have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had...

(She/Her) My hobbies include nervous apprehension, increasing dread, and wondering if my enemies were right after all.

[yujateaandpi]

Was driving with my grandmother and in broken English she says “no eyes… no nose… no face. Don’t trust.” To which I looked around wildly in search of this omen of ill portend.

Cybertruck. It was a cybertruck.

[chortlebot]

before someone screenshots this and posts it elsewhere this is me

[clawcakes]

PREV TRUTH NUKE

[official-michigan-posts]

i'm definitely not qualified to answer this chat what do you think

[official-michigan-posts]

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!!!!

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD IS!!

YURI!!!!!!!

[baleful-meat-worm]

waiter waiter more depictions of traumatised malnourished characters putting on some weight postcanon to show their recovery from the horrors please !!!!!!!!!!!

[samcormac]

what’s the rush?

[rainwasheseverythingaway]

The time will pass anyway

[shamebats]

"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry

[podcastwizard]

saw a comment that misspelled “kind gesture” as “kind jester” and am now imagining a beautiful world where we praise good samaritans by calling them kind jesters. good on you, you gentle fool. you’ve made the world a sweeter and sillier place.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[wizardarchetypes]

absolutely looosssinggg it. i'm so obsessed with movies which portray the woman MC in a highly specific job because the writers clearly think it's like "off-beat" and "quirky" but have no idea how the field works whatsoever.

i decided to try a romcom i somehow missed i the 2000s 'head over heels' and i got 3 and a half minutes in and we're introduced to the lonely MC with bad taste in men as evidenced by her extremely short list of ex boyfriends, including her first boyfriend when she was 11 or something because i guess that's still relevant in her adult life.

so she's resigned herself to never finding love and prefers to ignore men to focus all her energy into her career.

this job is immediately presented as though it's for spinsters with no hope of ever finding a man.

the mc's lesbian bestie (whose first line involves her being scolded for being too sexual in the workplace, but moving on) points out their colleagues as evidence that they're doomed to a romance-less, sexless life if they don't switch up their shared career path. the colleagues are three old women, so-dubbed "the menopause triplets":

these women are presented as if they have no idea what's going on at any given moment. this is 2001, and presumably this is an entry level job requiring low effort and no experience.

then their boss bursts into the room, unceremoniously bumping a large painting into the door jam and walls, announcing that it's a new project for our MC.

our MC is thrilled to see the painting. apparently it's a light in the daily slog at her dreary job for loser women with nothing going on in their lives.

And that job is? Conservator of paintings (specializing in Renaissance) at the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The painting being handled like an old couch on its way to the curb?

The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian.

Her lesbian colleague who is presumably also a a highly trained & skilled curator finds it depressing that the MC is so excited about the painting.

it's a quirk unique to this MC that she cares so much about paintings, in her department at the metropolitan museum of art, where her colleagues find all that art business rather dreary. because we all know that's what conservators in extremely competitive museum positions are like.

[wizardarchetypes]

I'm not saying there can't be lifelong love in here somewhere but I also just feel like the monogamous heterosexual marriage you're fantasizing about isn't necessarily best represented by the bacchanal. and that's okay. but i do stand by that.

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[damazcuz]

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like it's a nail. And when you have a character, every post looks like it's about them. And that's cause it is! 😊 #wisdom

[liebelesbe]

I love emoji reactions so much. Don't know what to say but don't want to ignore whoever texted you? Boom. Lizard reaction 🦎

[bluegrasshole]

we all live such different lives

[kaijuerotica]

[nuclearbummer]

[wiigiwaamcore]

David Cusick was a Tuscarora (Haudenosaunee) artist who self-published the first known English-language record of Indigenous stories told BY an Indigenous writer-illustrator. His book is called David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations and you can read it for free online.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

We should popularize more hispanized phonetic spellings of classic character names like we did with esnupi

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Citripio y Arturito

[crabussy]

small tips for Enjoying Being Alive from someone who went from wanting to die to genuinely loving life. these won't fix your life but they'll make it a lot easier to want to live day by day. I promise.

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

diet deficiencies can make you properly miserable. your physical health impacts your mental health more than you'd think. get some vitamins, some omega-3s and so on. whether from food or supplements. they can make quite a difference! your brain is responsible for a LOT of the way you feel, and giving it the fatty acids it needs to function at its best can go a long way.

[crabussy]

I know these all sound like stupid junk people who have never wanted to die tell you. I know they sound like dumb "self-help" tips written by people who have suffered mild anxiety at worst.

they're coming from someone who had multiple daily panic attacks for half a decade. someone who genuinely felt like he did not deserve to live. someone who hated himself so much he convinced himself he was irredeemably evil. someone who loves being alive these days, even though it's difficult sometimes.

you truly don't have to follow any of this advice. but just read through. store it in the back of your mind. come back to it when you want. best of luck. [:

[nedzira]

These are genuinely great! If I can add a small comment it would be to try to change scenery every now and then, take a different route home and go for walks. And make appointments to meet your friends!

[crabussy]

ABSOLUTELY. anytime I feel myself descending into a slump where everything feels wrong and bad and gross and hard, I go on a Weird Walk. I choose a familiar destination (the dairy, the beach, a specific hill) and intentionally choose a route I've never tried before. it's crazy but it makes me feel better almost instantly, even if the new walk is worse than my usual route. your brain CRAVES new stimulation! you are a member of a species with one of the most active brains in the animal kingdom. please try not to live like a hamster.

[chiveoil]

took me so long to learn that small things like this that might help me feel like 2% better were a good idea to do anyway even if that isn’t very much.

in the same way that if you can set a timer on your phone for five, even two minutes and fill a bag with trash, stack up dishes, maybe gather clothes in a pile in the room you’ve been depressed in for days, it does improve the overall feeling of the room more than you’d think it would.

my suggestion to add is that if you can, maybe also try keeping a list in some form of ‘things to look forward to’, which you do not have to actually feel any enthusiasm about in the moment and which can be as small or big or far away or close as you can think of, anything you think you might be able to muster up even 2% enthusiasm for at some point in the future, put it all on the list. eventually you will start recognising things (friend hangout, roommate making dinner, new season of show you like, get to see your cat) as something to put on the list and you will build the muscle of looking for enjoyment in the future, even if now sucks.