We're on page 2 of this nonsense now! The last page was getting a little too long. Same deal as before. Same key. Turn down the lights, get some snacks, and get comfortable. Enjoy (or cringe at) my various tales. Symbol Key ☏ primarily more about someone else being dumb ⍟ me being a dumbass ◍ me being bad but I don't feel bad about it » crushes and other such things ⚠ warning, really fucking gross ◹ misc stuff that doesn't fit the above ☏There's a guy at work who, if one of the computer's is free, will get on it before shifts start and go straight to FF.net. He's always reading Naruto fanfics. It's always Naruto. The ship is always Naruto x Sakura. Every time. Sometimes, it's a fic I know he's already read before. There's one in particular, some oneshot, that he rereads a lot. I guess he really likes that one. He never views the site logged in though. Instead, he'll go to Google and Google the specific fic he wants+FF.net and go there from the search. He won't even use FF.net's own search. He always uses Google to get there. Old people at work always refer to him getting on the site as him "reading his stories". ⍟I work a pretty physical job. Sometimes, I might have to lift shit that's 150lbs. I'd say the average is more in the 40-70 lb range. Anyway, I'm usually pretty exhausted after work. At times, I think, is this money really worth it? I should find a desk job again. However, this has caused my muscles to get a lot bigger than any time in my adult life. Sometimes, when I'm leaving the bathroom, I look at myself in the mirror and start flexing because I'm like holy shit. Luckily, no one has caught me. At times like that I think, fuck, if I change jobs, what workout routine am I gonna have to do to keep this?! »In elementary school, I had a crush on Carmen Sandiego and Miss Scarlet from Clue on the version where she basically just looks like Carmen Sandiego without a hat. From what I can find online, this version of her seems to be from the regular edition of Clue from 1996. ◍I sleep naked. ◹Like that red sweater from the 70s that used to belong to my dad, I also got some really old Converse from him that he found in a box somewhere. They belonged to him when he was a kid. Those were one of the best pairs of shoes I ever had. I wore the hell out of them until, like my dad, I eventually outgrew them. So impressed by the shoes, I got a new pair of Converse after that. They were ass. ⚠I won't touch Ghibli shit, because Miyazaki. If you know, you know. ◹I buy all the music I like, if I legally can. I don't use music streaming services. Looking into how these "pay" artists, I don't consider using these services to even be contributing to artists at all. Apparently, Spotify will even count me just listening to a song on repeat more than like twice in a row for mood to be "not real" streaming and may flag the artist I'm listening to as using bots. (And that's not getting into how these companies fuck indie people over or manipulate who goes to the top) I tried calculating how many days I'd have to listen to an artist to pay them the equivalent of just buying their album outright as mp3 or CD, and it would take over a fucking year of listening daily instead of just paying them that same sum in one second. If you don't want to buy mp3s, CDs, or vinyls, maybe you should buy that t-shirt or hoodie... ☏Remember that Wolfaboo who had a driver's license in middle school after failing for a year at getting one? One time, after a trip to Alabama back when fireworks were still illegal here, the Wolfaboo tried to shoot some off and almost became the one-legged Wolfaboo. Huge gash on the leg for weeks. Anyway, don't attempt to howl and shoot fireworks at the same time. ☏Speaking of the Wolfaboo, the Wolfaboo could not howl right. There would be an attempt, a proud attempt, and it always sounded like a dying dog barking. How do you not know how to howl?! ⍟In middle school, I walked across broken glass to impress a girl (the girl I got the nickname "Homewrecker" because of). Didn't cut my feet at all. I'd actually been practicing that skill for unrelated reasons. It didn't impress though, because the other person, who dared me to do it in the first place, could also walk on broken glass. So that just made it unintentionally look easy to do. ⍟For some heart health trend and because there was this weird jump roping fad during the late 90s/early 00s, at the last elementary school I went to, we had this whole month of jump roping drills during PE. This led up to a contest to see who could jump rope the longest. I didn't give a shit about it, but somehow I won the contest. And not even by a few seconds or something. Over fifteen minutes passed after the second to last person stopped before I just decided to stop because it was getting awkward. They put me in the yearbook for that. Whyyyy.... ⍟If someone wasn't my friend and asked me to sign their yearbook, from elementary into high school, I wouldn't sign my name. I just wrote "I see dead people" and nothing else. I thought this was hilarious. ⍟My dad used to read books to me to help me fall asleep until about kindergarten. I don't really remember this anymore, just that I know he did that because he would bring it up from time to time. While I forgot those memories of being read to that young, those books from them did still stir a happy feeling in me if I encountered them. This would've still be when I was young, in mid-elementary school, but whenever I would find one of those old books, I'd read through them again. I couldn't remember him reading me the stories by then, but I remembered what happened in the stories. Or so I thought. Turns out my dad wasn't actually reading those books. He was reading parts of them, then making up more "exciting" parts to entertain me. The stories he "read" me basically didn't exist. He pulled a Princess Bride on me! ☏My dad had this idea if he played calm music to me and read to me while I was still in the womb, it would affect my personality and make me "smarter" and "calmer" than other children. The primary music he played for me was Enya. Enya was also used as my "lullaby" music after I was born and in general I was made to listen to Enya music for all of elementary school. By the time Amarantine dropped, I was buying my own Enya stuff. I can name any Enya song from a few seconds of listening. As for my dad's experiment, yeah, I'm pretty sure that was bullshit. ◹I don't celebrate Christmas, not even in a secular way. I did when I was atheist for a bit, but eventually stopped. I don't really get why people celebrate it when they're not Christian. A lot of atheists and agnostics would give me a bunch of reasons about "fun" and "it's secular anyway", but you know, somehow anyone I met who was part of a religion other than Christianity never had a hard time not celebrating Christmas. I feel like stuff like this is why I've run into so many atheists who are basically just weirdo Christian bigots, but without the god part. They just replace it with evo-psych bullshit, "common sense" (that lines up with Christian ideology), and loads of pseudo-missionary work to convert people to atheist. They left the god, but not the church, is how I see it. I'm always surprised to learn a lot of these types even go to church because "community". Shit, I never went to a church once when I was Christian. ◹When I attempted to be Christian for a few years, one of the things that helped end that was, hilariously, reading the bible from cover to cover. I don't know how that inspires anything in anyone. ⚠On my dad's side of the family, everyone was Catholic and went to church weekly until my dad was in late elementary school. It came out the priest at their church was molesting little boys. They switched to a Baptist church, but it was too creepy and they all just stopped going to church. My great-grandmother remained very religious till her death. She had an altar in her bedroom to various saints with charms to protect against fairies (yes, really) and a bunch of four-leaf clovers my dad and me had given her that she kept to...protect against fairies. She "powered" these anti-fairy items by keeping them in her very, very old bible. This bible is still around with her prayer cards, anti-fairy charms, religious news clippings, records, and four-leaf clovers all still tucked away inside it. She was the most religious. After leaving, only my uncle started going back to church and only after marrying his second wife, who demanded him and their children attend. Oh, and that priest I mentioned...yeah, he didn't go to jail. He continued on at that church until his death. Some people left. Many who knew stayed. They chose to not believe the boys. ☏My great-grandmother was convinced I was a changeling. Her proof was she thought I could manipulate the weather, talk to and tame most animals, and give detailed information on how locations looked before I was born or where things out of sight I "shouldn't know of" were in forests, and that I could tell time without a watch. For the weather, I used old techniques most old meteorologists would know of, I knew a lot about animal behavior and forests from all the science books and documentaries my dad got for me, and my dad taught me how to tell time by the sun. There was no magic, only the illusion of it. ☏Oh, and there was that I could find four-leaf clovers in any patch. That was another "proof" of hers. There was no magic to that either. I could teach you how to do that in five minutes. I've taught my wife and one of my cousins. There's a very simple method to it, but if you get good at it, you can use it to freak people out. I won't post it here, because the internet is a stupid place and someone might spread it all over social media and pick up all my four-leaf clovers. I'll only teach you this in person. ⍟I'm supposed to wear glasses. I should probably get some of those some year. I'm gonna be honest, I've kind of just been relying on my different forms of synesthesia to avoid getting any. This has caused some of my forms of synesthesia to get stronger. But uh...yeah...I should probably...do something about that. ☏Since I'm clearly on about Christian stories on this page, one time in middle school, some of the kids in my Spanish class where talking about the "rapture" and how it was totally coming in their lifetime (and probably very soon even!!) and how they were certain they'd be going straight to heaven. Hilarious, as I would consider near 100% of the kids convinced of this as being people I would think would likely get a one way ticket to hell if hell wasn't fake. But anyway, one of my friends, we'll call him T (he was one of the friends that stayed over at K's house that fateful night with the "log"), asked me what I would do once I was raptured. I said I'd demand to be sent back to earth. He asked why would I return to earth in the middle of armageddon if I already made it to heaven. I told him to help other people. By Christian lore, only people who both worship Jesus and are good by Christian standards get raptured. That would mean plenty of good, non-Christians would suffer. That, and that if everyone is capable of change and deserving of forgiveness, shouldn't someone be there to guide people towards a better path? He was amazed at my reasoning and told me, "when I go to heaven, I'll be your guardian angel while you're on earth to keep you safe from all the bad stuff." And I'm like, wow, I guess that's kind of nice, but also...only me? You found me noble enough to protect, but not the people I would be returning to help? Haha, I found that so hilarious. I didn't believe in the rapture myself then. In the few years I was Christian some time after that, I still didn't believe in that. It's just so hilariously, disturbingly psychopathic in concept--people waiting to have a quick death to go to heaven and enjoy its wonders while they get to look down and watch endless, cruel suffering on those left behind who didn't make the cut. Creepy. ☏Speaking of T, T had this thing for a certain type of girl. He was really into this red-headed female video game character. (Being vague here on purpose.) His first girlfriend looked very similar to her. This obsession with this character became a bit of a running joke between K, another friend we'll call Y, me, and another friend from MS. And then, it happened again. In high school, he got another girlfriend who looked like this character. She looked even more like her than the first girl, and the weirder part, her name was one letter off from the character's name. Me and Y (K and the other friend went to different HS's) approached him when we found out. "Dude, this again?!" I started calling the girl by the character's name. She vaguely knew who the character was, we learned, because T kept talking about the character to her, but she herself didn't play video games. She accepted the nickname and would still answer to it long after she broke up with T for being ever increasingly weird around her. By the end of HS, I was still on good terms with her and some of the people from her friend group along with being (albeit more distantly) friends with Y. None of us hung out with T after mid-way through HS. He was a bit weird in MS, but in HS, in his quest to become "one of the popular kids", he became a douchebag and lost all his friends while also failing at becoming popular. ☏I never believed in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa. As soon as I was told about those, I deduced immediately that was bullshit. However, my brother was a true believer. He cried when he learned the truth for all three. First, it was the tooth fairy. He was so upset to learn there was no little, tiny fairy gifting him coins and taking his teeth to some magical land and they were really just in some little film container my mom kept in a drawer. The Easter Bunny revelation was worse. So, in my family, parents and the older kids would hide the eggs and then walk around with the little kids to help them find the eggs. We used those plastic eggs and my grandfather would put either candy, coins, or bills in each one. One egg always had a $20 and whoever was walking around with the youngest child was supposed to gradually lead the child to the $20 egg. My turn to start playing "Easter Bunny" came when I was either 7 or 8. My grandmother took me into the kitchen to tell me "the truth" (which I already knew) and now it was my turn to help be the "bunny" to make the day special for the little kids. Every kid got this treatment until there were no really little kids left and we stopped the hunt. Well, when it was my brother's turn to became "the bunny", he went into a rage-filled screaming fit, crying his eyes out. He screamed at my grandma, my parents, and me for "deceiving" him as "the bunny". But worst of all was when he found out Santa wasn't real, which happened after the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny. Absolutely absurd rage-crying, throwing himself on the floor, threw himself down a small flight of steps, called my mom all kinds of names, yelled at me for some reason for not "telling him the truth", and how it's yet another "lie" we've all told him and he hates everyone and the world. He screamed for an hour straight. About Santa. He was around 10 when this happened. He eventually became atheist at age eighteen when he found out Bigfoot wasn't real. ⍟I kept physical journals on and off throughout my childhood. My first journal was a little notebook I won at some contest at a party (a birthday party, I think?). I managed to keep it after a move, but then couldn't figure out where it went for years. I thought my mom might have thrown it out for the longest time. Then, one day I found it. I was shocked to see it and then curious. What was it that would be in that journal? I couldn't remember what I'd written. This was nearly a decade after I'd gotten that notebook. There it was, my first journal with my first ever journal entry. I hesitated for a moment and then opened it to see what it was my child self felt so compelled to write down that I bothered to start journaling at all. There was only one entry, spanning two pages. The first page had one sentence; "This is Eliza Thornberry" with an arrow pointing to the second page. The second page was a drawing of Eliza Thornberry. The rest of the notebook was blank. I looked up the date. It was the day the series first aired (This would be September 1st, 1998, apparently). That was it. Eliza Thornberry. I didn't even like The Wild Thornberrys that much as a kid. It was a pretty good drawing of Eliza though. Really looked like her. ◹Like a lot of 90s kids, I was really into temp tattoos. My first temp tattoo was one someone gave me in kindergarten of Ickis from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. I hated that show, but I put the tattoo on anyway, LOL. My second one was a big one I got from a Mellow Mushroom of some Pisces art out of a sticker/tattoo vending machine for $1. All the tattoos were zodiac themed in the machine. Lucky for me I am a Pisces, as I only had four quarters that day. ⍟Speaking of journaling as a kid, one of the journals I had the longest was this big, black leather journal with really tiny lines. I always wrote in pencil in it and tried to write really small to keep the journal going for as long as possible. During this time, I was really obsessed with making my journal like some kind of historic log. I would record the date, the exact day of the season it was, the moon phase, the current weather conditions and time per "update" each day, numbered all the pages, and had an index listing when each entry started and a title for each entry to give a general idea of what each entry was mostly about. The longest entry I had in that journal was thirty pages long. I kept that journal for about a year and a half. I really thought someone centuries in the future would find this journal some fascinating discovery. Most of my entries were me rambling about Inuyasha and ranting about Hex being canceled when I wasn't ranting about Hex changing protagonists. ◍Since the 90s, I have found at 100% rate of accuracy anyone who tells me they really love the show Friends is going to also tell me one of the top dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. It usually happens within 1-3 months after they inform me of their love of Friends. That show is cursed. I am positive it is brain cell destroying. My parents used to make me watch that shit. Even as a kid in the 90s, I knew that was garbage. Got a laugh recently rereading old Boondocks comics and seeing some jabs at Friends in there. I've seen a lot of people online claim everyone in the 90s loved Friends and hating on it now is just to seem "cool". Well, I don't know if it was only me and Aaron McGruder being grumpy about it, but hey, that's at least two people back then. ☏The first journal I actually fully completed (not that Eliza Thornberry nonsense) was the first journal my mother decided to not only read, but to tell me and everyone else she could find that she read it and what was in it and that she intended to read any journal I ever made for the rest of my childhood. My second journal, I used a simple code to make it a pain in the ass for her to attempt to read it. I also tossed out the first journal I fully completed because of her nonsense. Between eighth and ninth grade, I created a more complex code with symbols for the alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and some common words. I took inspiration from a fake "language" someone used in a web comic and also had repeated letters and repeated syllables have a special symbol added to them to indicate the information should be doubled. I used this symbol over repeated numbers, number sequences, repeated phrased, and repeated punctuation too. This code and the more simplistic code I used before that were primarily used for more "sensitive" information, but there were some journals written 100% in these codes. She gave up on reading my journals. ⍟ I still use the more complex code for things I don't want people to read, because I'm paranoid. ◹ During that same summer between eighth and ninth grade, when I was 14, I changed my handwriting to minimize the number of "strokes" for each letters, as it were, and to make certain letters a bit more distinct from each other (at least to how I "felt" when writing them) so I'd be less likely to write 'habby dlrthapy' or some dumb shit like that. I "refined" this to look less like ass in the summer between ninth and tenth grade. Apparently, I had too much free time during the summer months. My handwriting has gotten better since then and continued to veer into an even more minimalistic style, but hasn't changed all that much from this. I also hoped this would make my handwriting stand out as more uniquely mine. My handwriting, hilariously, looks near identical to my father's. The older I get, the more our handwriting styles look even more similar. Coincidentally, he also changed his handwriting at age 14 for similar reasons. ◹Our signatures are also increasingly getting similar despite our first names not being similar at all. I have no idea how this is happening. My dad jokes he made his signature very "artsy" and "abstract" to make it very difficult for anyone to forge his signature. Other people have attempted to replicate his signature just to try to see if they could. No one else has ever convincingly copied his signature. I can do it without even trying, because it's already almost my signature. ☏My mother's handwriting and signature are easy to forge. It's just neat, big bubble letters. I forged her signature often when I was a kid, and wrote notes pretending to be her for school stuff. Teachers could never tell the difference. Sometimes, she instructed me to do that because she was lazy. My brother's handwriting looks worse than it did in kindergarten. I...don't understand how that is possible...? ⍟When it comes to typing things up, my same spelling issues return no matter what font I use. My main site uses a very lazy half-assed replica of my handwriting from about years ago and that's easy for me to read, but typing sets things back to zero even when using that font. See, that handwriting helped me not just because of how it looked but how it felt to write those letters. The movement of my hand was part of the process and that just doesn't work with typing. It's all the same to me. Everyone should be glad they don't see my rough drafts that are like "Luck looked out out hwen he Luked insibe at all at all teh ihdden treasure in teh bote across teh bond across teh bond..". That's a made-up example, but honestly, I've typed up far worse incoherent gibberish than that. Reading this aloud doesn't help because I'll just read it correctly. So, in this example, I would just see "Luke lucked out when he looked inside at all the hidden treasure in the boat across the pond." instead of what's actually typed up. My wife has to read over all my stories before I post them so you can actually read any of them. »As a kid, I had a crush on both Brandon Lee and Mark Dacascos as Eric Draven in The Crow/The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. I was really into that look, and embarrassed by it. I actually had a bigger crush on Mark than Brandon. Because I was clearly a dumbass, despite the B-movie DNA being one I frequently laughed at and thought about a lot as a kid, and me thinking the lead in that also looked way too hot to be in a B movie, I never connected until I was an adult that the lead in that movie is Mark Dacascos and the same guy that was in Stairway to Heaven. So, I had a crush on this same guy in two different properties without even realize it was him. He's definitely hotter in DNA, which is just unfortunate because have you seen that movie? Haha, maybe I should review it one day... ◹Out of my first cousins, I'm the oldest. For a while when I was a kid, a lot of family photos was just me towering over a bunch of kids. Eventually, the height differences went away but I still looked a lot older. Now, everyone looks vaguely the same age of "I'm fucking over this bullshit" which is somewhere between "dumbass teen/20-something idiot" and "my back hurts", except my brother who looks about ten years older than me despite being younger than me by a few years. He keeps looking ever increasingly older than everyone. I think it's all his rage. He's always angry about like, nothing. Literally nothing. The wind blowing. But also very much opinions on Reddit and video games. He's the only one of us who doesn't have a job. However, he is one of us who has not gone to jail or prison, so I guess it's a wash. ☏Illegal things various relatives have been punished for by either losing their job, losing some form of aid, going to jail, or going to prison: (exact relative connection and time period not mentioned for obvious reasons) grand theft auto while high as shit, selling crack, selling weed, selling meth, using meth, running a meth lab, using up all the private stash of cocaine at the precinct that was meant for the secret coke parties, another meth lab, robbing a police officer's house while high as a kite and pawning the stolen goods one road over, showing up high AF to a random high school classroom and demanding to take the GED test after being released from a psych hospital an hour prior, and falsifying information to the federal government to scam for services the person didn't qualify for. Added bonus that doesn't fall into any of these but had consequences: trying to screw over a drug dealer which led to that relative getting shot up in a drive-by. All but one of these people, as of me writing this, is alive and not currently in jail or prison. I have never been to jail or prison. I would say this is because I'm one of the "good ones", but I'm not. ◹One of my favorite things to do as a kid was get into fights with other kids. Not bullying kids, but intentional fighting everyone agreed to. You know, just punching and kicking the shit out of each other for fun. In the streets, in the yard, in the woods, on a trampoline, with weapons, without weapons, just whatever. When I was in middle school, it was still pretty easy to find someone who'd want to fight with me. No one really wanted to do that anymore when I was in high school. So I'd just work out instead. ☏I've never met a Christian who thought they were going to hell. I find that interesting, because it seems like the whole thing is wanting to go to heaven and being afraid of hell, but no one I've met who's Christian ever thinks they could be going to hell. I'm sure there must be some out there, but they seem to be the minority. I don't know why, but I find this both odd and funny, given how many have told me I should be worried about going to hell. I mean, if they're not and they believe in it, why should I worry over it? ◹I'm not really sure any afterlife even exists. Some people find this odd for someone who has spiritual beliefs to think, but I don't think an afterlife is a required part of spirituality. Looking back through history, plenty of people didn't necessarily believe in one or if they did, it wasn't always one where their current consciousness would continue on with all their memories either. And I really don't care either way. That was something that bugged me a lot when I was atheist, that "oh but what if when you die you're wrong and there's nothing" which is just the flip of the Christian "what if you die and you're going to hell". Like it could be nothing and that wouldn't disprove any other beliefs. It only disproves that one. But a lot of atheist arguements in the west are really just reactions to specific Christian things anyway. It's pretty interesting to see atheist discussions from atheists who were previously a non-Christian practice, especially polytheistic ones. The arguments and points of focus are very different. But yeah, I don't really have strong opinions on that, and I treat my life as it's most likely this is all I get and there probably won't be more after, which is a terrifying and sad thought, but it's not like it's something I can change about reality. Would be nice if this wasn't the end though. I think most would agree no one really wants this to be it. ⚠My mom used to go to this one tarot reader/psychic a lot that served pretty much exclusively Latinas. Nothing inside the building was in English. Sometimes, my mom would bring me into the reading room with her, but a lot of the time, I'd sit in the waiting room watching Mighty Mouse in Spanish if I was lucky, but it was usually El Gordo y La Flaca on the TV. The waiting room had all kinds of weird New Age/mystical nonsense posters on the wall. One of them was a poster of Jesus naked floating in outer space with chakras and a different zodiac sign over different parts of the body (the parts those signs "rule" over). Over where his junk should be, there was a scorpion for Scorpio because that's what Scorpio "rules" over (lol). Around when I was ten and puberty was really starting to kick in, I stared at that poster a lot imagining what might be "behind" the scorpion. The desperation is sad. ⚠Around this same time, I used to stay up late hoping to catch those Girls Gone Wild extended commercials. We had a computer for a couple years by then, but it was a family computer in an open area. I used to watch fashion shows early in the morning for the nip slips that were very common and often uncensored. I'd watch ice skating competitions a lot too, more for the men to stare at their junk in the tight costumes. Wrestling was great because you could get big muscled up, barely dressed dudes grabbing each other, but you could also get hot, barely dressed women grabbing each other sometimes too. And of course, the exercise videos and the underwear models were another outlet. Actual porn had to be looked at very, very cautiously. I didn't really have complete privacy to look at porn until I was 18, though it was easier when I was a teenager and we had more than one computer in the house. I'd wait until it was late at night. ◹I sometimes sleeptalk and sleepwalk. Once, I told my wife about El Gordo y La Flaca in my sleep. Another time I sang her a horrifying, cheery song about Ronald McDonald. According to her, this is roughly what I sang to her that night: "Welcome to McDonalds we don't know where Ronald is he left us long ago in the grease sometimes we still see him in the sea in the ballpit laying flat as you down the slide a surprise Ronald smiling wide" Just in the middle of the night for no reason. I also told her about Gene Wilder being the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland and sang that song about soup. Apparently, I've made up "commercial" narrations for Zote soap, including mentioning a made up website called zoteisokay.com. I sleep talk more if my sleep schedule is off or I have bouts of insomnia. ◹At a previous job, my wife told a coworker who once worked at McDonalds the Ronald song I sang and the coworker said that was pretty accurate to what working at McDonalds is like. I have many questions... Previous