Dollar tree jersey city photos

My bf's a good man, he's not the kind to cheat, but because of my past relationships I can't bring myself to fully believe it. Every now and then when he's asleep, I go through his phone just to calm myself down. Way before I started doing it, he's already given me permission and told me I can check his phone anytime.
I was going through his photos today to look for something and I saw intimate pictures of him w his ex fling. The photos were taken a couple nights before we met. This is very unusual for me since he's deleted every single photo of his exes and girls he's been with before. He's the type of guy that when it's over, it's over. He didn't even keep a single picture of his ex fiance and he's got most of his exes blocked. I deleted all of the photos and I removed her from his contacts. I don't know if I shouldn't have done that but my anxiety got the best of me, since he's told me before that they didn't really end it, that it just did because the girl's not from our city. If he didn't meet me when he did, most likely they would've been in a relationship by now.
It's just kind of odd to me that he still have those saved. I need some advice on what to do. Do I talk to him about it or pretend nothing happened?

The haunted/cursed objects exhibition which featured items that had caused gruesome deaths of their owners or anyone else that got close to them was another stunt by Professor Melvin.
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Professor Eric Melvin was one of those professors who thought he was too good for this little community college in Shady Grove, Maryland. I took his art history class, which he never shied away from telling everyone he had no time for. I was shocked to see that his teaching slides were just blurry photos that he took of the pages from a textbook with his phone.
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What Melvin had time for were stunts. His goals were to get the attention of the Gazettes or be trending on social media. His earlier exhibition which featured only blowup prints of a screencap of a dating app profile made the front page of the Style section, and that was all that mattered.
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Unlike his other stunts, the haunted/cursed object exhibition involved me.I worked as a student assistant at the college’s Art Department. My jobs consisted of making photocopies, answering phones, and taking turns with other assistants to guard the gallery until 8 pm.
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Melvin asked us assistants to help with the setting up of the haunted/cursed objects show. We all politely declined, which annoyed Melvin a bit. He stared at me with the just-you-wait look.
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I came from a superstitious culture where there was always someone who knew someone who had fallen victim to dark magic. No one could pay me enough to touch those literally cursed things.
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As I was watching the delivery guys carrying the objects into the gallery, I was surprised by how modern the haunted/cursed objects were. I was expecting a creepy painting or a scary doll. Instead, there was,
a plasma TV
a recliner armchair
a turquoise necklace
a miniature fire station
and even an animatronic singing fish.
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Without additional decor, the exhibit looked more like a yard sale.The owner of the objects had a list of rules, but Melvin never bothered to look at it. He handed me a still-sealed envelope. I read the rules aloud so that Melvin, my supervisor, and other student assistants could hear them too.
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Dear Professor Melvin.
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Thank you for taking an interest in my collection.
All of these objects have caused numerous misfortunes and deaths in the past. It is my sincere wish to not add any more tragedy to the collection’s history. Please follow these rules carefully and may your show conclude without incident.
Rule 1: Never be in the same room with any of these objects when the lights are off.
Rule 2: Do not allow pregnant women anywhere near the haunted/cursed objects.
Rule 3: The cursed pieces of jewelry have the power to entice people to wear them. Please make sure you have a system in place where people won’t be able to touch them.
Rule 4: Do not connect any device to the TV.
Rule 5: Do not change the channel on the TV. If you or someone else did, you must change the channel back to channel 33.
Rule 6: This should not happen if the above rules were followed, but if the little light on the gate of the miniature fire station starts to blink and makes a sound, run as far away as possible and call me directly.

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Melvin scoffed and said, if the exhibit ends without incident, where’s the fun in that? Melvin then turned to me, hoping to get a reaction. I was taken aback. What was that supposed to mean? Did he just say he wanted something bad to happen? What are you planning, Melvin?The letter continued,
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My collection contains both cursed objects and haunted objects. Haunted objects are possessed by spirits and can cause fear, while cursed objects are deadly to anyone who interacts with them. The plasma TV is both, and is, therefore, the most dangerous. Please be extra careful around it.

I took my concern about the assistant’s safety to the dean, whose office was right next to the gallery. The dean laughed and asked me if I believe in curses and ghosts. I said that in Thailand, there was a phrase that said “Not believing is fine, but don’t disrespect just in case,” and that was my stance.
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The dean shook her head and just told me that if I was so scared then don’t break any of the rules. For the first time working there, I felt less like a student talking to a well-meaning professor, and more like an employee whose concern was being brushed off by an apathetic employer.
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The first night with the haunted/cursed objects inside the gallery I was guarding them with another student assistant. We behaved just like any other night as we just sat in the mailroom and watched YouTubers play Dead by Daylight. We could see what was going on in the gallery next door through the CCTV monitor.
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At 7.30, both of us heard a very loud thud coming from the gallery. I didn’t see anything abnormal on the CCTV, so the other assistant and I both walked over to the gallery to check.We both saw a squirrel with its neck broken lying dead in front of the plasma TV. I didn’t know how it got inside. That was enough for me to creep me out and want to call it a night, even if it was a bit early.
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Something I hadn’t thought about until then was that I had to turn off the lights, but the switches were at the far end of the gallery. I would have to walk out of the gallery in the dark, breaking rule number 1.
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To avoid breaking the rule, I told the other student assistant to keep the door open and light the room up a bit with her phone’s flashlight. It was a good thing that we both came from a culture that believe in curses and hauntings, so I didn’t have to work too hard to convince her. I shut off all the lights and ran out.
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The other student assistant asked me what I would do the next night when I would have to guard the gallery alone. I told her I would probably just leave the gallery’s lights on for one night.I got to the mailroom the next day at around 10.00 AM and there was a commotion.
One of the haunted/cursed objects, a turquoise necklace, was missing. I asked my supervisor bluntly if it was our fault, but one of the professors said he saw it early that morning, which meant that it wasn’t stolen overnight. Since this had nothing to do with me, I just went to class.
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In the evening, it was time for me to guard the gallery alone and I started the night by just watching people play Dead by Daylight to pass the time. In between one of the matches, I looked over at the CCTV monitor and saw a lanky man in ragged clothing staring at the plasma TV.
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Normally, a strange person walking into a gallery would not be a cause for concern. I mean, that was the point of having an exhibition. But, two things made me run to the gallery. One, I could see that the man had a flickering glow on his face, which meant that the TV was turned on. The TV wasn’t supposed to be plugged in and turned on until the official opening ceremony on Friday. And two, he was changing the channel.
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The man did not notice me despite me asking him repeatedly to step away from the TV so that I could switch it off. I considered just pulling the plug, but the man looked scary. What if the moment I unplugged the TV he decided to jump me?
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The man kept staring at the plasma TV with his mouth slightly opened, seemingly in a trance. Up close, I could see that he was unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot red. His fingers kept pushing the button that changed the channel, despite the screen only showing static.
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I did not know what to do. The man technically wasn’t doing anything wrong since we didn’t announce the rules to the public. There wasn’t any sign that said don’t touch the TV and don’t change the channel. I can’t tell the security guard to kick him out just because of his disheveled appearance. This is a public college, so he has the right to be there as much as anyone else. I decided to go back to the mailroom to watch more YouTube videos, hoping that he would leave on his own before closing time.
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When it was 8 pm and he was still doing the same thing. I called my supervisor to ask her about my options. She said to ask the security guards at the front of the school for help.
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I brought two security guards back with me to the gallery. Once we arrived, we found the man seemingly strangling himself on the floor in front of the plasma TV. The TV screen showed a very old black-and-white POV shot of a person being strangled by another man who had a sadistic glee on his face.
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One of the security guards rushed in to help the man while the other one radioed his superior to call for an ambulance. I was horrified by what I saw. The face on the screen of a smiling man started out staring downward at the person he was strangling. But after a while, he looked up right at the camera like he was looking at me.
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As I was backing away from the chaos, an elevator next to the gallery made a sound. Someone was coming down from the fourth floor? No one should have been upstairs since this was already past 8 pm, and our building did not have any night classes.
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Once the elevator door was opened, a cleaning lady who was inside turned around. Her eyes were gouged out and there was blood all over. She held her hands up and ran out of the elevator toward me. She tried to grab onto my shirt collar but her hands missed, and she collapsed on the ground. She was wearing the missing necklace.
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I was so scared, I was on the floor and didn’t even remember falling. The security guards, who looked shocked and traumatized themselves, told me that I didn’t have to wait for the paramedics with them. And so, I just bolted home.
I had a hard time sleeping that night, with the image of the cleaning lady without her eyes rushing toward me burning into my brain.
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I decided to go back to the college the next day to rip everyone a new one. The dean, my supervisor, and especially Melvin for allowing this to happen. I also just wanted to get some updates on the cleaning lady and the man.
On my way to the department building, a pregnant woman was walking right beside me. As we got closer to the entrance of the art building, I realized she was about to go through an entrance close to the gallery. Remembering the rules about pregnant women, I stopped her.
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I politely asked her what was she there for. She seemed annoyed and answered that Professor Melvin asked her to meet with him for an acting job. She was going to be in his experimental films. He asked her to wait for him inside the gallery.
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There was no doubt in my mind, Melvin was deliberately challenging the rules. I asked the woman to wait and called the other student assistant to ask if Melvin was in. She said Melvin never showed up to his morning class and could not be reached.
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Before I hung up, the student assistant told me that the man who strangled himself died but the cleaning lady survived. The cleaning lady told the police at the hospital that she didn’t steal the necklace. Melvin paid her 50 dollars to wear the turquoise necklace for a day as part of his experimental film.
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I turned to the pregnant woman she was not allowed to go into the building, and to go shop at the bookstore in a different building instead. I will tell Melvin to meet her there. She seemed angry, and in hindsight, I probably used the wrong words and should have tried a bit harder to convince her. But, I was about to storm the office and didn’t have time to tell her about the haunted/cursed objects and the exhibition’s rules.
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I saw that my supervisor was also at the dean’s office. Before I could yell at both of them, the dean sheepishly turned her computer monitor for me to see. It showed Melvin installing something behind the TV and also plugging the TV in. The dean said that it was something that would allow Melvin to turn the TV on or off remotely.
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I was livid! Did Melvin plan this? I reminded everyone about the rules, then angrily told the dean about the pregnant woman I had just met and how Melvin was trying to break another rule by using her. Both the dean and my supervisor were speechless. I wanted to find Melvin right now, seriously considering slapping him.
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But nobody knew where Melvin was. People had been trying to contact him since last night. Then, Melvin’s wife called the dean.Professor Melvin was found dead on the stairs last night. He fell and broke his neck. She said his body was contorted in an unnatural way, with his legs twisted and wrapped around the stairs’ railings. He died with his eyes wide open, filled with fear, glaring intensely at the front door.
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The dean and my supervisor were both stunned. They turned to me, trying to see if I was going to join them in being shocked. No, I was still angry, and partly at them, for allowing this to happen. The dean then avoided any more eye contact with me. I think that by that point she was a believer.
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Suddenly the pregnant woman from earlier appeared behind me. She had her hands on her hip and her face was full of defiance. She quickly turned to sneer at me before approaching the dean. She said that I dared told her that she was not allowed to enter the building, confident that this would get me in trouble.
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She went on a rant about how she paid taxes and that she had the right to be in any place that was public’. She then asked where is Professor Melvin and that she was ready for the job he promised.
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The dean, my supervisor, and I just looked at her, stunned. Her confidence started to slowly fade from the woman’s face as she was wondering what was going on. Suddenly, a little beeping sound broke the silence. It was coming from the gallery. The little lights on the front of the miniature fire station started to blink.
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So I was playing Japan with Oda in civ 5 and I thought it was a good idea to use my culture for the city state tree. When I finished it I saw that the city states would occasionally give you great people, which happened once in a while. But then I got a weird one that I didn't recognize. I looked it up and found out that it was the merchant of Venice! That way I used him to annex a free city state that gave me more uranium and some luxury recources. And no warmonger penalties! I was just wondering if this happens often, or if I was extremely lucky.

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Date Posted: May 29, 2023 📅
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Recent graduate, woman, engineer, musician, love making new friends

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Hi everyone! This is a complete English translation of the Aniara sequel book by Harry Martinson called Doriderna that was put together after the author died. This translation was put together using various translation programs that can be found online, so I can't guarantee that it is a perfect translation, but it's better than nothing. I will also post the original in Swedish so you can improve the translation or look up words etc. if you want. Hope you enjoy!
I would also like to let everyone know that I am also working on my own Aniara fan fiction short story that I call "The Lost Voices of Aniara". This story tells about the events aboard the Aniara from the view point of another passenger and attempts to add more details to the story. It should be ready in the next week or two.
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HARRY MARTINSON
The Dorides (Doriderna)
Remaining poems and prose pieces in selection and with preface by Tord Hall Albert Bonniers Förlag
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PREFACE
For reasons I will not go into here, Harry Martinson did not publish any new work in the last years of his life. There is therefore a very large literary legacy, the publication of which began in the fall of 1978 with "Längs ekots stigar" (Along the paths of the echo), published by Georg Svensson. This collection contains only a few purely scientific poems - the emphasis is on nature poetry. The selection was made from unpublished material - which had nevertheless reached the proof stage - in three previous collections.
It remains to address other lines of thought in Harry Martinson's work: the ideas in Aniara, which in various forms occupied his imagination until the end. To follow the continuation of this great theme - at least in part - is what I am trying to do in this second selection from the surviving archive.
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The 103 songs in Aniara were part of a larger set of poems, and the author then worked for several years on a sequel, to be called 'The Dorids', the people of the tribe of Doris. Around 1959 there were about 80 songs - most of them in more or less completed drafts. The dominant figure in the Dorids would not be Isagel or the Mimarobe, but Nobia, the Samaritan from the tundra planet and deportation site of Mars. Nobia would be a norna (fate goddess), though not a cruel goddess of fate, but a norna who weaves goodness into the fabric of the world.
But the whole project remained a large-scale endeavor. The reasons were many: illness, world events, which seemed to be moving towards a fulfillment of the prophecies in Aniara, and which gave him an increasingly dark view of life: he told me that "Aniara has become a neurosis" ... I feel like Mima being blown apart'. But the decisive reason was surely his demand for absolute freedom in his creativity. He did not want to be confined, and the result was, as he himself said, 'I have stepped out of Aniara'.
The fact that Harry Martinson stepped out of Aniara, and thus also out of the Dorides, does not at all mean that he left the motifs or ideas found there, which cover the scientific field from atoms to stars. Rather, it means that he was able to write without direct connection to the characters of Aniara and the Dorides in particular.
I have therefore considered it justified to call this entire collection the Dorides, even though the prose pieces and several poems do not have a clearly visible connection with such a title.
In order to comment briefly on the selection, I would like to say a few words about Harry Martinson's attitude towards modern science (it is my intention to return to this subject in more detail).
There are two main lines. One is deterministic, and has its roots in classical physics, founded by Newton, which dominated until the end of the 19th century. It has a philosophical form in the law of causation, which means that if you know enough facts about a certain course of events in the present and in the past, you can precisely specify the course of events in the future. Examples of such events in the 'big world' - the macrocosm - are solar and lunar eclipses.
But in the world of atoms - the microcosm - this determinism does not apply. Heisenberg demonstrated this through his uncertainty relation, also known as the indeterminacy principle. In the atoms, individual events are indeterminate, we cannot discern any causality - there is randomness. But chance can be mastered by the methods of statistics, and we must content ourselves with a "statistical causality", which describes the course of events in the atom with the highest possible degree of probability.
It is this second, indeterministic line that has long been followed by most physicists. But there is one major exception, and that is Einstein. At the 1927 meeting of physicists in Brussels, for example, he asked Bohr, Heisenberg and others with mild irony whether they really believed that God plays dice - "ob der liebe Gott würfelt". Einstein was convinced that the universe follows an ordering principle, a geometric structure, which can be called a world soul. This is a pantheistic view that is reminiscent of Spinoza.
Similar ideas are already present in Aniara, but in this selection the picture has become more sharply defined. Harry Martinson does not believe that chance plays a decisive role in the course of the world, as is clear from several poems and prose pieces. He believes more in Einstein than in dozens of other Nobel Prize winners. Apart from these authorities, he follows his intuition.
His approach to religion has often been quoted: he chooses the Riddler over the God. This belief is reflected in 'The Riddle'. In 'Poems on Light and Darkness', published in 1971, Harry Martinson, with 'The Inner Light' and 'The Bird in the Phoenix Bell', presents the events inside the atom itself. These poems show that - although 'Aniara' and 'The Dorides' are more about stars than atoms - he never lost his interest in the microcosm. In this selection, it is the atoms that are more interesting than the stars.
The bard enters the atom. He describes the course of events in a world which is completely beyond our senses and which, despite the enormous aids of science, we will probably never be able to understand exactly. The story itself probably comes from Gamow's book "Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom". Published in Swedish translation in 1946, it is, along with "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland" (also 1946), the versatile Gamow's best popular science books. Harry Martinson rated them highly.
The two poems 'Submerged as in a dream but still awake' and 'Actually, the comprehensibility was slight' depict a journey of thought into the atom, and the same motif recurs in several other places.
The poem "A Cosmic Thickness Lying Boundlessly Spread" poetically depicts a world development related to the hypothesis of the "stationary universe" put forward by Hoyle and others, and to Klein-Alfvén's "symmetrical cosmology". For several reasons - mainly aesthetic - Harry Martinson did not like the theory of 'the big bang', which was celebrated by most scientists. His poem should have been written quite a long time ago, and perhaps he would have changed his mind if he had been given the opportunity to understand what the "cosmic background radiation" - with a temperature of about 3 degrees above absolute zero - means for the credibility of "The big bang". It took natural scientists some time to become convinced that this radiation can best be interpreted as a fading glow after an unimaginable cosmic explosion some 18 billion years ago.
This selection also contains several pieces of prose, which in general do not need any comment. But I would like to mention a few. For "The Figuration Patterns of the Goddancer's Juggling Program", in three sections, there is a drawing by Harry Martinson, reproduced on the cover of this collection. The spread comes from Hindu philosophy: we see 'Siwa's juggling dance before Brama'. The dominant curves are so-called lemniscates, which were already known to the ancient Greeks. The lemniscate looks like an eight and is the mathematical symbol for infinity. It is defined as the trajectory of a point under the condition that the product of its distances to two given points is constant. In the center of the drawing there are several small curves. They are ellipses, and an ellipse - also first studied by the Greeks - is defined as the trajectory of a point under the condition that the sum of its distances to two given points is constant. The result is a geometric pattern, similar to a flower, which at the same time provides a poetic image of the complex interplay of forces in the atom with outward and inward energy impulses The juggler finds it increasingly difficult to work with his ball-particles as he progresses through the periodic table of the elements. In the end, he "dances the spectral theme in the dance of the Phoenix" - a symbol of the indestructibility of both energy and poetry, and a recurring motif in Martinson's poetry.
"Delsaga om tidens ariadnetråd" (Part of the saga of the Ariadne thread of time) is almost a fantasy about four-dimensional space, where you have to be careful not to get on the wrong track. The selection of prose pieces ends with "Some fairies dancing in the summer night near a quiet lake". It is a cheerful tale where the author combines a love of the Swedish summer with a love of light.
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I made this selection at the direct request of Harry. He even said several times that I should have all his scientific poems and prose pieces. But I think I judged this offer correctly when I saw it as an expression of his great generosity towards his friends. I always replied that he himself should complete and select what was to be published. But in his last years he did not want to publish anything. I therefore promised to make a selection if he did not change his mind.
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He did not, and this collection is the result.
Finally, I would like to thank Ingrid Martinson and Georg Svensson for the understanding and assistance they have given me in bringing this selection to fruition.
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Tord Hall
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The Dorides (Doriderna)
The book you hold was written in Mima's hall.
Now, on a secret wavelength, it is sent home to you, my friend, who for some years inhabits a spherical beach called the Valley of Doris.
In other words, it was written so close to your own being that nothing could be closer to you than those described here. You are one of them.
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Over the graves, the indifferent wind spreads
the whisper of the immortal gods
that no loss is foreseen in the grand scheme of things.
But what do the gods - those wasteful billionaires of the heavens - know about the beautiful and wonderful Doris?
how she was worth saving forever
and that whoever loved her
can never be comforted by the gods' continued waste.
About her a bird sings now alone in the tree of the grave. Of her as she was, the glorious one, if no other, the Dorides' thrush sings.
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The window was full of stars,
The Leonids' swarm of stars came, then you know the time.
Autumn was gone, its yellowing burnt.
The lookout tower, closed on the wooded mountains.
I stood as a child of a time that saw the stars detach from the roofs towards a room where novas frightened a more distant valley, I found other myths than those I was used to picking hurled at me from the space of the Leonids.
I stood in the cathedral of fear of dreams.
The great copper woman who lay there with her back soldered to the lid of the sarcophagus drove horror into me, cast my foot with lead.
That the copper woman knew who I was, I immediately sensed as a deadly weight, and that I had been summoned here by herself, by the queen of copper, of that I was certain.
In empty benches sat forgotten years, from the emptiness of the auditorium the organ pipes shone like stalactites in the vault of a cave and there was nothing, no light, no hint that gathered my crumbling courage.
For everything was fulfilled as it was written in stone once when the water abandoned the green and it was said that man will go away and become the dead slave of the dead dust.
And as I stood there gripped, filled with horror
for this judgment and epitaph
which was predetermined and rehearsed
in the mute trumpet of the seraphim of the stones,
bells fell suddenly from the towers to the earth that rocked with an ore-broken thunder, and the copper woman rose, a scream of remembrance drawn from afar to her lips as she drew me in close to her copper body in terrified death.
He woke up. There was light. It was day.
And the Samaritan Nobia sat silent, but still heard the echo of the screams his dreams had squeezed out of his fear.
She searched for words simple enough for a stranger to grasp, but not so simple as to drive away his trust, hardly won yet.
In simple action she finally found them.
And she stood up and smiled with milk
From the moors of Gondrin to the mouth of this fugitive.
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It is no exaggeration to say that space gave us long winter evenings rolled into one - the one that lasts. Our leisure time finally became a grim question with ice in our eyes and a frozen flame.
It became necessary to tell stories from reality - as it can be taken. I chose to tell about King Basii, who, supported by Chefone, forcibly turned himself into a god and magician in a celestial drama.
The Goldonder King felt like God and determined to live up to the gods he built himself a city in the sky.
It was a global world city of goldonders assembled into a kind of hive heaven.
But Basil's space-city, though it contained twelve million men in his service, was not enough for him; he had another built, and the greatest city in the world was soon in space. That city was a marvel to behold: a mighty golden dome, surrounded by three bionomically serving drabants, one of which was called the Vegetable City, one the Fish Drabant, and the third the Sting.
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The names reveal their role and purpose.
So Basii sits in his heavenly land. The aquarium dragon orbits faithfully and Stings follows it with fattened animals and the vegetable moon amounts to the redwood.
The golden dome was the city of retreat for all climbers and celestial rebels, for gamma was a poison to all alike and all poor and rich alike had to choose between death and escape.
So many preferred the city of Basil.
But although he rules over twelve million
inhabitants of the great city of space, he is still very rarely happy.
And although the dragons in a faithful circle
raise animals and grow fish and wheat
Basil's only pleasure is when he gets
with Vulvis, the royal slave, to bathe in Lethe.
But all the deliciously good virginity
that can be enjoyed in Basil's harem
is in its nakedness a skin of fear.
of frightened dissimulation. And his love story
...is but a tale to be seen from the outside..,
and all his lust a forced voluptuousness.
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Thus in The Night of Aniara I draw a little picture that everyone can understand from the rich treasure of reality.
And every time I make an arabesque in the hall of Mima about this space grotesque that Basil's space city can probably be said to be, I can for an hour or so make people sigh: the best is here anyway.
From Basil's false heaven we preserve. No, I'd rather travel with Aniara.
But soon the alarm goes off. The bells proclaim that the images of the fairy tale are overtaken by visions here that distress ignites.
And quickly to the halls I return.
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The Goldonder's garden bubbled with glamour. A party was being held there and Chefone was there. He showed us a picture of the smith of happiness: the goldonder king Basii, a portrait jubilantly taken on the day the fifteen thousandth goldonder lay in the field ready for the wave of endlessness.
Then we were each seized by thoughtfulness and went to our own in solitude.
For in every ship of this number there was a Mima locked up in its cage.
The Rapid criminal was much loved and could operate as he pleased under the protection of the admiration he aroused. He always appeared at great speeds and abducted women whom he brought to Chefone in light blue rapid rockets.
Of course it was criminal, the people of the valley thought, but the charm was so close to the deed that the rampart was breached by sheer admiration and open worship soon followed the advice of restraint at the murder pedal.
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Tucked away in a corner of our gondola, I pretend to smile at some rough fellows who spend their evenings with mockery and violence, with a devilish flutter as their sole aim.
They look at me and find me mortified,
- The clear approval is what they expect...
and I'm close to being squeezed badly
every time they jokingly glance at my grave door.
The brute is approaching, his dull face with many a foolish whim weighing on his mind.
And many a scowl missed by pigs from the worst corners of the soul he throws at me.
And when, full of fear, I strike with depleted strength in the dull face, the troll is only amused by my blow and raises his eyebrow with interest.
Then I flee between the troll's legs and out the other side of the danger of death.
How this happened can only be fully explained by the light of the gopher and the fourth tensor theory.
​
Here came the sober, composed and sober man who always kept his soul in trim and stuck to the dry, honest maxims of life.
Now he went into the fire with his imagination.
His cool reason was completely burned His sober composure was fried in seconds when the photo turbo in Xinombra exaggerated the cold matter.
And yet I can't help but admire the man as he made his way to the office where he had been employed for many years
and where, despite offers to flee to the tundra, he provided punch cards for thousands who broke up every day.
There died a man who never raised his voice, who always remained true to his calm tone, the martyr of calm composure who was burned when the cruel fires of excess were lit.
​
One is often chilled to the rock crystal by everything one hears before the ear falls like gray-white ash into the cremation hall.
And the girl from Rind who sees nothing is often heard to ask beyond the eye: how is the world of such torment visible? What is to be seen in this madness, where eeriness against eeriness is heard to answer?
Cultivating insight seemed futile
and many fell away from the faithful crowd.
and its program which was to see through
so that with the transparency of evil
as lens and instrument
try to find new signs
and new ways for the land of Gond.
Most people grew tired and withdrew from the room of the Truth Service, and Nobia sat for long periods almost alone, trying to hold on to her looms, always tormented
by the blood moisture of evil memories, the echoes of horror
surrounded her days
and made the Mara a bedfellow
who tore the fabric of the noman
and raped Nobia's dream
and the mood of life over the moors of Gondria.
It is as important to us to have friends
in the houses of distant worlds as at home by
the familiar road of the green earth.
You are reflected in endless eyes, watched by immense spectators.
They never interfere, but they watch the sewing and the mining,
the nurse and doctor on the rounds and the weapons in the shamelessly cruel wars.
Your own position under their eyes may be likened to the position you take with one whom you do not wish to grieve, but to share joy and to please.
So spoke the old astronomer, and then laid his head down to rest.
And he went smiling to the eternity that had been waiting by his side all his life.
His forehead shone with its ideas, even in the dead of death in the years of space.
He was among those who know the fairies of everything, those who get to comb Berenice's hair.
​
But for the longest time I still want to believe that this is the torment of an evil dream and the ship Aniara a phantom from which I will wake up in the Valley of Doris.
Perhaps everything is a nightmare and I want to wait with poison and a knife. They say there are dreams of a kind that seem as long as a man's life.
Out of the dust you were born, from its gifts you were supported.
You did not manage the gift, many a meadow you made desolate.
What is beyond this sea is called Going down deep among riddles too great to be found in a grave.
Faith can never cover more than what you see in spirit.
​
All the other things are too much to bear.
Do you hear the sound of the rescue team calling from an emergency station that is one of a thousand others, regardless of faith?
Now guess where the road leads and what Paradise is.
One of a thousand rescue stations scattered along the coast here.
Now I want to sing to my ear and ask it to listen to a voice that descends not to destroy the language I have collected for comfort. For the comfort of life and death, I whisper the price of sensitivity every time the sinful flow of language storms the breeze of the spirit.
​
One night Heba lay awake in the city of Aniara and heard the painter's joyful painting.
The skilled varnisher was varnishing the years that would one day end on a stainless steel stretcher.
And suddenly from Heba there was a shout against the smooth roof.
The skilled varnishers know their business well.
Too hard to become joy, too happy to become sorrow. The painters paint everything in Aniara's castle.
​
We know that we have been left out of the higher insight of the ocean of mystery and that we lack the tools to reach the depths of clarity that Mima once gave. But since Mima's death, the average of what we achieve of truth is not very high average is what is required if the choice of new paths is to be avoided.
A small number reach the values that should be the average to reach.
The others are satisfied with the flow of thought,
the rattle with which time is made to pass.
A daughter of my mother, called Tovi, was born in the night of space. Alas, dear ones, where can the crowd's demand for sensation and wonder lead us?
First came, as it should be, the blissfully sweet and indescribably pure birth, when the mimicry lay naked, uncovered and panting in the golden bed of the formula.
To her camp now came the mimicry and winged it
the naked one, as when the butterfly flies the honey chalice of its flower, in Dori's meadows. The description is not given (much to my regret) because there is always the possibility of a wave of miracles taking place in secret, to the great disappointment of many who wish to see how the mimagyne makes love, and from what angle the picture of the goddess's love life should be taken in order to really reach the audience.
Can it not be enough that Tovi gave birth to an allegorical child whom Isagel happily suckled at her breast and practiced miracles and consolation You may think so yourself, but others think otherwise.
For not even a mimagyn can defend the fruit of her womb against the human hyena who demands a clear answer on every point of what precedes it all: the prelude to sowing,
with the insides of the thighs well described in a clear image that gives the "public" a feeling that it was in the bed.
​
Yes, it has happened that I have sometimes asked myself (in private silence, of course) whether the smooth ice of superficiality does not have enough joy, and that the great swallows in these spaces are only terrible wakes which, compared to the agile princess and heartlessly threatening with superior power, will in the end become the cold room of beauty.
So small a strip bears, the other breaks, and all the incomparably large gapes with the same dark death which, unchanging with cold upon cold, only imitates itself.
To raise one's hand then with a light-year pound and demonstrate the fugue of eternity on terrible organs, while the girl in the icy distance dances, hardly greater to see than a fly flown away towards the light, it is to chill with the great weapon as when the superpower with the powers the element hides coldly makes its rows in the land of Gond against unsuspecting cities and, although itself dismissing all talk of sin punishment and trial, nevertheless treats the human with such terrible flame that this terrible torrent of loose gamma released by those who do not mean sin punishment nevertheless cruelly destroys both Yaal and Gena and melts down to ashes the wonder Heba
With the same fire they turned on Chebeba.
​
Posterity does not understand you so easily.
It judges according to the image of posterity
and counts up the time you lived in
as rows of negligence, as offenses
against the spirit of foresight, the duties of thought.
To this it adds the work of suffering
and piles up, as blind as a judge
as you were blind as a criminal, case by case.
Can those who have killed the foundations of joy and destroyed the great city of joy have the right to the joys of life?
Does Cain have the right to be happy?
Can those who strangled the joys of Xinombra and burned the valley of paradise have the right to heights of heaven other than Aniara's daily agony?
I ask but never get an answer. I have to arrange for pastimes
for the hordes of Aniara and manage its entertainment.
​
A wave of newly awakened hatred swept through the mountains where Nobia lived in deep mines and ghostly white lights illuminated every thread of life in the fabrics she wove.
She had sought and found the thread of life - a discovery of how healing rays are empowered by the inner council of things and fused with the heart of the atom.
And while hatred swelled around the mountains
and wounds screamed in the valley of time.
she wove day and night until the color of victory
and the skin of life rose in the hall of death.
Of her beauty little can be said. It was lost in a wave of radiation but the clear purity of the soul could be weighed; in healed wounds we saw her reflection.
​
Then I will throw you out of your chair. I will break your armchair view, because it is false and holds a convulsive security in a time that has slipped out of its rooms, but also the other way around: that it becomes a view without deep insight.
From this world, I shall send you happiness today to the kingdom of love, to the evil shore where the Samaritan Nobia and others spread works of love from country to country.
Figuring out the ways of evil and tracking down all the poison in the city of hate was futile, for hate stood there with heavy blocks united row by row.
Within its walls there was life and movement in the birthing centers and squares where human beings were conceived and human beings were born and human life in the human gap was destroyed. It was best to pretend that this city of self-righteous evil existed as nothing more than a devilish childhood that would mature, grow tired of itself.
We resolved to keep on sending saints there for the longest time.
from the saints' camps as long as the funds lasted
and as far as the need still aroused the heart.
This plan was tried for nine years, during which the Rind camp of saints bled to death: an act of self-sacrifice based on faith in the powers of good. But the heavy wall of hate stood just as hard, and the fatigue of leadership followed the act of hate; only too great was the throne of victory we had.
A single city consumed the power which we had thought sufficient for the transformation of the world.
​
On a rare occasion, the happiness of being free from desire also came.
Then the emptiness suddenly became populated by a kind of spiritualized mystery.
We walked the spirit's path of happiness along the beach, exchanging thoughts, making fortune cards.
It was evening and sunset in the sea.
Night fell, but the land of thought stood firm.
He woke up. She said: guess where.
I can't, he said. How did you get here? The same way you did: up the gravel path and then straight to the left among the cypresses. There was a dewy path the moonlight itself went there with light steps which I tried to imitate.
And when everything was past and the path was over
I managed to become a clear crystal and find you, my friend, on this path.
It is so transparently wonderful here.
We no longer exist. All that was is over.
Neither god nor devil here reaches us anymore and the end is the cruel parody of life.
​
Where is the plain text?
This is what I'm looking for.
The one that fits but still gives song.
After thanking God that he was a wasp and not something else, he continued between the leafy branches and stung the farmer.
Laid out by spiritual mobs, the truth becomes worse than the lie. When the mob washes the barley, it is never clean.
The rabble always wash in the dunghill from the Augean stables.
​
​
Matema's camel bells ring in the deserts of speech where the caravans of unfinished quarrels
never reach their oasis, only become more camels.
Immersed as in a dream but still awake, I found myself changed and so naked that no dream has words for what it was like when, transformed by the stone, I cut down towards the inner realms and while this was happening I became smaller, smaller and even more stripped of layers and layers of time and space as I sank further and further into the stone, deeper and deeper into things.
Who undressed me, wore me down so much that no conceivable smallness so small on this earth can be imagined unless one is long since beyond what every comprehensible thought wants to deny.
And yet I was being stripped and reduced still further in no direction.
So sunk, unceasingly sunk in
towards even more breathtaking reduction
I retained in my dream a way of seeing
and understand that I was traveling into
to the dimensions, the innermost
who with their interior work with their interior
and whose interiors compose the world.
They scare children with darkness, criminals with punishment and sinners with realms beyond death where the vengeful desire to torment has transported its arsenal of tormenting images.
But sorrow follows us every day, and joy follows us every day.
We ourselves are the sorrow, we are also the joy, everything human is rooted in humanity, and no human being can escape humanity, not her hatred and her self-degradation, nor the joy she spreads, nor the love she forms.
There is a third land that is not death and not life, but the reality that pervades all realities, and spins the very thread of the fabric from which dreams are woven. Yes, I had come to the rooms where these threads are spun. When I arrived, I stepped out and saw no longer surprised the smallest fairy, who herself was not at all surprised to welcome me to her inner land.
And although we were both unimaginably smaller than two grains of traveling dust on a suit on earth, we thought we were big here in this smallest room to which I have now come and which nevertheless encloses with its vault a separate world of realities formed.
On the contrary, I cannot describe what I saw of strange things, but that will follow when the habit of telling stories has been practiced for other habits than what life offers,
and other things than those called death.
For though beyond all I have known
this was not death
and though within all I have known
this was not life.
​
Actually, the comprehensibility was slight, as when multiples arranged in layers, and layered in the directions of space, make the fabric of the dream omnidirectional structural and become a fabric consisting of paths where the thread is only thought of as a path as a sign that here the shuttle has gone, but where is the thread? The thread is the path. I saw how the gnome was in a quandary as to which of two different possibilities to give clarity.
Then came formulas of such an elusive nature that the gnome was again gripped by the anxiety
which arises when the explanation is attempted but little response is felt by the pupil.
And with a look that shone as if with sorrow, he signaled a break in the dilemma. And with a formula more magical than comprehensible, we left the atom.
We expanded to other contexts and sat on a leaf next to a bee eagerly searching for honey in a meadow.
​
The Dance
Around the great star of the day we shall orbit the years we have been given to live, and our family for a few thousand centuries, perhaps more, perhaps less, no one knows.
But the time that we are orbiting is so small compared to that of the suns where they wander around in orbits in the galaxy our family named the Milky Way, luminous to behold.
What can our eyes see, our hearts cry out at the thought of atoms going around in the same way with waves and particles.
Some have called this the dance of the gods - it is always being danced by everything in the universe.
All indications are that among the arts of the muses
the art of dance is the first and the last,
and we are in it, dancing out
our role in the dance, it is already being danced
in other worlds separate from our time,
in other dance theaters,
yet one thing is clear
that we are dancing our turns.
Our role in it
is ours and no one else's.
Our own role in the dance art of all worlds.
​
Economic overview
Our earth wanders alive alone, around the sun our dear parent.
As far as the giant tubes reach no living neighbor to see.
Desolate and empty on the one who received the name of the god of war, burning hot and desolate on the one who received the name of the goddess of love.
Jupiter, planet of Zeus
ice-clad to two hundred times the height of the Himalayas.
The others are death's door.
Beyond that, light years to the next planetary village.
So each sun has only one living person, and that one is a leased farm, indefinitely and to an unreliable and dangerous race.
​
Here is a world of light distributed in the mystery of things.
Here is the salvaged light in the innumerable rooms of the stone.
Wands point with poles directed to their rooms inside mountains and stones, spinning mystery.
Deep in her fairy tale, she lives for the sake of the tale.
the norn who has learned to spin the yarn from the wool of the riddles.
​
The spirit of Ideema from space in endless lines gathered the seeds into the durable wood of the suns.
From far beyond time the hydrogen came in modest garb and built for its God the ingenious nests of the atoms.
Come, let us nurture the foundation of our life. The green sphere we have been given to live on in the universe's lottery system.
When the next lucky draw can get rid of the Milky Way's big tombola we do not know and can never reach.
But we do know one thing for sure: the next draw will not include us.
​
A stranger called chance shuffles the cards and deals them to the local players.
Every single poker face keeps a straight face.
There are plenty of goldfish in the tureen here.
According to the law, the silent coincidence itself is the last to raise its hand, with ice in its stomach.
Soon jaws of granite are chewing the cigar.
Where is the bundle of happiness among the starlings?
That question is answered when chance wins.
Then the shot goes off, chance's life disappears. His house of cards collapses, but soon everyone at the counter thinks it was a nice fish, that no one won, that chance herself was told by Smith and Wesson what chance was.
by Smith and Wesson what chance should do.
( translation to be continued )

This weekend a family member is coming to visit the town we both moved to.
I'm going to ask them if they can drive me back to the city we're from when they leave. Know I have to somehow stealthily pack and I'm not sure how to take our three pets with me. He has punched one and kicked the other, and has threatened to kill them if I leave. I think I might just have to leave the cage and take my pets in their carriers with minimal things like their food/bowls/blankets.
I don't even know if my family member will say yes. Hopefully when he sees all my bruises he'll say yes. All I have is 100 dollars as well. My boyfriend takes all of my money as well as sabotaging job efforts. Then he calls me useless and worthless because I don't have a job.
Don't know where I'll stay when I go there. Maybe my family member will watch my pets while I go to a shelter or I could stay with family member. I just know I need out and that my boyfriend will never get better.
I'm terrified of what will happen when he realizes I've left. I'm terrified he'll hurt himself or try to track me down. I honestly don't even know if I can go through with it.

Just a bit of context- I grew up in a small town in Michigan. Locals refer to at as “island city” because the center of town is technically an island. One of the most notable features is a giant dam located next to the largest bridge (which inspired the “dam festival” bc puns).
Anyway. When I was growing up I used to be terrified of this dam. I had countless bizarre nightmares of skeletonized cows stomping through the water and not being able to get away from them because the current flowing over the dam was too strong.
Eventually I found out that at some point wayyyy back in the day a cattle truck had in fact tipped over on that bridge and several cows were killed after being dumped into the river.
I don’t remember being told this story prior to the dreams even though I am sure that’s what happened. But for a good few years I was convinced these damn dam cows had been haunting me.
Kids are stupid
Photo of town included.

I have two trees (like this one on the left side in the picture) in front of my house. They stumps are not very thick, wondering how easy it would be to remove these safely. Due to the size, I’m wondering if this would be easy rather than spending hundreds of dollars to get them cut.
Anybody know what kind of tree this is? Cedar?
They are very close to the house, they touch the eaves trough. Not even 2 feet away from the house.
I was wondering if I should first cut them from the roof but that seems dangerous and I can’t make a wedge cut on both sides from the roof. Can anybody recommend what would be the safest way to do this?

I taught at a strict vocational college that forced students to wear uniforms and bow to elders. As someone who let students call him by his first name and played Valo with them, I was not surprised when my boss called me into his office. I was ready to defend myself, but I was hit with: “Are you aware that your students are descendants of a cannibal?”
Truthfully? Sort of. I knew that in 1600, colonists invaded the island and enslaved the natives. A pirate named Sur-Linyao slaughtered the colonists and became the island’s folk hero.
Murals and statues of Sur-Linyao were all over the island. His signature look was his very long tongue sticking out of his mouth. The symbol on his pirate flag was a six-dot triangle. Technically, Sur-Linyao didn't eat ALL of the colonists, just one organ. First, he tied each colonist to a tree. Sur-Linyao then cut out each man’s liver and ate it raw with chili paste while staring into the person’s eyes. Sur-Linyao then threw that bleeding and squirming colonist into a dirty shallow pond, where Komodo dragons, attracted to the blood, devoured the victim alive.
The school rector handed me a photograph. It showed a male Westerner smiling while kicking a statue of Sur-Linyao while two women cheered him on. The three in the photo were humanitarian workers. Traces of candle wax at the base of Sur-Linyao’s statue showed that the islanders worshipped the liver-eating pirate, and for some reason, the workers felt they needed to do something about that. The three thought that their 6 months long relationship-building with natives on the island earned them enough goodwill for them to get away with that kind of stunt. Just a few hours after the photo was taken, the hacked body parts of all three were found scattered all over the beach. Their livers were missing.
The rector then stared right at me, preparing me for his next sentence. “Before you think that I’m a racist who is prejudging the modern-day natives as liver-eating savages based on what their ancestors did hundreds of years ago, you should know that the killings happened in 2017. To put things in perspective, the Nintendo Switch was already out.”
The rector then revealed that he called me into his office to ask me about an incident a day before.
There was a report that a White man with a goatee whistled at a native girl inside a convenience store on the south side of the island. He asked if that was me.
I was shocked. That was the reason he called me in here? I told him no. Apparently, there were only about 30 Caucasians on this island of 20,000 people, and only a few had a goatee. The rector then told me that a cop and the girl’s father and an older brother went to my dorm to look for me but I wasn’t there.
After seeing the look of horror on my face, wondering what would have happened if I was at the dorm, the rector told me not to panic and that he will talk to the cop and the girl’s family on my behalf. The rector ended our meeting with, “Just be careful AJ. We are the minority here. I hope to god you know what that means.”
For the past few classes, I started letting my students analyze Western media and culture. Thanks to globalization, these island kids watched and played the same media content as others their age around the world: Stranger Things, MCU, Fortnite, etc. As their teacher, I was often asked to comment on controversial topics like: “AJ, what do you think about a Neo-Nazi being punched before he does anything?” “AJ, what do you think about Black Lives Matter?” “AJ, what do you think about Go Woke Go Broke?” “AJ, what do you think about Don’t-Say-Gay-Bill?”
My answer was always to not ask me what I think, but for them to gather information from various sources and come to their own conclusion. Since more than ⅔ of the class were teenage males, their views were… not very much aligned with mine. But even though I disagreed with them, I felt like we had a healthy discussion.
I then noticed a student, Stephanie, seemed very unhappy as she shoved her notebook into her bag at the end of class. “You know I used to love your class. But I think these past few classes were shits.”
I was confused. Stephanie was one of my best students. She always sat in front and answered all questions correctly last semester. I asked her right away what was wrong.
“Is it going to kill you to just outright say that racism is wrong, misogyny is wrong, homophobia is wrong, and Naziism is wrong? Why does it have to always have to be a healthy debate?” I was shocked by her response. I told her that I don’t think a teacher should just outright tell students what to think, especially when it comes to social issues.
I mean, of course, I think racism, misogyny, Naziism, and homophobia are wrong. But I guess I would feel like I was brainwashing the students if I just tell them: this is what you must believe.
Stephanie scoffed. “Well, now Benny and his gang think that you approved of their homophobia and misogyny. You didn’t want to correct them not because you are this free-thinker, but in reality you just want them to think that you are a “too cool to care” edge lord just like them, right? Do you think the disenfranchised people enjoy watching others debate whether or not they should have the right to exist and feel safe? How would you feel if one day the island natives have a healthy debate about whether you should live or die?” Stephanie then stormed out.
Needless to say, I was not in a good mood that evening. I took it out on the students playing survivors while I was playing as a killer on Dead by Daylight. After getting slaughtered the students were not happy. “AJ, why were you tunneling me?”
A student named Benny asked after I sacrificed him within fifteen minutes. I thought that was rich coming from Benny, who, as a killer, only played Leatherface and Facecamp-ed all his victims the entire match. My response was snarky. “Benny, why don’t you try hiding like the other survivors instead of running around the map like a decapitated chicken?” The other students laughed. Benny didn’t respond right away, which made me feel kind of bad. Benny eventually responded after about two minutes. “I can’t wait to eat your liver, AJ.” My heart dropped to the floor. Did Benny just threaten me? I was waiting for the other students to call him out on that comment, but they were silent. After about thirty seconds, Benny continued, “I bet your liver tastes delicious, AJ. I bet it is so sweet and juicy I won’t even need a chili sauce.” The day after, I tried to spin that whole experience as a teachable moment. I decided the next class lecture was going to be about influential people and why people are so divided over them.
I listed some controversial ‘a hero to some, a villain to others’ figures for them.
Che Guevara Napoleon Edward Snowden
Hoping to have some more healthy debates. But the students do not have strong enough opinions about the figures that were so distant in relevance to them.
So, I did something that was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I asked them about the island's liver-eating hero, Sur-Linyao. Benny said that there’s nothing controversial about Sur-Linyao unless some douchebag wants to sympathize with the genocidal colonists he slaughtered.
I reminded Benny that if someone were to hear his comments in the previous class, they could accuse him of sympathizing with sexist racist homophobic Nazis too. Like an arrogant idiot, instead of leaving it at that, I decided it was healthy to hit them with some truth about Sur-Linyao.
Sur-Linyao was a horrifying villain to the islanders before the colonists arrived. He was a pirate after all. Sur-Linyao would regularly pillage several villages on the island, killing several innocent people in the process. Seeing the six-dots triangle jolly-roger from the distance must have been a nightmare for the islanders at the time.
And Sur-Linyao didn’t kill the colonists out of the goodness of his heart. There were pieces of evidence that showed Sur-Linyao worked with the colonists for years, and in the end, betrayed the colonists just because he wanted to rob them. Benny shook his head. He told me that several people in this class were direct descendants of Sur-Linyao, including him. I chuckled, thinking that he just WISHED he was a descendant of Sur-Linyao. But Benny said he could prove it.
More than half of the male students in the class stood up. They slightly tilted their head down but their eyes kept on looking forward, staring at me. Suddenly, their tongue started to slither out of their mouth. The tongues were too long, longer than a foot, but it was not the length that unsettled me, but the way it wiggled out of each of their mouth as if they were separate creatures. I was horrified looking at the dozen students standing in front of me, staring at me with their long tongues dangling out.
Benny then said, “Do you know what the six-dots triangle means, AJ? It means that the man seeing it was about to lose his liver.” I always parked my car a bit further away from the school because I didn’t want to fight with other faculty members over the parking space underneath the building. Besides, I didn’t mind walking a bit since there was a nice view of the ocean. As I was getting out of the car, I saw that someone painted the six-dots triangle on an abandoned water tank in the middle of the field. It was new, I didn’t see it the day before. And I was more than certain it was meant for me to see. No one parked where I parked and the surrounding area was abandoned.
I went and told the school administrator about this. They said that the six-dot triangle symbol was a symbol of Sur-Linyao who has pictures all over the island, including that symbol on his forehead.
It was not an intimidation symbol like a swastika and that I should relax.
Frustrated, I went back to my dorm. The view from my balcony was almost great, but there was a weird Ferris wheel-like structure blocking part of it. I didn’t even know what the circular structure was, but there seemed to be a bunch of neon light bulbs attached to it. I hoped it never got turned on or else I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
As I went into my closet, I found a T-shirt that was not mine. On it was a phrase, ‘I’m the Other White Meat’ on it. Why was this in my closet? Did the dry cleaner mix in someone else’s clothes with mine? Who would dry clean a T-shirt? I realized then that my room may have been broken into.
I was nervous and scared out of my mind. Am I being targeted or am I just overreacting? Is the entire island gaslighting me, or was it just Benny and his friends? Heck, it could have been Stephanie doing this, trying to teach me a lesson.
I opened Discord to see if some of my students want to play some games, but none of them were online, at least not in the group chat I set up. Some of them changed their profile picture to a six-dot triangle, including Benny.
That evening, I went to a gas station to fill up my car. As I was just about finished, I saw a truck coming down a steep hill, heading straight into the station. It was an old truck, but an intimidatingly large one, and loud. Then, I saw the six-dot triangle symbol painted on the side of the truck.
Logically, I shouldn’t have panicked. The symbol was a symbol of the island’s folk hero and the gas station is brightly lit and full of people. But out of nowhere, this feeling of dread overwhelmed me. The hair on my arm just rose straight up. I felt chills as if something was telling me to get out of the gas station now. I trusted my instinct and quickly started my bike and bolted out of there.
The next day, I walked past a hallway where a colleague named Beth was putting up a poster made by her students. The poster was showcasing English words that came from French. For some reason, there were also photos of faculty members floating alongside words like “Garage”, “à la carte”, and “Cache”.
I stopped in my track when I saw my photo with the word, ‘Foie Gras’ underneath it.
That word and my picture seemed so out of place being in its own little corner on the poster. I almost had a panic attack right there. Another threat? Are you kidding me? I thought. Beth asked me what was wrong. I decided to tell her.
That evening, I went to have dinner with Beth and her husband Jan on the beach. Just three White expats talking. I told them about what I had been experiencing in the past few days. The three dotted symbols painted where I parked, the comment from the student made on the game chat, the mysterious T-shirt, the racial profiling, all of it. “You are being very racist,” Beth said right at the very second I had just realized that I never really liked her.
She continued, “Don’t you get it, AJ? The students are threatening to eat your liver because they know you are a racist white man who thinks they were going to eat your liver. Kids will always try to exploit what they think the adults are afraid of. It’s your fault for showing them your cards.
Have you ever been outside of the States before? Do you not know how to be a minority? You came to an island paradise with so much special privilege but you suddenly have a male Karen racist nervous breakdown moment because you think that your teenage students are going to eat your liver? Quite frankly, I am very disappointed in you."
Her husband Jan tried to save the mood of the dinner. “So AJ, what are your plans for when the island shut off the power on July 7th?”
For one day every year, the island shut off all electricity for maintenance. Nothing electronic will work on that day, most importantly the ATM and the Internet. People, even the island natives, would go to the mainland for one day. There’s a problem with that idea. The ferry itself takes 3 hours to reach the mainland. And, with so many people thinking of doing the same thing, the line at the dock will be extremely long, both to the mainland in the morning, and back from the mainland in the evening.
For the last two years, I rode out the annual power outage by just chillaxing on the island. But this year, a Facebook post by Benny made me reconsider.

“I just want to say, my favorite teacher is AJ. He surely delivered. And soon I will de-liver him.”

Jan said that he and Beth will drive their speedboat to the mainland, which is 5 times faster than the ferry. They are also taking the rector with them. Judging from the way Beth glared at me, I don’t think she will say yes if I asked her if I could come too.
On the day of the power outage, I waited almost five hours in line to get my car onto the ferry. The ticket machine no longer works so everything was written on a notecard with pen and paper, which I found amusing. When the ticket man came to my car. He said to me that I have to wait for the next one. I looked at the ferry and it was not even half full. I asked him why and he pretended to suddenly not understand English.
I looked in my rearview mirror and then saw it, the truck with the six-dot triangle painted on its side only three cars behind me. How did it get there? I didn’t see it behind me before. I realized then that the truck wanted to get on the next ferry with me. I told the ticket holder that I will leave my car there and I will get on the leaving ferry with just me. Before he could say anything, I quickly maneuvered out of the line and parked in front of a cafe. The ticket boy said I couldn’t park there. I asked him if he owned the cafe, then quickly ran and jumped onto the suddenly departing Ferry.
After riding the ferry many times, I figured out that the top deck gave me the least motion sickness. I climbed up there and found a surprising person. Stephanie. She smiled at me, which made me so glad. I didn’t think what I did was something so bad that she would be holding a long grudge anyway. We made small talk, I asked her about what she was planning on doing for the day, etc. After a bit, I couldn’t help myself and showed her Benny’s Facebook post. I always thought she didn’t like Benny. I told her I was disappointed in him and was so shocked that he would threaten me like that.
I looked up at Stephanie and was shocked to see her eyes bulged out and her foot-long tongue dangling from her mouth. “Just like Voltaire, I may disagree with what Benny says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it." I was so scared, I backed away automatically. But, the teacher in me still corrected her and said that Voltaire didn’t say that. She laughed, “Good. Voltaire was a smart person. Only an idiot would say something like that.”
I moved down to the lowest level where the cars and the smoking passengers were. I tried not to fall asleep as I could feel the eyes of the other passengers staring at me.
The sound of people barfing almost made me want to barf myself. I went and sat on the edge of the front of the ferry. The wind blowing into my face did calm me a little. I was scared and frustrated. I wondered if I should just never go back to the island after reaching the mainland.
After looking at my watch and realizing that it had been three hours, I looked out the window and saw what made my soul leave my body. We were heading to the island? I didn’t even realize we had turned around.
I asked the ferry driver what was going on. He said there was a storm coming and he has to head back. Besides, it was already close to 5 PM, and the power should be coming back on soon.
I was extremely angry that I was about to be back on the island. Stephanie was nowhere to be found on the ferry also. Since I was farsighted, I could see the tires of my car were slashed.
There were also a couple of men standing there doing nothing, blocking my path toward my car. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that the natives were planning to do something to me. I was targeted and was about to be beaten or killed for whatever reason.
I surprised them all by jumping from the ferry before it was properly docked and sprinting in the opposite direction of where my car was. I climbed up the steep hills next to the road leading to the dock and disappeared into the woods The light was not coming back on and it was getting dark.
I was shaking in fear but I had to calm myself so I could think of the next move with a clear head. I wondered if Beth and Jan came back from the mainland yet. I could ask them to use their boat or at least hide me, and if they say no, at this point, I was at a level of desperation where I was willing to just cause chaos until they let me. On my way to their house, I had to pass my dorm. I considered going to gather some of my things until I saw something moving in the dark.
I almost peed my pants from fright when I saw a floating pair of eyeballs approaching my dorm. Despite everything else being in complete darkness, the eyes of a person and his dangling red tongue were glowing in the dark. I had never seen anything like this. Several more pairs of eyeballs and long red tongues emerged from the dark woods.
I couldn’t tell if the floating eyeballs and tongue belonged to Benny or any of my students, but they were right outside my dorm. As my eyes started to get used to the darkness and started to see shapes, I could see that they were each holding a machete. I quietly made my way to Beth and Jan’s house. When I got to their boathouse, there were flies everywhere. I tried to brush them away, but I could feel the thickness of the swarm. I felt like I was touching a bunch of floating chunks of meat.
I saw their boat at the dock. So did they come back? But why wouldn’t they turn on their boat’s light? I finally decided to use my phone flashlight to help me search for the boat key inside the boat house. I didn’t use my phone earlier because I was trying to conserve battery and also I didn’t want to draw attention to where I was. As soon as I shined the phone’s flashlight inside the boathouse, I was shocked to find the hacked-up heads of Beth, Jan, and the school’s rector covered in flies. Suddenly, I heard a wood creaking sound coming from outside. I quickly grabbed the boat key and jumped into the couple’s speed boat.
I hurriedly start the boat and just drove off, not caring about anything else. I used my phone’s compass to find the direction towards the mainland and I just kept going.
Suddenly, lights came back on the island. It shined brightly behind me as a nuclear bomb had just been detonated. I couldn’t help but look back, and then I saw it: a giant face formed by the neon lights, making the entire island look like it had a demonic face. The circular Ferris-wheel-like structure that was outside my dorm’s balcony was part of one of the giant face’s eyes.
I told myself to just ignore it and kept on driving. It was their world and they didn’t want me in it. I could do nothing but kept on going into the darkness.

Hey everyone I have a couple questions.. I will be taking the above drug test for a pre employment screening this coming Tuesday(2 days away) for a job in Iowa.
I am most worried about testing positive for THC. I stopped smoking April 24th (4 1/2 weeks ago) and I was a daily smoker (1-2 blunts a day) prior to stopping. I have bought some drug tests from dollar tree and my results are iffy(last week I had a faint neg line but now i’m testing positive again).
So my first question is does this test even test for THC especially for where i’m going?
Secondly if so do you guys have any tips? I’m going in between just buying synthetic pee or trying a detox drink like Qcarbo.
Thanks i’m advance for your help!

Any recommendations for where to get cheap city connect jerseys that look authentic? $150 is pretty steep.

Hi y’all
I’m moving to Bayonne in a few weeks and I started the mail forwarding process however I’m unable to get informed delivery anymore. I’m moving to a two-family house and I’m not sure if that’s part of it or because it’s not available in Bayonne? I’m moving from a building I’m currently in Jersey City. Has anyone else experienced this? Thanks!

Hi. I just came back from a two week trip. I lived in Osaka and Tokyo some years ago so this trip was really meeting up with old friends again and also going for some new adventures.
It's so affordable now (if you have USD, which is strong against the yen right). I ate and drank so well! I went to a lot of izakaya, tried various local and regional specialties (unagi around Hamamatsu, akafuku in Ise, for example). All for waaaayyyyy cheaper than what I spend at home in Philly or NYC.
I also did a bit of biking. In Japan you often get a mamachari, which is like "your momma's chariot", or a bike your Mom would ride. With a basket. But hey they're fun for just cruising around! I've decided biking around the countryside is one of my favorite travel activities.
The main idea of this trip was:

• Tokyo - catch up with friends and visit my favorite hang out places and restaurants.
• Hamamatsu - I went to a beach at 7am, rented a bike, and biked around the Lake Hamana area.
• I took three trains, two buses, and a ferry to Ise. Yes obviously it takes longer than shinkansen to Nagoya, but this is the scenic route lol.
• Going to Ise was about Ise-jingu, of course.
• One night in Nabari. I wanted to see Akame 48, where there are a bunch of waterfalls.
• Nara - last time I was there was 19 years ago. I spent just one day doing the usual stuff in Nara-koen and two days doing a bunch of other things on the outskirts.
• Osaka - it was great to be back, but mainly I was there to get shinkansen back to Tokyo.

Some more details:
Tokyo

• I splurged and stayed at the Shiba Park Hotel. Shiba Park is near Hamamatsu-cho, which is easily accessible from Haneda via the monorail.
• I went to a Kanda matsuri (festival) that involved people parading around omikoshi (portable shrine). They're really fun if you haven't seen. While there, by chance I came upon a kabuki theater and an usher convinced me to buy a ticket. Really colorful and dramatic.
• I hit up some museum favorites such as the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Ebisu (I used to live across the street) and Ōta Memorial Museum of Art in Harajuku (all ukiyo-e, which I love).
• Tip: if you are in Tokyo Station, have time to kill, and like art, there's a gallery near the north gate. Currently it's Japanese Paintings of Modern Osaka.

Hamamatsu

• Probably not on most people's radar. I took a local train to Maisaka, walked to the ocean, walked around more, and found a bike rental place in Bentenjima.
• Biked up to Hamanako Garden Park. It's all about flowers. Then biked farther up to Kanzanji-cho and ate some delicious unagi (eel).
• The city is not super exciting but the Museum of Musical Instruments is really cool. They have a room with instruments you can rock out on. I banged on a djembe and plucked a koto.
• As part of the scenic route to Ise, I took trains and buses out to Irago, then ferry across to Toba, and local Kintetsu train up to Ise.

Ise

• Stayed in a ryokan near the train station. The main thing here is Ise-jingu, the most sacred shrine in Japan, the holiest of holies. Took advantage of lingering jet lag to wake up early and get in at 6am. It opens at 5!
• The early morning hours are great. The main strip leading up to Geku wasn't that crowded even in the afternoon, although the main strip outside Naiku - okage yokocho - started to get busy after 9am.

Nabari

• A small town in Mie-ken. I had always heard about Akame 48, where there are supposedly 48 waterfalls. The day was totally rained out. I took a local train and then bus to the visitors center but the rain wasn't letting up. I had a long chat with a friendly young Japanese guy who worked there. He doesn't see many visitors lately so I think he was glad for the opportunity to chat.

Nara

• Stayed at a guest house near Nara-machi. This area is so cool - some tourists visit but still very local. Great for strolling around and checking out the shops. I did the usual Nara Park stuff for one day - Daibutsu, Nara National Museum, etc.
• I rented a bike and headed out to Toshodai-ji and Yakushi-ji. It's a slight trek but there's a small river you can bike along which was cool.
• I tried and failed to finish the yama-no-be-no-michi ("mountain area path"), as detailed in the LP book. I started too late and it was too hot. There are sign posts here and there but notably lacking where there are some forks in the road. You start from Tenri station and takes at least 30 minutes walking just to get to the start of the trail. Better planning next time.

Osaka

• Stayed at APA Hotel in Umeda, rented a bike and went out to the aquarium. That's a bit of a slog but still worth it. At night walked around the usual places like Shinsaibashi, Ame-mura, etc.
• I had time to kill before catching the shinkansen back to Tokyo so I rented a bike from the Shin-Osaka station and biked along the Yodo River. It's so nice - wide paths and great scenery.
• Tip: I was reminded of how confusing it is to navigate Umeda on the street. Don't bother. If you have to find a station or something, go underground and follow the signs!

Some expenses (USD):

• Airfare: $1500
• Hotel: $1200
• Food and drink: $700, which is simply amazing. And I ate so well!
• Transportation: $325
• Various activities: $300

Check out the photo album here
My takeaway: after traveling in many places, I continue to find that some of the best experiences are those unplanned. Any trip requires plans obviously, but with a little luck and a traveler's intuition, I'm getting better at arriving at those fun spontaneous moments.
Ask me any questions. Thanks for reading.