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TL;DR: manager of my IT team has a difficult teacher-like attitude, part of my team dislikes her. She thinks I am not a team player and undermining her authority when not attending an optional meetings. I called her out during a team outing. A few days later she scolded me during a 1on1 meeting, didn't take my explanations, started crying, saying how hurt she is and how difficult it is for her. I put in my notice, but I feel like an asshole and emotionally manipulated at the same time
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Whole story:
I work as a senior software engineer at a medium sized startup. I've been working in the company for about a year, she a bit longer than me. She started managing my team a few months ago. It is her first role as a manager (before she was working with processes and people). She is good in interacting during 1on1s and arranging stuff across teams, but most of the team dislike her attitude in team meetings - she is lecturing, treating team members as unruly children instead of coworkers, and has generally a teacher attitude. The team is small - around 8 people. She received constructive feedback about her attitude at least once.
We had a few hours of workshops planned. She informed everyone that there is no agenda (meetings will be arranged as needed) and all of them are optional to reduce time waste. Since there was no agenda and I have long commute time (normally everyone works remotely), I informed everyone that I will be about 1h late. Nobody objected and there were a few reactions that it is ok (including from the manager).
When I arrived, I was asked to join the meetings, as they are compulsory. When I asked about the previous rule about them being optional, my manager responded "please remember that you are part of the team". I cringed, but said nothing and joined. As I had suspected the meeting were waste of my time.
After work, we went out for some outing with the team. It was fun, we were after a few drinks. When ordering some food at a restaurant, we were a bit loud when trying to talk about who wants what. She stepped in in her teacher shoes and started slamming a menu on the table to silence us. I saw a few people from my team burning her with their eyes and holding back from saying something. She noticed the nervousness and backed off saying "I know I might sometimes be like a teacher". I couldn't hold back and said "yes, and it is a bit irritating". One person supported me saying it's not only my opinion. After that it quickly came back to normal. She left after eating, and the atmosphere cleared immediately. The team thanked me for someone finally saying it. We started talking about her and it turned out there are many more problems with her.
The next day there was a company event/party, and my team was actively avoiding her, telling me that they can't stand her vibe.
Two days later, I had a cyclic 1on1 with the manager. It went in a direction completely unexpected by me, as she seemed cool and positive towards me. I was scolded about being late to the workshops, that I am not a team player and I undermine her authority. Her tone was calm, but aggressive. I stayed calm and just stated the facts - I actively disagreed with her, citing her official message that the meetings were optional and I announced my late arrival, which no one disagreed with. I also asked why she didn't ask me to be on time, as I would have adjusted - she said that she was angry and didn't want to say something bad. Anyway, she didn't accept any of my explanation.
Then she brought my calling her out in public setting, how hurt she was and how difficult it is for her, how fragile personality she has, that she won't change etc. She started crying - not sobbing, but talking with tears rolling down her face. I apologised to her for calling her out like that in public - while I think what I did was unprofessional, it was a setting outside of work, with everyone already a bit drunk and some people being annoyed at her. She said that I destroy the team's atmosphere, that we are already difficult and no one notices her good sides, only bad. At that point I've had enough and calmly and delicately said that she has skewed perspective on the whole situation and shared with her that the team was relieved when she left. She looked blankly in my eyes and through tears said "then I think I know what I need to do with my career". Not wanting to be in the centre of some company drama, I said that her leaving might not be necessary, as I will be putting in my notice (I had another job already planned, but wanted to delay the decision - but that meeting was the nail to the coffin). She handled that pretty okay. Then it went mostly friendly but still sad on her end, we were talking about her personality issues and that she does not blame me and values my honesty. The whole meeting took probably an hour.
I left home with complete confusion in my head. I talked about it with my gf and relatives, and they were all absolutely shocked how unprofessional and emotionally unstable she is, and that she is unfit for the role if she can't handle this kind of friction (which completely I agree with). A few of them pointed out how manipulative and guilt-tripping she was during the meeting. It cleared my head a bit, as even during the conversation with her I was constantly asking myself: I am an asshole? am I insensitive and should just apologise for everything? I am still asking myself those questions, and I've been uneasy about the whole situation

This sub was so helpful in helping me plan my trip and what to pack so I wanted to post a review of what I ended up packing. An important caveat here is this is what worked for me. What works for you may vary depending on your itinerary, your luck with the weather, and your cold tolerance. Personally being from the American South where our winters are rarely colder than 40 F (4.5 C) I am a little weanie when it comes to being cold. I had literally never seen snow or walked on ice prior to this trip.
Our trip: our general itinerary was to fly into KEF, transfer to RKV, then take a domestic flight to EGS. We started our trip exploring the east and then made our way down the southern coast back to Reykjavik and ultimately flew home out of KEF. So we essentially did 1/2 the ring road.
Our weather: the lowest temps we experienced were mid 30’s F and highest temps were mid 50’s F. Through the majority of our days were in the low 40’s. We also had the delight of a yellow warning while we were in Hella that grounded our hiking for the day, and we experienced intermittent light hail throughout our trip.
Besides the obvious things you need to packs, here are some of things I spent time researching before packing.

1. waterproof hiking boots: a must pack. If you plan on doing any significant hiking or even walk around the city in the rain water proof boots will help keep you cozy and comfortable! However if you have older boots that may have lost some of their weather proofing I recommend reproofing them before your trip. My boots were a little bit leaky-er than when I last used them and I would have benefited from reproofing them.
   
2. Snow pants: I got these. Like I said I live in a warm climate and owned zero pairs of cold weather pants before this trip. Lots of people online said snow pants were over kill and I was hesitant to purchase these. But as a tall and always cold girlie having some warm pants that actually covered my ankles was game changing. Since I’m tall the pants being long enough was HUGE as they prevented rain from funneling directly down my leg and into my boots. I wore them almost every day while hiking and they were especially great on the beach as it was quite windy when we were there. They did get a little warm when the sun came out but I would compensate with removing top layers.
   
3. Water proof pants: If you plan to get close to any of the glorious water falls having water proof pants is a life saver. I paired mine with leggings underneath to prevent from freezing. I even wore them over the snow pants one time for glacier hiking as it happened to be pouring rain.
   
4. Rain coat: an absolute must. I used mine as a thin rain coat/wind breaker and layered underneath to match the weather. I got one that was on the cheaper side and while I don’t necessarily regret it if you have cause to splurge and get a nicer rain coat I say go for it. Mine did a great job keeping my dry visiting water falls and in light to regular rain. It did less well while hiking for hours in the rain atop a glacier. The material of mine feels more fabric-y and less plastic-y which I’m sure helps with breathability but I think water resistance is sacrificed and it has a hard time holding up to heavy or prolonged rains. But ultimately I’m not sure a more expensive coat would have performed much better.
   
5. Water proof winter gloves: these were great on our glacier hike and glacier lagoon zodiac boat tour. Granted they got soaked but they were still immensely helpful with windchill. I don’t know if I could have done either of these activities without gloves. If this stuff is not on your itinerary you could probably skip these and replace them with regular thinner gloves. I wore them a few additional times on the beach and when it was quite windy but never for long.
   
6. Fleece buff: loved this in place of a scarf for layering while hiking. Easy to pack away when too hot. Easy to pull up to covered more of your head and chin when too cold.
   
7. Quick drying towel: we got thin microfiber quick dry towels that pack down really well. They were great for when we went to natural hot springs or just drying off if we got rained on during a hike.
   
8. Water proof backpack cover: great buy if you want to get close to a waterfall while protecting your gear.
   

Things we didn’t get: some stuff just didn’t seem like a worthy investment for us since we live in such a warm climate. Sure they might have enhanced our trip, but we managed just fine without them. On this list is: wool socks, wool base layers, trekking poles, yak traks or other crampons, or mosquito nets.
Hopefully someone finds this helpful! Cheers!

I have made a restaurant listing site where on one side I have made a sticky header for reservation, but I want it to stop being sticky beyond a certain point so that it doesn't come over the footer. Is there any way to achieve that in figma?

So for a... rather delayed campaign I've come up with a few factions which I want to involve in a campaign. Its a sandbox game with factions competing in the area that the party might have a chance to work with or fight against. I've a couple of core ones and a range of other ideas but I'm aware at this point I should probably be cutting some. So i thought I'd throw this out there and get some advice as to what people thought was most interesting and what people thought should either be entirely discarded or at least moved to a back burner.
For a quick setting overview i'm going with some of the classic clash of order and freedom type of thing borrowing some ideas from things like Dark Sun and Mesopotamian history as inspiration. Broadly this part of the continent has most of its agricultural land focused around the coasts and some river systems that extend into the interior of the continent, most of this agricultural land is ruled by powerful city states dominated by Draconic King. Beyond this the lands surrounding it are largely arid, plant life only briefly able to flourish in the wet season as wadis fill for a time, the lands and people here often wild. Go far enough north and you hit a region of hills and mountains of a different but equally harsh nature most often.
So 2 factions which are must haves
Meshant
The closest of the great city states to the starting area, ruled by a powerful Blue Dragon named Ukrik'Azahim'Mli and with a satellite town called Oulm'Aki being a possible starting/hub location, a modest town sitting at the edge of a minor tributaries of the larger river upon with Meshant sits. As with many of the great dragon city states slavery is common here, order is often enforced ruthlessly and the society is extremely hierarchical, with a small clique of wealthy nobles (most of whom are dragonborn) at the top and a large number of slaves and poorer subjects at the bottom of the pile. However, it represents a place of socio-economic complexity, that embraces long distance trade. Ukrik'Azahim'Mli is also quite a capable ruler, he's been fairly good at fending off the attempts of rivals to conquer his lands and has earned wealth for his city through wars, his court is a centre of learning regarding the magical and mundane, as well as being a patron of the arts. His legal system may provide broad powers when dealing with those accused of crimes against those of a higher station but the great storm dragon does still value something approaching rule of law. And if you are someone who values things like trade and literacy it is Meshant that will further such things. For an adventurer who seeks wealth and prestige the forces of Meshant are also perhaps the best resourced to offer such things.
Here in Ouim'Aki, the governor Amar-Suen is the governor of a town at the edge of the city's zone of control, the river that connects them navigable in the wetter parts of the year but not always easy and safe to traverse with Ouim'Aki sitting on the north shore of a marshy lake in the wet season as water collects from nearby areas, the river flowing out to the south and joins the flow of a larger river at Meshant. Meanwhile with a new campaigning season likely to begin it is likely the king will bring his power southwards to wage war on his neighbouring monarchs meaning although Meshant is the greatest power in this region not all of its resources will be focuses here.
The Hatussa
The Hatussa describe a loose, fluid group of desert nomads that live in this area, their population is made up of a fair mixture of desert elves along with humans, half elves and a smattering of other races. The people of the cities would call them barbarians, surviving off pastoralism, hunting and gathering as they move across the landscape in small groups rather than farming, having no knowledge of writing and with the concept of law being nothing more than a group of loose shared norms, the enforcement of which is not the monopoly of any king, judge or their men. Those of the city might describe them as untrustworthy, at one time happy to do trade and at another to engage in banditry and raiding. The deserts they live in can often be tough places, low on water in many parts of the year and even at the best of times wild monsters and dangerous beasts are not uncommon. However they are lovers of freedom, decisions are often made by consensus among groups, leaders often chosen only for a specific purpose such as conducting a raid or a negotiation, their lose political structure lacking many of the traditional facets of state structure such as taxation and a monopoly on the use of force.
But I have some other ideas for factions and I'm debating which I might also include.
The Nethaniah
For generations the valley dwarfs have lived as slaves or poor lower class workers in the realms of the Draconic Kings. The Nethaniah are a local group focused on the liberation of of the Valley Dwarfs in particular and perhaps abolition more broadly, hoping to either rebel against the King of Meshant and free perhaps Oulm'Aki or else take as many of their people as possible and find somewhere to free. On their own however they know they lack the strength to have much chance of taking Meshant on. They are known for including warriors highly skilled using simple weapons and in unarmed combat but some are also said to turn to darker powers seeking stranger abilities. They are quite willing to be ruthless in their goals, carrying out assassinations and the like to undermine the power of the Draconic Masters in Oulm'Aki, although they are not blind to the suffering of slaves of other races they still tend to prioritise freeing their own people
The Sleepless Dreamers A group of former supporters of the old king of Meshant, Uzi'Isbi'Imi, who have fled into the deep desert along with the bones of the dead Brass Dragon. Since then they have been trying to find a way to bring her back to life or perhaps unlife. So far they have yet to be successful but in order to continue their work in that desolate place many have successfully turned themselves undead and raised undead servants. The old King was probably a better person than the current Ukrik'Azahim'Mli, if a less capable general, but the means that their followers would go to to return them are... disturbing.
The Cult of Kamosh Another internal rebellion group but this one largely led by humans. Focused around a secret religious movement focused around the dragon slaying god Kamosh they blame a lot of the woes of the world on the Dragons and their servants, their vision of liberation has little room for Dragons, Dragonborn, Kobolds and the worship of the Draconic gods in any area they may manage to liberate. The local cult is eager to rebel in Oulm'Aki and take control of it but at the present will need more resources or more allies to do so.
The Naram League As the name suggests this is a small group of villages and a town who are roughly organised around an alliance to a young copper dragon Naram'Dalu. These settlements are organised in a small ridgeline of hills much to the east where slightly higher rains and something of an aquifer allows them to survive in an area that is arid but a little more liveable than the surrounding desert. Their remoteness and small size has meant Meshant has generally had bigger fish to fry but both sides well know that they may one day turn on them and try to conquer them. Currently they have an awkward relationship with Meshant where they are willing to pay a small, largely symbolic tribute to the great city in order to secure their peace and a trade. Naram'Dalu is much less intentionally brutal than some of the draconic kings but this local lord would still much rather spend his time partying than dedicating himself to working hard to benefit his people.
The Yamna An nomadic tribe come from across the mountains that were driven south by bad weather increasing competition for resources in the far north a few years ago, the Yamna are a group forged around an orc core but they care more for strength than for lineage, any who prove their capability may join the tribe and as such they have a fair few people from other races mixed into their group. In recent years the Yamna spent some time providing mercenaries for Meshant, but two years ago during a difficult campaign against rival cities in the south their relationship shattered, both sides claimed the other more or less betrayed them. Now the broader tribe has been scattered into its component familial groups, many of which have come to this region with their carts looking for pasture for their cattle during the wetter parts of the year. With the drier season approaching though the future of the tribe is yet to be decided, will they be united under a new leader or remain scattered, will they try to return to the steppe beyond the mountains, will they try to carve out a place here by force with raiding and seizing land, will the establish relationships with local powers through trade, alliance and mercenary work to ensure they have means to keep their cattle from starving.
The following are more minor factions, they will probably only come up under certain circumstances, i'm less likely to create hooks to allow players to actually join them with their purpose more to be mainly either possible allies for a faction the PCs might join or factions mainly there to be antagonists.
Clan Jerahmal A dwarven mountain clan north the local region, the closest such of the clans that dot the mountains and jungle hills. They have no love for the dragons and heir servants and feel a certain kinship towards their cousins enslaved and otherwise oppressed by the whip of Meshant, despite some considerable religious differences, but it is likely to take a fair amount of persuading to get them to leave their fortified settlements in the hills and mountain and march upon the plains. Many in the towns and cities view the mountain clans as terrible isolated and superstitious, given their aversion to arcane arts and culture of ritual cleanliness, but their access to iron is both shrouded in mystery much envied and sort after given the lowlanders can only work meteoric iron. I'm debating whether to have some goliath either folded in as part of the clan's structure or as a separate but allied group in the same general region.
An-Nesa The marshy lake near Ouim'Aki in the wet season is a maze of reeds, deep channels of water and banks of mud. In the dry season it still retains a degree of folliage due to soil moisture but much less is navigable by boat, land navigation is still difficult as many areas have only a thin layer of hardened material baked on the surface which can break to reveal much softer mud and silt beneath. Half submerged in this is the ruins of an old settlement called Nesa, its inhabitants, the An-Nesa are a tribe of lizardfolk primarily (and a small number of those such as black dragonborn), they are known to hunt and fish in the area, as well as sometimes carry out a basic form of flood agriculture, but the An-Nesa are well known to often supplement this with raiding and piracy, which they seem to consider much the same as hunting, often targeting shipments that might contain food and fishing boats, not afraid to eat those they have slain to. Meshant would like to see these destroyed, or at least beaten back until they are no longer so great a threat. The marsh has made it somewhat difficult but the forces of Meshant would certainly consider operations to kill and enslave the lizardfolk when the chance arises.
Halfling Merchants River halflings are well known across much of this part of the continent and the bands of water traders and land caravans they use are well known in this region for their work. While some may regard them as not entirely trustworthy they do represent an extremely useful middleman for many groups, willing to buy goods from a party and sell them on to people who might have serious trust issues dealing directly. Their capability at navigation and willingness to take the risks involved in such journeys allows for a certain risk reward benefit for them to.
Araxes Serving as possible ally for the Hatussa these will probably only come up if the players choose to ally with Hatussa and seek allies or perhaps the odd random encounter with them. The Araxes are a loose group of Aarakocra in he region, they are known to travel long distances as the seasons change, largely practicing a hunter gatherer life style while the rains keep the low lands richer in resources they may well remain to exploit them before returning much further north as they steadily dry out in the coming months. In many regards they have a spirit not unlike the Hatussa in their love for freedom and willingness to act in a fluid and flexible manner, as such they may well serve as valuable allies should the Hatussa decide to go for a major attempt at waging a war in the area.
The Kukan Another faction that will probably be mainly just antagonists. They are a tribal group of goblins living in the east of the region not so far from the league of Naram although some smaller groups are well known to come west seeking chances to raid and the like. Their relationship with Meshant is particularly poor, they largely regard the goblins as pests who are barely people and will kill or enslave any they find without hesitation. Their relationship with other factions is perhaps not as immediately antagonistic but few have much love for them given the Kukan have a reputation for treachery and cruelty.

Hoping for some help that isn't 'get good'. I'm having lot of success in battles but overall the game just tends to overwhelm on the map. I've played quite large games of Stellaris and other 4x games (I love Civ) so I'm not sure why I'm struggling so much here. It feels I'm always defending and not pushing ahead maybe? So I have about 60 hours into Warhammer 1. I recently got the 2nd game but haven't played it for fear of an even larger map and objectives, though I know many people said I should because of the better mechanics and fixes.
I usually play games on hardest modes but I've backed this down to normal/normal.

1. I know you can make your own objectives and not follow the game, but how do you make those fun? Like being Empire and trying to wipe out the vampires seems fun an reasonable already to me.
2. I'm not even close to the victory conditions by time Chaos comes (Yes I know you can make your own in your head but to point #1?). It seems by time I get a foothold on a province or two I get warnings about Chaos already in turn 20 or 25. When I make it until Chaos arrives I only have the smallest fraction of anything done (Like Vampires still exist as Empire, and half the empire factions hate me and I did nothing wrong - Or as dwarves I'm friendly with all the dwarves but Chaos came when there's still Orcs over half the bottom of the map).
3. Overall I just tend to get overwhelemed by the large maps, many armies and hero's attacking me seemingly every turn.

My recent campaigns:

• Empire expansion - Spread south and got 3 provinces in total by around turn 50ish. I end up trying to hold choke points best I can. Do I need armies there 24/7 on watch instead? I just find hero's are creeping into my terrority all the time and armies just keep harassing my land as I expand. I know that is part of the game but I get a bit overwhelmed. Instead of pushing for more land I'm just stuck endlessly defending.
• Empire Build Tall - Just took the first province and built it up as much as I could. Then tried to make friends with everyone and just play defense. This worked well until Chaos and Norsemen showedup, just didn't have enough income or armies to keep replenishing. I got totally wiped out in a heroic last stand at the capital.
• Dwarves - Thought being against the side of the map would help and it did, but as soon as I got a few provinces in the wide open area to the west where the orcs are it felt very similar just constantly felling like I'm under siege and making no progress.

So anyone just wondering if anyone else felt the same way and tips to 'break through'. I thought of buying the mini campaigns for Wood Elves and BeastMen since that sounds more manageable, but it looks as though they dropped that in the later games so it feels like a solution just to play a couple games but not all the races.

Hello there! I haven’t flirted with anyone for such a long time that I thought this could be fun. I never quite know how to introduce myself but I am a 21 yo male from Brazil, a country in South America. I am going to university for a social sciences degree, and while this is not an application, it feels like one so yes my GPA is pretty high. Besides that, I write poetry on the side, and I work for a small online newspaper.
I am fascinated fairly often by many things so you won’t be bored. These days I was reading about Liberian history before the 1980 coup d’etat and last month I became fascinated by modern Spanish history after reading Preston’s biography of Francisco Franco. In general, I really enjoy all the humanities. I follow politics keenly, and I’d say I am on the centre-left – pro-abortion, in favour of a robust welfare state, LGBTQ+ rights, affirmative action. If you know about Brazilian politics, I voted for Marina and Haddad in 2018 (the voting age here is 16), and Lula last year.
As you can imagine, I also really enjoy reading and writing. Besides poetry, I often write little chronicles, and I have dreamt about writing a novel, but that definitely sounds like too much work right now. As for my favourite novels, they definitely would be Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti and War and Peace by Tolstoy. I also really enjoy TV shows and cinema, in general, and I am easily brought to tears in the movies. Yes, I cried during the last Minions movie – and I didn’t even go there willingly. And I really love music. My taste in music has been described as “fairly gay” by a few friends. Since last year, I have been especially fascinated by Rosalía, but I love tango, classical music, hip hop, pop, and indie. I'd have loved to be a musician, but ah, social scientist and amateur poet is good enough.
I'd say I am pretty introverted, polite, and timid. I am affectionate and I can be very passionate as well. I’m fairly funny – or at least, a few people laugh, that is. As for what I want to do with my life, I am unsure though I am inclined to go into academia. I have been considering applying to a PhD program in the U.S. after finishing my undergrad here in Brazil. My family does want me to go into their business, which is related to politics.
What am I looking for? I’d like someone curious about the world around her. And I’d like someone who would be willing to watch Seinfeld with me at times. Someone to love, someone to care, and someone to write about.

We have done it. The end of another school year! Before we jump into this last set of stories, remember to subscribe to ReddX, home of the best cringe content on YouTube. Promise, swearsies, it’s just a fact and it’s totally science. Go ahead and look it up!
I miss that intro a lot so I figured I’d just write it in. I waited until after graduation to post this because, with ManiBeard at graduation, I figured anything could happen. And it did. And with that, let’s jump into this last set of beardy tales (for this school year). Let’s a-go.

1. “No Place Like Home (Campus)”

I was in a pretty good mood because I found out that district was ticked off at admin for considering moving my Cave to a different room next year and because they keep using my Cave as ‘backup’ for state testing. Evidently, the district was unaware this was happening but after I had complained to Cook about the extent of it she went to the district and, well, I’m keeping my Cave next year right where it is, and testing use will be limited. I won without lifting a finger. Sometimes bureaucracy works. Not often, but it’s beautiful when it does.
Of course, that good mood was not to last…
On this day I had a meeting with all the other Graphic Design teachers at another campus. We will call it Clique High School (because ‘cult’ may or may not be YouTube-friendly).
The first thing you need to know is I have a history with CHS. Remember, all the way back in chapter 1 where I mention I was a substitute teacher at Standard High before they hired me as a teacher? Well, there was one part I left out because it was irrelevant to that story, but it becomes relevant here. It is true I did sub at SHS, but the part I left out was that for half of the 2020-2021 school year (Covid year), I was a long-term sub at another campus and that campus was Clique High School. To say it was a poor experience would be underselling it immensely. You could say that Elon Musk is well off but that doesn’t really express the massive mounds of money that malevolent menace truly had. Likewise, saying I had a poor experience at CHS doesn’t really express the absolutely traumatizing, terrible, troublesome experience that my life there. It got so bad that I would leave work, cry the entire 30-minute drive to SHS, pick up Beatle, and make him drive the rest of the way home because my eyes were sore from crying.
What did I do at CHS? Well, I was a long-term sub in ESL. That’s where I got my start with it. When I walked in at the start of that year I’d never had a high school classroom before, I had no lesson plans, limited access to the curriculum since I was a sub, and I was teaching virtually because Covid…and what did I do? I build a curriculum, bonded with my class, and wrote my own lesson plans (even though subs generally don’t write plans). Basically, I rebuilt their ESL program. I did apply for the job. After all, I was already doing all of the work for substitute pay. I may as well get teacher pay for being a teacher. Right? Wrong.
They did interview me for the job but then proceeded to yank me around for half a semester before finally saying they were going to hire someone else. Who? No idea. But not me. But they wanted me to continue to long-term sub and do what I was doing until they found someone. Honestly, when I didn’t get the job part of me was pissed because of all the work I put in, but part of me was relieved. You see, the culture at CHS isn’t like the culture at SHS. Their principal, whom we will call Mr. D (for reasons that will soon be clear), had been named the district’s principal of the year and his staff completely fawned over him…a staff mostly comprised of women. The male-to-female ratio at CHS was considerably more unbalanced than at SHS. What struck me as odd was that Mr. D did not seem to warrant such admiration. During my interactions with him, I got slimy car salesman vibes more than high school principal. I would come to find out that this went deeper than I knew.
Remember AVIDBeard? Yeah, to her credit she was the one that warned me. Mostly I think she saw a chance to gossip, but nonetheless. I was visiting SHS and telling the English dept. how much I missed subbing for them (they actually liked me at this time…this was long before EnglishBeard even worked there so certainly before that whole thing made me a pariah). They missed me too. Although honestly, they missed having a sub at their becken call. Let’s be real. Anyway, AVIDBeard was all too happy to jump in with gossip.
“Be careful over there Mandy,” AVIDBeard said.
“Why? What do you know?” I asked.
“I had a training over there once and this teacher that works there started freaking out because the instructor, who was also a teacher there, was late. She started to have an anxiety attack and when I asked her what was wrong she said ‘Daddy isn’t going to like this’,” AVIDBeard explained.
“What?!” everyone in the room asked at once.
AVIDBeard nodded, “I know! So I asked her, ‘you call your principal Daddy?’ and she said ‘of course.’.”
I raised an eyebrow. I was skeptical, to say the least. Even then I knew AVIDBeard was not a reliable source. But, on the off chance she was telling the truth I had to know. CHS wasn’t exactly full of friendly teachers. In fact, where everyone at SHS had been welcoming, it had been the very opposite at CHS. They treated me like an outsider they were skeptical of. I had managed to at least have somewhat of a dialogue with the librarian. She helped me to ensure that my ESL students had books in their native languages to read during the pandemic. I went to her one day to ask about scheduling some book pick-ups for the students (this was when teachers were on-campus but students were virtual).
“Hey, can I ask you something?” I asked after we had figured out scheduling.
“Sure, what’s up?” she asked.
“OK, so it’s dumb, but someone told me you guys call Mr. D ‘daddy’. Silly, right?” I said with a laugh.
She just blinked, “Who told you that?”
Her reaction caught me off guard. She wasn’t laughing. My eyes widened, “Um, I don’t remember, it just got mentioned in passing.”
“Don’t ask anyone else that question…just…don’t even mention it,” she said.
I blinked. I wanted out of this conversation, “OK, I won’t. I’ll just forget I ever heard about it.”
She nodded and turned away, “I have work to do. If you need more books let me know.”
I rushed back to my classroom. After that, the librarian was very cold toward me.
To this day I honestly believe that the reason Mr. D didn’t hire me was because I’m too strong-willed and I have a big mouth…neither fits well into a cult-like structure, which it is very obvious CHS is.
At the semester break, they hadn’t yet hired anyone and asked me to stay for the rest of the year as a long-term sub. Basically, they wanted to pay me sub pay for an entire year of teaching. I told them ‘no way’ and I begged the district and Mr. Principal to let me return to subbing at SHS. I didn’t even care that regular sub pay was less than long-term sub pay. I just wanted out…and it turns out it all worked in my favor because obviously Mr. Principal ended up hiring me for the very job that Mr. D rejected me from and I’m very happy where I am now. And I don’t even have to call Mr. Principal ‘daddy’. Gag! Say what you will about Standard High, but I’ll take it over CHS any day.
OK, I know that was a lot of backstory, but I truly need you to understand why I so vehemently loathe everything about CHS and moreover why even being there gives me a mild case of PTSD.
Alright then, where were we? Oh yeah. Meeting for Graphic Design teachers over at CHS. I was not happy about this because I hate being at CHS of course, but I also hated leaving my students with a sub this close to the end of the year. But, alas, there I was. I walked into the familiar, loathsome halls. Daddy was in the main hall greeting his subjects.
“Mandy? What are you doing here?” he asked as he looked me over. I was in full-school spirit mode. SHS staff shirt and matching school spirit Converse I had custom-made.
“Graphic Design meeting,” I said.
“Oh, you teach Graphic Design now?” he asked.
I nodded, “Yeah, I did so great at fixing their ESL program they gave me my true dream job and now I’m relaunching their graphic design program.” OK, so it was a bit of embellishment, but I wanted him to know that his loss was SHS’s gain.
“Shame…we have an ESL position open here at The Clique,” Mr. D said. That’s how he referred to his campus. Imagine if the school’s name was Blue Mountain High and he called it The Mountain. Yeah…cringey.
“Oh yeah? I heard Patty didn’t stay,” I said. Patty was who they hired instead of me. She ended up retiring after one year at ‘The Clique’.
“Yeah, well we hired Emmy to replace Patty and now she is leaving,” Mr. D said.
“Shame…yeah, I’m still at SHS and quite happy. I heard principals were turning to poaching from other high schools so I’ll save you the trouble. I’m not poachable,” I said, wanting to get away from him.
“You could have your old job in your old room,” Mr. D said in a tone that made me very uneasy.
“I have a perfectly lovely Cave. Besides, my husband works at SHS too and I like being on the same campus as the love of my life,” I said, pointedly.
“If you change your mind, let me know. Enjoy your meeting. Welcome back to The Clique,” Mr. D said as I quickly walked away to find the room Graphic Design was meeting in.
Now, this may come as a surprise to you all, but I am NOT a social creature. Truly. Beatle is my best friend and aside from Cali all my other friends are on the ReddX Discord (hence my desire to not get myself banned over there). And I am 150% ok with that. At that moment I wanted to be in my Cave more than anything. The pressure to be ‘on’ and social was beyond exhausting to me, especially this late in the year. But, always the professional, I mustered every bit of perky in me to be lovely to my other-campus counterparts.
This proved to be a challenge. One of them, more of a Karen than a Beard really, would not shut up about how amazing her campus was and how she never had issues with phones because her kids were so well-behaved. She also said she couldn’t post work early because they would have it done before they ever got to class. Oh, and of course she is teaching graphic design because she needed a break from her real job as an engineer. And oh, did she mention she is an engineer? Because she’s an engineer. She also went on and on about how she didn’t like the curriculum at another campus she was at so she complained and got 68 teachers from all over the country to back her up and they changed the whole curriculum to what she wanted. OK, whatever. I wanted to ask if everyone stood up and cheered too.
Another teacher was just insufferable. She kept asking for the same bloody stuff over and over even after being told it wasn’t in the budget. She didn’t know the cost of any of it, just that everything she wanted (think equipment and software licenses) was expensive and our budget is next to nothing right now. She didn’t even make arguments as to why we needed it. She just kept asking for the same stuff in the same way. All of it was stuff we didn’t need and most of us wouldn’t even use.
I contributed my thoughts on what I felt needed to be added to the curriculum, which was met with agreement. I really only had that one suggestion. The rest of the time I let them do their thing, which was woefully unorganized, disjointed, and overall a waste of time I could be grading papers. And so I decided that while they did their thing I would organize my Google Drive. As I was doing this I noticed something. I was still the owner on ALL the ESL files for SHS. Not just the ones I created…ALL OF THEM. If I were to hit delete SHS would literally have to start from scratch organizing their program with new teachers next year. But Ms. Dean did make clear I was to have nothing to do with ESL anymore. If I deleted the folders was that malicious compliance? Or just being a bitch for the sake of it? I still haven’t decided…I find the situation humorous, in not a bit morally ambiguous.
Ultimately, it was decided that 1 day wasn’t enough for our meeting so we would meet again one week later at the same place. I declined. I needed to be on my campus because I did have actual work to do. Grades would be due the day they wanted to meet. I wasn’t the only one. About half of the graphic design teachers agreed to meet again the following week and we would all be meeting again August 1st. So I get to start my school year back at ‘The Clique’. Lovely.
Yeah, this was a very real reminder that for all the beardery at Standard High, it could be SO much worse.

1. “Lunchtime!”

After that long mammoth of a tale that the last story was, here is a short one for you.
This happened the day after my meeting at CHS. Sonia wanted to end the school year with some team building so she asked Ms. Dean if they could have an off-campus team meeting at a nearby restaurant and grab some food. Ms. Dean told them no. Sonia then decided they would just order takeaway and do the same thing on campus. She reserved a conference room and everything.
So the day of the eat and meet came. Beatle had ordered some enchiladas and was looking forward to a hot meal during the workday. CovidBeard didn’t go because she said she wasn’t feeling well and needed to just go home early. I know that comes as a shock. Meanwhile, ManiBeard decided he would sit next to his bff, Beatle. ManiBeard hadn’t ordered any food because ‘the catering menu looked good, but nothing on the regular menu appealed to me’. What ManiBeard did have, however, was a bag of crackers. As Beatle tried to eat his food, ManiBeard both ate his crackers and talked at the same time. It didn’t take long for Beatle to realize that small bits of cracker crumbs were flying at him and his food. He shifted to the side to dodge the airborne particles that threatened to infect his space. It was here that ManiBeard declared he had signed his contract but still wasn’t sure if he would be back next year because he had until July 3rd to pull out of his contract and he really just didn’t want to make a commitment.
After the meeting, everyone went their own way, except ManiBeard, who cornered Beatle in the mudroom. I was in my Cave waiting for him when I got a text ‘SOS, I’ve been cornered! Mudroom!’
I sighed, “Come on Wee One. We have to go save Dad.”
Wee One chuckled, “Oh no.” She followed me faithfully as we headed downstairs.
“Oh, good, you’re here already. We gotta go Love. Wee One has that thing…see ya later ManiBeard!” I said as I grabbed Beatle’s arm as I passed and just kept walking.
The next day Beatle went into Sonia’s room for inclusion and she smiled at him, “Sure you got all the crumbs off?” she teased.
Beatle rolled his eyes, “Right?!”
Sonia nodded, “ManiBeard is why I don’t eat lunch in the workroom anymore. ManiBeard would walk over to me and just stand over me…like right over me…and talk while he ate which would just send food everywhere. One day he was eating some chicken salad and a piece of chicken flew out of his mouth and landed on my arm.”
“Oh bloody hell. That’s disgusting,” Beatle said before vowing not to be near ManiBeard eating ever again.

1. “Little Lies”

Ever since it was announced PastorBeard was the new dept head he had been walking around like a roster puffing out his chest. He had also been going out of his way to talk to Beatle, as if to rub in that he got the dept head job and Beatle didn’t. It was annoying, but I stayed out of it. I even played nice when PastorBeard stopped me in the parking lot one day and asked me about my weekend plans while I was waiting for Beatle.
“What are you plans this weekend, Mandy?” PastorBeard asked as he leaned against the side of my car.
“Oh, nothing major. Weekend chores. Beatle has some school work to get done and he’s going to put some snake repellant in the yard…I’ll probably clean the house and spend some time with my mum,” I said, trying to be pleasant as I could be. What I really wanted to do was to tell him he was a bastard that should never teach, let alone lead a dept.
“You should come to watch me on Sunday. I’m preaching his weekend,” he said with a smile. His tone came off like he intended it to be a flex.
I forced a smiled, “No thanks. Not my thing.”
“God isn’t ‘your thing’?” he asked, leaning towards me a bit.
I took a step back, “Not the same one you believe in.” I started absentmindedly playing with the Flower of Aphrodite pendant I wore around my neck.
“Are you Catholic or something?” he asked.
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. People presumed since Beatle was Irish that we were a Catholic family a lot. Instead, I shook my head, “No. Actually, if you must know, I’m Pagan.”
PastorBeard looked taken aback, “Oh…I see.”
“So, while I appreciate the invite…not my thing,” I said again.
“You should come anyway. I’d love to look out on Sunday and see you there. And who knows? If you hear what I have to say you may change your mind about being pagan,” PastorBeard said with a cocky smile.
I looked around hoping Beatle and Wee One were going to be there soon, “I doubt it…anyway…um…I hate to keep you on a Friday.”
“I’m not in a rush. You’re fine,” he said, “Did you hear I’m the new dept head?”
“Yeah. I know,” I said, “Beatle told me. He applied to you know.”
“I know. They need someone that is a strong leader for the job though, someone that can guide the dept the way I guide the church. They can’t pick someone with a weak personality. A man should be able to lead…his church, his work, and of course his wife,” PastorBeard said pointedly.
“Uh huh…a good leader knows when to defer to those wiser than he,” I said as I saw Beatle and Wee One, “Love! Hey!” I waved.
Beatle saw PastorBeard and looked unhappy, “Hi PastorBeard.”
“Have a good weekend you guys. See you later Mandy…think about my offer,” he said as he went and got into his truck that sat on tires far too big for it.
“What was that?” Beatle asked when we got in the car.
I shrugged, “He was either hitting on me or he was just being a pompous arse…or both. Hard to say.”
And we went on our way.
The next work day Beatle walked into the workroom and saw PastorBeard in there talking to Vera (the assistant mentioned in chapter 26.)
“Just do your best to set them up for success,” PastorBeard told Vera as he walked out of the workroom.
Vera sighed.
“Are you ok mate?” Beatle asked her.
Vera shook her head, “We’re almost done. Almost there.”
“What happened?” Beatle asked.
“Well, only 2 of the kids in that group in the hall workspace need my help,” Vera said pointing to a group outside PastorBeard’s room, “The others are kids missing work and PastorBeard kicked them out of the classroom. I’m supposed to watch them and make sure they behave but they already told me they aren’t going to do anything.”
Beatle’s expression went dark, “You’re a SPED assistant. Not a babysitter.”
“I know, but I’ve never seen him actually help anyone. He doesn’t go around the room to help. Just tells them to be quiet and pokes them. I don’t know why he feels the need to touch them. He tells them if they need help they can go to him and he just sits at his desk the whole time…but no one is gonna go to him for help because they don’t like him,” Vera vented.
Beatle sighed, “You know he’s dept head next year, right?”
“Oh, I know. He told me no one else wanted it,” Vera said sadly.
Beatle blinked, “No ma’am. I interviewed for it.”
“That’s just what I heard,” Vera said.
“He lied,” Beatle shook his head.
What PastorBeard didn’t know is that Beatle had something else in the works…we weren’t sure it would pan out at this point (as of this writing we still aren’t), but Beatle wasn’t going to take PastorBeard’s crap lying down…and for that, I was proud of him.

1. “Wrapping It Up”

3.5 days till summer. Grades were due. I sat at my computer to adjust the grade book and turned on some music. Not even kidding, ‘The Final Countdown’ was on the radio (yes, I listen to the radio. Satellite Radio to be precise). It was the perfect music for working on my end-of-year checklist. I felt like I was in a movie and this was my montage music!
We reached the point in the year when all the teachers were just playing movies. For my part, I was letting them watch the Super Mario Movie. I had some happy students. I also wrote Wee One a pass to spend the day in my room. She was done with her work and wanted to help me with some Graphic Design work for next year’s launch (we are launching an on-campus design firm). She asked me which workstation she could work at and I did the worst thing a mum can do to her child. I sat her next to my baby neckbeard. She started working but within 10 minutes she came to my desk.
“Mom…” she started.
I looked at her. “Excuse me?”
She sighed, “I’m sorry…Ms. Mandy?”
“Yes ma’am?” I asked her.
“Can I sit on the other side of the room…it’s less claustrophobic and I have a friend over there…” she trailed off.
I chuckled and leaned in so only she could hear me, “You don’t appreciate sitting next to the baby neckbeard?”
She looked sheepish, “Not really.”
“Can you smell him?” I asked.
She made a disgusted face, “Sort of, yeah.”
“OK, yes, go ahead and move,” I nodded.
In the meantime, Beatle was texting me:
Beatle: Why does ManiBeard always start class with “How are we?” instead of “How are you?”?
Mandy: Because that’s what’s in his programming.
Beatle: LMAO! Point. I will not miss him this summer. You know he said he is only helping with graduation because he didn’t help with either dance. I thought it was mandatory that we do one of the 1 dances.
Mandy: Sigh. 1) yes it is and I bet they got on him and forced him to help with graduation and 2) why the hell would they let him help with graduation? That event is stressful enough without adding ManiBeard to the mix.
Beatle: He said he rather work graduation because it’s his favorite event because he gets to see the kids move on.
Mandy: But he’s a freshman teacher. He doesn’t know many if any, seniors.
Beatle: I know! Oh, CovidBeard is leaving.
Mandy: WHAT?! FOREVER?!
Beatle: I’m watching her class for the rest of the period.
Mandy: Oh, just for today.
Beatle: Yeah. Don’t get too excited.
Mandy: Damn. 3.5 days left. Heaven forbid she stick it out.
Beatle: Right?
And right about the time I was hoping my Beard encounters were over. At least until graduation…it happened. I had to email EnglishBeard. Why? Because I needed one of his students (who happened to be one of my most talented graphic design students) to come to my class the next day during his class. I cringed at having to interact with him. I asked Beatle if I should even bother. “We’re not doing anything, why would he say no?” Beatle asked. “He’s a beard.” I replied. “Fair.” Beatle conceded.
Finally, I took a breath and started to type: “EnglishBeard, if it is alright with you, can Sara come to my class during 5th period tomorrow to do some Graphic Design work? Thanks, Mandy”
2 hours later, he replied, “What work? Why should I send her to an elective? My class is core.”
I sighed, “It’s ok if you are doing something in class. I just thought it would be ok if you are just watching movies.” I replied.
“We are just watching movies, but my class is still a core class and yours is not,” EnglishBeard replied.
“You are correct. However, Sara is going to be in my Graphic 3 class next year and I want to get all my Graphic 3 students together for a meeting before the end of the year and the rest of them are in my 5th period. If you don’t want to send her that is fine,” I replied.
“Ok, that would be fine. I will allow it,” EnglishBeard finally said.
I sighed and wrote a pass to give to Sara.
Meanwhile, in the English 1 meeting, Beatle was dealing with his own Beard.
“And the Beard came back….CovidBeard came back for the meeting,” Beatle texted me.
“WHY?!” I texted back.
“IDK! I’m spraying Lysol when she leaves the room. She’s like ‘I’m sitting here sweating. I have no idea what I have.’ I guess she came back for attention,” Beatle replied.
I sighed as I typed, “Probably.”
Why did all these Beards have to come back? Why couldn’t this be last year when we had the mass exodus of Beards? That was nice. I liked that.
Maybe they would get less beardy over the summer?
Probably not.

1. “Graduation Day”

Have you ever sat through a graduation ceremony? If you have you know how dull they are. Being part of it is even worse. Graduation in Australia was quite different, but when I graduated from college in America Beatle practically had to force me into the cap and gown. It was not something I have ever liked…so the irony that I volunteer every year (except next year when Wee One graduates) is not lost on me. Mostly, I do it because I know it means something to the kids to see their teachers there. That said, I silently curse in my head the entire time while making sure to smile, be peppy, and congratulate even the most ungrateful of students. While I don’t look back on my graduation fondly, some of them might and I want to help provide good memories.
Graduation isn’t just on that day either. The day before we have to participate in graduation practice, which is just as awful, if not worse. I did entertain myself by watching ManiBeard however.
We all gathered in the practice gym to line up and then once everyone was in place we processed into the main gym. The practice gym was so bloody hot that I was sweating. It was so bloody hot that ManiBeard actually took off his cardigan for the first time all year. I have now confirmed he does have arms under it. Bloke never takes off his cardigan/coat…even when the outside temp is 100+ in Fahrenheit. I further observed only to realize that they had, for some reason, put ManiBeard in the same row as 2 of the baby beards I’ve been observing over the course of the year. ManiBeard was as clueless as one might expect and had no idea how to manage the kids and telling them when to stand, when to sit, when to walk, etc. He made it through graduation practice, but I was seriously concerned about the next day. I was also concerned because I saw the gown they set aside for Mani. It was huge! He was going to look like a puppy wearing his owner’s sweater. Let the chaos commence!
And commence it did. Shortly after lunch Beatle texted me “OZZY ISN’T COMING BACK! WHAT THE HELL IS EVEN GOING ON AROUND HERE?!”
Remember Ozzy? The other Australian on campus? Yeah, evidently he said, “this really isn’t something I foresaw happening. It is something I needed to do. But please, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m excited to leave. I’m not. It’s actually been really hard packing up my things.” Ozzy had been around since the campus opened in 2016. It was a true shock to see him leave and Beatle was very distraught over it. Honestly, so was I.
After school Beatle barrelled into his classroom, “OK, mate, what the hell is going on?”
The conversation was private so I’m not going to detail it, but I will say that circumstances happened so that Ozzy had to go back to Australia. He was not happy about it. He said he thought he would retire from Standard High, but life happens. This was a blow, but we wish him the best.
I found out later that night that ManiBeard managed to out-beard himself. He did the beardiest thing he’d ever done.
“Did you guys meet today in E1?” I asked Beatle.
“Yeah, but it was more social than a meeting,” Beatle replied.
“ManiBeard? Social? How did that go?” I asked.
Beatle chuckled, “ManiBeard wasn’t there.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he miscalculated all his grades and had to redo them,” Beatle said.
I froze as I tried to register what he said. Finally I spoke, “But our gradebook is automated. We don’t calculate anything. We put in the number and bam…grades. How the hell did Mani manage to ‘miscalculate’ grades?”
“No idea, but admin wasn’t happy. They sent in Lana to guide him through it,” Beatle said.
I laughed, “Oh my god! After everything he did to keep Lana out of his room she ended up fixing his gradebook? The irony is too delicious! This has got to be the beardiest thing he has ever done. How the fuck do you miscalculate grades in and automated gradebook?!”
Beatle shrugged, “Talent?”
The next morning (THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL) an email started circulating from teachers that were worried about getting left at the arena we were holding graduation in. They wanted to ensure the bus wouldn’t leave them behind. Beatle and I watched as the emails flooded our inboxes. ManiBeard: “I need a ride too.” EnglishBeard: “Don’t leave me behind!” HistoryBeard: “I look like too much of an escaped inmate to safely hitchhike. Don’t leave me either.” MathBeard:I need the bus to get back to school.”
It was at that point I texted my brother to see if he could pick Beatle and I up after graduation. To be clear, we have to ride the bus over with students so taking our own car wasn’t an option…but riding the BeardBus home did not appeal to either of us. I like getting fodder for stories, but I’m not a complete sadomasochist. My brother agreed and I felt relief wash over me.
Beatle and I ended up combining our classes in my Cave for the last day because we bought breakfast tacos and donuts for the kids and it was easier to combine classes than to try to split the food. So, most of the last day was the kids eating and playing Mario Kart on our Switch. It was pretty fun. I did leave the kids with Beatle at one point so I could go down to Cook’s kitchen and do my department check-out stuff. When I say Cook had a professional kitchen that is not hyperbole. The culinary kitchen at Standard High is anything but standard. We’re talking a state-of-the-art kitchen that any head chef would be in awe of. It’s truly a thing to behold and for high school students? Yeah, it is pretty bloody great. Oh, and the cutting boards…let me tell you about the numerous cutting boards!
…I’m kidding Red! Just kidding!
But yeah, the kitchen is pretty great. Anyway, when I went into said kitchen, MediaBeard was in there doing his check-out as well. When he saw me he smiled and turned to me.
“Mandy, thank you so much for everything you did for me this year. It was a rough year and you had my back. I truly appreciate you, thank you,” he said as he hugged me.
I hugged him back, “Aww, mate…I got ya. Anytime. Next year will be better.”
When I said back in Chapter 1 that MediaBeard was certainly a Beard, but one of the ‘good’ beards, this is what I meant. Yes, he can be a bit…well…beardly. But, the bloke has a good heart. And I am glad he will be back next year. I’m going to try to mentor him now that I’m settled in graphic design. I am also glad he will not be Wee One’s teacher next year. She’s decided to take graphic design 3 and animation 1 which means she will have me as her teacher for 3 out of 8 periods. Come to find out she likes me as her teacher. And I’m pretty hard on her. She said I made her better. I must be doing something right!
Cook has 100% become my work Mum and I adore her. She plans to have a department soiree before school starts and for the first time ever I’m actually looking forward to going to a department function, solely because of Cook. She is amazing.
Finally, as long last, the 2022-2023 school year ended. All the non-senior students left and the seniors arrived.
Beatle and I scarfed our lunch down and headed to the gym… this is where graduation truly begins.
I put my gown on over my work clothes as did Beatle. We sat together and chatted for a bit before he went to his row to help organize kids. I was left sitting alone in my row as the students filed in. And, as I usually do in these situations, I started to observe my surroundings and live a bit in my own head.
I saw some teachers grouped up talking and laughing near me. For a moment I felt that loneliness I felt all through school (until I met Beatle). I had a moment of feeling like that ‘weird blonde kid’ again. I guess it never really goes away. It was a reminder that from the day we met (see SquirrelBeard for that story) Beatle has always been where I fit. Does anyone else ever have a moment of reversion like that? Where even as an adult you remember how it was to be an outcast at 15 or whatever? Maybe it’s just me? Maybe it’s because I work in a high school?
In any case, I snapped out of it and looked around. What caught my eye was a pair of BRIGHT crimson skinny jeans. And the wearer? ManiBeard. OF COURSE! He also had on a plain white t-shirt with the district logo on it that we got free at the start of the year and Van trainers. What was the dress code for this event that admin had explicitly given us the day before? Dress pants and a Polo or button-up for men or a suit for men, a dress or nice pants and shirt for women, dress shoes, and absolutely no jeans, trainers, or t-shirts. Yeah. For J’s part he had on black pants and a black button-up shirt with a tie. He looked good. It was also the first time he got to wear his Master’s hood at a graduation, which was pretty frickin cool too! I had on black pants and a nice shirt. I was not wearing a dress at graduation. Just, no. Anyway…ManiBeard…right…so he wore EXACTLY what admin said don’t wear. Cause…ManiBeard. And I was right, his gown made him look like a puppy wearing his owner’s sweater. It would have been cute if it was anyone but Mani. Instead he just looked robotic and lost. And, exactly like I suspected, he didn’t talk to any of the kids. He didn’t even congratulate them. Probably because he teachers 9th graders and didn’t know any of these kids and had no connection to them. Beatle knew a lot of them. These were the kids that he taught his first year as freshmen so he had seen them through all 4 years. It was emotional for him.
It was around this time I turned around and noticed paramedics in the hall. I later found out a student (one of mine actually) had a seizure. I had seen them roll a kid out of the building on an office chair but I didn’t know who under Mr. Principal told me later. As all of this was happening APBeard said they put a sign up sheet on the stage for any teacher that needed to take the bus back to campus after the ceremony. A bunch of teachers headed to the stage. One that looked like a textbook beard said, as he walked past me, “that would be all of us. Like any of us can afford an Uber with what they pay us.” I raised an eyebrow and looked the man over. “That has GOT to be HistoryBeard” I thought to myself. Beatle ran up behind me.
“See that bloke up there…the one at the sign up sheet right now?” Beatle asked me quietly.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s HistoryBeard,” he confirmed.
“I knew it! I knew that had to be him. Damn, he is a beard and it’s not even just on the inside,” I said.
Beatle shook his head, “No, he’s one that is beard inside and out.”
I shuttered as Beatle returned to his seat.
About 45 minutes later we boarded the bus and headed to the arena. I hoped everything would be smooth sailing from there, but that would have been WAY too easy.
So, I need to paint a bit of a picture here…have you ever been backstage at an arena? It’s not a huge space…and when you put a couple hundred people back there…it’s a tight fit. We were lucky to have a 2 inch radius around us. Personal space does not exist when you cram everyone back there. And we had to line up in order. Each row had a letter. It seemed everything was fine. My row was in order…but something felt off. That’s when I realized whoever set the signs up doesn’t know the bloody alphabet because instead of A, B, C, D, E, F, G it went A, B, C, D, E, G, F. I was in row F. I realized the error but I also wasn’t about to move anything without telling an AP. So I found an AP that said he had to find another AP and 3 APs later I was told to swap Rows F and G. I helped correct the signed and then we had to shift the rows with VERY little space. It was…something.
It was hot, cramped, and miserable. Beatle told me later some of the kids in his row snuck back into a supply room and were stealing popcorn. It was in the moments of being back stage I remembered why last year I said to myself ‘never again, I’m never doing graduation again’. I’m really not next year cause of Wee One and I’ll probably forget the year after and volunteer again. Cause teacher brain. Anyway, it was finally go time and we walked out, sat down, and the ceremony started. All done? Not quite.
For the sake of wrapping this up I’ll quickly list the crap that happened during the ceremony:

1. Someone in the stands called to a kid ‘you look like ET but we love you anyway!’ to which a graduate yelled back ‘you’re an asshole’. Classy.
2. ManiBeard was clueless and lost. He may as well have not even been there because he was mostly just in the way.
3. The boys decided it was great fun to pretend to fall on stage just before the got to Mr. Principal. This happened 4 times. A 5th pretended he was about to fall then twerked instead. Again, classy. Ladies and gentleman, our future.
4. A boy in the row in front of me turned around and was using his program to sword fight with a boy in my row. I gave them the ‘mom/teacher look’ and they both got a panicked look and said ‘sorry ma’am’ before sitting straight for the rest of the ceremony. Maybe Wee One is right. Maybe I am scary.
5. MediaBeard made the senior video and it was awful. I have a hard time believing he worked ‘in the industry’. Next year I’m going to see if he will let me do some graphic design templates for him. It will be part of my proposal to mentor him.

And then graduation was over. Beatle and I checked with Number One and were cleared to leave. Brother picked us up and we headed to dinner (where Brother once again came very close to getting the name BrotherBeard) and summer began.
And that concludes this year of School of Beards. If there is any demand I will be back in the fall because with all the beards returning I am sure to have a new batch of tales. I sincerely want to thank everyone that had come on this journey with me, Red for reading (and being a mate), and Beatle for supporting me and allowing me to share his stories. I mostly want to thank everyone that has listened to Red read these stories because that is the most amazing thing…hearing these stories read and getting his insight. I do appreciate it more than I can say. Keep an eye out for the rest of BowserBeard this summer and maybe a couple of one-offs.
Now, to end this year I decided to try my hand at my first parody song. Apologies if it’s not very good. Like I said, it’s my first one. I hope it doesn’t suck!
“BeardSchool’s Out” (Parody of “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper)
Well, we got no choice
But to hear the noise
Listenin to the beards’ voice
The poor girls and boys
Well, we can't escape ya
Can't find an out
And when they start to shout
Education’s in doubt
BeardSchool's out for summer
Beards go into slumber
Beardschool makes us shutter
No more Mani
No more English
No more preacher's judgment, yeah
Well, Mani can’t control his class
And Pastor’s got the Principal
And the students pay the price
We can't even think about next year
BeardSchool's out for summer
Beards go into slumber
Beardschool makes us shutter
No more Media
No more Math Emails
No more two-faced Dean
Out for summer
Out 'til fall
Do the beards have to come back at all
Beards go slumber
BeardSchool's out for summer
Watch the Beards lumber
BeardSchool’s out till August

Hello there! I haven’t flirted with anyone for such a long time that I thought this could be fun. I never quite know how to introduce myself but I am a 21 yo male from Brazil, a country in South America. I am going to university for a social sciences degree, and while this is not an application, it feels like one so yes my GPA is pretty high. Besides that, I write poetry on the side, and I work for a small online newspaper.
I am fascinated fairly often by many things so you won’t be bored. These days I was reading about Liberian history before the 1980 coup d’etat and last month I became fascinated by modern Spanish history after reading Preston’s biography of Francisco Franco. In general, I really enjoy all the humanities. I follow politics keenly, and I’d say I am on the centre-left – pro-abortion, in favour of a robust welfare state, LGBTQ+ rights, affirmative action. If you know about Brazilian politics, I voted for Marina and Haddad in 2018 (the voting age here is 16), and Lula last year.
As you can imagine, I also really enjoy reading and writing. Besides poetry, I often write little chronicles, and I have dreamt about writing a novel, but that definitely sounds like too much work right now. As for my favourite novels, they definitely would be Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti and War and Peace by Tolstoy. I also really enjoy TV shows and cinema, in general, and I am easily brought to tears in the movies. Yes, I cried during the last Minions movie – and I didn’t even go there willingly. And I really love music. My taste in music has been described as “fairly gay” by a few friends. Since last year, I have been especially fascinated by Rosalía, but I love tango, classical music, hip hop, pop, and indie. I'd have loved to be a musician, but ah, social scientist and amateur poet is good enough.
I'd say I am pretty introverted, polite, and timid. I am affectionate and I can be very passionate as well. I’m fairly funny – or at least, a few people laugh, that is. As for what I want to do with my life, I am unsure though I am inclined to go into academia. I have been considering applying to a PhD program in the U.S. after finishing my undergrad here in Brazil. My family does want me to go into their business, which is related to politics.
What am I looking for? I’d like someone curious about the world around her. And I’d like someone who would be willing to watch Seinfeld with me at times. Someone to love, someone to care, and someone to write about.

I want to take my parents out for lunch or dinner . They like South Indian food mostly but are okay with some North Indian dishes or starters. VEG only I am looking for little luxury or fine dining options , so no sangeetha or ratna cafe . Just now ordered from these 😅. Money is not an issue . But main thing is I do not want to go and get dissapointed even after paying a premium . I feel Chennai dining out scene is very bad compared to Bangalore , most restaurants like Sangeetha don’t seem to care about customers . 15 years back I loved Sangeetha poori and potato gravy( they called it loose Masala) now they are giving half boiled dry potato , same as the masala dosa one for a 100rs 3 poori dish 😕. Shows zero fucks given for customers.
Guys and girls please share any recent ( less than 2 month ) buffet or fine dining experiences at the areas I mentioned . Because most places that were great 3 years back all all SHIIIIT now

Good Day! Repost po eto.
I'm trying my luck here to find the one who won't give up on me, the one who will always be my number one fan, the one that i can lean and cry on in this fcked up world, the one who won't judge me by mistakes, the one that i can be an open book, the one that i can be vulnerable and weak, the one who won't use my weaknesses against myself and finally the one who will carry my last name.
Very wishful thinking but there's no harm on trying it.
About me:
Single for 2yrs now coming from a long failed relationship
5'5
Furdad
Working professional in IT
Confident with what i have right now
Chinito and cute daw😉
Techy person since im passionate about technology especially on the hardware side
Sweet and loyal 💯
Non smoker
Loves to watch movies specially horror, suspense, super natural, gore and sci fi
Anime enthusiast specially with mecha, sci fi, feels and romantic genre
Gamer and has a lot of backlog on my steam. Help
Has a car. SUV
Introvert by heart but ambivert by nature
Loves to explore things im not familiar with
Open minded. Power 💯
From the southside, CAVITE lugar ng mga loyal
Black coffee lover. Current record was 10 shots of espresso without sugaar, creamer and just plain ice. Venti cup
Will date to marry
You:
Single and no attachment nor prior commitments from previous relationship
Petite (negotiable)
Chinita that's wears spec is a huge++++
Normal to chubby BMI
Working professional as well
Can drive (just want to experience to be a passenger prince) (negotiable)
Can host (negotiable)
Hoping into the same hobbies and interests but if not i would gladly appreciate if you can introduce me to yours
Hopefully from south dn sana but i can long drive for you
Non smoker din sana
Willing to exchange pic and let's see if we vibe
Willing to be an open book as well if we vibe
Date to marry na din sana
If you reached this part then i would like to say thank you for reading through our my long post.
If you're looking for the one as well just HMU. Im open to everyone even though you doesn't fit the bill as long as we vibe.

With the first day gone, Artemis and Luther gave their analysis and previewed public polls. Mortimer had usurped Wolvthorne (7) as the favourite to win after his victory against the District 1 tributes as well as exercising his chemistry prowess. Surprisingly, Cat had risen up the ranks as well, being the third favourite to win. Luther remarked how if Mortimer wins the games, they would have the seventh consecutive Golden Victor on their hands. Artemis then said the same could be said about Cat if she does something spectacular with her therapy skills. Luther reminded everyone that they were two tributes away from the final round of bets.
The cameras checked on the progress of the tributes. Mortimer stepped away from the boiling water to gather more logs for his raft project while his allies slumbered. Andrei (2) and Wolvthorne (7) were resting back at the cornucopia after failing to find more tributes. What they didn’t know was that John (9) had managed to steal a water bottle and a knife from them while on patrol. Carnelia and Logan (11) both were still in the eastern sector while Horace (10) continued to stay out of sight. Wren (5) and Jassy (12) were struggling to sleep inside a hollowed out log yards away from the lake shore.
Cat and Pearl awoke to see Mortimer napping on a nearly completed raft. Cat correctly guessed he stayed up all night working on it. She asked Pearl why he was making it. Pearl explained his logic behind it and Cat agreed it made sense something valuable would be on the other side. Pearl woke Mortimer from his nap while Cat filled the water bottles and pulled out the sandwiches. Mortimer was annoyed with himself for dozing off, but Pearl assured him nothing had happened since the portraits of the fallen. She urged him to eat breakfast before resuming his raft project. He relented and the two joined Cat.
Cat out of the blue asked if he could sing like his mentor. Mortimer was caught off guard but shook his head. Pearl regaled how Gill would sometimes burst into spontaneous song when visiting The Brine. Cat said that from a therapist’s perspective, it’s good to have someone in the community keep spirits high. Mortimer asked if Phoebe was hers, to which Cat nodded. She said that if she wins, she will provide District 6 another high spirits person. She asked the two what they would do if they won. Pearl announced her intent to open her own restaurant and clean the Grotto Hole neighbourhood. Mortimer agreed that the place needed some “R&R”. The two girls stared at him. He realised he hadn’t answered Cat’s question and rolled his eyes. He admitted he would hopefully marry his girlfriend and get his father some medical treatment. Cat seemed confused by him saying hopefully, but he returned to his raft project before she could ask. Pearl told her, “I appreciate what you’ve been trying to do for him. Considering he’s the most likely of us to go home, he needs to be in a better headspace.” Cat smiled and patted her on the back. She went off to relieve herself with Pearl accompanying her.
The next two hours went without much incident. There was some entertainment in Wolvthorne (7)’s agitation of not finding more tributes, Andrei (2) complaining about the smell, and the D11 tributes munching on leeches. However, interest was peaking when the tracking system caught Wolvthorne and Andrei (2) unknowingly closing in on Cat and the D4 tributes. A moment of triumph came when Mortimer had completed his raft, which measured 6’x10’. Pearl asked how they knew it would float. Cat decided to test it by standing on it while Mortimer pushed it off the shore. He kept it from floating away using the sturdy rope. A big smile spread across Mortimer’s face when seeing it float. He pulled the raft back in and suggested they pack up and begin their journey.
The three began gathering their materials. Cat went to grab the last backpack when all of a sudden, she heard a splash of water. She looked up and spotted Andrei and Wolvthorne bursting through the brush. She dropped the backpack and blocked Andrei’s attack with her sword. She dodged his next attack but wasn’t aware of Wolvthorne circling around to kill her. He was stopped by Pearl, who threw a rock at his head. Wolvthorne looked up and spotted her and Mortimer at the edge of the lake. He raged at the sight of Mortimer and bolted towards them. Pearl jumped onto the raft and urged Mortimer and Cat to retreat. Mortimer realized she was right as he had left his trident on the raft. As for Cat, she turned to see Mortimer and Pearl push off the shore and escape Wolvthorne. Desperate to reach them in time, she spat in Andrei’s face and slashed his face with her sword. She dove into the water and swam towards the raft. Artemis guessed she was a strong swimmer as she managed to catch up to the raft. Pearl quickly pulled her up onto the raft. All the while Wolvthorne threatened Mortimer with a gruesome death, his language having to be censored by the Capital.
The trio slowly moved through the lake, relieved to be far away from danger. The first hour was silent as Cat was upset with nearly being left behind. Pearl sensed the tension and waited for the first person to speak up. Unfortunately, Mortimer was unperturbed and continued to watch the trees and the water’s surface. In the commentator’s booth, Artemis described the drama as juicy and wondered if they would turn on one another. Luther was on the fence as well, remembering how Mortimer left without hesitation. Eventually, Pearl broke the silence and said, “Will someone please start talking as I’m tired of hearing the dead air.” Cat said she’d be willing to talk if her partner apologized. The annoyed and oblivious Mortimer asked what he had to be sorry for. Cat reminded him that he didn’t try to help her fight Andrei and left her to die. He argued that there was no time, but Cat recalled how he stood there “like a passive waste” as she struggled against Andrei and Pearl hurled rocks at Wolvthorne. Mortimer took offence to that comment. The two began hurling insults at each other while Pearl stood watching. She tried interjecting but her voice was lost in the chaos. Strangely enough, Andrei and Wolvthorne could hear the pandemonium while running along the shoreline. Their interest caused them to miss John (9) sneaking past and hightailing it to the cornucopia. The fight ended when Cat accused Mortimer of plotting to kill her and he blurted out, “I only kept you around for Pearl. But when an opportunity presented itself, I took it. I refuse to get screwed over again.” Cat was surprised by the sudden revelation and her face morphed to one of shock and understanding.
Mortimer was frustrated by the whole ordeal and sarcastically said, “Well, now the cat’s out of the bag. You now know after all this, I still have issues. Are you happy?” As he said the last sentence, he thrust his arms in the air and accidentally sent Pearl plummeting into the water. The splash pushed the raft forward. Mortimer quickly anchored the raft to a tree and Cat asked if she was alright. Pearl gave them a thumbs up, reminding her that she could swim. Cat urged her to return to the raft. Suddenly, Mortimer was freaking out. He noticed that the chemistry kit was missing from the backpack. Pearl guessed it fell in the water and sank to the bottom. She volunteered to swim down and grab it. He objected to this idea and offered to go himself. But before he could dive in, he saw nothing but the ripples on the surface. Underwater cameras found Pearl navigating the cloudy water searching for the kit, which was fortunately sealed in a waterproof box. Leeches attached themselves to her arms and legs, but she continued to swim. On the surface, Mortimer began berating himself for what happened. Cat assured him it was an accident and that Pearl could take care of herself. Mortimer felt slight relief, commenting how she did set the breath holding record.
Suddenly, something floating in the distance caught his eye. From his perspective, it looked similar to a log. However, when he squinted and leaned closer, he could make out big green eyes. It was a ten foot alligator and it was swimming closer. Mortimer’s terror heightened when he spotted two more coming from behind it. Pearl found the kit and burst out of the water, surfacing a mere three metres away from the raft. When she disrupted the water’s surface tension, this signalled to the alligators of prey in the water and they darted towards her. Cat screamed for her to get out of the water. The confused and terrified Pearl turned to see the sudden danger and screamed. She tossed the kit onto the middle of the raft and swam desperately to Cat’s outstretched hand. Mortimer grabbed his trident and was ready to stab any gators that came near.
The first alligator reached the raft before her and was on course to bite her head clean off, but was quickly stabbed in the neck by Mortimer and pushed away before it could do anything. A split second before Pearl could grab Cat’s hand, the second gator latched its jaws onto her right foot and began to pull her under. Mortimer impulsively dove into the water with trident in hand. He stabbed it in the eye and pushed its jaws open to help Pearl escape. Seconds later, the third and final gator latched onto Pearl’s waist and wrenched her free from Mortimer’s grasp. Mortimer cursed to himself, the bubbles giving the Capital a brief comedic moment in the chaos. He swam up to the surface to catch his breath before diving back down to save his partner. It didn’t take long to find his partner still in the gator’s clutches. His fear for her safety heightened when the gator began rolling and twisting her body around like a ragdoll.
In the commentator’s booth, Luther explained to the audience that the gator was commencing a “death roll”, an effective technique they use to kill and dismember their prey. Mortimer quickened his pace and lined his shot up when suddenly, the gator’s tail slapped him across the face. The sharp tip of the tail cut across his right eye, emitting a small mist of blood into the green water. The unexpected attack blinded Mortimer and caused him to drop his trident. He covered his eye to see better and saw the gator still rolling Pearl. He swam towards them and wrapped his hands around the gator’s neck. He fastened his legs around the neck and jabbed both of his thumbs into its eyes. The rolling stopped but the gator didn’t let go of Pearl’s now limp body. Mortimer grabbed the snout and pulled back as hard as he could, only sending everyone deeper into the lake. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted his trident and abandoned the gator to grab it. The gator tried to swim away, but Mortimer was quicker and stabbed it in the back of the neck, paralysing it and causing it to drown five minutes later.
Unfortunately, a cannon sounded while he was away. Pearl’s body floated to the surface, a mass amount of red spreading around her lifeless body. Mortimer dragged her body towards the raft and received assistance from Cat. Cat checked her vitals as he dragged himself onto the raft, still covering his eye. Cat stared at him with teary eyes and shook her head, signifying Pearl’s death. Mortimer began to cry, mourning the loss of his partner. The tears irritated his injured eye, making the scene all the more devastating. It was reported that back in District 4’s town square, Pearl’s older sister Henrietta was arrested after assaulting a peacekeeper in anger after he mocked her death to his comrade.
Cat cut off a sleeve of her Lycra swim piece and created a makeshift rag. Mortimer rummaged through his chemistry kit, Luther calling it his “hat of tricks”, and grabbed some leftover algae in a vial. Cat insisted he let her do it, but Mortimer argued that he had to do it. Cat grabbed a leech from Mortimer’s leg and dropped it in. Mortimer then poured in the last of his hydrogen peroxide, placing it in a stopper before shaking the tube. He then stared at the tube as the contents became a black goo. When the process was completed, he ignited it, creating a flame with a sulphury smell. Cat realized his hands were shaking at this point and insisted she apply the goo to his eye. Mortimer relented and allowed her to do so. She told him he was lucky his eyeball was unaffected but had to use some of their water to wash the blood out.
During the process, the two ignored the two cannons that rang in the distance. They were revealed to be Wren (5) and Carnelia (11), both having fallen victim to the alligator mutts. The difference was that Jassy (12) refused to budge from her small island while Logan (11) was relieving himself when his partner died. The arena was silent overall as the surviving tributes collected themselves from the attacks. Other notable events being Andrei (2) and Wolvthorne (7) fending off a congregation of five alligators, being considered one of the most dangerous mutt packs ever.
Back in the commentator’s booth, Artemis was geeking out over the recent events. She considered Andrei and Wolvthorne barely Golden Victor material, adding that Mortimer was “definite”. Luther claimed to believe Cat was the same as well, with Artemis claiming she was a hair away. She diverted the topic to Mortimer and his great performance taking on three gators single-handedly. Luther wondered how he was feeling after failing to save Pearl, guessing he was blaming himself. This made Artemis interested in whether Cat could exercise more of her therapy skills.
Mortimer and Cat sat in silence as the raft continued to drift into the northwest sector. Cat took it upon herself to steer as Mortimer was lying down lost in a pool of tears. Cat eventually sat down and asked him if he was alright. At first, he didn’t answer, prompting Cat to tell him, “As your therapist, I suggest you let it all out. It will make you feel better.” The therapist part received a weird look, but Mortimer took a deep breath. More tears came out as he blamed himself for Pearl’s death, pointing out that he was the one who caused her to fall out. Cat assured him that it was an accident, but Mortimer argued that if he didn’t have trust issues with Cat, they wouldn’t have been fighting in the first place. Adding insult to injury, Pearl’s final act was to put his chemistry kit (their survival) over her own life. Cat agreed that his trust issues were a problem. She told him to explain what he thinks is the root cause of his issues. Mortimer was reluctant, but Cat explained that being honest about his childhood and inner demons could make all the difference. She rhetorically asked, “Whether you die here or win this thing, you want to go out a new man or not?” Mortimer admitted she had a point and decided to regale his childhood experience.
As told by Mortimer, he grew up with his father Edward Beckett, Faroe Island Base engineer, and his unemployed mother Ursula. After a workplace accident fractured his back, he was medically discharged and sent back to District 4. With no source of income to support them, Ursula left the family and never came back. Mortimer had no choice but to enter the workforce early in order to support himself and his disabled father. A few kindhearted adults, including Gill Henderson and Pearl’s father Alexander Riverstone, offered to lend their support. However, hurt by his mother’s abandonment and being bullied at school, he turned them away. Eventually, he dropped out of school at age nine and found work in a shipyard. Bullying would still persist outside of the workplace, even having his hard earned fishing equipment stolen by troublemakers like Adrian Carrick. It was around age fifteen when he first got himself entangled in a covert smuggling operation with District 6, trading fish and hooks in exchange for warmweed and soda bottles. On rare occasions, refugees fled the district and were given fake IDs. Mortimer saw what warmweed did to his peers and vowed never to consume it himself. He did notice the health benefits it possessed as a pain reliever and took it upon himself to study warmweed and find out a safe way to feed it to his father. He requested chemistry equipment and textbooks on his smuggling trips. He learned about the science of warmweed and engineering a method to separate the SHC (medical component) from the TBA (psychoactive compound) through trial and error. He would feed the SHC to his father, enabling him to walk for limited periods with assistance from a cane, and using the TBA in a secret grotto as bait to catch fish. Though there was no evidence, the citizens knew who the smugglers were and looked upon them in disdain.
In present time, Mortimer began to tear up some more, knowing what the next part was. Cat comforted him and assured him he could take a break. Mortimer insisted he finish. He talked about his girlfriend Meridia Vilewater, who against her family’s wishes, fell for him and successfully befriended him. He admitted that he found her presence annoying at first, but realized her feelings and intent were genuine. He began to fall for her as well, further cementing his hoodlum image. He even talked about the Kraken tattoo she did for him. Mortimer lamented how he took her for granted a lot and didn’t reciprocate as much as she did. He asked himself why she would continue to see him. Cat pondered over this for a few seconds. She told him that Meridia recognized his dedication to his father and knew deep down that he was a compassionate person. “What’s not to love?” Cat said. “You are handsome, strong, and talented. Come to think of it, the parallels between you and your mentor are hard to ignore.” Mortimer said that Gill was right on how he was basically him if he suffered worse. Cat guessed that’s why he took a personal interest in him.
Cat told him that even though he was dealt a heavy hand in life, he shouldn’t completely give up on humanity. She expressed how she was always close to giving up, having to see addicts tarnishing their bodies willingly and turning their nose up to treatment. However, it was the one in ten successful cases that continually recapture her hope. Cat continued how he already was taking a good first step in trusting Meridia and takes that as a sign of him having the potential to let himself be happy. Mortimer pondered over this and agreed. He made a solemn vow that if he wins, he would make things right with everyone, adding how Pearl would want that. Cat offered her hand in helping him make it to the end, declaring their victory to be for Pearl. Mortimer thanked her for listening and promised that if she wins, she will make an excellent therapist.
Suddenly, a cannon sounded in the distance. It was revealed to be Logan (11) after Horace (10) took advantage of his hysterics and beat him to death with a log. The heart to heart talk captivated the Capital, touched by Mortimer’s rare moment of vulnerability and in awe of Cat’s therapy skills. Both of their odds greatly increased, sharing first and second place. Artemis conceded and said Cat was Golden Victor material now, but hoped she does something explosive in the finale.
The next several hours were uneventful and tributes were still on edge. They had a perfect reason to as there were still alligator mutts patrolling the deeper bodies of water. The water had become so cloudy that one couldn’t see an inch below the surface. On top of that, the sulphur smell had gotten worse, causing some tributes to dry heave and cover their mouths. Jassy (12) took longer than expected to do this, her dry heaves giving Maximus Square a laugh. John (9) was bitten on the thigh by a gator when he got too close to the lake. He killed it with his knife and dragged himself into a hollow log to patch himself up. Andrei and Wolvthorne were camping close to John’s hiding spot. They were gorging on the food and water sponsors gifted them after killing the gators while complaining to each other about the smell. They left one water bottle unattended, giving a window of opportunity for Peggy (8) who hid in a tree over the course of the games. She was caught by Wolvthorne, but managed to escape with the water bottle. During the chase, Wolvthorne tripped and spotted John inside the log. He dragged him out of the log and proceeded to hack him to death with his axe in a fury. John’s cannon sounded at the fifth strike. The Capital fangroup The Mutts cheered for Peggy’s victory, but they received jeers from the Buccaneers (D4 fangroup) and the Lumberjacks (D7 fangroup).
It was near sundown when Mortimer and Cat entered unfamiliar territory. After three deaths in under an hour, the smell was much worse. Cat nearly fell off the raft while struggling to hold her breakfast in. They landed at a small shoreline and came face to face to a heavy brush. Cat picked up a small log and hurled it into the brush. When nothing bounced back, she guessed there was a secret area behind it. She commended Mortimer for being right and asked what they should do. He stated that as much as he wanted to explore, it was getting dark and they should camp. Cat agreed and the two started a fire. She became exasperated by the sulphur smell and asked how they could ignore it. Mortimer borrowed her sword and ripped one of their backpacks to shreds. He tied some pieces together and fashioned them into masks. The two now had something to barely stave off the powerful sewer smell.
Their relief turned to dismay when they discovered their last water bottle had one gulp left. What made the situation worse was that with no more hydrogen peroxide, they lost their means of purifying more water. Mortimer insisted she drink it. Cat accepted it and drank it. She raised the water bottle in the air and asked the sky to “fill her up”. Surprisingly, two sponsor gifts floated down to them seconds after saying this. One held a first aid kit while the other had two water bottles and two sandwiches. Cat doctored Mortimer’s right eye with a special cream from the kit. After she was done, the two ate their sandwiches.
Cat asked to see his tattoo. Mortimer shyly rolled his lycra suit off. The Kraken and the treasure chest became visible. Cat crawled closer and traced her fingers on the tentacles, marvelling at the design. Mortimer revealed Meridia liked to paint and desired to be District 4’s first female tattoo artist, using him as her guinea pig. He didn’t forget to attribute the treasure chest and polishing to Minerva. The viewers in Maximus Square were sensing the sexual tension, oohing and aahing as Cat continued to trace the tentacles. Artemis was fanning herself in the commentator’s booth, hoping the two would kiss. Luther slapped her shoulder, reminding her he had a girlfriend. Cat’s fingers arrived at the treasure chest on Mortimer’s actual chest and the two locked eyes. The two leaned closer until their faces were two inches apart. The sudden awareness of their actions dawned on them and they awkwardly distanced themselves by five feet. Mortimer said he was loyal to Meridia and didn’t want to betray that trust even in the arena. Cat apologised, excusing it to her imagining what might have been if she asked her coworker Pedal out. Mortimer promised her that she could do it if she wins. She thanked him, him joking how it felt good to be the therapist this one time. The rest of the night was without incident. A hovercraft entered the arena to display the portraits of the fallen. The fallen included Pearl (4), Wren (5), John (9), and Carnelia and Logan (11). This left Andrei (2), Mortimer (4), Cat (6), Wolvthorne (7), Peggy (8), Horace (10), and Jassy (12) remaining.

I've been stuck in my head since January. For added context, I met this girl on FetLife who for legal reasons we will call Terra, back in 2021. I was in South Bend during Ramencon looking for a hook up. I was lonely, and before you judge, my spouse at the time and I were swingers but going through a rough patch. My spouse at the time had asked me to be in an open relationship and up until that moment at the convention, I hadn't explored it.
Terra, who this story is about, ignored me at first because she was married and I respected that. I told her if she ever changed her mind to seek me out. Fast forward a few months later she starts commenting on my photos, liking and sharing my post. There was a Star Wars convention coming up in South Bend and I told her I would be in town. We met on March 26th, 2022. She was pregnant but wanted to hook up. It was only supposed to be a one night stand, I had not intentions of catching feelings. However when she came into the room, I felt an instant connection with her. My soul recognized hers. We sat on the bed, I gave her a massage and I asked her questions about herself to see if we were compatible. The sex was amazing, and we went a few rounds.
When we were done, I sat away from her for a bit. I asked when was the last time she was held? She paused and told me never. She told me her ex had abused her and that she was going to raise her son on her own. I respected this and stayed in my lane because I had a daughter at home. My daughter's mom and I were having a lot of issues. I spent time with my daughter throughout the week until I went to work. Some nights my child's mother would not come home until 5 AM the next morning. My child's mother allowed her mother, child's grandmother, to live with us for what was only supposed to be 3 to 6 months but this turned into almost 2 years until I finally had enough.
​
I would drive to South Bend every weekend starting from March 26th to see Terra. I was with her on her birthday April 4th, and wanted to surprise her, so I laid out flowers, went and got us food even though she refused to eat at first, and I got her a birthday Balloon. I had access to Daily Pay so I would withdraw part of my check to rent us a room and hang out. I was gentle with her because of the baby but she brought out this side of me I never knew I had. My bills were paid so I didn't think much of it.
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I enjoyed our time together. It was like an escape from reality, but during one of our visits, I noticed she told me..."he's nice...I can use him."
I was put off by this statement, and I hesitated being around her because I didn't want her to think I was just some lonely sucker who would give her everything...except that was exactly what I was to her. She called me her dog who she could whistle and I would come running to. I feel sick to my stomach just thinking about it. Yet...despite everything I was falling in love with her.
​
It came to a time where I told my child's mother the truth. Even though she knew about the other woman, I admitted that I had fallen out of love with her and I was in love with this new woman who I felt completed me in ways she couldn't. I got very tired of the verbal and sometimes physical abuse from my child's mother, and I found comfort in this other woman who was always there, even getting to the point where while I was at Exxxotica for my birthday in 2022, all I could think about was Terra. She even surprised me and drove out to see me on my birthday.
​
My child's mother and I separated in June. I ended up on child support but Terra was there. It scared me to be this close to someone, because my intuition told me to keep my guard up. Then one day she told me she was only using me to speed up her birthing process and that she planned to ghost me once the baby was here...but that changed and she started to actually like me.
Feeling like this was too good to be true, I blocked her on everything, Facebook, Twitter, FetLife, Instagram...any means of contact she was gone. She text me and asked why? I told her I didn't want to get hurt. If she didn't want me in her life, I would leave to save us both the trouble. She told me she started to care so I gave her another chance. I was hesitant...we met up a few more times and she took me to see Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness in theaters. We went to a buffet and I felt this connection I had never felt before. It scared me...I felt like she would hurt me again and she admitted to being invited to a gangbang but left because she didn't want to hurt me.
I wanted to leave but I stayed. I told myself and her we could work it out so long as communication was open. I stopped entertaining other women, and aside from my daughter, she was the only woman who had my complete attention. I was never the only man. She went to Tennessee and we started binging Future Diary together. She told me she had another man she was into. Again I walked away believing I was a burden on her life. She told me...she didn't want to be in a relationship but she didn't want the sex to stop. I told her I was not ready for a relationship but despite the protest we were in some way still committed to one another for a period of time.
When she came back in town from Tennessee, I allowed Terra and her to stay with me. I enjoyed having her there despite the way she treated me at times. I didn't expect to come home to a clean house, or food on the counter. I asked why she did it? Bragged about her to my coworkers, and had nothing but love and respect for her. Except...the respect wasn't mutual. I would see her talking trash about me on social media and I would confront her. She told me it was nothing to worry about yet...I kept forgiving her. I knew I could find better but I only wanted her. We broke up on Christmas, she told me she didn't want to be together and I said okay. I stopped communicating with her, blocked contact, but she created another account and reached out to me. We agreed to just be friends and have sex but she was with another man. I refused to be second place to any man. I started noticing she post pictures in my apartment naked on my furniture. I asked her to remove them. She refused and stated if I posted them she would sue me for defamation of character despite constantly bashing me online when she swore up and down she didn't want people to know we were together. Terra had shown her true colors and it made me sick...yet I still had love for her. I remembered the good in her and believed she only acted out because of her environment. I was wrong.
I returned her things to her and in February, I saw Terra face to face. She asked if we could hang out still, and I told her she was welcomed as I retrieved my keys from her, when I came back for Valentine's Day, she laughed at me stating she didn't want to be seen with me. I felt I had wasted my time, money and energy and left her be. I woke up one morning to threats of a restraining order and she'd even threatened my life if I had tried to contact her again. I thought to myself how could I have been so stupid? I almost lost everything trying to hold on to her. When she left my life slowly got better but I still missed Terra. It was like Teen Titans, no matter what I said...no matter how often I tried I couldn't get through to her until I eventually just had to give up on her and move on which has been hard because a part of me still misses her.

Hey y'all!
Me and my girlfriend have lived here for a couple years now but shamefully never visited an Indian restaurant.
Girlfriend loves South Asian food and is a real spice lover. I'm not so much but I wanna take her to a place she'll really enjoy.
I titled it Indian but any real authentic and good South Asian restaurant will be good too!
We live in Sefton but happy to travel around Liverpool for some good eats.
Thanks!

Date: December 14th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day One
I am Sergeant Paulo Martinez, of the United Nations’ 12th Marine Regiment, field doctor. Unfortunately for my bosses, I’m not writing this diary for them. This one is for my sister. Yes you read that right, Maria, this one’s for you so i’m doing it the way I think you’d like it done.
So, lil’ sis the historian always talks about how the most fun historical discoveries are in mundane documents, a lot of stuff gets lost to time with just official documents, so when I told her I was going to visit Colia on official business, in fact at request of the Zurulian government, she just straight up begged me to keep a personal diary. Even if I never show her, in like a hundred years it’d be a more accurate story of what happens than any official report. So… This is it.
To explain better, in preparation for future operations the UN is trying to integrate alien advanced technology and methodology with ours, both to patch up theirs where it’s missing (as is often the case with their methods) and prop up ours (usually technical). My case, however, is a bit particular while being part of the same initiative. The government of Colia, that’s the Zurilian homeworld by the by, has requested a technical exchange with a field medic experienced in combat operations in order to help them prepare for the inevitable need for their famed medical expertise to be applied on the field, i’m not sure what my counterpart is going to be doing back home but I bet he isn’t going to be with the marines.
Anyway, it seems like I'm to be set up with a group of first responders for a grand total of a week, see what I can learn and see what I can teach. Shuttle (which is tiny, by the way, love those teddy bears but they’re tiny and their bespoke crafts are tiny) will be arriving in another hour and after that i’m to head for a briefing.
Okay! Still the first day, or night right now. I got to meet the crew I’m to be training with and got a better grasp of what I’m actually working with here. I made a mistake previously, it’s not first responders, I’m training with a unit from the First Response Fleet. Those guys have an entire fleet in charge of emergency response to any catastrophe, admittedly it’s not a very large one it’s just their flagship “Beacon of Hope” and a small group of support ships like two fuel barges (seriously what is their operational range to have fuel barges?) and some lander shuttles.
For a moment I thought it made sense why they sent a marine, those are military right? Nope, those are civilians as far as I can tell. I got to meet some of the people I’ll be training with though! They’re a fun bunch, and boy did they barrage me with questions. Remember the stories back early during first contact about aliens asking all sorts of stupid questions? Now picture that at quintuple speed and all of the medical variety, at some point I had to shut them all down. Not because they were annoying, mind, but because the questions started getting far outside of my field of expertise. I’m a marine combat medic, not an endocrinologist!
Which made me curious, so when I asked it turns out they’re all proper doctors! Out of a crew of twenty, because apparently the crews train together based on which lander shuttle they’re assigned to, we had ten surgeons of different varieties, three neurolinguists, two geneticists… I don’t even remember what the other five were but none of them with less than five years of schooling and all but one with at least eight years in the First Response Fleet, that other one was fresh out of getting his PhD, however.
Date: December 15th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Two, Training
Apparently the FRF has its own facilities for training and fleet maintenance. I woke up early to get a look at the place and… I admit I’m a little surprised? This doesn’t look like what I was expecting, because it feels familiar. There were a lot of restricted areas, expected in a medical facility, but this felt different because a medical college, what I thought this was, wouldn’t have armed guards.
It also wouldn’t have a starship drydock. And it wouldn’t be designed like this. This place looks more like a federation-style military base than anything you’d see a bunch of civilian doctors in. I wonder if they’re essentially contractors to the military?
After a short tour on my own I went to have breakfast, and if this didn’t look like every military mess hall in the universe I’d throw my stripes in the trash. Boy are the teddy bears noisy, though, if there’s one thing I can say they’d beat any marine at is making a goddamn ruckus. I readied myself for some bland vegan breakfast, which don’t get me wrong I get it they’re herbivores and all but I usually I really miss my protein and the taste you know, but I was very surprised. I couldn’t tell you the name of the plants I ate but… Just… How can vegan food be this tasty? I thought aliens didn’t know how to cook?
Well, I was sure as hell wrong about that. I’m actually writing this at the end of the day and I’m chewing on a raw root for heavens’ sake because this thing tastes like mint and cashews? Most aliens might not know how to cook but apparently the teddy bears aren’t most aliens in this case.
Anyway, back to some chronological telling. I also learned they love tea, they can’t really start the day without tea and I don’t mean the pansy stuff from Earth (i’m a coffee drinker), oh no. I never thought steeped flower leaves would give me the caffeine jitters, but I should have when I saw they were black. Right, one of the gals in my unit is a biochemist, and she made this very weird joke to me if I could taste the poison on the tea? Humans have gotta stop the damn capsaicin hype before they think we can drink actual poison.
Surprisingly tasty breakfast over, me and the unit went for the first training of the day. As part of a disaster response team they need to keep fit, so morning is physical training. Now, you’re going to read this and think it’s weird, right? Wouldn’t it be paramedics or firefighters doing this particular piece of job instead of full blown PhDs with doctorates and all that? Yes it’s that weird.
Running, pushups, pullups, you know the whole full body training regimen? That’s how it started, I thought I was going to smoke the teddy bears but… Good heavens, I can’t in good conscience say I did. I mean, yeah, I outperformed every one of them but that was close, I swear the only reason I outperformed them is because of mother nature because it sure wasn’t my training and I’m, not to toot my own horn too much, a goddamn marine.
Afterwards we had ‘deployment’ drills. Yes I’m calling them drills because at this point I’m certain those guys are military in some weird way. Deployment in this case refers to the simple act of exiting the lander shuttle and deploying the field hospital. Guy in charge of training said today they were going easy because of me since I’ve never done this before, to general cheer of the rest of the unit.
The basics of deployment training is, we all get inside the lander with the gear, wait a minute to simulate the landing procedures, then we unload the gear and set it up as fast as possible but prioritizing no mistakes. So off I went to start, first boarding the lander, which was the actual lander we were assigned to. When I asked I was told this was so we’d be familiarized with the idiosyncrasies of the equipment we’d actually use in the field, in fact all of the gear we were training with WAS the gear they used in the field.
My first surprise was how… Cramped the lander was. And by that I mean this was an eight-person craft carrying twenty plus enough medical equipment to set up a field hospital. This was frankly absurd, in order to create enough space for me two of them had to sit on my lap because there wasn’t enough room, half of them had to stay standing! “We don’t take up a lot of space” one of them told me.
Apparently, these lander shuttles are perfectly safe to ride standing and there were specific roles for people who were standing, they’re supposed to start moving some of the gear out the instant the landing ramp hits the ground. That’s what they’re supposed to do anyway, but that isn’t exactly what happened. The landing pad is equipped with some kind of setup to simulate the ship’s landing impact, and that was some movement discipline I haven’t ever seen before- I felt the downwards impact of the ship, but before elastic forces moved it back up as ships do when landing this hard, people were already moving.
They didn’t start moving gear when the landing ramp hit the ground. They moved so fast that the first piece of gear, the power generator, hit the ground moving into place less than a second after the tip of the ramp hit the floor.
The whole deployment training was four hours. We repeated the deployment procedures for four hours without rest, and it wasn’t simple. This isn’t a field hospital in human terms, my friends, no. One of the first things set up is a power generator, after that a communications array to call up the flagship, then they bring out the tents but those aren’t the simple bed and clean space affair. They use shielding technology to keep particulates out, the operation tent even uses that system to create an airlock to keep the air inside clean. There’s an entire miniature operation theater, there’s a rapid diagnosis rig with a whole ass ton of sensors operated with VR as well as two tents just for patient recovery.
Those are neither simple nor light pieces of kit. That’s some sci-fi supertech shit right there. The target deployment time is five minutes. Five. Fucking. Minutes. I don’t think I could set up a tent in five minutes. Hell, when they started moving I had to reign in my instincts, it looked like I was getting ready for breaching action. Oh, they were taking it easy and instructing me all the time, took them fifteen minutes to set up the entire field hospital.
After that bit of intense training, it was dinner time. Did you know that there is a specific kind of plant here that when you mix its dried and powdered leaves with some of the local flora it induces the maillard reaction? Fucking cold-fried tubers is what I got, it’s like those slightly citric cold fries that have all the good parts of fries but are cold? Alien food I swear, if I ever have to turn vegan I’m only eating at zurulian restaurants.
And then it was study time, gotta keep up on the latest medical science and they afford you time to do that. Pretty damn impressive library they’ve got, not just some proper paperback books mostly for historical value (did you know paper here is black and they use a dark red ink to write in it? Weird alien trees) but an immense digital library. I was a bit at a loss of what to do , I’m at best a paramedic not a doctor needing to keep up with the latest and greatest, thankfully one of the guys on my unit showed up with some first response manuals with the basics for every species. And then promptly dragged me to the unit’s study group because apparently the entire unit also studies together.
Man I thought that was going to be annoying, it thankfully wasn’t. Damn cheerful bunch they are, real classy body horror jokes as well. I’ll be honest I never thought I’d see an alien get dark humor, nevermind start it, but I like those teddy bears. Also none of that better-than-you crap I thought I was going to get either, they helped me out a fair bit memorizing some procedures (seriously, there’s a method for mouth-to-mouth on a bird that works, but boy is it going to be nasty) and awkward as it was having a nearby human was plenty helpful since they were all studying human medicine.
And oh, hey, that’s the door. I got invited for a bit of a welcoming party. I’ll add more when I get back.
Date: December 17th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Four, Hangover
Sooo… Apparently tea brewing is a far more complex and ancient art here I guess? Did you know there’s a kind of plant that builds up alcohol inside of it here? And with the right steeping process you get this very tasty alcoholic green tea that just sneaks up on you like a motherfucker? That’s why you’re not getting anything from yesterday, jesus fuck deployment drills, timed this time, on an ungodly hangover were not fun. Turns out this unit’s usual time is seven minutes, by the way.
Got to learn a fair bit about zurulian biology that night out, though. And clean up your mind, that’s not what I mean. Turns out they’re quite more sensitive to some chemicals than humans, or at least sensitive in different ways. They’re also WAY more open to recreational drugs, it turns out, especially in drinkable form.
One of ‘em got this thing that looked like an ashtray? And it was burning something. Dude just put it on the table and took whiffs of it now and then. I got curious and went to try and holy crap I got dizzy just getting close to it? Lum leaves, he told me, they give a nice buzz he said. Nice buzz? It’d have knocked me right out if I didn’t step back fast enough, apparently whatever’s in lum leaves at best works like a beer for them, though. And the weird part is he said it tasted good.
That was when I learned that zurulians have a damn fine sense of taste. Which, by the way, explained why they were passing by a rock and licking it at some point. I thought they were trying to weird me out but no it’s apparently some kind of palate cleanser, I tried but it just kind of tasted of rock. And, it turns out that their tongues can detect some usually-airborne chemicals as well! Including ones their noses can! They can detect some things as both taste and smell!
And apparently after the fifth cup of tea I was asking them what all sorts of things tasted for them and I could not tell you the answers because I should have stopped at my second. Except for one thing, I think whoever I asked was high as a kite too to accept it but I asked what I tasted like. Look I was really intoxicated as well. She said I tasted like I had vitamin deficiency? And… I don’t know, I know I never ate properly but how the hell do you tell that with your tongue?
Don’t feel it’d be very decent to ask that, though. You don’t make wise, or decent, decisions when you’re so out of your mind you get a thirty-hour hangover later.
As for the day, it’s been deployment drills and studying. But we did get to play with a few more toys between the drills and dinner, the unit got to test out (or well, make sure they were working) a bunch of fun-looking portable piston units, they also had a couple of plasma torches and a magnetic cutter (think a hydraulic cutter but instead of hydraulics it’s magnetism, looks silly but damn thing could cut through a support strut of a starship in half the time of a hydraulic). I, of course, didn’t get to play with any of those. They were built for zurulian bodies and according to the trainer if I ever were to work with the Fleet they’d just treat my body as another set of tools anyway. I mean I get it, nature gifted me a larger and stronger body than theirs, but he could have been less blunt about that.
Date: December 18th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Five, Emergency
Soo… See how I’m being cute with titles? Look you’re lucky I’m writing in english and not japanese or else you’d be getting triple-sized titles, I love me some good titles. I wish I was talking about emergency response training here, however.
I’m a diligent man, I haven’t been skimping on preparing my official report, in fact a third of study time I’ve spent on writing the report. Super detailed, put as much as I damn well could in those, described every last bit of tech, hell I described the seating arrangements per specialty for deployment because apparently you can shave seconds off of deployment with the correct arrangement. Even included the fact it was faster for me to just carry the two guys on my lap out and drop them on top (yes on top) of the storage unit going to the surgery tent than to wait for there to be enough space for them to hop off.
So my official report is out. I’m going to write a second, too, about whatever else happens. I made a quick call to HQ and got the go ahead too. Earth’s gearing up to fight the feds but that doesn’t mean the rest of this old bullshit war isn’t going on. There’s been an arxur raid on a colony world, apparently a venlil colony, and we’re deploying. Sorry, I’m not going to just go back home and wait for the call to action when I can help something going on right now. Plus I know it’s been just five days but damn, I like those guys. I hope dealing with a raid aftermath isn’t going to break them.
excuseme, what. Sorry, I am currently on the lander shuttle as we make our way up to the Beacon of Hope. I was going to finish there and then but I heard it… Someone talking to the newest guy “You get used to it”. You get used to it? Did they do this that often? Or was he just trying to be nice?
Not the time to ask.
Date: December 19th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Six, Stalking
The trip was fast. Alarmingly fast. I can tell the Beacon of Hope has probably the best FTL drive ever created or something like that. It was two thirds through the day when we got a message that we had arrived and were now on standby. And also, that I was being called up by the captain.
The trip to the bridge was surprising in two ways, the first because I didn’t need to bend down. The Beacon of Hope is built to accommodate even a Mazic in its interiors, and be able to work with an interspecies crew. The second was because of the austerity of the place as I expected a civilian ship to make some concessions, but any area that did not expect to see a patient was perfectly functional and wasteless in design. Only the patient areas seemed a bit more comfortable and even then, it seemed like it was more because of the patient’s needs.
The bridge was very much a spartan affair that took advantage of their species’ diminutive size, it was tucked closer to the center of the ship and was distressingly small despite the amount of staff present, though someone of a larger species (like me) could probably still do their job as an operator here but they’d probably have to do it laying down. Something that the layout of the chairs would seemingly permit. It was there that I met the captain, aliens might not be much for clothes, but they’ve right up there with us with hats. The only identifier he had was the rather classy dark blue hat which is apparently the base of the design of any air force hat in the galaxy too, I guess some pieces of design are universal. Later that day I had time to ask around, and it seems like their space military splintered off of their air force, unlike the navy back on earth.
And the captain told me some very, very impressive information. And some very distressing as well. First off, we had arrived before the Arxur, which in itself was baffling because I thought we had responded to an attack. Nope! It was an early detection system. I asked him, then, if we were so early why wasn’t a defense fleet instead of us? “I don’t know. And I’m afraid of knowing” At that point I dropped that line of questions, I guess it got pretty obvious, huhn? Then what’d he need me for, I asked. He was blunt, me being a predator, and a trained killer at that, he wanted advice.
I might have been a bit annoyed at the wording, but the captain of the most advanced, and genuinely unarmed, hospital ship I had ever seen asking me advice like that? What even was going on? He explained to me that we were hiding in the shadow of a planet close to the colony, directly opposite of where the arrival point of the Arxur fleet should be, and showed me the map. He knew I wasn’t a naval officer but if I had anything, if anything in my training, if anything in my instincts could help, anything to make sure the mission would work more smoothly.
Were we doing an evacuation? Not with just this ship. VIP extraction? First Response doesn’t do priorities like those. Dropping support for ground troops? What ground troops. No, we had no way to aid during the actual raid, this was the direct opposite of a warship. But the very second the cannibals left they were going to start dropping shuttles, every last moment counted and if that meant arriving before the threat it meant arriving before the threat.
I mean, I got nothing. I told him I got nothing, none of my training worked here and I couldn’t just summon some magical foresight to help. To which, he was grateful. Told me it was an assurance of a trained soldier couldn’t find flaw in the plans of ‘an old retired pediatrician’ and i’m absolutely fucking sorry?
At that point I had to ask, are they military? Oh no, they’re not. While sure the FRF was part of the military organization, it had no need for soldiers since it was basically just a large mobile hospital. Those were all civilians, including him.
Now, if any of my fellow humans catch this document when it’s still relevant or anyone at all a hundred years from now, I want you to consider what the average military competency of the federation species is like. They’d fall prey to the dumbest fucking ambush and if I remember right even the Arxur were pissing their fucking scales at a simple fighting retreat. Those people have been fighting longer than some countries have existed on earth and they got no idea how to wage war. And here was this ‘old pediatrician’ pulling some fucking grand admiral moves because his only focus was getting medical aid down on planet as fast as possible.
I waited to get back to my room to wait before I lost it. But still, we had a mission ahead of us and we’d need to prepare.
Date: December 21th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Eight, Fieldwork
Don’t have much time to write, there’s a lot of work to be done but I think I can skimp a few minutes of sleep for this, using voice to text for this one. I guess mumbling might help me sleep, too. We just landed, guys got deployment down to six minutes. Fuck, unit back home couldn’t move this fast with this coordination. Shit, they probably do those very often don’t they?
Each lander shuttle went to a different place, we’ve all got a huge area to cover with our shuttle’s crew. Flagship dropped a few comm buoys up there, we got a temporary planetary cover for the comms. Dunno how the fuck the shuttle slipped down when it did, last croc ship wasn’t even done taking off when we hit the ground, also the pilot’s a fucking maniac. Miles wishes he could pull a deceleration at that low height without splashing.
Fuck my feet. Fuck my legs. Fuck my back, everything hurts. Three guys stayed behind in the triage tent, two in the surgery tent, one on the radio, everyone else got to go out searching for people in pairs. They use this fancy headset thing with data feed from the flagship, scans for life signs, real advanced. Not perfect precision, though, still needs the people on the ground to cover the last hundred meters of range. “Well, that’s leftovers” fucking dark humor at this point. Fuck. We were going towards a lifesign marker when we ran into a corpse.
Right. Funny thing here, this is a federation world. Yeah I know I said it was a venlil colony but seems like not every colony split off from the feds when the republic did, makes sense. Don’t matter for those sons of bitches, someone need help they come for you. That was a venlil body, burning wreckage of a toppled building, half-eaten.
Fuck i’ve seen the worst goddamn wounds, saw people missing limbs, shit… Y’all of my unit on earth remember the Placido thing, right? So much fire. Y’all remember the smell of the burning bodies, don’t you? Saw some sick shit in the past but this? Seeing a half-eaten person?
And teddy bear says that damn joke. Pulled me outta the shock, at least… Wasn’t the first time they had to say that, was it? Wasn’t long until we hit that lifesign, though. Venlil kid, panicking the hell out when he saw me, bleeding like a fountain from a cut on the shoulder and side. Tried to calm the kid down, and what happens? Teddy bear just comes out of no fucking where and jabs something in the kid’s neck and they’re out like a light. We called for a recovery there.
Have you ever seen a motorcycle ambulance? How about a hovercycle ambulance? Yeah, shuttle had one as part of the gear, it’s a kinda funny piece of kit. Super tight to be a normal ambulance, but a zurulian can fit in there right fine with a patient, it’s got some magical gyro-stabilization because no way it could speed off like it did and fucking fly over a pile of debris like that without killing the ride, to say nothing of the patient. But fuck, I read the specs of the thing while we were taking the shuttle down, they’re written in the cockpit. Thing could apparently hit supersonic speed with a set of secondary thrusters it has, it wouldn’t do it for long because that’d melt the engine down completely but it could. Who the fuck puts that fucking speed on an ambulance?
You can see I’m lacking adjectives at this point? Because this is all so absurd. The recovery vehicle, that’s what it’s called, grabbed the kid and sped the hell off. “No bedside manners for us, let’s go” is all my partner said when we started heading for the next life sign. We had people who’d barricaded themselves in furniture and underground and couldn’t get back out, people who’d given up a limb to hide in a tight squeeze.
The worst were the ones that… They were still begging for help, ‘unfinished meals’ the fucking teddy said. How do you get so callous? Only from seeing this too much. Fuck is that what being a veteran in this job is? Dealing with this fucking horrorshow so much you get like that? But still, if their heart is beating it’s good enough, even those ones got help. I took a ride in the recovery vehicle with one of those.
Krakotl, it was. Don’t matter how much you hate the birds, you see one like that, torn open and half eaten begging to god to have one more second in this universe… You ain’t human if you can still hate. Idiot lizard decided to have a meal mid-bombardment, it looks like, building collapsed on him and pinned his body on the bird. I pulled the stone out of the bird, my partner dragged the arxur carcass out of the way, there was so much blood. You’d think that them not bleeding red makes it feel less like blood, it doesn’t. Sealant gel applied to the open blood vessels, beautiful thing that gel, it can basically serve as a physical barrier to prevent blood loss and it can be removed safely, and we wrapped them in a sealing blanket.
Sealing blankets are amazing emergency devices. They’re stored in this plastic bag because they need to remain wet, but you warp the patient in it and it constricts with just enough pressure to do what you need it to (there’s a control for it), in this case keeping the bird’s insides on the inside, and it’s soaked in a cocktail of antiseptics and painkillers that work for just about any species. It’s more than just soaked, even, the material it’s made of actually very slowly dispenses a low dosage of the fluids it absorbed serving basically like an IV drip in this situation. When the recovery vehicle arrived I tapped out, as they say. I’d accompany the patient to the base and take a moment to refresh myself before outing again in the next recovery vehicle call.
I’d like to say it was a wild fucking ride. But I didn’t even feel it, thing must have ship-class inertial dampeners somehow. They spared no expense for this fast rescue vehicle. And by the heavens that driver, I haven’t been around the pilot and the driver much since they had some separate training but this driver? Straight. Line. He’d only make a curve if going over an obstacle would take longer than around because he was not increasing the length of the trip by a single meter.
Also, the stretcher the poor bird was in? Gravity sledge. You heard that right, you know how costly and difficult miniaturized anti-gravity is, it doesn’t work without a much higher attached computational power than an object that size can handle. I bet it was receiving assistance from the vehicle. Moving them to the triage tent was easy, didn’t think there’d be much need for triage, mind, but that was the procedure. Full sensor suite you’d find at the best hospitals with three VR control sets to be able to perform multiple operations at once, I didn’t even think those things were mobile. The three on triage had a full readout on the bird in seconds, hear that seconds. So I did the last part of my job and wheeled the patient to the surgery tent with the report.
One thing I didn’t mention before is the fire. This wasn’t a farming colony, this is an extraction colony, they were pulling some manner of chemicals from the ground here and refining it. This place where we’re at mostly stored things, mind… Very flammable things. After the damn crocs were done being murderous psychopathic cannibals on the ground they decided to destroy everything just in case, of course the aftermath of dropping bombs on highly flammable storages is rampant fires. Just so you have an idea of the backdrop.
I got a bit of a chance to wash up after that patient, the boss (he’s apparently the most senior, in veterancy) ordered me to take a rest. So I took the chance to fish my soap from my personal belongings (we all got a bit of space to carry personal stuff down) and take a quick wash before sitting down here to take a nap.
Date: December 25th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Twelve, Fieldwork
What a christmas gift, eh? Playing heavy machinery in a nightmare. Been putting less of my first aid skills and more of my muscles to use and I don’t blame them for it, the heavy duty tools are all showing signs of wear by now, and I can replace them with my hands for some uses. They’ve got plenty of people that can stabilize a patient, they don’t have many tools.
I asked around a bit how long we were planning to stay, and whether there was a bigger relief fleet coming. “Until everyone’s saved” was the first answer and “Nobody knows” was the second. After all, this is ostensibly a Federation planet, and we were waiting on one of their relief fleets to show up. My next question was about, how long did we have supplies for, and the Beacon of Hope came geared for 30 days of operation with six ground crews. We had eighteen ground crews going, because the damage was extensive across the entire planet.
We had a third of the supplies we would normally have, and I’d be insulted if they didn’t start rationing supplies between ground crews. If the situation was this dire they’d have to make decisions about where their supplies would be best spent. Please heavens, let this place be a priority, I don’t want to teach those poor teddy bears how to do low-tech lifesaving.
So for now, we need to go easy on our tools to keep having them, and as luck would have it I’ve got enough physical capacity to replace them in about a third of their use cases. So for the last two days I’ve grown pretty accustomed to the recovery vehicle as I get moved from one place to another to move debris and carry things.
I’ve also noticed everyone seems a bit more relaxed when I’m around sometimes. Though I’ve the impression it isn’t quite my presence itself, that tends to happen right before I go take a nap. I don’t mind the weirdness, whatever helps those guys. They’re making me question the way everyone hypes up human stamina because they’re keeping right the hell up with my work shifts.
Date: December 28th, 2136 Standard Terran Time - Day Fifteen, Starvation
Well, that was the call I was hoping we wouldn’t have. Right when what we’ve started finding more and more is the deeply wounded and the infected.
We’ve been on the ground for twelve days, chances of survival of anyone at this point is minimal, but minimal isn’t zero and that’s good enough to keep working. Unfortunately, there are other ground crews in bigger population areas, which means a higher volume of minimal chances, which means they get the resource allocations.
The power generator should be good, each one lasts the full month so that won’t be a problem. But most of our miracle medicine will start having to be rationed, also the hydraulic lifters gave up the ghost. Not like they were bad but it was simply from excess of use, my back knows the feeling at this point.
We’re going to run out of antiseptics in three to five days if we keep going at this rate, as well. Hopefully we should have saved everyone that we can at that point. But there was a small miracle, or rather, there was a small underestimation on my part.
I thought I’d have to teach those guys how to save a life without their spacer tech and miracle medicines when we ran out of stitch-gel. Stitch-gel is a rapid-clotting agent that effectively serves as instant stitches, it’s amazing. And we ran out of it the soonest. Then a woman with a horrifying neck wound was brought in, gal went down fucking fighting she did, don’t know how she took down her would-be killer the beast’s claws were still dangling from her neck. The fuck kind of movie hero was she? But the moment we’d remove the damn things (also did I mention her lower body was burned? She definitely wasn’t moving on her own, those legs are gone) she’d bleed to death and there’d be nothing to do about it.
And here’s where I underestimated them. She was taken out of the surgery tent and got to the next shuttle to the Beacon, she certainly bled a lot but she did not bleed to death. The surgeon had opted to, instead of bringing anything personal like me, pack additional supplies as his personal items. Like a fucking mile of biodegradable stitching string and a whole ass set of needles, plus some weaker over-the-counter painkillers.
I thought I’d have to teach them how to handle some primitive medicine, but they came readier for it than I did. They knew they’d be sitting here until they ran out of resources. They gave up any possible nicety they could have brought to buy a few more days worth of supplies.
I’d say I was ashamed of my choices but I don’t think I am. I realized why they kind of gather around me before I take a nap- It’s not the nap, it’s my soap. I brought a mint-scented one, you know, when you can bring some niceties to help your mind in the field you do. Turns out the scent is doing some wonders for their mental health.
Pfft, big muscles and smelling nice, that’s what i’m doing right now. I’m cool with it, people often forget the effect some small things missing can have on a bigger operation. Dude done did an open heart surgery in the middle of a fucking field hospital to save a life, he deserves to take a good nap.
There’s something else but i’m not sure if I should say it. I know, history and all, but do I want people to remember this happened?
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[Part 2]
Okay so I got an immense surge of inspiration to write this one. Mostly also 'cause i'm a little tired of the only depictions of our allies out there being their failures, I mean sure it's a great narrative driver but it gets a exhausting a bit.
Plus i've also been trying to writre something in the vein of this for like two months at this point so I changed format and story while keeping the important parts. And it seems i'll have to split it in two parts because I hit Reddit's limit.

Hi ladies I’m a 40 year old guy I am originally from England and currently living in another part of Europe for the last few years I’m not giving out my exactly location on this post.
I am a very well spoken guy you could say I sound a bit posh the way I speak I have a strong south English accent I am originally from Reading Berkshire and I later lived in Oxford England before moving to where I am now.
What I am looking for is a serious relationship that leads to marriage that’s based on love and friendship. I have very strong morals boundaries and standards I live by. I have never used dating apps at all I never will to be honest I don’t think there a good idea at all. I know I’ll be a good loyal man to you and a good father I won’t ever abandon my children and walk away from them.I know also be a really good lover to you too
I do not Watch Porn i have no addictions I don’t smoke I don’t drink heavily and I’ve never touched any illegal drugs. Porn is causing unrealistic expectations in relationships I have no unrealistic expectations for intimate things once I get in a relationship. I have no other addictions and I’m in very good health with no serious health conditions
Intimacy is something I only want to have with one woman and is something I also don’t want to rush into I want to take our time getting to know each other properly. I really want to be a father in the future very much so I want a woman that also wants children the same as me.
I want to be In a loving caring supportive relationship and marriage. I believe that being intimate should be very special between two people and it should also be gentle between two people. I am a Virgin and I am not interested In any kind of meaningless stuff.
I could never have an affair or cheat on someone as I say I only want to be with one woman and share my body with one woman. Ideally I’d also prefer to be with a woman that’s also a virgin.
I only want to be married once in my life this is why I haven’t settled yet I don’t just want to settle with just anyone. Another thing is I’m extremely family orientated family is very important for me in fact I actually live with my parents at the moment I have no desire to live by myself I’m not someone that likes living alone so you will have to be okay with that and also the fact I don’t work at the moment again you will have to be okay with that from the get go.
My interests include photography gym swimming nature beaches walking camping hiking travel reading music I love classical music I listen to classic FM uk during the day which is classical music 24/7. I also love food Im a big foodie! I also love animals especially cats and dogs! I love technology too. I also love eating in good restaurants and red wine is my favourite drink I know a few good eating spots! I am also a very strong swimmer I would love to hear from women that also love swimming as this is something I’d love to do together!
I am not vegan or vegetarian I love meat and dairy foods. I love Italian Indian Mexican food cooking from scratch is how I mostly roll and I don’t eat much sugary foods or processed or junk foods.
I am also not liberal and I don’t follow any liberal political movements including woks culture I’d like the someone who is the same as me on that.
I am 6ft 4 dark blonde hair hazel eyes rugby player build and Natural smooth body which means I’m naturally smooth chest back arms and legs. I have freckles on my arms and legs plus big hands and feet. I do havé a big frame to go with it. I have a very deep manly voice too which I’ve been told women really like and I don’t aspire to look like men on social media and reality tv I have a very natural body type I prefer Being natural basically I embrace being natural.
In a woman I like a natural body type and no heavy makeup fake tan fake nails fake hair extensions fake eyelashes. I do also like women that don’t show too much off that dress conservatively and modestly plus you don’t wear too skimpy bikini on the beach. You also don’t aspire to look like women on social media and reality tv. Basically I like women that have a completely natural body and are natural all over. I do find women that are feminine and embrace there feminine side extremely attractive can’t tell you how attracted I am to that.
Please also be kind caring sweet easygoing gentle supportive trustworthy genuine and You have never done any meaningless stuff at all and have never cheated or had an affair either ideally as I say I’d prefer you to also be a virgin.
Please mention the word milkshakes when you send me a message and tell me more about you your age location and what you are most passionate about please don’t just say hi or hey or hello I’m unlikely to respond to that at all.

I am at my wits end right now. During the pandemic I foolishly drove myself into the ground trying to restart my failing self employed business, leading to 33k in personal debt and 55k in business debt. I never carried credit card debt ever in my life until the pandemic. I'm not a crazy frivolous spender. But during the pandemic I really was in denial that I had to fold my business and get a job.
I finally woke up and got a decent paying job, but living in California is making it SO HARD to get ahead of this stuff.
I still have a bit of my side hustle going - but the income JUST makes the minimum payments from the business credit cards, so it's stable at the moment but not changing anytime soon. At any moment my one client could discontinue my monthly service and I wouldn't be able to meet the business card minimums.
My take home from my 9-5 is about $4200
I am going to have to move out of my current cheap place and minimum rents in my area are like $1400 for a ROOM in a shared house (San Diego), and that doesn't include utilities. So say it's going to be around $1500 at least.
Life expenses are like another
Rent/Living: 1500 Car: gas (250 bc $4.60 a gallon), maintenance (20), insurance (64): $350 Groceries: $500 Restaurants: $150 Peloton (MY ONLY FORM OF SANITY): $90 Streaming/entertainment: $110 (Could def cut this by some) Pet insurance (92) + Food + Vet e-fund: $182 Starbucks (Flame away but can't drink drip coffee): $150 Credit Card Minimums: $1030
That leaves me with like ZERO room. In the past few months I had my car completely die on me which cost several thousand, and an ER visit for palpitations (probably because I'm so stressed!). Every month it seems like there's a new disaster putting me more and more behind. I had skin cancer earlier last year as well (gone now thankfully).
Even if I lived like a monk, I would be really behind. And I'd have to live like a monk for a very long time.
I considered Door Dash but as a female and everyone getting shot these days for going to the wrong door, I'm very hesitant.
I don't want to drop my dog's health insurance, I'm single and he's one of the only sources of joy in my life at the moment.
The peloton is important to me as it keeps my depression and anxiety at bay and is good for my overall health. I use it REGULARLY. I'm obsessed with it.
I could axe starbucks but it's the only thing getting me out of bed in the am because my life feels a bit hopeless right now. And I'm in such a hole, axing it seems like it would be a drop in an ocean.
I really have NO assets. I live fairly simply, hardly ever buy myself fancy things, haven't bought clothes in like a year, stopped going out except once a week with friends and sticking to my $150 going out budget, but I have no retirement savings. Credit Card debt and minimums have me in quicksand, and the California cost of living is ridiculous.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Solution I am considering: I have the opportunity to move home. My parents are truly very supportive, I have a decent relationship with them, and I used to go home to visit for a few months out of the year throughout my 20's and 30's until I wasn't making enough money to travel a lot (and got a dog making long term visits not feasible). Additionally, I'm blessed in that my parents live in a nice vacation area.
Another chapter to the story: My parents have put our family home on the market. They aren't selling it to sell it, they're selling it to get the price they want, and listing it with an exclusive agency (it won't appear on Zillow, etc). They've told me they will help me with the debt if it sells. But, it's not a guarantee.
So, to be honest, unless my parents do something crazy I'll have a decent inheritance to fall back on for retirement.
HOWEVER: My main goal right now is to right my own ship, and that may mean moving across the country and moving home at age 39. I am single and life is just NOT stacking up very well for me at the moment, and I've been pretty despressed about it. I've considered bankruptcy, but if I move home, I can pay off my personal debt in a year (according the Dave's snowball calculator). I'm not sure what to do about the business debt.
Also, if I need to live like a monk to get out of this hole and totally stop going out with friends etc, might as well live like a monk where I don't have to pay rent. I'm getting really tired of constantly declining invites from my friends to concerts, vacations, even cheap things like baseball games because it would blow my budget.
Tips? Flames?

My birthday is in 5 days and i just spent the first 2 hours of my day crying my eyes out. A couple of weeks ago i texted some friends to try to plan something for my birthday, since one of them doesn’t like friend mixing and doesn’t think she will get along with my friends i decided to plan activities with them on different days around my birthday. She was on board with this however as my birthday approached i asked her if shes still on board as i planned for us to spend the whole day together and she even suggested a restaurant for us to eat at, i wanted a confirmation so i can book a reservation at that restaurant however she seemed to just ignore my question and change subjects. I really have a feeling she will cancel on me last minute, stuff like this make me feel like our friendship is one sided, we’ve been friends for 6 years and i always thought of her as my best friend and will do anything for her but i dont think she thinks of me in the same way and it makes me really sad. In the past i planned to just hang out at my place on my birthday and invited her and 2 other girls (one of them she knew and always hung out with us in the past) but she canceled on the day of my birthday, a couple of days after that she told me she feels weird hanging out with those 2 girls since they aren’t close. I respected that and i understand how she feels when hanging out with people shes not friends with but this year i planned to do stuff just us two, i feel really shitty and desperate for even suggesting to celebrate my birthday with her. I decided to plan this with her on the day of my birthday since i valued her over my other friends. So my plan was to hang out on the following day with my 3 other friends, one of them is out of town and can’t make it, the 2nd one left me on read, and the 3rd one hinted that shes not coming by talking about the weather and how its gunna rain (we are doing indoor activities) I feel so pathetic for even suggesting to do something on my birthday, im turning 24 and i always dreamt of having a fun birthday with a group of friends, its been so long since I’ve celebrated my birthday and when i finally decide to do something im treated like this. What hurts me the most is that i have bought a present a month in advance for the girl that was hinting about the rain, i was looking at our past conversation and she completely forgot about my 23rd birthday and texted me days after my birthday saying happy birthday… our birthdays are 2 days apart, thats what started our friendship we bonded on the fact that our birthdays are so close. I feel so humiliated and just wish if i didn’t mention my birthday at all. It might sound dramatic but it really hurts when nobody not even your family would celebrate with you, my parents divorced when i was a kid so that created distance between us all, my “friends” got me overthinking myself, even tho we talk on a daily basis im starting to feel like they see me as somebody to pass time with and not as an actual friend. I feel like such a loser i just want to delete all my socials this is so embarrassing.

Some background: He was a poor communicator unless we were in person and would constantly let me down, "forget" or go back on promises made. It was clear he didn't care or couldn't be bothered with me if i got too much for him i guess. I'd just be ignored until i waited long enough for him to reply or i essentially, blew up his phone. which was usually what happened. I'd vent my frustrations, try to distance, ghost him even but he would act hurt by those actions and want me to "come back" to the friendship but never compromised on what i asked of him. Once he moved away, he didn't care about maintaining the friendship. It was rough but i eventually and finally removed him and stuck to it. With that out of the way let's get to the dreams...
I've had about 3 vivid dreams about him. To preface, I don't remember my dreams. Ever. (Aka i dont dream) but whenever i wake up from a full rest and go back to sleep to catch some extra Zzz's, thats when i get the weirdest dreams like being young again with all my elementary class mates going through this maze like house while everyone is roasting/bullying me or trying to fight someone but my arms are like wet noodles no matter how hard i swing. I try to run away but im slower than a snail despite going full speed.
With him, the dreams were EXTREMELY WHOLESOME (he, irl is an antisocial loner who ill look you dead in the eye and walk away mid conversation if he doesn't know you and doesn't want to talk). The first one was last year so the memory has faded but the second one happened a little over a month ago. I was in Laos and strangely i was there with the side of my family i dont like. It was a good time. Everyone was having fun on the beach, by the water etc. I went in to some sort of beach restaurant and i saw him from the corner of my eye but wasn't sure if he saw me, I avoided him and went back to my family. I see him walk by while im with them but this time we make eye contact. I don't acknowledge i just kind of act like i looked past him. I go back to the place where i first saw him (i think for food, idk its a dream lol) and he sees me again, eye contact again, but this time i smile but still look away. Next thing i know he's approaching me and he is in full uniform (Air force vet but was wearing a Marine uniform in my dream. Idk why) in front of me catching up with me and we end up just talking and walking along the beach and i eventually go my separate ways back to my family and then i wake up.
The reason i think im in Laos or even Vietnam at this time is because before i stopped talking to him, he was vacationing in one of these places which I also plan to go to for my own trip when im older. But I don't understand why i was having a good time with people I personally cutted out of my life.
The second dream i had today. Same situation of falling asleep again. I was with friends in this dream and we were having a good time (outside settingni believe. We were on a bench) then he appears and again, same old catching up but he's completely changed in physical appearance this time. He had outrageous ink and piercings and facial implants, grew his hair out longer than before had a whole different style too. It surprisingly didn't turn me away, i still found him easy on the eyes in the face. In this dream he was a lot more openly affectionate: hugs, sitting close, forehead kisses and just seeming like he changed but it was a maaaajor 180. All of these gestures I did not reciprocate or acknowledge. I just smiled and continue whatever i was doing.
I guess what i want to know is, why am I having better-than-reality dreams about someone who I have long since cut off and want nothing to do with anymore? I genuinely dont miss him. He made me feel shitty about myself without even trying. And I went quite a long time (little over 3 months) without a thought or care or regard in the world about him. He is absolutely a chapter close. And yet my dreams make me feel like there's such a high possibility of us running in to each other again (there's not, i promise) if we do i will not act like everything is fine like i did last time. I will call him out and want answers if i ever have the displeasure of meeting him again.
So why the wholesome shit brain???

Hi ladies I’m a 40 year old guy I am originally from England and currently living in another part of Europe for the last few years I’m not giving out my exactly location on this post.
I am a very well spoken guy you could say I sound a bit posh the way I speak I have a strong south English accent I am originally from Reading Berkshire and I later lived in Oxford England before moving to where I am now.
What I am looking for is a serious relationship that leads to marriage that’s based on love and friendship. I have very strong morals boundaries and standards I live by. I have never used dating apps at all I never will to be honest I don’t think there a good idea at all. I know I’ll be a good loyal man to you and a good father I won’t ever abandon my children and walk away from them.I know also be a really good lover to you too
I do not Watch Porn i have no addictions I don’t smoke I don’t drink heavily and I’ve never touched any illegal drugs. Porn is causing unrealistic expectations in relationships I have no unrealistic expectations for intimate things once I get in a relationship. I have no other addictions and I’m in very good health with no serious health conditions
Intimacy is something I only want to have with one woman and is something I also don’t want to rush into I want to take our time getting to know each other properly. I really want to be a father in the future very much so I want a woman that also wants children the same as me.
I want to be In a loving caring supportive relationship and marriage. I believe that being intimate should be very special between two people and it should also be gentle between two people. I am a Virgin and I am not interested In any kind of meaningless stuff.
I could never have an affair or cheat on someone as I say I only want to be with one woman and share my body with one woman. Ideally I’d also prefer to be with a woman that’s also a virgin.
I only want to be married once in my life this is why I haven’t settled yet I don’t just want to settle with just anyone. Another thing is I’m extremely family orientated family is very important for me in fact I actually live with my parents at the moment I have no desire to live by myself I’m not someone that likes living alone so you will have to be okay with that and also the fact I don’t work at the moment again you will have to be okay with that from the get go.
My interests include photography gym swimming nature beaches walking camping hiking travel reading music I love classical music I listen to classic FM uk during the day which is classical music 24/7. I also love food Im a big foodie! I also love animals especially cats and dogs! I love technology too. I also love eating in good restaurants and red wine is my favourite drink I know a few good eating spots! I am also a very strong swimmer I would love to hear from women that also love swimming as this is something I’d love to do together!
I am not vegan or vegetarian I love meat and dairy foods. I love Italian Indian Mexican food cooking from scratch is how I mostly roll and I don’t eat much sugary foods or processed or junk foods.
I am also not liberal and I don’t follow any liberal political movements including woks culture I’d like the someone who is the same as me on that.
I am 6ft 4 dark blonde hair hazel eyes rugby player build and Natural smooth body which means I’m naturally smooth chest back arms and legs. I have freckles on my arms and legs plus big hands and feet. I do havé a big frame to go with it. I have a very deep manly voice too which I’ve been told women really like and I don’t aspire to look like men on social media and reality tv I have a very natural body type I prefer Being natural basically I embrace being natural.
In a woman I like a natural body type and no heavy makeup fake tan fake nails fake hair extensions fake eyelashes. I do also like women that don’t show too much off that dress conservatively and modestly plus you don’t wear too skimpy bikini on the beach. You also don’t aspire to look like women on social media and reality tv. Basically I like women that have a completely natural body and are natural all over. I do find women that are feminine and embrace there feminine side extremely attractive can’t tell you how attracted I am to that.
Please also be kind caring sweet easygoing gentle supportive trustworthy genuine and You have never done any meaningless stuff at all and have never cheated or had an affair either ideally as I say I’d prefer you to also be a virgin.
Please mention the word milkshakes when you send me a message and tell me more about you your age location and what you are most passionate about please don’t just say hi or hey or hello I’m unlikely to respond to that at all.

I'm driving from the NJ side of NYC (near Nyack) to Ithaca on Tuesday afternoonish and can give a ride. I can potentially pick up in Yonkers or further south on the NJ side (toll 😥).