i just walked past the apartment beneath mine and through an open window i could hear my downstairs neighbor crying faintly while the song jolene played in the background and im just like… bitch are you okay…?
I actually ended up going back downstairs to check on her and brought some leftover cookies I baked this afternoon. she’s very sweet and going through a Breakup Mood™️ after being cheated on. she’s coming over to my gf and I’s annual bad movie night on Friday and she even let me pet her cat named Clarence
my gf thinks it’s funny but very fitting that our downstairs neighbor was able to summon a concerned lesbian just by playing jolene while crying about being done dirty by a man
My family likes to vacation in Topsail, North Carolina, which is a little barrier island mostly covered in vacation homes. We rent a huge house in their off season, when most people consider it too cold to be at the beach, and we, with our icewater blood, consider it quite pleasantly deserted.
I love going for walks at night, especially when there’s a clear sky, so I, age sixteen, would go a few miles up the beach around midnight most nights. One night, while still about a mile from our house, I saw something rolling in the surf.
“That’s either a plastic bag caught on a log,” I thought, “Or a four foot shark.”
I jogged over. It was not a plastic bag caught on a log.
The shark was moving and didn’t appear to be hurt, but was caught in water only an inch or so deep, being pushed higher with every wave. I was by myself, and didn’t own a cell phone, and couldn’t see a house with lights on in either direction. There was nobody around. Leaving to go get help would probably take long enough for him to suffocate. The best thing I could do for this shark, I figured, would be to get him back in the ocean.
I have no idea how he wound up so high on the beach, because it was a very shallow slope. I’d have to carry him a good fifteen or so feet to get him into water deep enough to swim. It was nearly a full moon, so I could sort of see what I was doing. I got a grip on the shark, careful not to squeeze too hard, in case he was hurt, and picked him up. He didn’t like that at all.
I started walking into the water. Here’s a thing I didn’t know about sharks: They’re pretty damn flexible. I got a couple steps with this shark, looked down, and realized there were a hell of a lot of teeth coming directly at my forearm.
It occurred to me that I had not thought this through very well.
I’m not proud of what I did. It seemed like the best way to get this shark back in deep enough water and avoid dropping thirty pounds of very bitey animal directly on my own toes. So.
I yote the shark with as much force as I could muster.
He curved through the air like a thing of beauty, all angry and toothsome in the moonlight, and splashed wonderfully into the deeper waters. I caught a glimpse of fin diving away shortly after.
And that’s the last I saw of him.
So now I’m just remembering one year when we ended up doing a big grocery run on like the 23rd, trying to make sure we were well stocked up for when basically the whole country shuts down.
That time, not only was the store (our closest Sainsburys, in fact) a total madhouse worse than before a big storm back home? The fastest estimate he could get on a minicab home was like 3 freaking hours. Trying multiple places.
So yeah, we ended up taking turns pushing the overloaded trolley home. Good thing it was only about a mile, and the worst uphill you get around here isn’t very. Because of course it was vaguely uphill too 😅
ETA: Somebody had also nicked the trolley from outside the back gate when he went to wheel it back the next day. Another hike avoided, at least.
the worst emotional truama ive ever recieved in my life is in 2nd grade, i went to catholic school and i was really acting out that day because something my teacher did my made me blood boil, so i acted out and got to sit on a bench alone during recess
however, in defiance i ran to the slide and did the only thing i knew how to do when i was upset at someone and pissed my pants
my teacher was forced to clean up the unpacified rage that was my urination off the slide and of course my mom got called, when i got picked up by her later that day, she began to ask me if i still liked Hillary Duff, who was like my weird 2nd grader TV crush and i got all happy shaking my head like YEAH, YEAH I DO LIKE HILLARY DUFF IS SHE HERE
and thats when it struck, the peircing lance that struck my heart, and i will never forget these words my mother told me:
“Hillary Duff doesn’t like pee pee boys.”
This is exactly the kind of weird 2nd grade kid shit I remember
Just reminded with that reblog about when the proverbial Missing Stair gets tolerated inside the family.
My own family has enough problems with ways it’s apparently OK to treat people, but luckily that wasn’t one of them that I ever knew about. Another thing which really shouldn’t involve luck. The idea is totally appalling, especially where it involves kids getting shoved to the bottom of the collective family priority bucket to the point of being actively placed in danger.
That didn’t mean that there weren’t several other people in the community with bad enough reputations and/or creepy enough behavior that I got warned to stay well away from them as a kid.
One of those lived right up the street from us for several years, and I played with his kids who were around the same age. But I was forbidden to ever go inside their house or be alone with the guy. He came across that wrong to my mother, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d also heard some things because smallish communities.
There were a few people like that, but that particular guy was the closest and the hardest to totally avoid. It didn’t even really strike me at the time just how messed up the whole situation was, especially for the children who were just not in a position to avoid these people. Including their own, too often 😦
Anyway, after a few years we moved, and I was honestly pretty glad to be away from Alicia’s Creepy Dad hanging around. (And that’s in a culture where dads are expected to pay more attention and spend more time with kids. Just…not like that.)
My family’s involvement with ACD wasn’t totally over, though! Because he owned a garage, and would pass basically anything not super blatantly dangerous on state car inspections for an extra $20.
Dude may have been creepy enough to warn your kid away, but that deal apparently looked like a tempting enough offer when inspection time rolled around and there wasn’t money for proper repairs. My mom didn’t even like to go there, and would get my dad to take the cars in for ACD’s special inspection deal so she didn’t have to deal with him. But, they still gave him money.
Anyway, I eventually got old enough to drive, and a while after that my $500 car came due for inspection.
($500 in like 1992, but still. The thing was a year younger than I was and mechanically sound, to the point that my dad was still driving it some when I left 10+ years later. But, it had a few quirks. Let’s put it that way.)
You can maybe see where this is going. For some reason, both of my parents were busy, and my mom turned pissy when I protested, insisting that I eventually needed to learn to handle these things on my own. Which happened a lot, tbqh. And of course in this case that involved going for the ACD Special Inspection Deal.
By myself, dealing with somebody who creeped me out and that she had explicitly told me never to be alone with. Maybe 17 was too old for him to act Like That, but I was just not willing to find out. I explained why I didn’t want to do that, and that got treated as ridiculous.
So yeah, I set up an inspection at a different garage. And it was all my fault when the car failed on a busted defroster and a missing California-only ‘70s vintage exhaust device. And it had to go back to the same garage to be reinspected.
I got to take back roads as much as possible and try to dodge cops for probably 6 months after that, especially trying to get to and from school in the next town. Until my dad could track down a junkyard smog pump for shipping (pre-modern Internet) and we could get the defroster reconnected enough to pass.
My mother would send me out to run errands in the no sticker car, and yell about it being all my own fault if I said a word. I did get a ticket at one point, not surprisingly. (And yelled at over that added expense, of course.) Mostly surprised it did only happen once. I got pretty good at avoiding places you often saw cops.
The whole thing was about as stressful as you might expect, especially for someone who’d only had a license for about a year at that point. I still think my mother’s behavior was inexcusable, but yeah she wasn’t ever about to admit she was wrong to begin with. If you could ask her now, I’m sure it would still be all my fault 25+ years later.
And I really was not in the wrong for being unwilling to deal with Neighborhood Missing Stair that I had been warned about, by myself, when I was 17 years old. And was offered no reasonable alternatives by people who should have known better.
Hadn’t thought about that experience for years, very possibly because I didn’t want to. But, reminded of it today. And I evidently needed to rant some.
So, a few years ago, Yom Kippur was coming up and I really needed to ask forgiveness of a Gentile friend who I had failed a couple times that year, and even though the friend hadn’t mentioned it, it had been eating at me. This friend didn’t really know anything about Judaism.
So I contacted him, by email, (we were in different countries at this time) and I said “I know that I failed you with [thing], and I just want to say how sorry I am. I will try to fix it in the future. If I have done anything else that may have harmed you at any time in the past, knowingly or unknowingly, I am truly sorry. I ask that you will forgive me. I hope that you will accept my apology. Please let me know before 3 days from now.”
My friend promptly responded with the following: “Are you dying????”
The Moral of the Story: explain what Yom Kippur is to your gentile friends.
ok so the other day i was at sears. I was in the baby section. Im standing there looking at clothes and a lady who works there comes up and is like “oh are you expecting?” And i was like “uhhhh” and because im a dumbass i was like “no i already delivered.” And she was like “How long ago?” And i was just like “two weeks.” And she said “wow! You look great! When i had my first son, i looked like a mess for six months. Is it a boy or a girl?” And i was just awkwardly like “a girl….” And she asked her name and i said Chernobyl and she was like “oh what a cute name! It sounds really familiar.” And i honestly just stood there going through all that and pretending i had a human baby two weeks ago named Chernobyl because i didnt wanna tell this poor lady i was buying baby clothes for my fucking baby opossum
every time i see this text post i forget the ending and every single time it decimates me
Now I’m almost sorry you can’t get hold of the salt-risen bread here, even if it’s really not celiac-friendly. At least without somehow getting a starter and doing a lot of baking experimentation I really don’t have the spoons for.
(I didn’t know it was specifically an Appalachian thing, but that would certainly explain why nobody else has ever heard of the stuff. It’s basically a sourdough but not relying on yeast for leavening, just some bacteria. Kind of similar to what makes the bubbles in Swiss cheese.)
My Papaw’s aunt who looked after my mom while her parents were working was apparently extra fond of salt-risen bread with the classic farm soured cream (cultured) butter, kept nice and spreadable at room temperature.
That keeps better than the sweet cream butter now standard in the US, and up to a certain point it will just keep developing a stronger vaguely cheesy cultured taste and smell. (Besides just starting out with a stronger buttery taste. I do really like that the standard commercial stuff is soured here.)
So, of course her husband had to keep ribbing her about that “cat shit bread with axle grease”. Which my mom found hilarious as a kid. Didn’t put either one of us off the bread, at least.
Salt-rising bread is denser, with a closer grain, than yeast-leavened bread,[5] and has a distinctive taste and odor.[4] The pungent odor of the fermenting starter has been described as similar to “very ripe cheese”.[2]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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