Reminder to self:
ALTWhat do you mean?? I took one whole day off! Why am I not immediately recovered from years of barely scraping by at subsistence level???
I feel bad for people who’ve never experienced a corn maze bc it’s not even fun but you just have to do it
I'd like to reblog this with some tags and comments bc I've really appreciated reading them
people who get what I mean:
people who have found a way to have fun in the corn maze but who I'm a little worried about:
person who we are going to put in the corn:
When I was working at the sex shop I was pulling poverty wages. I loved my job but I was on food stamps and still barely getting by. When they hired the stores first male employee and he started at my pay rate after I’d been there for three years I quit.
I was initially really nervous when I saw the post for the mattress job. It listed a pay scale that I couldn’t even conceptualize and I appeared qualified. When I got an interview I was over the moon but also petrified. Reactions to my line of work often varied but most people were very embarrassed or skeptical. I worried about how I’d address it in the actual interview.
I lived far to the north of their headquarters and drove almost two hours to get there. When I finally arrived it was in the nicest thrift store clothes I could find, but I shrank inside to see a room full of older white men in nice suits waiting to be interviewed for the same job.
Why did I bother? I was decades younger than anyone else in the room, shabbily dressed, and I suspected I was the only afab person in the entire building. I stewed in my insecurities until I was called in.
The second I met my interviewer I was instantly put at ease. The man had the energy of a therapy dog, he was abound with positive, good natured energy. He was also incredibly beautiful. I grinned back at his welcoming smile as we said our pleasantries. But still. This very beautiful polished man seemed very innocent. How would the sex shop question go?
“I see here you worked at STORE?”
“Yes,” I said hesitantly.
“And that was sales? Or you just rang people up.”
“No, it was sales. I’d help people find products, we were encouraged to upsell, there was sales spiffs, and most importantly we educated customers on products to help them find what they liked best.”
He grinned approvingly and asked, “Can you give me an example of a time you successfully upsold a customer?”
I paused, wringing my hands before I asked, “How vague would you like me to be…?”
“Not at all!” He assured me. “Go for it!”
“Well. A man came in looking for something to make his fingers vibrate so when he was touching his wife it would enhance that sensation. We had cheap $10 cockrings that I showed him first. But we had a rechargeable waterproof one made of nicer material, and after I showed him a demo he bought that one.”
“How much was that one?”
“$110”
“Wow! You had an upsell of 100% from what he came in looking for! That’s incredible!”
He was so truly genuinely stoked and not at all embarrassed that for the first time I saw a tiny glimmer of a future where I didn’t have ramen and peanut butter tiding me over between paychecks.
He asked me to wait then came back to tell me he liked me so much that he wanted to send me right into another interview, if that was okay. He didn’t want me to have to drive back later, it was terribly considerate and exciting. I beamed and told him it would be lovely.
I then had the second worst interview I’ve ever had. The worst goes to the time I applied to be a store manager for a pet food place years later. The district and store manager interviewing me passed notes and texted while I was speaking. When the district manager called to inform me I didn’t get the job I told him I’d never have accepted anyway because I’d never had such a disrespectful interview.
The new man sitting behind the desk radiated an aura of a brick wall. As someone with anxiety I’m highly keyed into the emotional states of people I’m talking to. To receive no feedback at all was my personal hell. After a perfunctory greeting he asked me with no inflection to sell him a pen.
I gathered the shreds of my courage and attempted the Herculean task he’d set me. Through my whole improvised spiel he resisted all attempts at engaging him, regarding me with a cold apathy as I touted the benefits of my fictitious pen.
Halfway through I broke into a cold sweat. My smile didn’t waver but it grew strained as I projected friendliness and warmth into the black hole of his heart. My thoughts scattered and my sales pitch grew redundant in the face of his nothingness. I finally concluded with a hard close and he simply nodded.
He glanced at my resume and commented, “You didn’t ask me to touch or hold it. Though I suppose I can understand from your previous line of work why you wouldn’t.” I shriveled and died inside knowing that I encouraged people to touch dildos all day long and had been too frazzled to offer him the pen.
He bid me a cool farewell. I made it to my car before I started sobbing. I had never been so rattled. I couldn’t understand what I’d done to make him so unfriendly or if my threadbare clothes were what had made him treat me like dirt. I drove an hour and a half to get home, weeping intermittently.
I was therefore taken by complete surprise to receive a call the next day inviting me on board for their five week training program. The first man who’d interviewed me gushed on the phone about how the second guy had loved me and that I was going to be fantastic.
I was in shock. When I showed up to training the second interviewer was charming my new classmates, beaming and laughing. He was an utterly different person. To my dismay I learned he was the trainer for my district and would be my point of contact if I made it through training.
He joked with me later that his interview facade was just a tactic to see how people held up under pressure and I filed him into a category of my deepest enmity. I never forgave him for how small he made me feel that day, but I never showed him the depths of my fury.
I aced every test and went on to be valedictorian of the eight people who had survived the rigorous training process to earn a sales position. When I got my first paycheck I bought myself new clothes, the first non-thrifted things I’d owned in years.
Well that’s fucked up!
Would be great for a children's hospital
i think we should all start using arabic words and phrases more often because its a beautiful language and also theres not really. english equivalents that have the same vibes
theres also the comedy potential of it. you guys dont know the joy of having your muslim friend text you "hopefully the racists in our city will all get sick and cant go to the protest" and you, as a pasty white guy, responding with "inshallah they get covid"
its a one hit KO every time. its fucking hilarious. theres no english word that has the same effect.
he also once texted me that he got over a mysterious illness he came down with (i think? i cant remember the exact context) and i responded with "subhanallah he is cured"
again, one hit KO. he lost his shit.
what im saying is we gotta normalise arabic. its just a language like any other, and it has some great words. its just like saying "thank god" or whatever, but theres so much variety and nuance. its beautiful
what do inshallah and subhanallah mean so I could potentially use em in the correct situations? And potential words I could use?
OK LETS DO THIS
disclaimer i am not arab or muslim and i dont speak arabic but @frogofalltime has explained these words to me and says im using them correctly lmao
inshallah - "if god wills it". like an "i hope this happens" kind of thing. remember the finding nemo poster "inshallah they find him" meme if that helps. used in future tense.
mashallah - "god has willed it", used when something good happened. can be used to denote awe about an event or person. used in past tense.
alhamdulillah - essentially "thank god" or "praise be to god". like mashallah and inshallah but stronger, and can be used in any tense (i think). he will be baked soon alhamdullilah
subhanallah - "glory be to god". like alhamdullilah but stronger. used for when something almost miraculous happens!
those are all the ones i remember off the top of my head im sure binya can add more (and also confirm whether ive got my translations right)
mashaallah robin my faithful student you translated and explained all of this so well :0
there's also astaghfirullah which means "i seek forgiveness in god" which you use when you or someone else does something haram (forbidden / sinful / wrong). tbh we use it in a lot of jokey contexts like if someone swears in a conversation you can call them out like "astaghfirullah haram !"
and bismillah which means "in the name of god" which you can use before doing something, we often use it before doing a difficult thing like when you are struggling to open a bottle or something lmao. or you can say it when someone falls or drops something or gets injured. idk
Wallah! is also a good one, it’s essentially equivalent to “I swear to God!” when said in frustration. Or istg/istfg. I’ve indirectly started adding inshallah to some sentences just because nothing else really hits like it and also it’s so funny to see people take me, a very white woman of obviously Scandinavian descent, bring in God’s will in Arabic.
I was looking for this one, I say wallah to myself an inordinate amount of times, especially after this post:
they don't want you to know this but being weird and staying silly really helps you feel young forever
Also keeps the stodgy old fuckers from hanging around.
I bring a sort of "actually mass traumatic events have an effect on the public's mental health and you're NOT acting in isolation from that trauma, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away" vibe to the party that Americans do not like
"IDK why [name] is acting up lately"
"Well on top of the things going on in their personal life causing stress, we've also had nonstop pandemic on top of authoritarian threats and genocide and cost of living being unsustainable, so yeah, they're acting pretty much as expected"
"NONE OF THAT OTHER STUFF IS IMPORTANT, only their PERSONAL problems, so they shouldn't be this upset!"
sorry but the background radiation of stress does, in fact, affect people
#i keep on having to tell myself this about myself
hey, OP here. look at me. <3
me. too.
EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. i have to remind myself that my mental health isn't ONLY being affected by the things within my own home. I CONSTANTLY have to remind myself and my loved ones that we're bearing the weight of SO MUCH SHIT right now and we can't do anything about 99% of it.
you aren't alone, NONE of us are. we're just... isolated anyway. and it sucks.
grace and patience and compassion are the only things that will get us all through this
so called free thinkers when h-o-t t-o g-o you can take me hot to go
amazing work thank you
i log onto tumblr dot com and get a first glimpse of the pleading wet eyes of the lil supernatural guy professing his love for the upteenth time and know something has happened
The immediate stomach-dropping feeling of "Oh no, oh fuck, what is it this time???"
Today I cried a little bit because I remembered that when Beethoven conducted his ninth symphony for the first time he got a standing ovation and one of the sopranos had to turn him around to see the audience.
I have never recovered from this illustration by Scott Cameron for Barbara Nichol’s “Beethoven Lives Upstairs.”
do i even need to say it?
nah i got a feeling about this one tumblr
i have hired this fucking thing to stare at you
im rehiring this fucking thing to stare at you
die girlies reading this 🥰
oh my god I meant in a german accent I did not mean to wish death upon girlies
The girlies reading this post
the statements "clothes don't have gender" and "clothes can and do invoke gender dysphoria and euphoria for many people" can and should coexist.