AND NOW THE U.S. HAS IT THANK YOU

in sixth grade you were either a cucumber melon bitch or a warm vanilla sugar bitch

Weeks? It’s been like 8 months.

Today’s aesthetic: keeping the same tab open in your browser for three solid weeks because you’re definitely going to get around to reading and/or acting on whatever’s in it any minute now.

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[unrelated] This is a restaurant in vietnam and its so cool??

TIL, the residents of Cheran, Mexico armed themselves and kicked out the ruling cartel as well as every politician and policeman. It now functions as a legal self-governing indigenous community with a crime rate near 0%

via reddit.com

Lol I never thought about it that way but it’s so true! I play piano and flute, but I’ve also picked up some guitar and ukulele along the way and I can manage a cello too. I can also play the piccolo, but not particularly well. I don’t know how to use a violin well enough to say I play it, but I’ve learned a couple simple songs on one. (I’ve wanted to learn the harp since I was 13 or so, but those aren’t easy to get a hold of.)

What instruments do you play?

Him: yes

So if anyone’s curious about how this ended up getting resolved, here’s what happened. 

He came back in multiple times looking for me, according to my coworkers. They and my boss had all been made aware of the situation. Thankfully, I was only there one of those times, and it was shortly before closing, so I was able to get rid of him without too much trouble. After that, my boss insisted on calling the police to ask for advice - and so that there would be a record of what was happening.

Then, while I was off-shift for a week or so for exams, he came back in a couple more times, and this time, he started harassing my boss. The second time he started bothering her, she called the cops. Apparently, while the security at our mall is basically nonexistent, there’s a police precinct across the street. They came. It was quickly discovered that we were not the only store in the mall that had had a problem with this man harassing female employees. 

Anyway, he’s banned from the mall now, and if he comes back, we can call the cops again and he would receive a citation for trespassing. I feel so much better now when I go to work since I no longer have to worry he’s going to pop up and start bothering me. I was so on edge for a while, worrying incessantly about what clothes I wore and whether I was going to be on shift alone. The fact that he’s gone is such a relief.

Thanks to @radicallyaligned and everyone else for your support and advice!

(1/3) So, the store I work at just moved to a new location where there's greater foot traffic. Today was my second day there, and my first shift manning the store alone. I’m 18, by the way. Towards the end of the day, this guy came in. Sweaty from a run. Seriously muscled, maybe mid-to-late-twenties. Anyway, he started talking, being kinda friendly and joking, and also I had the impression of flirtatious too.

(2/3) I was, you know, wearing my ‘customers’ face. Anyway we’re chatting, I’m telling him about our soaps, etc. Then, he kinda stops, looks me up and down, and says, “You know, you have a great body. Do you work out?” And I’m like, ugh, internally. I shrug and tell him I do ballet. I go back to talking about the products, kind of just, you know, moving away, but he kept moving closer to me, getting within about a foot of me.

(3/3) We talk for a little bit more about the products, then he looks down, says “Wow! Your feet are so small! They’re tiny!” and then he knelt down and he grabbed my foot around the heel and lifted it up to examine it. I was so startled I nearly kicked him, but I just ended up just jerking my foot away. He stuck around for the rest of my shift (half an hour), and said he’s planning to come back and see me again. Any advice, anyone?

Okay that is seriously creepy and I’m so sorry you experienced this. Touching you without permission is harassment. A couple thing to do if he comes back in, optional, of course:

1. Immediately alert your manager or another person on staff. Tell them he has come in before to bother you, touched you without your permission, and makes you uncomfortable. Allow them to handle him while you wait in a back room.

2. If you do not have another person working with you, be sure to keep your distance from him. Stay behind a counter. If he lingers, inform him your “boss” has a policy against loitering, and you’ll have to ask him to leave if he isn’t shopping. If he inquires further, say that the door “has a counting metric, to see who enters and leaves without a purchase, and it affects your formal review”. (A retail shop I worked at before had this, it’s real tech). This is to encourage him to leave.

3. If he strikes up casual conversation about yourself, or asks your number, work in that you “have a boyfriend”. Creepy men often respect the “authority” of a created man having “ownership” of you more than your own bodily autonomy. This can make you safer and deter him from returning.

4. If he touches you again, tell him you are going to have to ask him to leave. He will likely do a big show of “wow you’re making something out of nothing!!” Calmly ask him again to leave. If he seems aggressive, remind him of the “cameras”. It doesn’t matter if you actually have cameras.

5. If he continously shows up to bother you, make sure a manger is on shift with you to deal with him.

6. If he ever follows you home, or shows up anywhere else in your life, call the police.

I hope some of this helps!

Took these at the university’s garden the other day. Spring is coming - if very slowly.

In my junior year I became fast friends with a guy named Joe. We talked about our lives and ideas and so many other things - he told me I could tell him anything. I told him about how deeply I mourned my grandmother’s death. We hung out at school, I beat him at chess, we texted late at night. I was so glad we were friends. I even offered to start carpooling, to drive him home when I found out he waited at school for two hours for someone to pick him up, and his house was barely out of my way.

Then...I don’t really know what happened. Everyone was convinced he had a major crush on me. We were a pretty small school, so gossip got around fast. Everyone kept asking me what I was gonna do when he asked me to prom. I assured them all that Joe and I were just friends and that I didn’t like him that way and I didn’t want to date him. A week later, he just kind of...stopped. He stopped talking to me. He stopped answering my texts. He didn’t sit near me in classes anymore. I still drove him home. He didn’t even say hello. He just sat in my car and stared at his phone. 

At the end of the year, I found out he was dating one of my friends. I didn’t care, but I wished that he would tell me straight why we weren’t friends anymore. 

I told my uncle that summer how I’d lost a friend that I cared so much for and he’d never even told me to my face. My uncle wasn’t sympathetic at all. He told me I didn’t know what it was like to be rejected, how badly it hurt. He said that Joe was justified.

I did know how it felt to be rejected. Joe rejected me, my friendship. I never saw him again.

Then came my first semester of university. I quickly met a boy named Nathan. Nathan was nice and good at the piano and thought I was smart and we got on pretty well. But I figured out pretty quickly that he liked me as more than a friend. So one night I asked him if he wanted to ask me out, if he liked me. He looked a bit awkward, but he said yes.

And I told him I wanted to be friends, but I wasn’t interested in dating. I was very clear. I said I didn’t want to lead him on. I wasn’t going to date him. He nodded and smiled and said okay, and I smiled back.

We continued to hang out every so often. When we sat next to each other on benches or couches he would slowly inch towards me as we were talking and our legs would be pressing together, and I would readjust and scoot away until I was nearly falling off the bench. I asked him to stop doing that.

One day he was dead set on a picnic early dinner in the university gardens. I told him it was a terrible idea - the mosquitoes would eat us alive. He persisted, and we went. We left ten minutes later because I was right about the bugs. Instead we just kind of wandered around campus. He pressed in close to my side and I uncomfortably realized it was kind of like a date. He told me I was pretty and that talking to me felt like talking to someone who knew everything. He looked at me with something like awe and I felt uncomfortable but told him thank you anyway. He walked me back to my dorm and made a beeline for the piano in the lobby.

He played a song for me while I sat on the chair behind him, unsure of what to do or look at or say. He got up from the bench and shuffled his feet a bit and asked me to be his girlfriend.

And I told him no. Exactly as I said before. He said “Why!” I said that I’d already told him I didn’t want to date him. He said that he thought if I experienced him taking me on a date I’d change my mind. And, well, I didn’t. After a bit more of this back and forth I told him sorry but no and he left. He was crying. I wasn’t happy. I wished he’d have just listened to me when I said I wasn’t interested, when I asked him to give me more space. 

I see him around campus sometimes. We don’t talk anymore. I wish that Joe and Nathan and all the others like them could just have been my friend. I wish they valued me, my company and my friendship, over my potential as a girlfriend. 

thoughts on the friendzone

[TRADUCCIÓN ESPAÑOLA] (thanks a ton, krissyraawr!)

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when i was 5 years old my best friend was a boy named kyle who didn’t know how to knock on doors so he made dinosaur noises outside my window to wake me up in the summer until i demonstrated how to ball his fists and slam them against my doors.  we collected caterpillars in my trailer park and built them houses while we traded pokemon cards.  he wasn’t the only one.  there was ben, and mitch, and noah–but kyle’s the only one who hurt me, because when he tried to kiss me and i asked him why, he told me “because you’re a girl and i’m a boy, shouldn’t we like each other?”

i missed him so much and i wondered why he couldn’t just be my friend like he always was

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