affect, and given that previous obesity research has shown differences based on hormone profiles, that's definitely something to keep an eye on. Also because spironolactone in particular messes with renal function and potassium metabolism, I expect that it affects this. Digression: spironolactone is total bullshit as an anti-androgen of first resort. It sucks and I hate it and I should have switched to other anti-androgens even sooner than I did. If you're using spironolactone as an anti-androgen because it was the first thing your doctor tried for that, you really should try something else and see if that works.

I steadfastly avoided dieting. I like my existing diet just fine, and that's why I preferred the "what if I just chug a bunch of potassium" plan. All else being equal, I'd rather try things that let me eat what I like than things that require throwing my relationship with food into upheaval. But of course you wonder, what would happen if you did combine dieting and exercise and potassium? The ExFatLoss guy has been busy trying a lot of diet-only interventions and he's got a lot of interesting results. I am not the person to try it, but it's one of the obvious things to try, so I hope someone does try it.

How does this interact with the munchies? If you decide to try what I tried and you, like me, enjoy living somewhere where marijuana is legal, I think you should look at whether the potassium changes how you experience marijuana-induced hunger/overeating. One of the things I found very striking about the matter is that it was possible for me to chug enough potassium that the marijuana-induced hunger was drastically reduced. I expected the opposite since the potassium was causing me to eat less (relative to exertion) at other times. However, I have very strong habits about marijuana (exactly twice a week, edibles only, same amount every time) and I'm not willing to change them for this, so who knows how this aspect will work out for others. Definitely something to keep an eye on, though. Even if I wasn't losing weight, the potassium reduces marijuana-induced overeating enough that I'd probably keep going with it just for that effect.

Conclusion

I spent 6 months trying to lose weight with lots of potassium and exercise but without dieting. So far I have succeeded. Unless something disastrous comes up, I'm going to keep trying it for at least another 6 months and going to keep recording what I'm doing. I'm particularly curious to see where I'll plateau, since I assume at some point I'll start getting really hungry and/or tired instead of accidentally starving. I hope that my experience and the data I've recorded from it, are useful to people who are looking into questions about obesity and weight. Please feel free to use my data and my writeup (this post) for that. If you want to try doing as I've done, good luck and stay safe: this has worked for me but it is still experimental, it might be unsafe and/or fail to work for you.

#potassium #obesity #n=1 #slimemoldtimemold #citizen science #achemicalhunger #more or less accidentally doing science and that's kind of a weird feeling ngl but I hope it helps someone <3 #krinnposting

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lmelodie · 8 months

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got distracted by cartoons, have a late ask game ask!!!!!

i wanna know! #s 5, 7, 8, 12, 25, 26, and 30!

Is that too much? MAYBE! But I feel like at this point in my internet life and our interactions and such, this is just to be expected ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I will not be chill w/ q's next time fr fr)

(i am lying)

5. Estimate of how much of your art you post online vs. the art you keep for yourself

Oh I post SO MUCH of my stuff. The doodle dumps are to blame mostly. Thats gotta be an 80/20 ratio on stuff that sees the light of day. This website is my dumping ground and i will use it like a fucking landfill.

Here's an ANCIENT doodle of the actual canonical characters of this franchise for the trouble.

(Small Buddy with elf shoes is a whole staple fyi)

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate

As per last ask, Comic artists! I do not have any will whatsoever to be stylistically consistent at all! I appreciate the people who can so many characters that many times AND convey a story. Cheers to that bro, could not be me.

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in

I don't know about any other projects I've abandoned but here's a character I've abandoned! Kinda, not really. Its Death! Death WILL make an appearance in CC, in the finale, but they've gotten a redesign as of late so here's what they used to look like

Thye used to be VERY self-inserty, but now their gonna be a lot more god like and much more ambiguous. Just you wait til Lucy meets them in person >:)

12. Easiest part of body to draw

Hands! People say their hard, but I think I've done enough studies to where I can crank out a decent hand like nothing. Love drawing hands.

25. Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by

I don't remember ever receiving a direct comparison to something pertaining to my art 🤔 Now I'm curious as to what it reminds people of!

26. What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended

Most of my pieces are pretty straight forward. We do it for the sillies here. I'm really blanking on this one! I dont do too much hidden meaning in illustrations, if I want something to look cool im gonna try and make it cool. Not a lot to interpolate lol

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

Probably a tie between these two!

It's probably because i starred at both of them it until my eyes bled but I like em! The lighting on Mera and Kills and the rock bridge on the wild west one scratches my brain itches.

#asks #thanks dani!#because you went hard on the asks #i went hard on the visual aids >:)

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legionofpotatoes · 2 years

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God, that post about movies being so dark that you literally can't see what's happening just reminds me of all those "realism" reshade mods that people make for every game where the saturation is gutted and contrast is cranked so hard that you can't even see your character's hand, let alone something that's 5 feet in front of you

Like, guys, nighttime doesn't need to be darker than satan's anus, horror and tension can exist without relying on sensory deprivation, skittish camerawork, and jump scares, and there's this magical celestial body called the fucking moon which literally reflects sunlight back at the planet to indirectly light up most nights (and I guarantee, like, 99% of fictional planets also have moons)

Need to give these people some 30-grit sandpaper and call it toilet paper, I swear they wouldn't know the difference

If we're talking games, the arrival of HDR did that more than anything. Devs got seduced by those high highs and low lows in light and shadow and started hurriedly implementing them, sometimes at the cost of legibility, and sometimes not. There's lots of good and bad examples but at the end of the day it's up to your goals on how it will affect both sides of the diegesis (is it important to see the face of this cliff in nighttime? if it is, is it also important to see the parts of it that you can climb?), and you will certainly get modders who will push things to even more naturalistic extremes without rhyme or reason. Them's the breaks I guess! But I think it's fine to use sensory deprivation and painting with light and shadow as essential building blocks if your game is something that relies on mood and tension a lot; it may feel played out, but cinematic language is both an important tool and a good shorthand in establishing a connection with viewers/players. It's always about deftness of execution, and being intentional with your lack of legibility whenever you do have it. It gets much harder when you're talking open world games with that slippery slope of art direction and global illumination constantly playing tug-of-war, but I think we're slowly building necessary tools to mitigate that as well. I keep bringing up the witcher 3 as a great example of that.

And if we're talking movies as I was then it's a whole different ballgame. Photography at nighttime is tricky as hell and the reason I mentioned Peele was specifically because him and his cinematographer (looked up just now; Hoyte van Hoytema) literally developed a new way to shoot night scenes in broad daylight by processing and using infrared data to retain visual fidelity after color grading, and that is why his night scenes are so legible at long distances yet tangibly dark and moody. It is a great way to retain naturalistic flavor while sacrificing minimal wiggle room for art direction. Miller's Fury Road, on the other hand, shot at noon and did very little to minimize the soft lightboxing effect from the sun; it is a highly stylized film with an even more heightened visual flair and it felt like a perfect way to depict it during the night, with an almost monochromatic edge. Again; intentionality wins in all of these cases. You light for the story you're telling.

Thank god we don't have people modding films. Actually, you know what, don't even tell me. I'm sure there's a rabbit hole here entirely not worth exploring.

#anon #asks

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signalwatch · 1 year

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Watch Party Watch: Reform School Girls (1986)

I'm sure this movie had a poster, but mostly existed as a worn out VHS

Watched: 04/28/2023

Format: Amazon Watch Party

Viewing: Unknown

Director: Tom DeSimone

So, first: Apologies. It's probably best that I actually remember the movies we're going to watch more than a few key scenes. This movie turned out to be a bit much more than I recalled it being, and I find it insane I was watching this on cable when I was like, 13.

Ah, the 1980's.

I was a bit surprised that no one had seen this, and many never heard of it. It's a cult-classic of the 1980's, and a lot of what made it so has faded in the ensuing 37 years.

This is a movie that, as Jenifer put it, covers all the tropes of the "women in prison movie" and then cranks up the exploitation (this is New World Pictures, one of the Roger Corman brands). So, it's assuming an audience that has grown up on slew of "women in prison" pictures that started showing up post WWII as earnest socially conscious filmmaking paired with, you know, ladies kicking each other, which was a novelty. Plus a host of other sketchy activities, some explicit, many implied.

1983's Chained Heat - which stars Sybil Danning but as a prisoner - is a pretty good indicator of what was going on at this point. It has legit actors (Henry Silva, John Vernon) but is clearly an exploitation picture. Mostly I remember 1980's-me wandering the aisles of the video store and being acutely aware there was more than one movie about women in jail, and some vague promise of sexiness. But since my Mom was paying, I was not asking to see these films.

Reform School Girls is loosely based on the 1957 film Reform School Girl, which I have not seen. But also familiar if you've seen other pictures. It's mostly been forgotten, but 1980's hip young adults were very into reflecting back the absurdities of the 1950's American monoculture. If you go back and watch other 1980's movies, usually lower budget stuff, but you can see the Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, etc... But also much as folks like myself born in the 70's grew up with 4 or 5 channels, most of which was reruns of stuff from decades prior. So, yeah, I imagine replays of those old movies were part of all that.*

The movie itself follows a teen girl who gets in trouble with the law, which lands her in court and on to "reform school" (but good luck pointing out when anyone is in class in this movie). The movie hits all the notes of prison and women in prison films, starting with the "you don't know what you're in for" messaging to the lead and therefore us. And then cue the humiliations of entering prison, paired with the exploitation of a 1980's Corman flick. And that's when I realized "oh yeah. This is probably full of nudity", which is an awkward moment with a chat full of people.

The movie's stars are Sybil Danning (who many dudes of a certain age has a passing knowledge), Pat Ast (whom you should Google), and Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics, who is 37 and playing... 45? and 17? I dunno, but I've thought she was great since I was 13 or 14. And then actually stars a supposedly 16 year old Linda Carol (I am suspicious of her listed birth year) as our POV character hero.

I *do* think the movie is funnier than was taken by the group. Everything is at 11. It's all absurd, including the atrocities of the film, and that's kind of the point. But maybe that's just not where we're at these days. We kind of are more aware of actual exploitation in a way the 1980's was not. But the movie could have leaned into the absurdity more and had fun with it instead of saying "no, the joke is how woefully dark this is going to get, and we're going to refuse to take it seriously".

All in all, I wish I'd revisited it solo, but here we are.

*it's funny. Growing up in Austin, we really didn't have much in the way of TV on local channels after 10:30 PM except SNL. I read lot of references to latenight movies playing on local TV, but by the late 1980's, I was watching Reform School Girls on cable, not the movies that inspired it. I don't remember what would have been playing on our UHF channel, if, in fact, they hadn't signed off. I suspect the larger cities of the 1970s had more of this, but we just didn't.

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#movies #prison movies #Reform School Girls

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loganinjapan · 19 days

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Day 4 ACTIVITES:

Today was like a fast-paced sprint and not a full-length marathon. Not too bad, but it had its moments. Imperial Palace: A lot of walking. Damn damn damn. But it was very very very beautiful. We walked through the gardens and went through a bunch of nature. I ended sitting on a bench and just taking in as much high quality fresh air as possible for 30 minutes. It was absolutely divine. I could have used more electrolyte drinks though (and *actual* Pocari Sweat this time, please...). There were these super steep inclines that absolutely cranked and tweaked my hip. Still nursing it while writing this. Overall, the nature was heavenly, but the walking was hell.

Yasakuni Shrine: I'll be blunt - this was a bit of a forgettable stop for the day. I can dive into the lore a lot more deeper on the academics post as this is a very historic and controversial spot in Japan. I didn't pray at the shrine out of personal reasons, but I did cleanse my hands and mouth before going in. I was honestly more focused on hopping on the taxi and getting food and electrolytes into my system. Lunch: I'm back at Takadanobaba Station to finally try Yuragi, the white katsu curry that evaded me on Day 1. I headed inside the restaurant with one of my fellow groupmates and after figuring out the ticket machine, I waited for my order. It was a small shop operated by one guy and I got to sit at the counter and watch him cook up a masterpiece. I won't mince any words. THIS was the best meal I've had in Japan so far. The tonkatsu was super crispy yet moist and the curry was addictive. The cheese on top added texture and taste that just boosted this dish to a whole new level. Forget the hamburg steak. When I die, bury me in a giant crockpot of white curry. Absolute 10/10. Even better than wagyu steak. Akihabara: Short and simple, I got my first anime figure - Ritsu Tainaka from K-On! She's one of my favorite characters. Lot of interesting-looking people in those Akihabara stores, by the way... TeamLab Borderless: Honestly, this was a bit of an underwhelming tourist trap. Don't let the social media posts fool you - there are only maybe 3-5 cool exhibits and everything else is just pretty crap projected onto a black wall. At $40 a person just to take photos in an overcrowded digital art museum, this was a bit of a miss. I did get some cool photos though and the music sounded good. But I probably could have spent more time at Akihabara instead. Dinner: Logan's first Tomahawk Steak. My goodness. We went to a place called Cedar Chop House Bar & Grill. I ordered clam chowder, me and my groupmate split a medium rate tomahawk steak, and I had some key lime pie for dessert. Everything was really delicious, but I'm taking a point off for the wait time - two whole hours. Bleh. 9/10. Pretty fun day. Doing some farming stuff tomorrow!

#japan #studyabroad

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dzpenumbra · 11 months

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7/15/23

6 AM. The creaks got me at 6 AM today. On a Friday morning. They were stomping around at midnight. They were stomping around at 2 AM, when I was writing my journal last night. Then they were up at 6, to the point where I just got up... after about an hour and a half of sleep... and again at 8. I don't even know when these people sleep. I don't even know how to sync my sleep schedule with them because it's just been constant and completely unpredictable.

Well... I just came down from jamming two improvised shims into the gap between the floor beam and the molding. I think it's just shoddy craftsmanship, a crap-build closet with cheap molding and the sound is likely the nail creaking inside the wood? Or something similar, I'm not well versed in this shit. But I was, through somewhat creepy and obsessive fixation and patience, able to identify the exact beam that was making the noise by... standing there and waiting. Just standing there for half an hour and just... waiting and watching. And sure enough... thump thump thump CRAAAACKcrackcrack thump thump And I took one of my cheap-ass foam brushes from 4 years ago that I never use and ripped off the foam top and whittled the handled into a wedge. I rammed that in between the beam and the molding, then waited. And waited. And sure enough, it made a difference. Not a huge difference... but a difference. So I just got done putting in a second one a few inches over on the beam, closer to the nail. And the footsteps have stopped, so I have no idea whether this worked or not. I guess I'll see in about... hmm... what time is it... 1:30? 4.5 hours? XD Oh god. Yep, this is what my life has become.

I really don't know what else to do, it's been 5 fucking days. I'm so delirious that I'm actually feeling high. I actually feel somewhat stoned. Like... "on the edge of freakout", "things are getting a bit surreal" stoned. So... I'm thinking I might as well just take a low-dose of the tincture tonight and go for it.

I went back to bed at 8AM and put my headphones in. I put on a binaural sleep thing and cranked the volume. It worked. But, again... only got about 5 more hours because the fucking batteries died. I'm still so pissed about that, they work really well when they work, but this battery life is just ridiculous. So, I just got up. I felt more rested than I had in a bit. 5 hours is a lot compared to 1. Plus, I had to be awake to get my groceries.

Today was basically a chill at home and get stuff done around the house day. Groceries, shower, more bead work, laundry. I was going to go skating despite the sleep deprivation, but the weather kept saying thunderstorm warning. The thunderstorms were supposed to start at 4 or 5, they started around 8. And they were intense, but short lived. So... I could've skated. Which sucks, but it is what it is.

The big thing from today was... I finally did my Instagram post for my hoodie. I even had some progression pictures from last fall to add in, from when the hoodie was just a freehand sketch in white pencil, progressing all the way up to the painted final product. I told the whole backstory, it was nice. It's been up for about 5 hours now. It has gotten 2 likes.

It isn't about numbers, it isn't about fortune or fame. It's about the work actually getting out there and finding people who like it, who want to see more, who want to support me in creating what I create... so I can pay my rent... And it shocks me how scam artists can find me like a fly finding dog shit, but somehow Instagram's professionally crafted perfection of an algorithm can't seem to find a way to get my art in front of people who are looking for that type of content. Hmm... must be my fault. Maybe I didn't Instagram correctly. I must not have played the game properly... hmm... wow, but really impressive how those ads do seem to be fine-tuned to the degree that they feel like they're fucking listening in to your conversations and shit. Really crazy how the ads are perfectly crafted to get companies who pay for ad space priority algorithms which actually work... while all the non-paying cattle can play the popularity game... the parallel algorithm that is designed to snowball popularity. See, I was gonna say... "If only Instagram had a functional algorithm that had a way of getting your posts in front of people who would really really be interested in it... you know... like their... ad... algorithms... oh..." So... I guess fuck me then.

It's not a matter of wanting validation. It's not a matter of wanting a self-esteem boost, though that would be an incredible bonus. It's about establishing a dialogue with an audience. And I can't fucking establish a dialogue... if no one can fucking hear me... because half of their feed is recommended popular accounts they don't even follow, and 1/4 is targeted ads. So yeah, I guess the reason I didn't post it sooner? The reason I'm kinda venting about now. What's the fucking point? One person who was a fan of my streams 3 years ago but has never shown an interest in my art clicked the "cool" button; one stranger did too, which is a bonus, I guess. I guess it's better than just... not posting it? I don't know.

Are people just that jaded now? Idk. I don't wanna go down that road. Whenever I start talking about "people" in the abstract like that it just gets super depressing real quick. Fuck that.

So yeah, that happened. Checked that off the side quest list on my whiteboard. And I decided to at least start sketching for the grip tape art on my trick deck... but I'm really just considering going straight to paint. I just... I have to be careful about layering paint, I have a tendency to layer paint really thick to get nice smooth blending. But thick paint means... less grip. So yeah, no, gotta be careful about that. I started sketching in colored pencil on grip tape. It's... something. It leaves a temporary sketch, kinda... but it's all like chalk dust, the second you touch it... it just comes right off. And it absolutely destroys pencils. So... yeah. I started doing the raven head, I didn't like the sketch... I wiped it off and started to sketch the circles for the mandala and that worked alright. Then it was just really late so I just called it.

The only other thing notable about today was... my meal plan thing. Today I tried one of the meals off of my new meal plan. I'm 100% vegetarian now, except for the fried chicken that was mistakenly delivered to me (instead of rotisserie chicken strips) and sausage that's in my freezer. It wasn't a big leap, and I still eat eggs, so there's that. I tried this meal that was basically like a caprese salad but with whole wheat pasta. And they wanted me to make two servings of it. And I followed the directions... and it was a fucking ton of food. A mountain on a plate. Like... I would not have eaten this much if the meal thing didn't tell me to. I would've eaten like... 2/3 the amount the recipe had me make. I'm fucking stuffed. But it was really light food so... yeah. I don't know. So I'm just kinda confused at this point... what to do diet-wise. I don't think my diet really has to change that much, I just have to be more conscious of calories? I guess? I honestly don't know. It just really caught me off-guard that after getting on this meal planner thing... my meal size went up... Maybe it's just the adding in of the exercise that made a difference. I have lost a visible amount of weight. Maybe I didn't need to change up my diet so much... as I needed to change up how sedentary I had become. But hey, cleaning up my diet a bit, cutting back on the butter and cheese a bit more... it ain't hurting.

The cholesterol is the scary part for me. And I still don't really know what to do about that diet wise... I guess fiber? That's been going well, and replacing milk with almond milk was seamless. Still don't know about eggs and all that. But yeah, honestly? I'm just really hoping I can get this whole sleep situation figured out pronto... because I haven't been exercising the past... 5 fucking days now. I did a full 30 day challenge straight into 5 days of forced insomnia and no exercise. I'm scared to exercise on such little sleep. It does not feel healthy at all. At all.

So yeah. I'm going to take a super low dose of tincture. I put together a playlist of good vibes hippie songs that should keep me from going to a bad place (fingers crossed) if I'm woken up and happen to be high... which is the exact reason why I stopped taking it in the first place. And... I put the shims in the ceiling so the creak noise should be significantly less. I hope. And... I have the AirPod music as an option in my back pocket, but the most it will get me is 6 hours. So... that's the arsenal. Is it enough? Only time will tell.

Oh, one last thing. My beans aren't doing well. The bottom leaves are really wilted and one of them went yellow. I think I overwatered them. I feel horrible for doing that to them, I really don't know how often to water stuff. My tomato loves water, it's watered like twice a week no problem. My Night Blooming Jasmine loves water so much that I had a mold problem in its soil and it flat-out didn't care. The thing has grown like a fucking weed. So... I've been trying to go by soil dryness but... I guess I didn't check well enough and overwatered them. So... I'm going to leave them until the soil is like... super-dry. I'm just not going to touch them at all and pray they don't have root rot. And hopefully they bounce back from this. Everything else is doing pretty damn well. The Pothos are all doing really well, they all have extra leaves now, all nice and healthy - from leaf cuttings in the mail from halfway across the continent to flourishing established plants. The Raven ZZ is just... doing its thing, growing like a damn weed and I'm trying to not stress about it potentially outgrowing its pot. The propagated succulents are doing very well, one failed but the rest are going strong. The chili has 2 peppers and plenty of flowers. The tomato has gone through a ton of flowers but... they just don't seem to be pollenating well. Or... I am not doing a good job helping it pollenate itself. So... I'll try to give it more attention, shake it up a bit. I've just been super gentle with it after its stalk keeled over twice. And that's pretty much the whole gang... the orchid is still kickin, kinda dormant... I haven't been watering it as much as I should because it really really needs distilled water and distilling takes like... a whole fucking day for like a quart of water. So... I'll have to get on that. It's not like I can just not water it. And I still want to plant that basil, I've put that off long enough... so maybe that's tomorrow's goal.

So yeah, that's where I'm at. All just hopes and prayers going forward from here that I can just get sleep fixed so I can get out there in the world. Its such horrible timing. I finally take a giant leap, I get confidence, I want to get out in the world regularly. I have a place to go, I have plans (the trails at the farm nearby and going to the skatepark), and the second I do that... my sleep gets fucked. For an entire week. By college students. I really really hope I get a solution for this soon, because I really don't know what else I can do.

Just a quick tangent. I know this is a PTSD thing. I know it. It's a nervous system thing, a hypervigilance thing. It's a "I'm not feeling safe, there's a wolf at the door" thing. Every time the jets fly overhead confirms it for me, it's not the same feeling. Having the maintenance guy actually enter my apartment validated it too, it was the same feeling, but to a lesser degree because that part of my brain had more information. Yep... this reflex was less severe when someone actually was inside my apartment. Because it's a reflex, it doesn't work by logic's rules. I know it's PTSD, I know it's isolation, I know it's living alone. But I still feel like... the way I put it when I posted in a support group this morning just looking for advice... I feel like I should be able to tank this. Like I should just get over it. Learn how to sleep heavier. Just get better. Or something. Like... I feel like this is somehow my fault, and it's part of living in an apartment, and I shouldn't expect peoples lives to revolve around mine. And I know that's my PTSD talking, my shit self-esteem, my broken self-worth, my self-blame. The problem is... it's partially right. This is part of communal living. And I don't really like this way of living at all. I want nothing more than to be in the forest right now. I just... need to find a way to get people into my life, to meet a community and develop a social network. And I thought moving here would do that... automatically, I guess? I don't know. And my isolation would get super bad in the forest alone, I know that from experience. Not that there are even places in the woods to fucking rent, they're all goddamn AirBnBs bought up by companies during the pandemic and converted into micro theme parks for rich ski bums to pretend they're "quaint and rustic" for a few days and then they sit empty for months at a time. I don't even know if I have any option but to... just somehow magically figure this out.

I found myself crying this morning. Going "I don't want to go on Xanax again. I don't want to go on Seroquel again. I don't want to go on Mirtazapine again. I don't want to eat fistfuls of Benadryl before bed again." Sleep problems are what sent me on meds in the first place. Desperation. Being out of answers, out of options. And going on and off of meds completely fucked up my life. I still haven't recovered. All because I had panic attacks and struggled with sleep from undiagnosed PTSD. That's all. So yeah. This is a pretty tough moment. It's not just... annoying loud neighbors. It's not just laying there with my eyes closed trying desperately not to engage with a gnat swarm of racing thoughts for literal hours at a time. It's not just jumping out of my skin and feeling like my heart is being stretched every time I hear that loud creak. It's the potential implications of what I might have to do if I don't find a non-medication solution for this. And all of the trauma associated with that. It's a doozy.

So... it's not quite as simple as just... someone getting cranky about noisy kids... then rolling over and going back to sleep. This is... someone who has had their life decimated by PTSD, constantly wrestles with agoraphobia... who is jostled awake by sounds sending him into biophysical flashbacks... repeatedly making him relive the physical and emotional sensations of traumatic events... every day. And then has to spend sometimes hours trying to calm his nervous system down enough to even consider sleep, because his heart feels like he just went on a fucking rollercoaster and his mind is racing like he just snorted a fat bump of coke.

But like... try explaining that to a complete stranger... Let me phrase that better... I would have to explain that to a stranger to be taken seriously, and even then it might be a stretch. I would have to expose how fucked my life is, how frail I am... just to possibly get some peace. And even then, there are no promises.

Ugh. And all this because some people just... moved to a top-floor apartment... and walk heel-toe, thumping their entire body weight unto their talus --- DAMN, it's calcaneus. I was close though, not too shabby considering I haven't studied bone anatomy since... 2009, I think?

Okay, enough dreading and dooming. I've done 5 nights of this, I can do one more. Fingers crossed. Goodnight (hopefully). Hey, that's a good song title...

#diary #journal #online journal #stream of thoughts #stream of consciousness

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wizkiddx · 3 years

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work with me

this is for @worldoftom 'lolbrosgetsicktoo' challenge event thing - go check it out bcos lots of much better writers have got involved too✨! I'm v new to these things but I tried :) the prompt was: 'would you quit whining and just get in the bath' . (also look at me acc posting sort of regularly, who'd of thought?!?!)

warnings: sickness / fever (more dramatic than it needs to be) / LOTS of medical inaccuracies

summary: when tom doesn't take advice and ends up very ill, very far from home, there's one person whose stuck dealing with it

“Please Tom… I need you to work with me!”

It wasn’t his fault he was being a complete nightmare, though your patience was wearing off somewhat.

For context, you were in Morocco, where he had been filming part of his next film, which only made trying to take care of him that bit harder.

Everyone got ill sometimes. It wasn’t his fault.

That was the mantra ringing through your head, even if you had a more challenging time believing it. Tom wasn’t stupid, as much as he liked to joke about it. HOWEVER, what he was less good at was heeding warnings. He was a white boy in Morrocco; the health and safety briefing had literally been aimed at him. Had he taken the advice not to eat any dodgy looking meats at the market?

Of course not; that’d be boring.

Everyone else was fine. You’d all sampled Morroccos culture without giving yourselves the worst case of food poisoning you’d ever witnessed. But not Tom - possibly one of the only ‘indispensable’ people on the set. If you, or one of the minor characters, or even the director, had got ill - the show could continue.

When you’d been rudely awoken by your phone going off, you’d known instantly. It was as if you’d told him not to take a bite out of the weird burger once you were away from the eager view of the street vendor. Sure enough, with bleary eyes, you hissed at the brightness of the phone screen before seeing ‘Tom H’ on the screen.

“Y/n?” His voice was croaky, but just from the single call of your name, it was clear he was feeling sorry for himself.

“Are you okay? It’s late T.”

“Um I… can you come over? You…you might need the key I’m - um- in the bathroom.”

As his stylist, it technically wasn’t part of your job description to also be mother when he was sick, but (unfortunately for you) after the 3 years working side by side with him - you were also friends.

Which you were almost regretting by the second time rinsing the toilet bowl clean after he’d evacuated what seemed to be the majority of his vital organs into it. Honestly, it was impressive how he managed to keep going.

That had been at around 4 in the morning- the doctor had been called at 8, coinciding beautifully with his 5th toilet extravaganza. Once the doctor had confirmed your original, if completely unqualified, diagnosis of food poisoning - you hadn’t been able to bite your tongue. Perhaps an ‘i told you so’ might’ve slipped past your lips, but Tom was a bit too out of it to argue back.

You’d been given firm advice from the doctor - he said little sips of water, rest and control his temperature. It all had seen pretty simple - though the action? Not so much.

It wasn’t his fault, yet Tom was not super compliant. You and Harry had both been taking turns in practically forcing him to take sips of water, having to turn off ‘modern family’ till he did. The blackmail had put you both in his bad book.

Honestly, thank the lord Harry was here too. You’d woken him up at seven, begging for help and since then, you’d tagged teamed. While one was looking after Tom, the other was phoning the director, the doctor, and the crew to inform them of the current situation.

Again, of all people. Why’d it have to be Tom?

Mainly because you knew how mortifying he found this. He didn’t like people fussing over him, never had. He liked to work hard, liked to make people happy - definitely didn’t like to feel a burden. Perhaps what made him feel ten times worse was that he knew he was inconveniencing the whole production team massively.

And yes, as you’d unhelpfully reminded him, it was ‘his fault’.

The lavish hotel room, big bathroom and pretty efficient AC still didn’t manage to mask the pungent in-the-back-of-your-throat smell from the bathroom. At the doctor’s advice, who had been a little concerned at Toms fever, Harry had cranked the AC on high. It had forced you to steal one of Tom’s big hoodies and a pair of joggers- you hadn’t left his room since he first called you, still wearing your tiny pyjama shorts and an old tee.

“Please turn the air con off.” His little voice whined from where he was lying, huddled up under the covers. Perched on the other side of the double bed, but over the covers with your laptop on his lap, you could actually feel him shivering with the chills. It felt like you were torturing the poor boy.

“T you know I can’t. It’ll make your fever worse.” The way he looked up at you, like a little Labrador that you were refusing to pet, actually pained your heart.

Okay, so yes it was his fault, but you weren’t mad, you just felt so awful for him.

“Please I’ll- I’ll pay you more.” His voice was hoarse; though he denied a sore throat, it sounded like the constant sickness was burning his windpipe.

“Tommm” you pouted, sticking your bottom lip out “I don’t want your money, want you to get better.”

Apparently giving up, brown eyes shot you the filthiest look in disappointment, rolling to face away from you. You thought he was giving you the silent treatment in a huff, but instead, he was praying on the weaker one.

“Harry, I’ll buy you that set of golf clubs-“

“NO!” You had to interrupt before Harry would say yes - because from the way his younger brother shot up from the arm chair, he was about to. Scowling eyes slowly focused back on you in annoyance, making you huff - shutting the laptop and kneeling on the bed to face him. After pressing the back of your palm to his forehead, which was scorching hot, you sighed. “I know you feel shitty and I’m so so sorry but I’m trying to make you better. So shut up, drink this and go to sleep!”

Like a child scorned, you received another death glare however, then he complied, taking a sip of the water you offered before lying back - huddling even tighter.

And it had been relatively peaceful for a few hours; Tom seemed to be getting some sleep - even if he was tossing and turning. Eventually, a prescription that the doctor had requested worked its way through the system, Harry getting a text to say he could go pick it up. The nearest pharmacy was probably a 30 minute drive from the hotel, so he left as soon as.

This left you alone with Tom, where the situation only descended into more chaos.

Almost as soon as Harry had left, Tom had stirred with a grunt. All it took was one look at his face for you to know. Both of you leapt up and flew into the toilet, Tom once again getting very familiar with the Moroccan toilet bowl.

This time though, when he had leant backwards, he’d sort of lost control and flopped most the way - you catching him before he could hit his head on the tiled floor.

“Woah, easy there!” It wasn’t like he’d passed out, but the look in his eye as he slumped into your lap… he wasn’t all there either. “Hey Tom… you with me? Tom?”

Lazily he blinked up at you, not really replying except for groans of half-formed words.

Deciding this had all got a bit direr, you almost sprinted back into the room, grabbing your phone and returning. He was still on the floor, his thumb and first finger pressing into each eye - groaning again.

“Hey Tom? I’m gonna call the doctor you need anything?” He whined in response, stopping only when you stroked his sweaty hair back, most of your attention on dialling the correct number.

The solution he’d given wasn’t pretty: Tom’s fever was too high hence why he was all woozy and groany. Until the doctor could get over with the stronger medications, you needed to lower his temperature in other ways or take him to hospital. He’d absolutely hate hospital, but the other choice? Boy, was he not going to like it either.

Ignoring Tom’s croaked question of what you were doing, you busied yourself switching on the bath taps. You let the water run until it was the right (very mild) temperate, then turned back to Tom, who’d managed to work himself up to sit against the sink unit.

“The doctor says you need it.” His brain was foggy, his mind was slow but your tone told him enough to know something was wrong with the bath. “Just take your clothes off and then I’ll help you-“

“Absolutely fucking not.” Good. He was still with it enough to argue.

“I am just as uncomfortable as you are Tom, but we both know you can’t stand up without fainting, so you are going to need my help.”

“Y/n!”

“Keep your boxers on and it’s just like a fitting! I’ve seen you have those before!”

It was clear as day just how emasculated he felt, especially because he knew you were right. Sitting up at this current moment was a push; there was no way he was getting in the bath without some help. Defeatedly he nodded, but gave you a piercing look to turn around before he started wiggling himself out of the flannel pyjama trousers and light cotton t-shirt. Most confusingly, he still felt freezing cold, yet he had long since learned not to argue with you - especially when your justification came from the advice of a doctor.

Your cue to turn around came in the form of an extra angry-sounding grunt- the look you got when you did wasn’t much better either. It was a weird contrast, though, having someone who physically appeared so indestructible (a superhero for crying out loud); to have been absolutely beaten to a pulp by a few mouth fulls of weird meat. You had seen his bare torso before, although it still wasn’t something easy to get used to - making you clench your teeth together just slightly. A very welcome view.

Perhaps you looked just a little too long at the man who was technically your boss, hunched angrily on the floor in nothing but his calvins - another grunt shaking you out of it. By now, the bath was almost full and you hurried to shut off the water, feeling your cheeks heat up as you cursed silently to yourself.

“Okay come on, gimme your arm.” Begrudgingly Tom followed your request, slinging his arm heavily over your shoulder as you crouched beside him. As strong as he looked, you knew right now he felt powerlessly weak - all that muscle was just going to be almost dead weight.

Now it was your turn to grunt and groan as you pulled Tom up to stand, him focusing on blinking away the headrush he got.

“Come on T work with me here.” Getting him to the side of the bath wasn’t too difficult, the issue came when he stepped with one foot into the bath and yelped, instantly withdrawing as if it was a literal ice bath.

The sudden movement had you both losing balance, ending with Tom sitting on the edge of the bath and you leaning over him, in between his legs, and slapping your hand on the wall opposite purely so you both didn’t end up in the bath.

“Tom!”

“It’s like ice water!”

“Its lukewarm like the doctor said!”

“It is not its from the fucking arctic!”

“Oh for god sake!” Exasperated, you paced up and down the bathroom shaking your head at his ridiculousness. This was ALL. HIS. FAULT.

You came back to him with an ultimatum.

“It’s this or the doctor said I had to drag your ass to hospital.”

“Nooooooo.” The 25 year old seemed to convert into a whiny three year old again.

“Those are the two options. So will you PLEASE quit complaining and get in the bath.”

Keeping up the toddler persona, Tom huffed but reluctantly nodded in agreement - you had come up trumps. It didn’t stop him yelping when you helped to lower him in. His breath was shaky, as a response to the ‘cold’, but he was firming it. At least when you felt his forehead after a couple of minutes, it certainly seemed as though the fever was starting to ease off .

“You can go if you want.” His voice was murmured and as you looked up at him, he did his very best to avoid your gaze.

“Not a chance, if you drown on my watch, Nikki will never forgive me.” At the very least he seemed to appreciate your joke, scoffing a little with a small nod. “If you don’t want me here I get it. As soon as Harry’s back, I’ll swap with him.”

“No! It’s not that its… I’m just an ass when I’m ill.”

“A self aware ass, though.” Again he chuckled a little, as you folded your arms on the edge of the porcelain tub, resting your head lying to one side. “You had me pretty scared there for a moment, you know?”

He nodded a little, creating a wave of ripples in the water which you watched to avoid his gaze - which you knew was tracing all your features inquisitively.

“Hey it’s in the job description, always a bit dramatic... I’m sorry though I should never of called you- don’t know why I didn’t just get Harry.” In response you tutted, taking a moment to lean up and push his sweaty curls back a bit.

Just because you could, it was allowed in this moment.

“’m glad you did.”

“Yeh me too” He sighed, eyes fluttering shut in the easy silence of the bathroom. You kept a vigilant eye on him for the next 20 minutes, checking the temperature of his forehead using the back of your hand, whilst he seemed to finally get a bit of proper restbite, appearing like the worst had passed. You had no idea what was taking Harry so long; in fact it was the doctor that arrived first- who you ran to let in (not wanting to leave Tom asleep in the bath one bit).

Whilst the doctor did all his checks, taking his temperature properly this time, satisfied that it was much more manageable. He still wanted to set him up with some oral rehydration rescue packs to get his hydration status a bit better and give some anti-sickness tablets and antipyretics.

Having actually been getting some rest before all the prodding and poking, Tom was back to being a grumbling dick - now not wanting to leave the bath (the irony was real - making you roll your eyes). Once again, he appeared embarrassed to have you see him like this, so you left the doctor to help him get out and changed- instead going down to reception to get a fresh set of sheets, as he’d done a pretty impressive job of sweating through the old ones.

Even if tired and grumpy, when Tom exited the bathroom, he looked much better - he was walking himself without the doctor’s help. Which honestly was such a relief because when he had passed out on you, you genuinely were terrified. Thankfully the doctor stayed for the next 20 or so minutes, which was just when Harry returned with a bag of medications - which were now wholly redundant, given the doctor had already supplied everything.

“What happened?” Harry asked you in a hushed voice, whilst Tom was distracted with getting his medications. Recounting the story of Tom pretty much passing out, Harry grimaced for you, then launching over to give you a tight hug.

“Are you okay?” That was a novel idea, you hadn’t really thought about yourself at all - but honestly, you were a bit shaken, having been running on adrenalin for most of the night.

“I-uhm… yeh I think so… just-just was a bit scared, I guess? Felt bad too because he didn’t want me there but-“

“I can promise you Y/n, he did want you there. Just probably embarrassed he wasn’t all manly and that…” With a nod, you smiled softly at the frizzy-haired boy.

Whilst working with Tom, it also meant getting pretty close to his younger brother. The two Hollands were almost attached at the hip, which you were very much okay with.

It was weird though... your relationships were completely different. Harry was just your brother, through and through. He wound you up like a sibling but also knew you as if he had your whole life. With Tom… it wasn’t that. Arguably, you were closer to Tom, but on a different level. It was more exciting, more nerve-wracking and heartwarming all at the same time. Honestly, you couldn’t get your head around it properly.

“Hey, you’re probably shattered. Why don’t you go back to your room and get some sleep? I got it in here.” You knew Hary was trying to offer something nice, and now all the excitement had worn off, you were unbelievably shattered. But you didn’t like the idea of not being there, as a just in case.

“Uhm, I think I might just stay, you know?” And he did, with a deliberate, knowing smile, he nodded.

He knew you were worried. He knew Tom had really really scared you. He also knew how much you cared about his brother.

Just like how Harry knew Tom wanted you there, even if he felt embarrassed. Well, anyone would- when you are passing out half-naked in front of the one person that really matters.

It was just at this point that the doctor was done, giving Harry instructions about the rest of the day, when you made a beeline for the bed. Tom was propped up against the headboard, still with a pale sullen look and tired eyes, but a bit less clammy and more human. He cracked a smile as you crawled up onto the other side of the bed, kneeling next to him.

“How’re you doin’?”

“All drugged up, just feel fucking exhausted.” Instinctively you reached up to feel his forehead, really appreciating the fact it felt almost normal.

“Join the club mate, I had a 5am wake up call too.” You almost whispered, intending to make Tom laugh, but instead only getting a pout.

“I am sorry, a-are you going to go back to your room?”

“Nah” Tom’s eyes didn’t light up, except the fact that they very much did. “Can’t trust you not to get into trouble while I’m gone Holland.”

“Thanks.” He laughed weakly before shimmying down on the bed, so he was much more comfortable. “And thankyou, I-I’m sorry I’m a dickhead and made your life-“

“Shut up Tom!” Laughing, you lightly slapped his arm, also leaning down on the bed, so you were lying facing him. “You’re all feverish; go to sleep before you say something stupid.”

There was a long pause, Tom just gazing deep into your eyes, because he was pretty sure what he was thinking was nothing to do with the dodgy unidentified meat he’d had the evening before.

“What... like asking you out?”

…..

“Maybe that wouldn’t be so stupid.”

~~~~im really not sure how I feel about this one, let me know what you thought ;) ~~~~

tagging: @lovehollandy12 @hallecarey1 @crossyourpeter@hollandfanficlove

#tomholland #tom holland fluff #tom holland angst #tom holland x y/n #hurt comfort #tom holland x reader #tom holland imagine #harry holland

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ziamhaze · 3 years

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My Future in Fic

Yeah, so, the 100k fic that I’ve been working on for the past six months? The one that was going to be uploaded to AO3 last week? Yeah, it’s accidentally getting published...

Where do I start?

I suppose with a massive thank you to anyone who’s clicked on any of my fics over these past two years. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I never ever thought about writing as a career. I’ve never written anything prior to my Harry Potter AU Compartment 451. I didn’t even take an English class in undergrad or grad school. I genuinely just had an idea for a fic I wanted to read and since no one had written it, I had to do so myself. Since then, I’ve written every single day for 2 years. I left my job in the entertainment industry, got accepted to one of the best creative writing programs in the world on a scholarship, and now one of my stories is being considered at Harper Collins. Yes, the Harper Collins. It’s the longest shot in the world, but for legal reasons I was not allowed to upload the fic version on any website prior to submission. Even if they don’t pick it up, I’ve been advised to continue to shop it around to agents.

What I can do, however, is share the premise.

If you’ve been following my tumblr and watching my tags - I SEE YOU ALL OUT THERE - then you’ll know that this fic was meant to have Zayn with his signature undercut hairstyle and one more little thing...

Someone sent me an ask a while back about what this fic was supposed to be about. I believe I said something about it being an adaptation fic, but not from a film/tv show/other piece of literature, from a song. This next fic was meant to be an adaptation of the song Younger by Ruel. Later on, it also took shape with the help of Remember by Liam and a few others that you can find here.

The miniature summary is as follows:

When his father suddenly passes, twenty-nine-year-old Liam Payne is brought back to the Sydney suburbs where he grew up. He doesn’t plan on seeing his childhood best friend, Zayn Malik, at the burial service. They haven’t spoken since going from brothers to strangers one fateful day fifteen years prior. But Zayn puts an end to this when he approaches Liam after the burial, offering his condolences and asking if Liam can help his archaeological research team with photographing their newest project. The unexpected closeness forces each man to wade through uneasy emotions. For Liam, a mixture of grief, lost identity, and confusion over why he’s willing to interact with the one person he swore he’d never forgive. And for Zayn, a tidal wave of anxiety that comes from finally facing a part of himself he’s always chosen to deny. When We Were Younger is a story heavily rooted in blurred identities and exploring what loss can look like in two different scenarios: death and friendship.

For obvious reasons, their names will be changed. Liam, to Hutton. Zayn, to Cairo (his ethnicity will also be changed to Egyptian). As you can see, it was meant to be my big ‘enemies to lovers’ fic. Technically, it’s ‘best friends to enemies to lovers’, but you know.

Right, so what does this mean for me going forward?

I still have so much inspiration when it comes to writing Zayn and Liam as characters. I don’t plan on putting a complete stop to writing them, but with my career taking this large of a turn, I do have to prioritise my time. That said, as of now, I can’t afford to write long-form fic any longer.

Soon, I’ll be starting a PhD program where I’ll be writing another full-length novel for mass publication. For fun, here’s a little insight on the two ideas that I’ll be pitching:

1. Underground boxer (loosely based off Liam) falls in love with arms gang leader (loosely based off Zayn). Throughout their love story, the latter has to outrun the psychological trauma his father (the leader of Zayn’s rival gang) still throws his way.

2. Cold War AU. Paris, circa 1950/51. Ambassador’s son (loosely based off Liam) befriends new student (loosely based off Zayn) at the international school. Paris is a ticking time bomb; war is about to break out at literally any second. The two clearly have feelings for each other, but can’t act on them because homosexuality in the 1950s...yikes. When war does break out, the two are separated, and as Liam’s character goes out to find Zayn’s, he learns a secret of his that changes everything.

Whichever I don’t write for the PhD will be the novel I write following it.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to write (and edit) like crazy. Ever since I randomly wrote C451, there hasn't been a day that’s gone by where I haven't written something. It may have only been a paragraph or two, but never zero. This is how you get better. This is the equivalent of going out and shooting free throws for 30 minutes a day. You have to put in the work in order to get better. I'm very lucky that I'm incredibly self-disciplined and I've been able to crank out as many stories as I have over the past 2 years.

That said, I’ll be writing shorter little oneshots. I have several ideas that I’ve been sitting on, but haven’t ever thought to write because I HATE writing short stories. Little ideas that don't have huge plotline/climax potential, but that I want to just see on paper, I'll probably end up writing. If I had to guess, I'd say they'll come out to around 10-15k. Also, sequels? Prequels? Haha, you never know...

I’ve also got a series called “Sleep Drabbles” that are, yes, you guessed it, a series of drabbles based around one theme: sleep. I also have a few scenes that I want to write which are based on ziam’s kids, not actually ziam themselves. If there’s enough demand for that, I can upload those too, but they’re quite niche, so I don’t think the general fandom would be very interested.

As far as frequency for all of this, I have no idea. I’ve always done things at my own pace and written stories that I want to write, for myself. That won’t ever change, so I don’t want to commit to one drabble a week or one short-length fic per month. It takes me weeks (months for this last fic) to research and interview the necessary people to get character arcs correct/believable. I love that part of writing, and so if I have a little story that I want to write that may only be 10k but takes me ages to put together how I want, then so be it. I will always be around to answer asks/messages and please, continue to tag me in your writing tag posts! But please, no prompts.

So, that’s my future with fic.

Again, I cannot say thank you enough to every single one of you. Every single thing that people tag me in (@malik-payne , @zqua1d , @zentiment , @liamisthesun , @redyellowberry I’m looking at you), I appreciate and love! The recommendation lists that people have put me on, THANK YOU! It’s wild to think that I used to look to rec lists for years and now I’m on them. @ziamfanfiction THANK YOU for always having my back with exposure! @paynefulperiods , my beloved beta reader, THANK YOU for always encouraging me and putting up with shit first drafts. @march-z5 , THANK YOU for always being on call for ideas and listening to me bang my head against the wall at 4 am.

Now, might fuck around and make a fake picspam for the fic that never was...

Also, all of the behind scenes pages for each of my fics are now public, so feel free to check those out here.

I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making this journey possible. I know people say that a lot when they gain a following of any sort, but I truly truly mean it. You have to have talent in order to be an author, but you also have to have people who want to read your stuff. Proof of concept is a real thing.

So thank you a million times over.

Speak soon my friends.

#ziamhaze #my writing #ziam #ziam fanfic #ziam fanfiction #not sure what to tag this #also gonna be reblogging for a while bc I know people are going to be curious about where the next fic is and won't have seen this

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low-budget-mulan · 3 years

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My Experience with the Covid Vaccine

Hi Everyone! I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about my experience with the Covid vaccine and I figured it would be best to just make a post where I can answer everyone’s questions all in one place. I will be going over a couple of different things here from how I was able to get the vaccine, my reaction to the vaccine, the ethics behind the vaccine (for my Catholic, Christian, Pro-Life friends-- you can ignore this section if you are none of those things), how the vaccine works, and why you should get the vaccine. I will try my best to make everything here as honest as I can in terms of my experience and I will link you to sources for my more scientific facts. I know that there is a lot of misinformation out there and fear regarding the vaccine and I hope to put all that to rest.

So let’s start this off with how I was able to get the vaccine. For those of you who don’t know I am a healthcare worker. I work in EMS as an EMT. I was lucky enough to have the option for either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine. My company offered us the Moderna vaccine, but the local hospital in our area (which was offering the Pfizer Vaccine) had some extra vaccines and were generous enough to share those vaccines with us. My company wouldn’t receive their shipment for another week or two and I wanted to get my dose as soon as possible, so I decided to get my dose through the local hospital. Which is how I ended up with the Pfizer one.

Many of you asked about my reaction to the vaccine. I have had both doses now and my reactions to both were very different. These were MY reactions. I know people who had different reactions than me, so just because it happened to me does not mean it will happen to you. Everyone is different and can experience things on their own. For my first dose I didn’t have any reactions. I just had the sore arm that comes with any vaccination. They are injecting it directly into your muscle so you are going to be sore. That is normal and you shouldn’t be worried. It feels kind of like a charlie horse or like you worked out really hard at the gym, but only in that one spot. Just ice it or throw on a heat pack or take a tylenol and power through. You did a good thing for yourself and your community. About 18 days later I had my second dose of the vaccine. This dose is larger and is needed in order for you to have the immunity to the virus. DO NOT MISS YOUR SECOND DOSE. I made the mistake of getting this shot while on duty lol. I had started my day with some normal back and neck pain that I attributed to regular heavy lifting of patients and a car crash I had a month prior. About 4 hours after getting my vaccine I started feeling VERY achy in both my back and neck. I thought nothing of it because I started the day with that pain and figured it was just because we had lifted some heavier patients. About an hour later I started getting the chills and the weakness. I was just feeling off and not quite myself. As the night progressed I ended up getting a low grade fever, nausea (luckily I had zofran on hand), a cough, dizziness, and I was diaphoretic (sweaty). I just really didn’t feel very good. I powered through my shift where I got off at 0700 and went home the next morning where I was able to sleep it off. By noon I was back to my regular self with only the sore arm. My reaction to the vaccine from start to finish was probably only about 15 hours. Yea that reaction sucked and I really did not feel too great, but would I do it again if it meant protecting myself and others from Covid? Hell yes!

The process for getting the vaccine may differ at each distribution site in terms of registration, but there are a few things that are going to stay the same. It started off with me registering on the website and answering some basic questions. Such as “are you a healthcare worker?” “have you been exposed to Covid without PPE?” “Are you Pregnant?” “Are you over 16?” “Do you have any allergies?” etc. Common questions that get asked in the current medical setting. I then had to register for an appointment time and show them my ID to prove I am who I am. After answering those questions I was sent off to wait for the first available person to administer my vaccine. Each table is sanitized after each person. I went over and got my shot. Went and filled out my vaccination card and had it signed off by someone then I went to sit in the waiting area for 15 minutes. That part is mandatory for everyone in case there is a reaction to the vaccine. WHICH IS EXTREMELY RARE. If you are a person who has many allergies then it is recommended you wait 30 minutes instead as it can sometimes take 30 minutes for a reaction to develop. Luckily there are healthcare providers all around so you are in good hands :) The whole process was so simple and I made friends with everyone else who was there getting their shots. We were bonding over our combined 5G super coverage. It was glorious.

How does the vaccine work? The Covid 19 Vaccine is a newer type of vaccine. It is something called a mRNA vaccine. mRNA Vaccines are different from our traditional vaccines as they don’t have a weak or inactive version of the virus or bacteria in them. What it does is it teaches the cells in our body how to fight off the virus by creating a protein to trigger our immune systems into action and fight off whatever shouldn’t be there. After the protein in our cells is created it gets displayed for our body to realize that it doesn’t belong. Our immune system then starts creating antibodies to fight off this unknown and very unwelcome protein. After our body has created these antibodies it deletes the protein out of existence as if it never existed leaving only the antibodies to protect us later down the line in case we do end up catching Covid (you can read more on this here https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html) . I think mRNA vaccines are going to be the future. They are more effective and way cooler in how they work. How did this vaccine come out so fast you ask? It was obviously planned by the government right? Wrong. Stop with the conspiracy theories ya wackos. mRNA vaccines had been in the works for YEARS. China had successfully identified the protein on the outside of the virus and sent that information to the labs across the world (pfizer and Moderna) to get started on a vaccine. They were able to crank one out and start the testing on animals, then people. After the trials they were able to approve these vaccines for distribution across the world (https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so-exciting-2020121021599). So basically the vaccine is cool and in no way a conspiracy.

Now for all of my Catholic, Christian, and Pro-Life friends. Is it ethical to receive the vaccine. In short, yes. For those of you who are still reading this part the reason this is a big issue for my Catholic, Christian, and Pro-Life friends is because past vaccines have used stem cells from an aborted baby. This is not meant to start a pro-life/pro-choice debate. Any of that on this post will be shut down immediately. For us as Catholics and as people who are pro-life it can be seen as a morally gray area due to the fact that a life has been taken and each human being has inherent dignity and value from conception to natural death. Now on to why we are able to receive the vaccine. Both the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines were made using the mRNA technique. Which basically means there is no fetal tissue in them. Now where people are getting confused. While the vaccines do not use fetal tissue in them, they still tested them on a morally compromised cell line. Now the reason we are able to receive these vaccines still is because while neither of these vaccines is remote from evil there were no other options for us to keep the population as a whole safe. If you are still concerned about it we are so far removed from the act of the abortion that we cannot be held accountable for the actions that took place that day. This is a very very shortened version and if you would like to keep reading then you can do so here https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/covid-19-vaccines-and-the-usccb?fbclid=IwAR2xRPbNxiCdsc1ISeb6u_D-YHjyoCrQlT3oTI4QZdeU1z9LZ6eGtbqrrKw. We should be getting this vaccine to protect those of us who are unable to receive it.

This post was not meant to be political in any way. I wanted to help you all understand why this vaccine is so important and put your minds at ease. Remember, the reasons vaccines work is because of herd immunity. Which means if the majority of us as a community get the vaccine then it will help to keep those who can’t get it (the pregnant, breastfeeding, immunocompromised, etc) safe and better protected from the virus. So please do your part. Social distance, wear your mask, wash your hands, get your vaccine, and look out for your neighbors. We are all in this together.

#sara posts about stuff #covid #vaccine #covid19 #corona #corona virus #covid vaccine #antivax #antivaxxer

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your-eternal-muse · 4 years

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I’m Getting Colder

Heather Series Part 6 (Were halfway through it!)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Bonus! Readers Card Confession

Summery: Reader leaves the BAU for some personal time, and turns to her vices to deal with the voices in her head

Warnings: Description of someone falling into a deep depressive episode, self-deprecation, unhealthy coping mechanisms, description of emotional breakdown, reader is not in a good mental state so please be prepared for that before reading

Words: 1.8k (she smol)

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Heather Charmical, Spencer Reid x eventual Female!Reader

A/N: So, this is not a light chapter. It’s not that long in my opinion, but it is very depressing. I do not recommend reading this if you are not in a well state of mind. Reader is very depressed, and she is falling deeper into that hole as we speak. I promise it does get better, but this chapter is just sad. I took from some personal thoughts and feelings I had when I was at a low point in my own life, which made it kind of difficult to make it any longer than I did, though I’m going to try and make the following chapters longer. I do recommend reading the bonus episode I posted, as it gives a lil insight to something said in this chapter. If you did not see, I sadly had to close both my permanent and my heather tag list, so if you are not already on there, and you want to be notified when I post a part, I suggest turning on my post notifications. Okay, that’s all. Love You!

~~~~~~~

“You really think he would love someone like You?”

“I will never love you.”

“Look at you. You’re disgusting.”

“I did love you. And then I met Heather and realized how much better she was.”

“Worthless.”

“Stupid Girl.”

“Useless.”

“UGLY!”

My eyes snap open.

My room is dark, and the sun is just barely rising over the horizon, the dim blue light leaking through my curtains.

The alarm on my phone goes off.

5:30 A.M. Meeting with Hotch at 8.

I slide my thumb across the dismiss button, and rub my face. All I want to do is go back to sleep, crawl deep under my covers and stay there until the end of time.

But I can’t.

My therapist's voice echoes through my mind.

“You’ve been through some emotional turmoil, y/n. It’s okay to take a break to get yourself better. But you need to talk to your unit chief in order for that to happen.”

So, that’s what I’m doing. I have a meeting with Hotch to discuss medical leave, where I’ll turn over my badge and gun and leave.

I sit up in bed, running a hand through my hair, trying to convince myself to get up.

Spencer comes home from his honeymoon today.

And if I haven’t been in the right head space when he hasn’t been here, then I’m definitely not okay to be shooting a gun when he is.

He called.

I didn’t answer.

He left a message.

I didn’t listen.

I don’t need to listen to him telling me that there's nothing we can do.

That it’s over.

That I have to move on.

No thanks.

I’m good.

I get up, and walk though my dark apartment, not bothering to turn on the lights as I go.

I strip in the pitch black bathroom, only lighting a candle so I don’t trip and break my neck.

The water is cold, and I let it run over my spine.

I leave once my teeth are chattering.

I get out and hastily dry off, before running a brush through my hair and cleaning my teeth.

I avoid my own eyes in the medicine cabinet mirror, but they slip back, and I don’t recognize the girl staring back at me.

I blink, pressing my palm to my eye, using my other hand to open the cabinet, turning the mirror away from me, so I don’t have to look anymore.

By the time I’m dressed and ready to leave, it’s 7:15.

I grab my purse, and my keys and head out of my apartment.

Once outside, I light up a cigarette, walking the short block to where I’m parked, climbing in and cranking the heat.

I used to stop and get a bagel and coffee from the bakery around the corner, but my appetite has left me.

My smoke will suffice for breakfast.

It’s a quiet ride to Quantico.

Mornings of listening to the radio, turning up my favorite songs have all but disappeared.

I pull my chin into my chest to keep the cold from biting my nose, as I walk up to the building.

The eyes of the security guards that I used to greet each morning follow me, as I keep my gaze glued to the floor.

The warmth of the elevator is no longer welcoming.

I’m the only one in the bullpen, as I walk past desks covered in files and papers.

I knock on Hotch’s door at 7:56.

“Come in.”

We’re the first ones here, and I know any moment, the others will trickle in, and their eyes will scan and find me standing before him, through his open blinds, where they will proceed to profile and figure out why I am acting the way I am.

I enter the office, and close the door behind me.

“You didn’t give a reason for this meeting, just stating that it was urgent that we met.” He sets his pen down, and gives me his full attention. “May I ask why?”

I rub my forehead, a headache already forming. “I didn’t know what to put for a reason. Every time I thought about what to write down, it seemed stupid.”

“Y/N, if something is bothering you, it’s never stupid.”

I nod, sniffling, taking my purse off my shoulder and pulling out the note from my therapist, handing it to him.

“I need at least two weeks of mental medical leave.”

He’s quiet as he reads through the letter, looking up at me every now and then.

I look out the window, and see all their heads turn to avoid eye contact, as if they weren’t just sitting and watching the whole exchange.

I bet they’re talking about it right now.

When he’s finished, he simply folds it and places it on his desk, waiting for me to speak.

I look down at my shoes.

I know he knows.

I'm pretty sure everyone knows now.

“I can’t be around him, Hotch.” My voice is no louder than a whisper, but I know he can hear me.

Jesus, I’m so sick of crying.

“Everything changed that night. I can’t even look at him without wanting to cry or…” I pinch the bridge of my nose again, harder, trying to distract myself from the pain.

“I can’t. At least not yet. Not now. And I’m not in the right state of mind to turn it off during the work day so we can work like a team.” I turn to look out the other window, so I don’t have to deal with the eyes.

“I just need some time to work through it. And I don’t want to put the team at risk during that time.” I shove my hands in my pocket, and bite my lip.

He nods.

“I understand. I hope you know your job will be waiting for you when you’re ready.”

I nod, breathing in to keep the tears at bay. “I know.”

“Good. I need your badge and gun please.”

That’s when the tears start falling.

I love this Job.

I love these people.

And here I am, abandoning them all because I can’t get over myself.

Yeah because you’re weak. Letting a boy take over your life. How Pathetic.

I untie my jacket, removing my badge from the inner pocket, placing it before him on the desk. I then remove my gun from the holster from my hip, making sure the safety is on, before setting that by my badge.

He stands, as I make my way for the door, moving out of the eyesight of the others.

“Y/N,”

I stop and turn, only to be met with his arms wrapping around me.

I fall into the embrace, so uncommon for Hotch, but oh so needed at this moment.

Hotch is a father through and through, and right now, a father’s embrace is what I need.

“I’m always here if you need to talk. No matter what time. I’m here for you.”

I squeeze my arms around him, taking in his scent before backing away. “I know. Thank you, Hotch.”

He nods, smiling softly, before stepping back as I open the door, and walk out into the bullpen.

The team stands, unashamedly staring at me as I walk down past them.

Now including Spencer.

I hastily wipe my cheeks, and shove my hands back into my pockets, beginning to walk past them.

“Baby girl,”

“Don’t, Derek.” I spit. If he hadn’t been a dick….If i had just watched where I was going.

Spencer is closest to the door, and I turn my head away from him, not wanting to engage in anything with him.

He reaches out and grabs me by the crook of my elbow.

“Reid.” Hotch says, but Spencer’s eyes are burning into the side of my face.

“You asked me to come and catch you.” His voice is soft, and once again, I wish someone would scream at me.

I swallow hard, and pull away from him, stepping back, retreating as far into myself as possible.

“I’m not yours to catch anymore.”

I place a hand over my mouth and practically run out of the glass doors.

I don’t stop running until I get to my car, where I collapse into the cold, and sob against the steering wheel.

“Come and catch me?”

“You asked me to come and catch you.”

He knows he’s killing me.

He has to,

He can’t say shit like that and not know.

My phone lights up with his name, and I slide my thumb across decline, before starting my car and pulling out of the parking lot.

The minutes blur by as I make my way home, just wanting to collapse into bed, and sleep away my problems.

My apartment is lighter now, but it’s still relatively dark. Light seeps through my curtains, but it doesn’t reach far.

I kick off my boots, and take off my jacket, tossing it across the counter.

A full length mirror hangs from my corridor wall, watching me. Taunting me.

“He’s just trying to talk to you.”

I pinch my eyes close. This isn’t happening. Not again.

“But you’re too selfish to accept him as anything other than a friend.”

The voice talking is high-pitched, and stings like a bell.

Heather.

“Seriously? You think he would ever want someone like you? When he could have someone like me? You’re pathetic.”

I turn to the mirror, where she stands staring back at me in the reflection.

“Shut up.”

“You are so stupid. No one wants you. No one will ever want you. The team will be so much better off without you.”

“Shut up!” My teeth grit, and I know I’m talking to a figment of my imagination, but I don’t care.

I can’t care.

“You’re so useless. You’re so stupid. You’re so pathetic. Do you know you’re the last thing on his mind? Especially when he’s deep within me, and I’m making him feel so good.”

“I said shut up!”

I grab a stray book laying open on my counter, and throw it at the mirror, watching it shatter upon impact, the pieces looking like snow on my floor.

I bawl into my hands, leaning over my counter.

Who have I become?

I pull myself together long enough to grab the bottle of whiskey sitting open by my sink, taking a long drink from it.

With it still clutched in hand, I shuffle over to my couch which is pushed up against my windows.

I lean over the back of it, opening the one above it, the cool air freezing the tears on my face.

I set the bottle down and pick up a stray smoke, lighting up and leaning back, exhaling the smoke up into the air and out the window.

My cell vibrates in my pocket, and I pull it out, seeing Spencer’s face pop up yet again.

In the photo, he’s smiling, birthday cake on his face. I hit decline.

Another swig, another hit.

My brain is becoming fuzzy.

A text comes through from Derek.

I swipe the notification away.

I lie down on my couch, holding a pillow close to my body, my cigarette hanging from my fingers, the bottle down on the floor next to me.

Another text.

I turn my phone off.

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#spencer reid #spencer reid angst #spencer reid series #spencer reid x female!reader #dr spencer reid #dr. spencer reid #criminal minds #criminal minds self insert #arron hotchner #song fic #heather #conan gray

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atths--twice · 3 years

Text

An Unexpected Discovery

An alternate universe in which Mulder and Scully are college professors working in buildings across from one another. They have become close, but one day, he learns something about her he never would have expected.

A couple of days ago, @msgilliana posted a tweet about an AU involving Mulder and Scully which led to a mini story being created by both of us. People asked for a REAL story, but it wasn’t my baby, I had only added a bit to an adorable idea. I suggested she and I collaborate and we two women, who were “too busy right now,” cranked out a 7,700 word story in two days.

Hope you all enjoy!

Fox Mulder knew the start of the new academic year could be daunting for new faculty: Am I teaching this class correctly? Is my syllabus adequate? Where the hell do I park?

When he saw one person in particular however, he knew she meant business. They never technically met, but it was more of a ‘we parked next to each other and your building is right next to mine, so we might as well chat’ situation.

“Hi,” he’d said when he saw her, the first of them to speak. He had been drawn to her beauty, her red hair causing her to stand out.

“Hello,” she’d responded.

“Are you new?” he’d asked.

She pushed a stray piece of that beautiful red hair behind her ear. “Is it that obvious?”

“Oh no, I just have an eidetic memory and haven’t seen you before.” She was impressed, and her face revealed as much before he asked another question.

“What do you teach?”

“A mix. Some general physics, some intro to modern physics. You?”

“Wow, that’s quite impressive. I teach psych. Intro, abnormal, and social. Most people think it’s a ‘soft’ science, but I think it’s pretty important.”

“Psychology is interesting to be fair. Why do people do what they do, what determines our likes and dislikes, or even hyperfixations. And that’s just scratching the surface.”

“I have never met anyone from the science department who sees it that way. It’s quite refreshing, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Well, my sister’s very into feelings, the energy of the planets, all that kind of stuff. She and I are very close. Well… this is my building.” She pointed to the one right next to the one he would be entering.

“And this is mine. How convenient. I’ll see you around Dr…”

“Scully. Dana Scully.”

“Fox Mulder.” He offered his hand and she shook it.

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Mulder.”

“Oh please, no ‘Dr.’ That’s so boringly formal. ‘Mulder’ is fine,” he had joked with a mock shiver.

“Then you can call me ‘Scully.’” She chuckled and then smiled at him. As he stared at her, he couldn’t help but notice the presence of a beauty mark above her top lip. She had covered it with makeup and he didn’t understand why she would, it was adorable and also incredibly sexy.

Oh, maybe that’s why, he thought, knowing how men could behave.

Pushing aside those thoughts, he smiled as they reached their respective buildings and separated, walking to their offices.

Over time, they’d gotten to know more about each other. He knew she was twenty six and had received her doctorate two years prior. She was Catholic with two older siblings, a brother and a sister, the latter of whom had an interest in all things extraterrestrials, and she also had one younger brother.

Before the end of her first teaching year, they’d managed to park next to each other almost every day. They would chat for the few minutes their walk to the building afforded them, until they had to separate to their own offices. They both looked forward to that time together each day.

At the year's commencement, they had sat next to each other, and she looked extraordinarily extravagant in her doctoral robe and cap. She would say the same about him.

The following school year, they had gone from their morning chats to leaving at the same time as well. It quickly turned into one accompanying the other to their office and continuing their conversations. While almost polar opposites, they felt comfortable with each other and talked about any and everything.

Of all the little things he knew about her, the one thing Mulder knew Scully prided herself on most was punctuality. He knew she arrived in the parking lot at exactly 8:05 every Tuesday and Thursday before her first class began at 8:30. The other three days, she arrived at exactly 9:25 am for her 10 am class. His classes were all later in the day, but he came in early for office hours and to get work done before his classes.

A couple of months later, however, it was 9:27 on a Wednesday morning and she was nowhere to be found. In the nearly one and a half years since she’d been teaching, Scully had never been late. Though he was curious, he decided to head into his office and start his day.

His work, however, didn’t hold his attention. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. What was she doing? Was she sick? Was there a family emergency? She had mentioned that her siblings lived all across the country. Her older brother Bill was in California where he was stationed with his wife Tara. Melissa was traveling, “finding herself” Scully had stated with a slight eye roll, and Charlie was in New York with his girlfriend Elaine. Her parents were in Annapolis, about an hour's drive from the school.

Shaking himself out of his reverie, he decided to email her, something he’d never done nor had any need to do.

Scully,

Are you okay?

Mulder

He forewent formalities because he felt they were on friendly enough terms, or at least he had assumed so. They hadn’t ever socialized outside of school events, but he had lost count of the high school and college friends he no longer spoke to or had only seen on campus.

He was about to get ready to teach his first class of the day when he checked his email one more time and saw a reply from her.

I’m fine.

Nothing further, not even her name, but at least he now knew she was okay. Or at least, Mulder hoped so. She would’ve said if something was wrong.

Right?

He didn’t sleep well that night, his brain unable to stop thinking and wondering if she was okay.

The next day, she still hadn’t arrived on time. He was in his office, about to send her another email, when he heard a car door slam around 8:15. The building was fairly soundproof, but the windows were not.

Curious, he got up from his desk and looked out the window. Seeing Scully’s car, he immediately smiled. She was a little late, but she was there. His brows then furrowed when she opened the door to the backseat. Bending inside, she was there for nearly a minute.

When she pulled back, he let out a gasp as she had reappeared with a small child in her arms. He could see the little girl was limp and appeared to be asleep. Observing Scully’s struggle to get her bags from the front seat while also carrying the child, he quickly left his office.

He tried to keep his pace slow, so as to not disrupt his colleagues, but his mind was racing with a million questions. Mulder made it outside, but didn’t see Scully. Assuming she must’ve gotten to her office already, he hurried up the stairs; he was out of breath when he reached the third floor.

Looking around, he heard a ding, announcing the arrival of the elevator down the hall. The doors opened and he spotted her shining red hair as she exited the elevator, and turned toward her office. Speed walking, he made it to her office at the same moment that she did.

“Oh, God. Mulder, you scared me,” she whispered when she saw him, breathing quickly as she reached for her keys.

“Sorry,” he whispered, matching her volume.

Scully took a minute to find her keys, only having one hand free for the action. She finally got her office unlocked, the little girl sleeping through it all. Propping the door open, she left the light off and set her bags down, a bright pink Dora the Explorer backpack standing out. She picked it up and held it out to him.

“Can you…” she asked him, nodding at the child in her arms.

“Oh. Um, sure. What…”

“Her blanket, please.”

He unzipped the bag and pulled out a small blue blanket with Thomas the Train across it. Versatile, I like it, thought Mulder. He couldn’t help but feel his heart grow as he watched the way she was with the little girl he assumed had to be her daughter.

“Mommy…” the toddler suddenly croaked.

“Shh, baby, it’s okay.” Scully’s voice was soothing and soft for the girl as she ran a hand across her daughter’s long loose curls. It was different from her no-nonsense, low-pitched professor voice, and it made his heart ache.

She mouthed a thank you to Mulder and took the blanket from him. The little girl whimpered as she was covered in the blanket and snuggled closer to her mother. Scully rocked her and smiled at Mulder.

“I’m sure you have some questions.”

“Just a few.”

She sighed and looked at her child. “Please, sit.”

He obeyed, watching as she carefully sat in her leather desk chair.

“How old is she?” Mulder asked.

“Almost three.”

“Wow, you’ve got your hands full. What’s her name?”

“Emily.” Scully smiled as she rubbed Emily’s back over the blanket.

Awkward silence washed over them as they both ignored the elephant in the room. Scully wasn’t married and didn’t wear a ring. She had never talked about her child before, let alone a partner that could be the child’s father.

“You’ve shared so much, why not her?”

She sighed again. “I don’t know. I guess I thought… that you would judge me. Everyone else sure does, except Missy and Charlie.”

“You know I’d never.”

“I do, but I was also worried. And I guess I wanted to keep her secret for as long as possible.” She avoided his gaze as she spoke.

“I don’t want to sound insensitive, but I do have one more burning question…”

“You want to know about her dad,” Scully guessed and he looked at her sadly and shrugged, not speaking the words, but obviously curious.

“His name’s Ethan and he had been my boyfriend since grad school. I found out I was pregnant the day I defended my dissertation. We broke up about halfway through my pregnancy. He hadn’t ever wanted children, but also didn’t want to use protection. I… well… now Em’s here. That’s the extremely simplified version.”

Mulder’s eyes were wide as he took in the information. He thought she was pretty badass to be able to raise a kid on her own. He could also hear how she may feel shame about it, because of others' comments and also how society tended to treat women who were single parents.

She sighed and he realized that he hadn’t said anything in response. Feeling like a bit of a jackass, he opened his mouth to speak, but she suddenly stood up and shook her head.

“Sorry to cut this short,” she said, glancing at her watch. “But my first class starts soon and I need to get her stuff to bring.”

He shook his head and stood as well. “I can watch her, if it would make it easier for you.”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t-“

“I insist. Besides, I don’t think she’ll like listening to her mother talk about super smart science stuff.”

“It’ll probably bore her to death,” she agreed with a chuckle.

“Then it’s settled then.”

“Are you sure?” Her expression gave away her uncertainty, her eyes searching his face.

“Really, I’d love to. I promise we’ll just stay in here while you teach.”

“You need to be in your office, Mulder. I can’t do that to you.”

“Then we can go to mine. Look, Scully, I promise we’ll be okay, okay?”

She sighed for the third time. “Okay. I should wake her though, let her know I’m leaving and let her see you. I don’t want her waking up without me and crying. Hey, Em,” she said softly, gently patting her back, waking the child.

“Mama…”

“Hey honey, Mama has to teach her class now. You’re going to spend some time with Mulder today, okay? He’s mommy’s friend.”

The toddler lifted her head and looked at him fearfully, tears running down her cheeks.

“Hey, Emily,” Mulder greeted. “It’s nice to meet you. Do you like Dora? She’s pretty cool.” Emily didn’t answer, but embraced Scully tighter.

“I know baby, but Mommy really needs to get to class. Mulder is a very nice man and he will take care of you. He has fish in his office. Do you want to see them?” She nodded, her eyes still full of tears.

Emily was gently passed to Mulder, Scully making sure she was wrapped in her blanket. The little girl sniffed and whimpered as she watched her mom blow her a kiss and then leave the room, thanking him once again.

“Would you like to go on a trip, Emily?” he asked, hoping to ease the tension. She looked at him, her expression unsure and still slightly fearful. “Let’s go see the fish, okay?” She nodded and he beamed.

He grabbed her backpack and swung it onto his back, closing the door to Sculy’s office as they walked out. He locked the door with the keys he’d taken off her desk, knowing she would come to his before coming back to her own.

Emily was trembling slightly in his arms and he held her closer as they walked to the elevator.

“Would you like to go outside? It feels nice out today.”

Emily slowly nodded her head, her thumb on the tip of her bottom lip, as she put her head on his shoulder. He stepped out of the elevator and then the building. He walked into the little courtyard separating the science and education/psychology buildings. The little girl lifted her head just enough to look around.

“‘Nola,” Emily said quietly, as she pointed with her little finger.

“What was that, Em?” Mulder asked, at a loss of what she was trying to say.

“‘Nola,” she repeated louder.

He looked at the direction she was pointing and chuckled when he realized what she meant. “Oh, you like the magnolia tree?”

Mulder was impressed by her intelligence. Of course, her mother had gotten her doctorate at twenty-four, which was not common amongst the other faculty. Even he hadn’t received his until just before she had started teaching, and he was thirty, nearly thirty-one.

“You’re very smart, Emily,” Mulder praised, but the little girl was uninterested. She put her head back on his shoulder, falling asleep before they made it to the office.

As he arrived at the door, he realized he had left his door unlocked when he found it hanging open and one of his teaching assistants, Tyler, was grading papers.

“Oh, sorry Dr. M, but the door was unlocked and…” Tyler started, but was confused as he saw Emily in his arms.

“I’m watching her for a friend,” Mulder said simply, putting her backpack down on the desk. Tyler nodded and went back to grading papers.

Emily continued to sleep, Mulder holding her as he sat down at his desk. Even as he held her, he managed to send a slowly-typed email to a student about the midterm, enter the test grades Tyler had given him, and sent out an announcement to the class about their extra credit assignment.

Looking down at Emily, he smiled. Other than her blonde hair, she was a mirror image of Scully and he couldn’t imagine anyone but her having a sweeter child.

Tyler left soon after he was done grading, smiling and nodding silently as he walked out the door. Emily began to stir, her eyes slowly opening and taking in her surroundings.

“Hey there, Em,” he said softly, and the toddler mumbled, clutching her blanket closer.

“Do you want to see the fish now?” She nodded and he stood up, his back protesting at the position he had been in for the past forty five minutes. He shifted her to hold her better and walked across the room to show her the fish.

“Oh!” she said, watching the fancy guppies he had bought swimming around the tank. “Fishies!” She pointed at the tank and he grinned.

“Yup! Those are fancy guppies. Can you say guppy?”

“Guppy.”

“Good job,” he said, smiling again and rubbing her back. “See that one there? The blue one with the red spotted tail? That’s my favorite one. Watch how fast he swims.”

“Fish swim fast,” she agreed with a nod and he chuckled, shifting her again.

“They are fast. Good job, Em! Gimme five.” She laughed as she lifted her tiny hand and met Mulder’s large one.

“Having fun?” Scully asked and they turned to look at her, standing in the doorway with a smile.

“Mommy!” Emily said, trying to scramble out of Mulder’s arms. He laughed as he set her down and she ran to Scully, who lifted the squealing toddler in her arms.

“Hey, baby.” Scully kissed Emily’s cheek and looked at Mulder. “Were you good for Mulder?”

Emily vigorously nodded her head while Mulder laughed. “She was very good. She’s a smart kid.”

“She takes after her mother.” The two adults smiled and Emily wrapped her arms around Scully’s neck. “Thank you for looking after her. I only had the one class today, but she was sick yesterday and I had babysitter problems and-“

“I promise it was no trouble and completely my pleasure. She slept most of the time, but she liked the fish. The guppies, right Em?”

“Guppy,” she said with a nod, pointing at the tank. “Guppy fish, Mommy.”

“Yes, I know. I knew you would like them.” Scully smiled. “Hey, are you free tonight?”

“Umm. I… no, I mean yes I’m free.”

“Well, let me buy you a drink. It’s the least I can do to thank you for your help.”

His heart raced. This was the moment he’d been waiting for since he had first looked at her.

“Um, sure, I mean… yeah, I’d love to,” he stammered.

Great job, doofus, he admonished himself, inwardly rolling his eyes.

“Great. I’ll sort out a babysitter for tonight and I’ll see you at six? I’ll send you my address.”

If he didn’t know any better, he’d think Scully was inviting him out on a date. Did she see it that way? They’d never spent time together outside of university functions, but he hoped she’d see it as a date, as he would love for it to be so.

He smiled as he nodded and she smiled back. She lifted Emily a little higher, telling her about her class as Emily continued staring at the fish. The way she doted on her daughter and how her red hair shone in the light, he could feel he was already falling for her.

Yeah… he was in big trouble.

#The X-Files #XF Fanfic #Fanfic Collab #Dana Scully #Fox Mulder #Emily Sim #Modern AU #College Professors #First Meetings #Getting to Know Each Other

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moldisgoodforyou · 4 years

Text

lost time (chapter seven)

MASTERLIST

pairing: rafe cameron x oc

warning: cursing, underage drinking

wordcount: 2.7k

_______

“You’re trouble, Soph.” Rafe murmured to her, laughing at her obvious blush.

“I’m just keeping the game fun. Poor Indiana has been getting blown out since the first quarter.” She rested her head on his shoulder and he cleared his throat, reminding himself this was only because she was drunk. “Ready to go?” Sophie shivered, crossing her arms. “Yeah, fine. To the bars?” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and rubbed her arm, trying to warm her up. “I don’t know about that, I think you need some food.”

“Rafe, are you joining us for dinner?” Her mom interrupted them with a friendly smile. “Um, no, I don’t want to intrude. I really appreciate you letting me hang around for most of the day though, I had a lot of fun.” He countered quickly, moving Sophie to stand upright. She let out a quiet whine and he dug his fingers just slightly into her shoulder. “You’re welcome to join if you’d like.” Her dad replied, giving Rafe a second chance.

“No, no, it’s alright. I’m going to catch up with my friends, thank you though.” He denied the offer again. “I’ll see you in class, yeah Soph?”

She patted his cheek with a dopey smile. “See you in class, buddy.”

Rafe grinned, shaking his head before he turned away to walk home on his own. “Call me if you want a ride later. It was good to see you both!” He waved goodbye to her parents, walking away.

Later that night, around 11, Rafe’s phone went off with several messages. He was surprised to see they were from Sophie, of all people. (He shouldn’t have been that surprised, given the way she was leaning on him earlier.)

Sophie: hiiiiii

We need to hang

Like for real

I don’t hate you you know that right

Rafe: You good?

Sophie: totally

She sent a voice message, on accident. It was mainly 30 seconds of background noise of the party, but at the end, Rafe could just barely make out a male voice saying “you’re not talking to him again, are you? You’re drunk, be careful.”

He texted again.

Rafe: Whatcha up to

Sophie: Drinking come drink drink

Rafe: I’m not sure if that’s a good idea

Sophie: Come hang

*sends her location*

After about 30 seconds of debating, Rafe let his laptop fall shut and stood, abandoning his post in the study room. Colin, the only other boy in the fraternity dedicated enough to study on a Saturday night, lifted his head from his math homework. (It wasn’t Rafe’s top choice either, but it was a solid distraction from parent’s weekend and his painfully obvious lack of family present.) “Hey, wait, where are you going?”

Rafe was already checking over his reflection in the mirror, trying to fix his hair. “Uh...Sophie asked me to meet her at some party.” He didn’t dare make eye contact with Colin, feeling the smirk bore into the back of his head. After a few moments of unbearable silence, he spun back around. “Fine, just say it.”

Colin laughed. “I wasn’t gonna say a thing. You’re going to change, right?”

Rafe groaned, glancing down at his worn t-shirt and basketball shorts he had changed into after the football game. “Do I need to? I don’t want to make her think I’m like, dressing up for her or whatever. I just want to drink.”

“Uh huh. Go change. And don’t get too drunk, you’re still coming to brunch with me and James’ parents tomorrow.” Colin waved him off and Rafe gave him a grateful nod before leaving the study room and jogging up the stairs to their room. He pulled out the clothes he had on earlier from his laundry basket, sniffing them quickly before tugging them on. He grabbed his keys, glanced over himself once in the mirror, then headed out.

Rafe double-checked her location before parking and walking up to a house with people spilling out of it, music blasting from the inside. He wasn’t sure he could handle drunk Sophie being touchy again and hoped to god she had sobered up a little bit - a naive hope, considering the way she was texting. As he made his way inside, Carter saw him right away and clapped an unfriendly hand on his shoulder, squeezing tighter than necessary. “What are you doing here, Cameron?”

“Uh, Soph - er, Sophie invited me.” Rafe explained, shrugging Carter’s hand away and glancing around the packed living room. He placed the warning voice in Sophie’s voice message now, nodding slightly in recognition. “You seen her?”

“Yeah.” Carter answered, completely unhelpful and stared him down as he took a sip from his cup.

Rafe laughed, a little wary. “Right. I’ll go find her, then, nice seeing you.”

“Watch yourself, Cameron.” Carter raised his eyebrows slightly and Rafe nodded again, rolling his eyes once his back was turned. He wove his way through the crowd til he found Sophie out in the backyard, looking bored as some guy tried talking to her.

Rafe watched from a distance for a moment with an amused smile as she briefly entertained the conversation, then made his way over. “Soph, hey!” He called out, settling his arm around her shoulders once he reached her.

Immediately a grin grew on her face as she turned into him, reaching up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Hi Rafe!” He turned red right away, grateful it was dark. The boy excused himself quickly, catching the hint. “Oh my god, you rescued me.” Sophie smiled, hand on Rafe’s chest.

He chuckled, taking the half-full can from her hand and setting it aside. “That bad, huh? How long have you been drinking for?”

“I...umm…” She trailed off, trying her best to remember and shrugged. “I dunno.”

He tapped her nose, grinning when she scrunched it up in a scowl. “You here alone?”

“Yeah, Carter dragged me here. Everyone’s, like, old.” Her face lit up and she reached up, patting his cheek. “But you’re here! Can you drive? I would, but I think I might not be sober.”

Rafe took her hand from his face, placing it back at her side and laughed. “Maybe not. Do you want to go home?”

“Yes please.” She took off, strolling around the side of the house to the front without waiting for him.

He jogged after her, letting her lead the way - until she made it to the street, stepping out just as a car flew past. Rafe grabbed her around the waist, yanking her back out of traffic. “Jesus, Soph, careful!”

She yelped as he grabbed her and pouted a little, crossing her arms once he set her safely back on the sidewalk. “Don’t yell at me, I’m fragile!”

He sighed softly and nudged her aside so he was walking on the side of the street. “I’m trying to not get you squished. My car’s just down here, okay?”

She took his hand, using him for balance more than anything as she struggled to walk straight. “Okay. Deal. I think you just saved my life.”

He laughed, tugging her a little closer. “Just want you safe.”

“Can I stay with you?”

If he hadn’t been concentrating so much on keeping her steady, he would have stopped dead in his tracks. “What? With me?”

“Yeah. Allie and Jules won’t cuddle with me. They say I’m ‘a hazard to society’ when I’m drinking.” She reasoned, putting on a sarcastic tone with her last statement.

He swallowed hard, debating how terrible of an idea this was. “Uh. Yeah, you can stay with me. James is staying with his girlfriend, so. I’ll take his bed.” The last part of his response fell on deaf ears. When they made it to his car, he made sure she was safely buckled before getting in himself.

After the fifth time of him batting her hands away from the radio volume, he gave in, letting her crank some terrible pop radio remix from the speakers. He grinned as he looked over, seeing her sing along, and thought to himself - I could get used to this - then frowned as he remembered they would never work. Not as long as she was Sophie Flint, and he was Rafe Cameron, and they fought like twin flames.

She didn’t miss his expression fall and reached over, resting her hand on his shoulder. “S’wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m good. You good?”

“I’m incredible.” She beamed.

He nodded with a soft smile as he pulled into the Delt parking lot. “Yeah, you are. Ready for bed?”

“Or more.” Sophie smirked and Rafe let out a long breath, shaking his head.

“Oookay. You’re drunk.” He got out and helped her out of the car, gently pushing her hands away as she went to grasp his hips.

“I’m hardly drunk.” She protested, leaning up to kiss him and he dodged away, laughing as she brushed her lips against his jaw.

“Sophie. C’mon, inside.”

“Ugh, fine.” She stuck out her bottom lip slightly in an adorable pout, stomping a little as she walked into the house with Rafe. He just smiled to himself, ushering her up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, she tried pushing him against the wall, rising up on her toes to try and kiss him again. “C’mon, let me,” she whined as he ducked away at the last second so her lips caught his cheek.

“No, you only kiss me when you’re drunk and I don’t like that.” He frowned slightly, placing his hands on her shoulders and nudging her away.

She frowned back, reaching up to poke the corner of his frown. “You don’t like me?”

“I never said that, Soph.” He corrected, then turned her around, steering her toward his room. She furrowed her brow but walked with his guidance, trying to figure out exactly what he meant. Once they were in his room he shut the door behind them and gestured to the corner of the room.

“Here, you can have my bed, I promise I just washed the sheets.” Rafe offered.

Sophie stumbled over to the only made bed as he followed close behind, trying to make sure she didn’t trip. “Are you gonna give me clothes?”

“Clothes?” He repeated dumbly, watching as she hopped up onto the bed.

“I don’t wanna sleep in a skirt.” She started pulling her shirt over her head and Rafe turned around quickly.

“Right! Right. Um…” He rifled through his closet then stayed facing forward, tossing a shirt of his to her.

After a couple minutes, she let out a quiet whine. “Need help.”

“Help? Can I turn around?” He waited a moment, but when she didn’t respond, he slowly turned and laughed at the sight before him. She hadn’t even tried, the shirt collar halfway on her head and her arms weren’t pulled through the sleeves. He did his best to avert his gaze south as her skirt already crumpled to the floor. “Arm up, Soph.”

She obliged only when he lifted her hand, pouting slightly. “Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing. Cooperate.” He grinned, tugging the shirt over her head and nudging her to pull her arms through.

“You are laughing. I did it!” She cheered, flopping back onto the bed.

Rafe blushed and pulled the blanket over her legs for her sake. “Good girl.”

She sat up quickly - too quickly, grabbing the headboard for stability. “Say that again.”

“What? No. Go to bed, Soph.” He laughed, pulling his polo over his head and tossing it in his laundry. He hesitated briefly before pulling on a pair of basketball shorts over his boxers and she frowned, reaching out.

“No, Rafe, c’mere.”

“No, I’m sleeping in James’ bed. You stay there.” He told her, moving to the other side of the room to get in bed.

“No, come cuddle.” She insisted, patting the empty space in his bed.

He paused, knowing it was probably a bad idea, but hauled himself out of bed with a sigh. “Just until you fall asleep, okay?”

“Deal.” Sophie grinned, pleased, as he settled into the small space next to her, trying his best to not touch her. She leaned over right away and tucked the blanket over the two of them, resting her head on his bare chest and draped her arm across his waist.

He had never been more grateful she was drunk, as his heart was threatening to hammer straight out of his chest. He rested a careful arm around her shoulders, gently scratching her back. “Go to sleep, Sophie.” He murmured.

Her eyes had fluttered shut the moment he started rubbing her back. “You go to sleep, Rafe.” She mumbled back.

He let out a low chuckle and she smiled to herself as she felt it rumble through his chest. “I will. Soon.”

It didn’t take long for Rafe to fall asleep after Sophie did. Colin had crept in an hour later, and had to clap a hand over his mouth to not let out a loud laugh at the sight before him. He decided to be nice and backed out of the room, staying quiet - but not before snapping a photo and sending it to James.

Sophie woke up around 4am, groggy and confused. She was cuddled into someone’s side, wearing someone else’s clothes that smelled oddly familiar. When she lifted her head to see who her strange suitor was, she almost gasped. “Oh my god,” she murmured to herself, resisting the strange urge to trace her fingers over his cheekbone.

Rafe stirred just slightly, pulling her closer against his chest. She froze and he settled, still clearly asleep. Sophie let out a tiny sigh of relief and untucked herself from his side, slipping out of bed without making a sound. She turned bright red upon realizing her clothes were in a wrinkled heap on the floor, and hurriedly pulled on her skirt and balled up her shirt in her fist. “Phone, phone, where’s my phone?” She whispered in a panic to herself before snagging it off the nightstand and creeping across the room.

After closing the door behind her, she let out a huge exhale, then escorted herself out quickly, thankful she only passed one drunk boy passed out on the couch in the living room as she left. “Fucking hell,” she mumbled, checking her dead phone. She cursed all the way back to the Theta house, shivering in the brisk morning air.

Once she was back at her sorority, she snuck upstairs back to her room, hoping to get into bed without waking her roommates. Julia woke first at the door, sitting up quickly. “Where the fuck did you go?”

Allie rose slowly at the sound of her voice, rubbing her eyes. “Soph’s back? What time is it?”

“Shh, shh, go back to sleep.” Sophie chided hurriedly, fumbling around in the dark for a pair of sweats before climbing into her bed.

“Hold up, did you shack with someone?” Julia asked, flicking on the lamp to see Sophie’s shirt.

“Jules, please,” Sophie begged, shielding her eyes.

Allie gasped, connecting the dots first. “Did you sleep with Rafe?!”

“Oh my god!” Julia exclaimed.

Sophie groaned, pulling her pillow over her head and turned to face the wall. “Leave me alone, I’m sleeping!”

“Fine, but you’re getting grilled when I get up again.” Julia threatened, but flicked off the light.

There was a brief moment of silence in the dark before Allie giggled. “That bad you had to leave, huh?”

“Shut up!”

“Get up fucker, how was your night?” James greeted Rafe the next morning, letting the door slam open as he strolled into their room with Colin in tow.

Rafe groaned as he lifted his head, arm cuddled around his pillow in the space where Sophie was. “...Huh?”

Colin laughed as James launched himself onto Rafe’s bed, narrowly missing his body.

“C’mon, James, what the fuck!” Rafe exclaimed, shoving him away.

James grinned, socking Rafe in the arm. “Heard you had a guest last night.”

“You weren’t even here last night...” Rafe frowned, then eyed Colin with an accusatory glance. “Traitor.”

Colin raised his hands in defense, but wore a telling smirk. “You just looked so cute cuddling up with her, I thought I’d take a photo. For the memories, you know.”

“Yeah, doubt she has any fucking memories.” Rafe grumbled as he hauled himself out of bed. “She was hammered, I picked her up, she asked to come back here and we fell asleep. That’s it.”

“You know what they say. Drunk words are sober thoughts.” James pointed out.

“James, last week you told me Helen Keller wasn’t real when you were drunk.” Colin argued.

“She literally wasn’t, dude, there’s no fucking way.”

“What the - there’s literally documented evidence!”

“Shut up, you two!” Rafe tossed a pillow at James, effectively shutting him up mid-response. “Why did you get me up at 8am on a Sunday anyways?”

“Right. We gotta leave in five, our parents want you at brunch.” Colin reminded him, eyeing over Rafe’s messy hair and shirtless state. “You should probably throw on a shirt. Brush your hair, maybe?”

“Yeah, you look like shit. But we’re not done talking about this.” James added.

“There’s literally nothing to talk about.” Rafe crossed his arms, a permanent scowl on his face as he glanced between his two friends.

“Photos say otherwise.” Colin grinned. “Get dressed.”

“Why are you both so set on this?” Rafe frowned, tugging on a quarter zip and raking his fingers through his hair.

Colin and James exchanged glances, quiet for a moment too long, before James shrugged. “I think you know why. Come on, we have to go.”

Rafe finished getting dressed and followed them out the door, grumbling more to himself than anything along the way. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

taglist: @obx-saltlife @dontjinx-it @butgilinsky @oopsiedoopsie23 @taiter-tots @annedub @alexandracheers

#photo is there just because i like it #leave me alone #rafe x sophie #mine #rafe cameron fanfic #rafe cameron #rafe cameron x oc #obx fanfic #rafe cameron fanfiction #obx fanfiction #college rafe #frat rafe

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teenyfish · 4 years

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Marine Biology Story of the Day #10

Hello all. This post was kinda delayed because I spent all day cleaning out my pool (it’s an above ground pool—my COVID 19 impulse purchase) because a hurricane came through and it’s full of dead insects and leaves among other things. The joys of living right on the coast 😊

Thanks for all of your interest and support on my shrimp research—it’s nice to know that people are interested in the little guys too. So today, we are going to talk about how all of my interest in tiny fish got started—my master’s program and my thesis.

SOoooo…originally I wasn’t planning on getting my masters because it sounded like a lot of work but then I changed my mind last minute when I started looking at job applications and saw that for many of them, you needed a masters—so I ended up becoming a master’s student at the same University that I did my undergrad at—called Christopher Newport University. It’s a teeny public school in Virginia near the Chesapeake Bay. And the reason I chose to do this is because I would be working under Dr. Jessica Thompson, who in hindsight, was probably the best advisor I could have had.

Dr. Thompson is a wonderful human being with many beautiful tattoos, and can definitely drink me under the table, and raises chickens in the middle of a city, but she is also pure and wholly supportive—something that I really needed during that period of my life. She also exclusively studied a wonderful teeny tiny fish: Fundulus heteroclitus, or the Mummichog.

(The males are the ones with the stripes and bright shiny scales and the female is the drabber one)

Her research focuses on this little fish because it is one of the hardiest fish on the east coast. It primarily lives in shallow water salt marsh habitats (intertidal marshes). These shallow water habitats often have very extreme temperature and salinity changes, as shallow water heats and cools up much faster than deep water. So they can survive in a wide range of temperatures, salinities, and dissolved oxygen conditions—I call them the cockroaches of the sea (except they are much cuter). They are also a very important food resources for a TON of marine and coastal predators.

They were also the first fish in space—and they were used in spatial orientation studies. You see, in space, animals and plants can lose all sense of up and down because there is no gravity—however in a few days, this fish were able to figure out their spatial orientation (possibly due to orienting to the overhead light source?). Anyway, they are incredible little babies.

(NASA scientist John Boyd choosing the first two fish (and fish eggs) to leave planet earth)

Because they can move into the very shallow intertidal marsh area (the part where the grasses grow) they can avoid predators during high tide, and this area of the marsh is chock full of food for them, mostly in the form of small zooplankton and worms that live in the mud. But during low tide, this part of the habitat dries up, and they are forced out into the deeper subtidal creeks of the marsh, where they get to be in cooler water, but they are at the mercy of predators, and there is less food.

(everything in the open water is subtidal, everything between tidal flat and low marsh is intertidal)

My aspect of this research involved looking at behavior choices made by these guys when presented with “intertidal marsh” habitat filled with food and marsh grass (their preferred habitat), however we cranked the temperature up to 34-40 oC (93—104 oF), OR a empty “subtidal creek” habitat with no food or structure, but at their optimum temperature for growth at 26 oC (79 oF). 34-40 oC is an EXTREMELY high temperature for fish to be able to function at—most fish begin shutting down their metabolism at these temperatures (aka dying). But supposedly, Mummichog can deal with these temps. There thermal maxima (upper temperature at which they can function) is reported to be 42 oC.

So I had to construct an experimental tank.

These were some of the first iterations of the tank—we had to do a lot of practice runs before we got the design just right. The concept is the same—we used this corrugated plastic (the same you use to make those political signs ppl stick in their front yard) to form two sections, one for warm, one for cold, and a box in the middle that we would remove a door and allow for the fish to swim out. Once the fish chose a side (remained on a side for more than 10 seconds) we would close them off from the rest of the tank—they made a “choice”. In later iterations of the design, we covered the tank in more of the plastic to hide them from us (so they wouldn’t show fear behaviors) and put in fake salt marsh grass on the warm side to mimic an intertidal marsh habitat. Fish were also fed pieces of cut up shrimp on the warm side. We ran 3 trials at increasing temperatures for each run, and during each trial, the fish were run through the tank simulation once a day for three weeks.

In order to get fish for this study, we had to catch wild fish. To catch them, we set minnow traps in the small channels leading into the intertidal marsh at low tide, and as the tide came in, and fish funneled into these channels, they became trapped in our minnow traps.

(examples of minnow traps, and our collection site in Norfolk)

Problem was, in order to get out to these sites, we had to slog through some serious mud. I’m talking about sink up to your thigh levels of mud y’all (and this really bothered me, I’m super claustrophobic). So in order not to get trapped in the mud, we had to wear mudders, which are a little bit like snowshoes (in concept?) but also not like snowshoes at all. They were like boxes you strapped onto your feet with plastic sticking out on the side which was meant to make your footprint bigger (and therefore give you more support on the mud). They worked pretty well but they always gave me major bruises on my ankles as the plastic pressed up and into my ankles. I had to buy some foam padding to wrap around my ankles it was so bad.

Once we got our sweet little babies, I would tag each of them individualy so I could keep track of individual fish. I did this with a combination of Visible Implant Alpha Tags, which are florescent and have individual numbers on them, or Visible Implant Elastomer Tag, which are made of a non-toxic elastomer “paint” and come in 9 colors, so you can create an individual code for each individual by combining 2 colors. These tags are injected under the skin so that they are still visible (fish skin is pretty transparent) but are not very deep in the muscle tissue. These are really great tags to use on really small fish. We used MS-Tricane to anesthetize the fish and inject them, so basically I’ve done fish surgery. You can check out these tags at Northwest Marine Technology—I still use them now! I’m using them on a current project.

(left, a VI Alpha Tag on a trout, right, two different colors of VI elastomer tags on a flounder)

And our fish did really well after tagging—we had no tagging mortalities!

Once we ran these fish through all three trials, it was time to analyze data. We calculated the fish’s dominant “choice” by calculating the proportion of days during the trial they chose the “warm side”—if their proportion was 90%, they had a high affinity for choosing the warm side, 30% they had a low affinity for choosing the warm side and instead more often chose the cool side for example. Then we put this data into environmental models to see if temperature influenced their choices.

And the result?

You read it here first folks. These little fish decided to swim into upwards of 104 o C water regularly to get food—they were so food motivated—and most fish chose the warm side over the cool side most often during every trial. However there was a decent amount of variation—there was a contingent of fish that went into the cool side more often as temperature rose, and would forgo eating for comfort, but overall, the fish chose the warm side. This shows that these fish may be able to adapt quickly as temperatures rise—and those that choose to move into warmer, shallower waters to access food will more likely survive to reproduce (since they choose to be in regions with less predators and more food). This means they are more likely to pass on their warm water acclimating genes to their offspring, continuing their species ability to deal with extreme temperatures on to the next generations.

My thesis defense obviously went well, and I got my masters, but I’ve kept my interest for the smaller fish and invertebrate species because they form one of the base levels of our ocean ecosystems and serve as a very important food resource to larger predators. I’d like to credit Dr. Thompson for giving me this interested and giving me the appreciation for these little and underappreciated animals. She and I have kept in touch—she was actually at my wedding last May, and when my dad got in a major accident (four days before I was supposed to defend my thesis) she came to the hospital and helped me through it, and also helped me push back my defense one semester so I could recuperate from the trauma a little. I am extremely grateful for her tutelage, and I’m grateful for these sweet little babies.

Thanks for reading, and as always, if you have any questions about the field work or the research, PLEASE do not hesitate to ask or comment.

#marine biology story of the day #marine science #marine biology #marine biology stories #coastal marsh #salt marsh #marine biologist #marine biologist stories #ocean stories #mummichog #killifish #fish in space #thesis research #Christopher Newport University #fish physiology #fish behavior

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blindprof · 3 years

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It’s Complicated

When people first hear me say that I am blind or severely visually impaired (B/VI), the most common reaction is surprise…followed by sympathy…followed most often by awkward silence. This is totally understandable. Unless you are regularly interacting with differently abled people, disabilities are uncomfortable. I feel uncomfortable and awkward around people who live with other forms of disability.

Heck, I’m still awkward around other people who are B/VI. And even this is understandable. Because each person is unique. Each manifestation of visual impairment is unique. Each path to and with B/VI is unique. Each person has unique life experiences, coping mechanisms, support networks, etc. We are all strangers in a strange land. I’ll have other posts dedicated to the whack-a-doo personal and social psychology of B/VI. For now, the focus remains on the physical, or rather the perceptual.

The second reaction is usually a question: “How bad is it” or “What do you see?” And my answer is “It’s complicated.”

In my first post, I laid out some more technical details: I have a visual field that is less that 10 degrees, night blindness, color blindness, uncorrectable myopia, light sensitivity, etc. But it’s not apparent how these details really affect what I see and how that impacts what I can do. This post will go into greater detail into what and how I see. Later posts will focus on how I (try to, with varying levels of success, stupidity, and hilarity) cope with these limitations.

It probably makes sense to start with my visual field, as this is the aspect of my vision that “qualifies” me as legally blind. However, before getting to that, we really need a basic understanding of how humans see. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it short and simple.

It may be easiest to compare the eye to a modern digital camera. A camera lens gathers and focuses light; it also constrains the amount of light passing through by altering the size of a mechanical aperture. In the human eye, these functions are performed by the lens and the pupil, respectively. In a digital camera, the lens focus light onto a CCD or CMOS sensor, which is a dense grid of light sensitive “pixels,” each generating a small electrical charge proportional to how much light (within a certain wavelength) is hitting it. The human retina is the biological, electrochemical equivalent. Finally, a digital camera has wires that transport these electrical signals to a computer, which then interprets the signals to create a digital image. Here, the human analogues are the optic nerve and the visual cortex within the brain.

As I noted in my first post, I have Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), which primarily impacts my retina. Due to the wonders of genetics and epigenetics, other parts are impacted. But for now, I’ll focus on the retina. Characteristically, people with RP find that their retinal “pixels”—millions of light-sensitive “rod” and “cone” structures, as well as protective retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells from which the disease gets its name—stop functioning from the outside in. We don’t know the exact cause, nor is there yet any proven way to slow, much less reverse the process.

Of course, this is a biological process that is unique to each individual. For me, it has progressed relatively slowly from childhood. I can recall early symptoms as far back as age 6. I’ll have a separate post at some point talking about progression. But it is notable the process is neither steady nor predictable. I’ll have periods of relative stability followed by periods of perceptible loss. It’s rarely like a light switch, but rather more like a dimmer. Each area of loss will appear darker with less usable information until it is just “clicked off” by the brain, presumably redirecting its limited processing resources to doing something other than trying to interpret shotty data from dying cells. For me, the progression has also been very spotty—for example, I retained some usable vision in the extremes of my left-right periphery until just a couple years ago, despite progressively losing most of my peripheral vision between there and my center.

The result today is that I have very little of my retina remaining that pretends to function “normally.” I can detect very high contrast light vs. dark in some of my periphery, but nothing there that you would qualify as usable sight. My central vision is still somewhat functional, but has been fading rapidly of late. As I said, it’s spotty, but on average in good light I have maybe 10-15 degrees total horizontal vision and less than 10 vertical. And much of that is probably equivalent to what most would consider to be peripheral vision. To help better “feel” what this means, here are a few examples of how this manifests itself in my day-to-day life.

When I’m sitting across a table from you, I can see your face but not your hands. If I’m not socially distant, I might be able to see your eyes or your mouth, but not both at the same time. I often creep people out during a conversation because I’m constantly losing eye contact and moving my eyes to different parts of their body. I promise, I’m not “undressing you with my eyes”—people talk with their entire bodies, and I’m simply trying to catch as many visual cues as possible.

When watching TV from 10 feet away, I can “see” my entire 55-inch screen. But less than a quarter of that is in my central vision. I have to move my eyes to see detail or read signs or captions. Sports and fast action scenes are difficult to catch. A fast action, dark scene with subtitles…oy…the Battle of Winterfell may as well have been a BBC Radio broadcast.

I can read, though usually only slowly and for short periods, especially if it is paper and ink. I see only a few words at a time, so my eyes have to constantly move. This causes a lot of eye strain, and I have trouble keeping both eyes properly oriented and occasionally have periods where one eye twitches uncontrollably—obviously I’m channeling my inner Mad-Eye Moody.

And of course, navigating unfamiliar or unpredictable environments is very difficult. I navigate by moving from waypoint to waypoint, and if I don’t know the waypoints or if things jump in my way, well, bad things happen. Or maybe funny things.

More on all of these and their many repercussions in future posts.

People ask, “What do you ‘see’ in the places where you have no vision? Is it blackness? Emptiness? Blurry?” Again, it’s complicated, but for the most part, my brain has just removed those areas from its visual processing “algorithm.” So, I see the same thing that you see when something is beyond your peripheral vision…just nothing. There are long periods of adjustment as I lose sight—kind of like losing a limb and still expecting it to be there. But eventually it’s just not a part of the picture that my brain paints of the world around me.

Unfortunately, that’s not all. Night blindness is often the first detected symptom for folks with RP. What is left of my retina doesn’t detect light well, so I need much more of it. The result is that I’m totally blind in low-light situations. I need direct light to see any kind of detail. I carry a flashlight everywhere I go and use it regularly day and night.

So, I need bright light. But it is also my nemesis. My eyes compensate like one would with a digital camera…by cranking open the aperture (pupil) and turning up the gain on the sensor. This does allow me to function semi-normally in certain situations. But it also results in severe light sensitivity. As with a camera, the wider pupil also results in loss of detail, and bright light can almost entirely wash any other visual information. To make matters even worse, although my pupils do function, they are VERY slow to adjust.

The results of all of that are varied. I’ll post more details in the future. But for example, I am no longer able to read a computer screen for any length of time without inverted colors. It’s like trying to read while staring at headlights. I truly need dark mode on all of my devices. Also, changing lighting conditions are challenging, especially when they are extreme. When I come in from outside, my eyes can take many minutes to adjust. And bright light sources like sunny windows in otherwise moderately lit environments can really cause havoc.

Finally, a common comorbidity with RP are cataracts, which cause hardening and blurring of the lens. Of course, this one hit me, as well. A number of years ago, I had cataract surgery. It was great. I was the youngest patient in the surgery center by like 30 years. The process involves using a magic wand to dissolve your natural lens and replacing it with a plastic one. This gets rid of the blurring, but entirely removes the ability to focus. As a bonus, I did go from needing coke bottle glasses to just needing a couple of diopters of correction. But this further complicates reading, and means I’m constantly donning and doffing my specs or having to look below them to read. Minor in the big scheme of things, but it does make me look and feel like a damn old fart.

Okay, if you made it this far, you deserve to be let off the hook for now. There’s more like the fact that my corneas—the eyes’ (usually) clear “lens caps”—now seem to cause my sight to remain blurry for the first couple of hours of each day. Or that the eye strain can sometimes get so physically painful that I have to close my eyes for long periods during the day. But this is a mostly complete and accurate snapshot of what I’m currently living with physically.

I guess I didn’t present too many funny or uplifting or forward-looking things in here. Truth is, you kind of have to muddle along with me through these sewers to eventually find the humor and hope in all of this. Because it’s complicated. But I’ll get there if you’re patient.

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girlofmanyfandoms · 4 years

Text

A/n: Next chapter is out! This one has a lot of setting up of the future plot points, it’ll be fun if y’all can pinpoint it. If the next chapter takes too long, I’ll post more of “The Plot out of context,” if it’s wanted!

Key:

Tater - @a-lonely-tatertot

Lynn - @lesbilynnette

Gray - @silver-snow

Lilah - @tribblemakingalicorn

Cadence - me

Ivy - @imaramennoodle

Molly - @molly-sencen

Farris - @everyonehasthoughts

Speens - @an-absolute-travesty

Holes - @holesinmyfalseconfidence

Connor - @linhammon-roll-bromance101

Panda - @worldwidepandamonium

Meg - @ultralazycreatorfan

Word count: 2,740

Warnings: Nothing makes sense.

“Lynn, can you have the next shipment of the Gatorade sent to my address in Peru?”

“Farris, what did you do now?”

“Nothing!” They grinned nervously.

“I swear if you moved to Peru just so you could buy an alpaca, I will-”

“It’s not that, I swear! Well, not just that. Boss called and said I have to be at the excavation site by tomorrow, that it might be a big break.” Farris scoffed. “As if. Last time, the only thing I found with my metal detector was someone’s Betty Boop keychain.”

“Yeah, I can ship them there,” Lynn sighed, exhausted from a night of getting a deal with the investor and setting prices for the products. “And that’s crazy.”

“I know right?” Farris answered. “Betty Boop? When was this person born, the 1950s?”

“That’s not- yeah, you’re right, Farris.” Lynn changed her sentence halfway through. “Any word back from Panda?”

“Yeah, Panda got back to me. Said that her sign is a Scorpio.”

“What?”

“Exactly, who would’ve thought Panda was-”

“Farris, you were supposed to ask about the chain restaurant idea!” Lynn massaged her forehead. “Why did we agree to be partners?”

“Because I threatened to blackmail you,” they responded, taking a bite out of an apple. “And I did ask about that. The zodiac sign was probably the question I wrote on my arm so I wouldn’t forget.”

“And?”

“She said the chain restaurant idea is a good thing to look into, as soon as we can make a good menu, hire some staff, good prices, nice locations, accessibility, y’know, all that jazz.”

“Because that’s so simple.” Lynn sighed, shuffling through the paperwork that had accumulated within the past week. “Alright, tell you what, I’ll get an artist to make an ad, maybe a social networker, I’ll set up a blog and we get the word out. As soon as you get back from the gig, you call me, alright?”

“Yup,” they agreed. “Oh, and Connor just texted saying he needs your help. I told him to wait ‘til I got back so I could teach him how to properly rollerblade, but the kid’s a madlad.”

“Anything broken?”

“His sanity.”

“Farris.”

“And a lot of furniture.”

“Guess I’ll have to find out for myself, huh?”

“You sure will.”

“Alright, I’m checking in with the supplier. Talk later?”

“Cheerio, mate,” Farris grinned, saluting her before ending the call.

Lynn opened her laptop and emailed her supplier, who had requested to remain anonymous. This was fine though, identities shouldn’t be known when dealing with the black market and pyramid schemes. Lynn was fine with using her real name because of her position as co-founder of Forbidden Incorporated. If she was going to go deviant, she’ll be damned if she didn’t do it with style.

_________

Cadence’s phone buzzed, as an email from a client had just arrived.

“Forks do not work with ice cream,” Tater yelled for the umpteenth time.

Holes clutched their head in a mixture of disappointment and annoyance. “Why would you use a spoon? It’s not soup, you can’t just spoon it out!”

“Then pop it in the microwave for a few seconds, for fu-”

“Crank it down 12 notches,” Molly suggested.

“-for Pete’s sake,” Tater acknowledged Molly. “And didn’t you just eat an entire bag of flamin’ hot Cheetos in one sitting?”

“They were good! And I’m fine,” Molly insisted. “Sure, we’re out of milk, and I have strep throat, but I just took a shower and I don’t think I’m gonna pass out just yet.”

Tater and Holes pulled out a Lysol can, masks, gloves, and a plexiglass barricade within seconds, clearly getting flashbacks from 2020. Cadence wasn’t paying attention, as usual, and kept writing her response to the email.

“Relax,” Molly laughed, clearly not finding it strange that they had those on hand at least a decade later. “I got my antibiotics, it’s not contagious anymore. And hey, good news: I made a questionable decision, and that’s also not contagious.”

They threw the equipment behind them, seemingly into the abyss, and relaxed a bit.

“Ok, now to address the real problem,” Holes started. “Who is Pete and why are we doing everything for his sake?”

“Oh my gods, it’s an expression, Holes,” Tater sighed.

“No, no, Holes, is onto something,” Molly said, grabbing the detective hat Lynn had designed for her and putting it on. “And I intend to find out.”

“Cadence, please make it two against two,” Tater pleaded.

Cadence glanced up from her phone. “What’s happening?”

“Oh my- you know what, I should’ve expected that, considering the Paint Water incident.”

“Ok, the Paint Water Incident was ONE TIME!”

“The what?” Holes looked interested.

“We don’t talk about it,” Cadence chimed in. “Think of it as the Great Gulon Incident of our group.”

“Great,” Holes sighed. “Another mystery. You’re all high.”

“I was fully aware of what I was doing in that incident.”

“Even better,” Holes commented dryly. “Nevermind, I don’t need to know.”

“Besides, there are great puzzles to be solved,” Molly continued enthusiastically. “Onward! We must scavenge for our first clue of Pete’s identity.”

Tater closed her eyes, telling her conscience to shove it for a moment. “Where do we start, Detective?”

Holes raised their eyebrows.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” Tater shrugged.

Molly looked at Holes in expectation. “Alright, fine,” Holes caved. “But I’m taking Cadence with us, I’m not going crazy alone.”

“That ship has sailed for both of us,” Cadence commented, not looking up from her phone.

“Yeah, haha, very funny. Let’s check out the corner opposite of the one they’re searching.” Holes paused, waiting for them to be out of earshot. “We don’t have to do anything, just pretend to search, I’ll be watching to make sure they don’t get killed.”

Cadence looked down at the email from her client. A shipping of 500 bottles, and 3,000 containers of newer products. And to Peru? Why had they changed the shipping address? She sighed. It was going to be a long day.

________

Connor’s house was on fire. Connor’s house was on fire. Why was Connor’s house on fire, you ask? Well, if you need to ask, you clearly haven’t met him. Lynn gazed at the sight in front of her tiredly, not knowing how she hadn’t expected this to happen.

Speens was calmly watering the bushes surrounding the house, not giving a second thought about putting out the fire with the water they had.

Lilah appeared beside Lynn, startling her. “Oh, good, you came. Gray has been trying to help Connor stand up for the past 30 minutes, but he’s way too drunk and he keeps refusing to ditch the rollerblades. Oh yeah, and his house is on fire.”

“About that, how’d it happen?”

“He was rollerblading on the stair railings when he fell onto their lamp, which tilted over and fell onto the seance that he was holding earlier in the day so the candles fell onto the hardwood floor, and then he spilled vodka everywhere, and then the flames turned blue, so here we are,” Lilah recounted all in one breath. “It’s kinda beautiful to be honest.”

“Beautiful isn't the word I would use to describe it,” Speens called. “It’s interfering with the plants. Well, except for Suzy, she’s a stubborn one. She wouldn’t burn, and believe me, I tried to make her.”

“I believe you,” Lynn said, quite understandingly. She had seen Speens around on the Deep Web, but had respected their secret. They all had secrets, after all.

Lynn walked inside where the hose was already uncoiled and ready to be used. Connor, however, was clinging to Gray’s leg. “NO, DON’T USE A HOSE, THE HOUSE DOESN’T LIKE SHOWERS.”

“Connor, the house is an inanimate object, it does not care,” Gray told him, trying to get control of the fire in the kitchen.

Connor gasped. “How DARE you talk to Cynthia like that?! She deserves better!” He crawled over to a wall that was, inevitably, about to burn down, and he stroked it. “You’re gonna be okay, sweetie. Don’t listen to the mean person, they’re just a hater.”

Gray shook their head and sighed. “Hey, Lynn. Can you increase the water pressure?”

Lynn did so, much to Connor’s dismay. To make up for it, Lynn handed Connor a piece of a floorboard that had undoubtedly been broken into pieces when they fell off of the stairs. He hugged the floorboard close to his face, crying happy tears, not thinking about the possibility of splinters. Lynn was confused, but had a feeling she would need him as an ally soon, and this was the best way to start.

Lynn babysat Connor as Gray put out the fire. When they had finished, none of the house had fallen down. It was weaker, and very charred, but somehow it hadn’t fallen.

Gray reached behind them and pulled out a ladder and a blueprint covering the new design of Connor’s structurally damaged home. Everyone had become acquainted with such things being summoned when needed. “Alright, I got the materials in the car, but we need to fix this house, er, Cynthia, up.”

“Renovating a house, huh,” Lynn muttered. “Better than spending all day dealing with paperwork. But if I’m going to help you and Connor, I’m going to need both of your help. So, how about an offer?”

Gray narrowed their eyes. “What would that offer entail?”

“Well, for you, Gray, I’d need help renovating a certain building. We’re talking about new elevators, knocking down walls, putting up new ones, new furniture, everything businessy. As for you, Connor,” Lynn paused, waiting for him to look at her. “I need a spy. You don’t have to be sober, but you have to keep them talking alright?”

“I’m feelin’ woozy,” Connor giggled.

“Can you overhear what people say and report back to me when you hear something important despite the wooziness?”

“Yup, and I can be a skater dude, too,” he grinned goofily. “We can all live our dReAmS.”

“Well, I’m in,” Gray said, helping Connor lay down. “I’ll certainly need a team for that building of yours, but I’m in. I can’t repair a house on my own anyway.”

Lynn nodded. A team, huh? For that she needed customers, crazy, loyal, and determined enough to support her products. She had a few people in mind who might be able to deliver.

______

“Meg, you got the snacks?” Ivy called over her shoulder, setting up the gaming consoles. They had finally stopped procrastinating and organized a group hangout between Speens, Ivy, and Meg, making it a game night. Ivy brought the video games, Speens brought the hands-on games, and Meg was in charge of snacks.

“Yup,” she smiled, wheeling in a wagon of junk food. “Anything you could want, it’s here. What games you got?”

“Rocket League, Mario Kart, only the best of the best. How about you, Speens?”

“Uno, Jenga, Connect Four, Scrabble, Twister, Monopoly, you name it, I got it. Where do you want to start? Virtual or hands on?”

“Virtual, I guess,” Meg decided. “Haven’t played in a while, ever since a pigeon yeeted my controller out of a window.”

Ivy tilted her head, asking for an explanation.

“T’was like a message from an angry god,” Meg said wistfully, resting her head in her hands. “A god who preached ‘live, laugh, yeehaw, and stop playing The Last of Us 2 because it’s a trash game.’”

“Are you on drugs?” Ivy looked sincere.

“I mean, I wrote ‘gay’ and ‘yeehaw’ all over my dad’s truck, and later that night I had a dream about falling in love with the sister of this prince that I had to stop from destroying everything at exactly 12 AM, but I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for.”

“No, that answered my question,” Ivy said, setting up the board out while the sunset shined brightly onto their faces in the cool evening light.

Meg chose the monster truck token. “Refresh my memory, how do you play again?”

“It’s literally just capitalism for kids, and I am above you mere mortals,” Speens helped, choosing the rubber duck token, and taking a Snickers and KitKat from Meg’s snack wagon. What happened next was ungodly. Speens opened the KitKat bar and ate it. Without. Separating. The Bars.

Ivy reeled back in horror, and Meg hid behind her, terrified of the scene going on before their eyes.

“What?” Speens finished the chocolate and wiped their hands with a tissue. “Are we going to play this game or not?”

“Oh no,” Ivy said, pulling her hair slightly. “You don’t get to gloss over that. The Forbidden Spicy Gatorade is for all of us to share and enjoy once we get our hands on it, but you never, never, disrespect the KitKat bar.”

Speens scoffed. “You’re really going to dwell on that?”

“Going to dwell- I can’t even-“ Ivy took a deep breath to steady herself. “I will not allow this in my house. So you know what? Let’s raise the stakes. We need this Monopoly game to be a game-changer.”

Speens narrowed their eyes. “What are you saying? You’re betting something?”

“Yup. If I win, you have to wear a hoodie that says “I love Holes” and you have to help me with a plan of mine. If you win, I’ll help you get revenge on someone.”

“And if I win,” Meg continued. “Y’all owe me a lifetime’s supply of fro-yo and you both have to agree to each other’s bet deals.”

“Deal from my end,” Ivy pitched in, selecting the top hat token. The other two agreed, and the game commenced.

By 3 o’clock in the morning, Ivy had been in jail 17 times, and Speens had one hotel left. With a few lucky turns, Speens was bankrupt.

Ivy smirked, having a good feeling about this. “I call upon the power of the almighty Top Hat!”

“Oh, don’t look so smug, Ives,” Speens scowled, opening their suitcase of vodka and pouring their version of two shots. “You can still lose to Meg, and she bet a lot.”

“True, but in reality, would you rather lose to Meg or me?” Ivy flashed a grin. “The hoodie’s in my room, by the way. Don’t worry- it’s washed!”

Sighing, Speens went to retrieve the hoodie. A deal’s a deal, after all. When they returned, they looked ready to kill someone. They wore a baggy bright pink hoodie with “I Love Holes!” spelled in purple glitter. “You better win this, Meg.”

Meg stuffed a hand in her bag of snacks and nodded. Ivy’s turn was next, and it brought Meg down to $100. Speens muttered something under her breath and waved her hand in an elaborate motion. Seconds later, a loud crash was heard, followed by the breaking of glass and the sound of spraying water.

Ivy frowned. “What was that?”

“Go check,” Speens suggested.

Ivy looked out of the kitchen window to see… no window. The top of a fire hydrant had come bursting off of its mounted position and had crashed through her window. “No!” She frantically ran to the street to assess the damage from outside.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Speens stirred their beverage casually. “She’s not looking, you can win this.”

“Even if it means you always have to pay for my fro-yo?”

Speens shrugged. “Beats having her win. Besides, I’ll eat just as much fro-yo as you do if I’m paying for it.”

Meg went through the cards quickly, ignored whatever magic just went on. With a lifetime supply of such an other-worldly snack, who wouldn’t? Meg found her card just in time, as Ivy came back in, looking surprisingly calm.

“I boarded up the window, insurance will cover it,” she explained. “Your turn, Meg.”

Meg pulled the card she had placed on top of the pile and made her move. She had done it. Ivy was bankrupt. Not only that, but she was going insane. She flipped the board, sending everything tumbling into the depths of her house.

“How did you- you had no chance-”

“Breath, princess,” Speens joked. “I know what’ll take your mind off of this: some good old fashioned revenge on an old rival of mine. Whaddaya say, pal?”

“This day could not get any worse,” Ivy whined.

Except it could. And it did.

The electricity cut out and Ivy let out an ear-piercing screech.

__________

A/n: Not my favorite chapter, but I have some freaking PLANS for the next ones. Stay tuned! And if I made any errors, let me know because I can’t sit still for more than 5 minutes, so I only corrected a few things.

#Forbidden Spicy Gatorade #Forbidden Spicy Gatorade Chronicles #the next chapter is where the real fun begins

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