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 kinda 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 it's 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 increaingly 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. Previous