Holiday farms glen head weekly circular

Heading to Iceland in 2 weeks and will be there for a week. We are renting a car and plan to spend the first day in Reykjavik and then spend the rest of the time driving the ring road. We did decide against the Golden Circle due to time constraints in the southern region. Also important to note that we are open to flexibility with this schedule and aren’t rigid about making sure we hit all these stops — for example, if we enjoy a certain spot, we may choose to stay there longer and skip something else.
Day 1 —

• Waterfront walk to see Sun Voyager
• Hallgrimskirja and seeing Skólavörðustígur
• National Museum of Iceland
• Perlan OR Árbær Open Air Museum
• 2 hour puffin + whale watching tour
• Sky Lagoon

Day 2 —

• Seljalandsfoss and Gljufrabui
• Seljavallalaug Swimming Pool (quick stop)
• Skógafoss falls + museum
• Kvernufoss (optional add)
• Solheimasandur Plane Wreck (optional)
• Dyrhólaey peninsula + Kirkjufjara beach
• Stay in Vik

Day 3 —

• Eldhraun Lava Field
• Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon
• Skaftafell (planning to do a hike here, likely to see Svartifoss)
• Svínafellsjökull Glacier
• Hofskirkja church (quick stop)
• Jökulsárlón lake + glacier (50 min drive)
• Diamond Beach
• Vestrahorn Mountain + Stokksnes Beach
• Stay in Hofn

Day 4 —

• Sveinsstekksfoss waterfall
• Folaldafoss waterfall
• Fardagafoss waterfall
• Gufufoss waterfall
• Seydisfjordur town
• Modrudalur farm
• Mývatn nature baths
• Stay in Myvatn

Day 5 —

• Grjótagjá cave
• Hverfjall crater
• Dimmuborgir Lava field
• Goðafoss waterfall
• Akureyri (options here include Akureyri Art Museum, Laufas Turf Houses, Akureyri Botanical Garden, Safnasafnið museum)
• Stay in Akureyri

Day 6 —

• Kolugljufur canyon + falls
• Icelandic Seal CenteHvammstagi
• Settlement CenteBorgarnes
• Bjarnafass
• Snæfellsjökull View Point
• Búðakirkja church
• Stay in Budhir

Day 7 —

• Rauðfeldsgjá Gorge
• Arnarstapi + Hellnar cliffwalk
• Lóndrangar cliffs
• Djúpalónssandur beach
• Kirkjufell + Kirkjufellsfoss
• Blue Lagoon (optional)
• Stay in Keflavik, flying out the next morning

I am not The OOP, OOP is u/ThrowRA5998
I (32f) am invited to join a get together with 3 other women (f30+) and don't know how to behave/act
Originally posted to relationship_advice
Original Post Apr 4, 2023
Hello there
So I (32f) got invited to a get together with 3 other women (30+), their spouses (all m 30+) and their kids. Which sounds lovely, but is kinda my personal nightmare fuel right now.
3 years ago I moved in a very, very rural area for my soon-to-be ex-husband. Shortly after moving my car broke down and I didn't had the money for a new one. Since then I practically stayed at home all day. The only time I'm out of the house is to bring my son to kindergarten, bring him home or when I need some groceries that I can buy in the very small shop here in the village.
My social interactions were limited to some info exchanges with the teachers, sometimes another parent who wanted small talk or the lady at the bakery who likes to gossip. Making friends was hard as everyone here seems to always be busy.
6 months ago I met this woman who we will call Jane. I don't talk to her on a daily basis and we haven't exchanged numbers. She works at this small shop. Everytime I buy something there we would chat a bit and last week Jane invited me and my son to just have a fun day with her, 2 of her friends, their spouses and the kids. I accepted.
This get together is next week and I'm constantly going from excitement to panic to pure joy to mentally exhaustion. I've been kept locked up by my soon to be ex for 3 years. I have no clue how someone behaves around others. What are topics to talk about? What topics to avoid? Do you still shake hands when you meet someone new? Do I bring gifts? These and more questions are constantly on my mind.
I would love to have some friends and I don't want to ruin it. To be fair I thought I ruined it already a month ago. She did me a favor and as a thank you I baked her some cookies. I handed them to her while doing a bow like someone would bow to a princess and said "I couldn't do [favor], so the least I can do is bake". She smiled but I wanted to run away as fast as possible.
I'm so awkward and just don't know how to be normal anymore.
I appreciate every advice even if it's just a "don't pick your nose". I'm desperate.
Thank you for reading
RELEVANT COMMENTS
fraserfraser

You sound genuinely lovely and these people will be lucky to have you in their lives!
I find the best topics of conversation in social situations are often the most basic…you just ask people how their week is going and share stuff that's going on with you. It can seem awkward or banal at first but eventually you’ll find things that resonate.
Congratulations on leaving your ex who's kept you locked up(?!) and good luck with the next stage of your life.

OOP replied

Thank you so much! The basics sound good. I can do that without making awkward gestures. Should I ask her if I bring something? Baked goods or a salad or whatever? Or would that be rude since I was invited?
I don't know if locked up was the right wording. Turns out he had money on the side and could have helped me with a car. He also had always something planned when I wanted to meet someone. He basicly ruined upcoming friendships for me. And he insisted to buy groceries after work, so I couldn't even do the big grocery shopping and get a change of scenery. I'm glad he's out of my life

Update May 31, 2023
I don't know how to link to the original post. I'm sorry
Thanks to those who gave me advice. It helped me a lot!
I talked to my therapist about everything and she basicly said the same as the commenters "Be you. Be quirky. Who wants only boring friends when you could have someone who brings sunshine and fun into your day!"
So first things first: the get together was cancelled. One of the women broke her leg and everyone agreed to schedule it after she is fine again.
The day after my post I asked Jane if I could have her number. Still awkward I told her I won't call or write too much and I would contact her for the get together only. She laughed a sweet laugh and told me to contact her whenever I feel like to talk about whatever I want. She would be happy, because she conciders me a friend. In my head I was shrieking like a fan girl!
As we talked and texted for some days she asked me if she could give a friend of hers my number. This friend is the other women from their group (not the one with the broken leg). Shortly after agreeing an unknown number texted me and introduced herself as "Hanna". She didn't beat around the bush and asked me if I wanted to come to her WEDDING! I asked if she was sure about that, because a wedding is for family and friends. She wrote "I am married already, but we didn't have a party. It was in the courthouse. We want to say our vowes again and celebrate with loving people around us. Family and friends. And, well, maybe we could be friends"
We texted for a while and she told me how good Jane speaks of me, that Hanna herself is a bit quirky and she would love to have another quirky friend. I accepted the invitation.
She told me the wedding will be at her farm and she's looking forward to meet me and my son there. She also was very understanding of my sons ARFID and has no problems with me bringing some snacks for my son. I promised to bring more so he could share if another kid wants some.
All in all I'm happy to meet new people soon and maybe make some (more) friends. And the best part for now is texting with two lovely women whenever they have free time (they are both busy people).
I'm glad I posted on reddit. It kind of gave me a confidence boost and I was able to ask Jane for her number. All I've experienced since then was pure happiness and joy.
Thank you again for reading!
RELEVANT COMMENTS
mittenminute

I am so proud of you for putting yourself out there! I empathize with you, I have always struggled to know how to behave around other women, especially when I really want to befriend them. You have broken the ice beautifully and it sounds like Jane and Hanna are kind and welcoming people - I hope you enjoy the wedding and that these new friendships flourish!

OOP replied

Thank you so much! I still have a lot of work to do regarding myself. I still look at someone, think I would like to talk to that person and then beat myself up with thoughts like "They have enough friends already" or "Out of my friendship-league". Take my virtual hug. I'll cheer you on! You can do it!

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khantroll1

You have no idea how much this story of someone over 30 making friends made my day! Seriously a ray of sunshine! Congrats!

​

(There is absolutely no /s in this. As someone over 30, I firmly attest that making friends post college is difficult for the "quirkier" of us)

OOP replied

Thank you so much! It really is different. In school you see others almost daily and just decide it works. And now you have to schedule work, appointments, family etc on both sides to have time.

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THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP

Hello all!
Currently on a bit of a roadtrip, and right now on the southwestern leg. After hitting some of the major canyons (Grand, Bryce, and today Zion), I'm heading west tomorrow. My destination is washington (for a farm job starting in a few weeks)
Diiiiddn't realize so many of the routes through Cali are still closed from snowpack. So it looks like I'll be taking rt 88 through the Sierras. Planning on hiking and camping in the El Dorado national forest region for a few days - while I am glad I hit those "bucket list" canyons... in general I prefer forest service land to formal parks - less crowded, and less managed / groomed.
That being said... Idk for sure I'll ever find myself back in this area, and it seems like a shame to miss Yosemite.
But it... also seems like a huge shame to backtrack hundreds of miles, and burn a ton of gas (and cash).
Thoughts?

This is a long story. These events happened over the span of a year and there's also a lot of build up before we get into the drama. Bear with me, but context is needed for some of these incidents.
When I was 22 my sister's house got flooded from a hurricane. She, her husband, and our family all pitched in to fix it up. It was a beautiful, but expensive, remodel. Just before the remodel was complete my sister and her husband decided that they were going to move to florida because her husband received a job opportunity. I was crushed, especially since my nephew had just turned 1 and they were pregnant with their second. Since the remodel cost so much money they were hoping to make a little extra money every month by renting it out. They first asked if I would be interested in renting it. I jumped at the opportunity and was really thankful that they trusted me. I found the first 2 roomates pretty swiftly, they were students in the same college as me and we were pretty good friends already. We'll call them Nick and Sarah. Since it was a 4 bedroom 2 bath house we still needed one more roommate but most of our mutual friends weren't in a position to move out. Enter Britney. Britney was a graduate from the same major just a year or so prior. We knew her enough to think she was a good candidate as a roommate. She seemed nice and responsible and given that she was a couple years older we thought she would be flowing with maturity. There was no indication that she would end up being a complete piece of shit.
It was understood from the beginning that I would take the master bedroom since I was essentially "head of the house". I would be the one in contact with the landlords and making sure we were keeping up with the house. Nobody had an issue with this. We all contributed to the house furnishings. I brought a love seat and kitchen stuff from home, sarah brought a reclining couch, Nick brought a dining table and chairs, and Britney brought the fucking audacity. Everything else we needed we bought together and split the costs.
Because I had the primary bedroom I also had a private bathroom. I made it very clear that they could use the bathroom at any point, even if i wasn't home. My only ask was that if I was home or in my room that they would first ask/knock on the door. but if I wasn't home, it was fair game. I trusted my roommates completely and it would've been unfair if I made 3 people share one bathroom.
We moved in in February. The first month or so went well. There were no hiccups, we all seemed to be getting along great. To make things easier and more organized I created a chore chart that evenly divided the chores between the 4 of us. This was going to ensure everyone was doing their part to keep the house clean. I also made magnets with our initials on them to use for laundry days. If you wanted to do laundry, you'd have to take your magnet and place it on the day you want to do laundry. You would have that whole day to do laundry. Chores were color coded and if your name was written in a color that would be your chore for that day. It was incredibly detailed, and some may say I am really controlling for this system but it's what I thought would be the best way to delegate and make sure everything was fair. Nobody really complained about it either.
In April Britney said she was interested in gardening and having a few house plants. We were all for it, even I wanted to have a few plants. She had three small herb plants on the windowsill above the sink and it never would've been an issued if she knew how to take care of them. Unfortunately, after a while she started to over water them and gnats became a problem in the house. I told her that her plants were attracting gnats in the house and that she needed to find a way to plant them outside. I suggested she buy one of those tin tubs and start a garden in it that she could have outside. She got super pissed and offended that I would tell her how to spend her money. She even refused to accept that her plants were causing the gnats and blamed it on the trash. I even asked her to move the plants into her room if she didn't want to plant them outside and she blatantly said no. I didn't want to make a bigger deal about it so I just let it go. Eventually she stopped over watering the plants and the gnats went away.
In May chores began falling behind. It wasn't one person's fault, it was everyone's. We were all guilty of not doing what we were supposed to do. I called for a house meeting and I thought i was being empathetic and kind about the situation, since I myself was also falling behind. I wasn't trying to single anybody out and said we all needed to get back on top of our chores. Britney threw a fit and screamed that she had been doing chores and that she didn't need to be part of this meeting. She called us all dirty pigs and singled Sarah out for being the first one to ignore her kitchen night. It was incredibly rude and factually incorrect. At this point i began to realize Britney would never take accountability. I'd also like to say that the kitchen chore consisted of unloading the dishwasher in the morning and making sure it was loaded and started before bed. It was up to each person using the kitchen to clean up after themselves.
Jump to July. July I threw a party, which was approved by everyone else. It was for 4th of july and we invited friends from school. Since the majority of our guests were mutual friends between me, nick and Sarah we told Britney she could invite her own friends. She thanked us but ultimately had to work that night anyway. Since she wasn't going to be there we didn't require her to pitch in for the party. We bought stuff for burgers, hot dogs, popsicles, a few different alcoholic beverages and stuff to make various dips. We encouraged our guests to bring they're own alcohol or desserts. It was a good party. Halfway through Britney came home earlier than expected and even brought friends to the party. We hadn't anticipated or planned for them but weren't going to turn them away. They drank other people's beer without asking, helped themselves to chips and dip and leftover hot dogs. It wouldn't be that big of a deal if it weren't for them drinking other people's beer. the next morning Me, Sarah and Nick were cleaning up and we all thought that since Britney and her friends came to the party that she should chip in for both the clean up and the cost. She pretty much told us to fuck off and that her friends didn't eat anything from the party....Yeah. There's that audacity.
September: this story is actually kinda funny but still a testament to how shitty she was. I was at home in the dining room doing a project for a class. I needed a wide table space so I was using the dining table. Britney brings her boyfriend over, we exchange a few hello's and they go to her room. Her door is only 10 feet away. They start playing loud country music from her room and I literally am just like "Jesus, how inconsiderate can you be. It doesn't need to be that loud" Well 5 minutes later I find out why they're playing loud ass music. I start hearing her bed hitting against the wall as well as my roommates moans. I'm sitting there in the dining room, gluing magazine pictures to a poster board, and involuntarily listening to my roommate get railed. I am dumbfounded. Flabbergasted. Gobsmacked! And suddenly I just hear a loud crisp *SMACK*. At this point I am mortified. And I have no idea how she wasn't. when they finally emerged from her bedroom 10 minutes later I couldn't even look her in the eye.
In October Britney decided to host her own party, a halloween costume party. We were all game for it and she said we could invite a few of our own friends but that ultimately it was her party and she wanted it to be mostly her friends. We understood, we had our own party in july, she can have hers and we'll just invite our closer friends. We even pitched in for the alcohol and snacks. But there was one rule. No weed on property. That's a stipulation in our lease. No weed. But of course, in true Britney fashion, she completely disregards the rules and brought weed to the party anyway. Even if she didn't bring it, it was her responsibility to tell her guest to put it away. I didn't say anything to my sister, I let it slide because as much as we were beginning to hate Britney we also needed that 4th roommate. But it certainly came in handy later on.
In November me and Sarah bought a gold fish. The lease did say no pets but I don't really view a gold fish as a pet since...it literally doesn't do anything or bring any harm to the house. The fish died a few days later anyway so no harm done except to our hearts. RIP Sushi. A few days later Britney comes home with a whole ass baby bearded dragon. They are cool and since I had a fish I let this slide. Afterall. how much damage could a bearded dragon do? WELL!!!! LET ME TELL YOU! I was sitting in the living room one day watching tv and out of the corner of my eye i see a bit of movement on one of our baseboards. I get a closer look and I see it's a small baby grasshopper. I kill it and as I'm walking to the trash i see another. then another, and another and so on. Our house is INFESTED with these tiny baby grasshoppers that I know are used as food for bearded dragons. I know because the kid I nanny also has a bearded dragon. I remember finding these baby grasshoppers all over the fucking house, some dead but most were alive. In our rooms, in the common areas, the bathrooms, EVERYWHERE. I sent pictures of the dozens of piles i swept up of these grasshoppers and I sent them to Britney and said "Just so you know, your bearded dragons grasshoppers somehow got out". And you would think that a logical response from a decent human being would be "Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I don't know how that happened. I'll come home ASAP to help clean up" but no. This bitch is a narcissist incapable of doing anything wrong and she responds with "Those are from outside. They're too big to be for my bearded dragon" I literally laughed outloud to myself. This was it. This was the straw that broke the horses back. Sweet and docile me broke and said "I'm not fucking stupid. They are tiny and I know they are for your pet. The boy I nanny has these for his dragon too. Come home and help clean this bullshit up"
Britney was also notorious for leaving her laundry in the washers and dryer past her laundry day. And it seemed to always effect Nick's laundry day because he would be nice and let her finish. But he had enough. So at exactly midnight he went to the laundry room, pulled her damp clothes out of the dryer and dropped them at her door in the hallway on the floor. I'm sorry but i was dying of laughter at his pettiness. We had all been tired of her antics and bullshit and it was fun having a little bit of payback. However, I will say Nick took it a step too far and banged on her door and shouted "Not your laundry day anymore bitch!" Britney's boyfriend came out and he and Nick started yelling at each other. I swear I thought a fight was seriously going to break out. I broke it up, told Britney she needed to adhere to the rules of laundry day just like the rest of us and Nick apologized for startling her. Everyone went to bed. THE NEXT MORNING, tensions are high between Nick, Britney and her boyfriend. The boyfriend, we'll call him Dick for funsies, got up in Nick's face for no reason at all. Nick was livid and asked me to reach out to to my brother in-law. My brother-in-law banned Britney from having her boyfriend over since he was creating a hostile environment and it wasn't fair to Nick since he was the one paying to live there. And if she didn't like it she could leave. She didn't and she adhered to the rule, for a time.
In December my sister and her husband came to town to do some work on the house to get it ready to be sold. We had known for a few weeks now that they were selling so we were working with them and the realtors to keep the place neat and tidy for house tours. It wasn't ideal but we understood. I'm in the living room playing with my new niece while my BIL is working on the A/C unit and who walks in? Britney and her boyfriend. Oh the joy that spread across my face in that moment. Britney and Dick went to her room and I looked at my BIL and said "that's her boyfriend". in that moment she and dick started to leave and my BIL walked out after them and gave her her official eviction notice. OH SWEET SWEET JUSTICE! Or so we thought. Britney's mommy called my BIL and begged him not to kick her out. her reason? She didn't want her to come back home. LMFAO. My BIL gave her one more chance to clean up her act but the rest of us weren't having it. We didn't care that holidays were coming, we wanted her gone. So I told him about her october party and the weed and he finally put his foot down and evicted her for real.
Unfortunately things didn't get better overnight. Britney was given a week to move her stuff out and turn in her key. One of the first things she took? Believe it or not, the outdoor trashcan (Which we all paid for) and in our city, the garbage collectors won't pick up trash unless it's in a bin. So for TWO WEEKS the city didn't pick up our trash and we had to verbally fight with Britney to get the trashcan back. It was absolute bullshit and I never wanted to strangle someone before. Not only that, but the plants she had sitting on the windowsill above the sink had papertowels sitting underneath them to absorb access water. When she removed them I saw how fucked up and bubbled the window sill had become from water damage. But at least the demon had finally been cast out and we were able to enjoy our last month in the house without her.
We never spoke or heard from Britney again...thank God.

TLDR;; my best friend Claire* is in a relationship with a violent alcoholic, Emily* and I don't know how to help her see that she needs to leave.
I (f26) have been best friends with Claire* (f26) for 13 years, we have been through a lot together during this time. Claire met her now wife Emily* (f40) a little over a year ago and at first I got along with her fine. Emily has 2 children (8 & 6) from a precious marriage. Claire does not have any children.
Things seemed to be going well for the first few months until Claire disclosed to me one day, that Emily drinks a lot and that when they argue when Emily has been drinking, Emily becomes abusive physically and verbally. She told me that Emily had punched her in the head on 2 separate occasions and kicked Claire out the house numerous times. Claire has never retaliated or become violent or verbally abusive toward Emily.
Upon this revelation, I told Claire that she was experiencing domestic violence and that she needed to leave the relationship because it would only get worse and she deserved better than the way she was being treated. Claire expressed she was afraid to leave as she couldn't imagine not being able to see the children again and that they were the only reason she was still in the relationship. She explained she wasn't afraid of Emily, but was afraid of losing the children.
Fast forward a couple of months and Claire proposed to Emily. Emily said yes and the wedding planning began.
Claire told me things were better, and that Emily had not been abusive since she had quit drinking and Claire was prepared to continue the relationship with hopes things would continue to get better now than Emily had her drinking problem under control.
12 months after first dating, the wedding came around. Before I walked Claire down the aisle, she asked me if she was making the right decision, I told her only she knew the answer to that and reiterated that I would support any decision she makes. The night seemed to be going well until late in to the night when Emily was getting more intoxicated. An argument broke out between Emily's sister and Claire's sister and whilst Claire and myself were trying to defuse the situation, Emily came inside and it was as though something in her just switched and Emily started hurling out verbal abuse to everyone, Claire tried to calm Emily down saying things like "it's okay babe, I've asked them both to leave, let's just go outside and enjoy ourselves" etc. Next thing Emily punched Claire straight in the face and I saw red. I told her to never lay her hands on Claire again and then Emily turned on me and tried to physically attack me. Claire asked me to please leave saying she was so sorry and she would talk to me in the morning. I left. As I now know, Emily continued her rampage, not only hitting Claire again, but also her own cousin and her best friend after I had left. All of this in front of her 2 young children.
The next morning Emily claimed to not remember any of the events of the night. I saw Claire a few weeks later and again explained to her that Emily's behaviour was in no way okay and that Claire should not tolerate it and needs to leave as it is a toxic and dangerous relationship. Claire was appreciative of my honesty and knows that she will only ever get that from me. She stated she they were going to go to a relationship counsellor and Emily was again going to quit drinking. Claire told me that nothing would affect our friendship and she always wants me to be honest with her and that my opinion would always be the most important to her.
It's been a couple of months and they're on holiday together and in photos I can see that Emily is still drinking. I am afraid that Claire won't confide in me if things get volatile again, now that she knows I have strong thoughts about their relationship. Claire and my relationship hasn't seemed to be affected aside from seeing each other less regularly but we still talk via text often. Emily has deleted me off all social media.
I have asked her what advice she would give me if the roles were reversed and she said the same things I have I said.
I'm afraid that Emily's gaslighting and manipulation is going to drive a wedge between mine and Claire's friendship. I've never been in a situation where I have absolutely despised a friends partner before and it's a horrible feeling.
Thank you if you have made it this far, I don't know else what to do to get Claire to see that she deserves so much better than she situation she is in. Any advice??

She still messages me. We went through a 7 month toxic break up as she just gave me mixed signals of love, hate, sex, rejection and all sorts of mixed. We had an argument as she was mix signalling so much to the point that my friend got involved without me knowing. This was 2 weeks ago. I decided enough was enough and went into no contact. She’s on holiday right now posting sexy bikini pictures. It’s my birthday today and she sent me a lovely text. Then at around midnight so 2am her time she asks where I went for my birthday meal. I am there thinking why is she contacting me. It’s torture. I want her and only her but she wants me as a friend that she can share all her intimate info with until she probably (although I do not know) finds some other guy.
The bottom line is that I have done very well for two weeks. I am in agony and pain and heartache. She has started following new guys on socials and beginning to hate life. I saw a sunset today and really only thought about her as I love and miss her like crazy to the point I am smashing my head against a table in frustration. Would it be acceptable maybe next week when the dust has settled from her holiday to message her the sunset photo I took and tell her how I feel even though she has rejected the idea of us being together a few times.

To begin, two major changes need to be made to both FTWD and TWD. Firstly, Travis is shot in the neck, and he does throw himself out of the helicopter, but he survives by landing in a river. Secondly, in TWD, Carl doesn't die. Instead, Morgan sacrifices his life in some grand gesture, and his final plea is for Rick to end the war.
My Reasoning:

1. Not only was Travis' death sudden and absurd, but it also ruined any potential he had to become an excellent character. In my version, Madison and Co are still pushed forward by news of his "death," killing two birds with one stone and allowing for a myriad of interesting possibilities.
2. This allows TWD to continue closer to how it did in the comics, a way I find much more narratively satisfying, and doesn't allow Morgan to crossover--thus stopping FTWD from becoming the "Morgan and Friends Show". (Maybe he can die saving Carl--bringing his character arc of not being able to protect Duane full circle.)

These are not entire seasons. These are simply general ideas. P.S. - Reading this in one sitting might make it feel like a breakneck pace, but just try to picture your own episodes within these seasons.
SEASON 3
With Travis now alive, it allows season three to play out basically the same, until the mid-season finale, where Travis would reveal himself as alive. From there, we would get a Travis-centric episode like we did with Daniel, showing how he stitched up his own neck wound and lived in the wilderness until he was found by Walker's people. As someone else said on this sub, this would open up the possibility of Travis being a bridge between the two people groups.
Because of his siding with Walker, we could get a very interesting dynamic between Travis and the other Clarks, specifically Madison. Story beats would have to change, but this will help the overarching story overall. For my purposes, Travis (while with Walker's people) would revert to his more pacifist self as he was in seasons 1 and 2. However, this would not change his tendency for violence, which he would struggle with during the duration of the season. Luciana still leaves, Daniel is still shot by Strand, Madison still kills Troy, and Nick still destroys the dam.
TLDR: Travis survives his gunshot wound and becomes a bridge between the two communities. The rest of the season's events basically play out the same, with obvious changes.
​

SEASON 4

The dam has exploded. And after a minor time skip, we meet up with our crew: Madison, Alicia, Nick, and Travis, who are hiding out in an abandoned gas station. You see, while the dam is gone and quite a few of the Proctors with it, they're still everywhere; searching for the people who tried to wipe them out. In a hail-mary attempt, the Clarks flee up north, leaving Mexico and hopefully the Proctors by heading into Texas. They all assume Daniel and Strand are dead, and whatever sense of morality they had at the ranch has now completely been lost. They are ruthless to both walkers and people, both of which they find plenty of in the Texas plains.
One of the main relationships I want to grow in this season is between Nick and Travis. While they did interact in the other seasons, it was to a very small extent--most of Travis' time was spent with his own son Chris. But with Travis' brutality more or less returning, and Nick no longer being the fun-loving and adventurous 19-year-old we knew, they grow closer--two men who have lost their innocence and themselves to the apocalypse. Nick will become the son Travis never had. But as they grow closer, so do Madison and Alycia. However, it's not a paternal healthy bond, it's Alycia trying to live up to the "Golden Child" standard she's kept for herself. With Madison's tendency to care more about Nick becoming ever more obvious, Alycia is driven by a need to please her mother--something that will eventually tear the family apart. But for all intents and purposes, the Clarks are the strongest they've ever been.
After a few episodes of traveling through Texas, they are stopped by three members of a Biker Gang (think Hell's Angels or Sons of Anarchy). They try to intimidate our crew into giving up what little supplies they have, but with a single look from Madison, two of the bikers are dead and the other is nearly beaten to death. Travis argues they take the bikes and leave, but Madison suspects they have a camp nearby--and after a torture session performed by Travis, she's told that she's right. They are led to the Dell Diamond Baseball Stadium, which the Bikers call home. After an initial standoff, our crew is let in. Everyone is wary of these Bikers, but after only a little while, they quickly integrate into the group. Travis fits right in with the rough-and-tumble men, Alycia is praised for what little medical skill she has (which she uses to heal the tortured Biker, named Cole), Nick becomes a valuable asset for what the Bikers do, and Madison quickly rises up the ranks.
You see, these Bikers are like the Saviors. They run a protection racket. But instead of Negan's view of people: that they're a resource to be maintained, the Bikers simply destroy whoever doesn't bend to their will. However, there's a major problem: both manpower and bullets are hard to come by in the apocalypse, especially when they kill whoever disobeys them. But that's where Nick fits right in. With his skill with the walkers, he dons the blood and guts once more, using it to lead entire walker hordes into stubborn communities. They've found another new home. But as Travis and Madison make clear, it is not permanent.
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All seems well until word begins to spread amongst the Bikers. Their pre-apocalypse rivals, the Proctors, have made their presence known. In a show of force, the leader of the Bikers takes most of his men out to meet with the Proctors. At the same time, a young girl named Charlie is let into the stadium. Nick becomes a surrogate older brother, and they grow close. But our group, of course now fearful, vote to remain at the stadium with a few other nameless civilians and a healing Cole. It's going to be a few days, so Madison and the family lock the stadium down. No one in or out. That's when the Vultures show up.
Like season four of FTWD, they're still a corny group of hippies, but our group has dealt with worse. Way worse. Madison and Travis leave the stadium to talk to the Vultures, while Nick and Alycia stay back with Charlie. However, the young girl is revealed to be a double agent, the one who let the Vultures know that the majority of the Bikers were leaving. She pulls a gun on Nick and Alycia just as Madison and Travis single-handily slaughter all of the Vultures. None are left alive. Hearing the commotion, mixed with fear and anger, Charlie shoots Nick. But Alycia, in a split second, kills Charlie.
Now dying of a gunshot wound, Alycia desperately begins surgery on Nick. Madison is purely focused on her son, but the weight of what they just did is finally beginning to set on Travis. Nick is treated just as the Bikers return, a majority of their numbers wiped out. We then get a Strand-focused episode, revealing how after the dam he was captured by Proctor John himself. But we see how he was unable to worm his way into a position of power within the Proctors. We get to see how the Proctors tracked our group all the way from Mexico, and how they had a massive battle with the Bikers we know, wiping most of them out. But the Bikers we know escaped, and the Proctors have followed them.
Out of both time and options, Nick sneaks away (still very much injured), his plans unclear. However, the Proctors show up, Strand at the helm. He's the spokesperson for the Proctors now, but a wrench is thrown in the plan for battle when he sees Madison and Alycia inside the stadium. Proctor John holds his attack too, realizing his chance for revenge is within his grasp. He then proposes a deal to the Bikers, saying that if given Madison and Co, they'll leave. This, of course, is a lie. The Bikers deliberate, with Cole being the main voice for trading them over. Travis tries everything he can to convince the Bikers to not hand them over, but realizes that being killed either by the Bikers or the Proctors isn't much of an option. Bound and gagged, the Clarks (minus Nick, who Madison fears for) are handed over.
Put on their knees and guns put to their heads, Strand tries to talk John out of it--trying to make him pause and think. But it's no use.
Just as bullets are about to be fired, a massive herd comes out of nowhere! Nick has led them all here, and being careful, he slips through the herd and unties his family. He tells them to do the guts trick, which they do, but for whatever reason, he turns back. As he moves through the herd, careful not to get shot or eaten, he finds Strand fighting for his life. Nick then steps in, helps him with the trick, and leads him to safety--but not before seeing Proctor John fighting the herd. It looks like he's winning; using a row of his soldiers to gun down the horde, until Nick sneaks up behind him and slits his throat. Now leaderless and surrounded, the Proctors and the Bikers are wiped out. Covered in guts and aimless, our crew leaves the stadium.
Weeks later, and after a few more misadventures, Nick goes out hunting. As he does so, he stumbles upon a man dressed like a cowboy, and sitting against a pickup truck: John Dorie. The same exchange happens, where John asks whoever is in the shadows if they would like to join him. Nick reveals himself, and it ends the same way as it did in the show, "So what's your story?"
TLDR: Madison and Co escape Mexico only to join up with a biker gang in an old baseball stadium in Texas. The Proctors return, old rivals of the Bikers, and a massive battle ensues. A group called the Vultures show up as the Bikers leave, and are quickly slaughtered by Madison and Travis. The Proctors come with Strand in tow, and after quick thinking from Nick, the family and Strand escape, while both the Bikers and the Proctors are wiped out by a herd of walkers. Nick then meets a man named John Dorie.
​

Season 5

John Dorie is what Morgan should have been for the Clarks: the exact opposite of what they are. While they're ruthless and cold, he's merciful and warm. His mission is simple: find his wife. And because of Nick's insistence (and Travis' persuasion of Madison), they decide to help him do so. He explains they separated several weeks ago, after meeting at his cabin and living there for the majority of the apocalypse. But he is far from incapable. In fact, he's the best shot of the entire group and anyone they ever come across.
Tensions however, are high. Madison of course doesn't trust John, and hates the influence he seemingly having on her son. She thinks that his kindness is weakness, and fights to keep her control over Nick.
Based on the evidence John gathered, his best guess is that his wife was abducted and taken north, into Colorado. With nowhere else to go, the Clarks travel with John north. Having entered Colorado, John soon catches a trail. He finds evidence of a camp with the same logo as he found before, that of a key. He feels that they're getting closer, and he turns out to be right, as they find a small community of survivors living inside an old motel. He wants to go in and talk, but Madison isn't risking it. Instead, and with much pushback from John, our main crew goes in guns raised.
Using a small herd of walkers Nick gathered, they take out the guards and quickly find the leader of the community. At gunpoint, the man explains that he's part of a network of communities under one woman, Virginia. They're called the Pioneers, and their goal is to make Colorado the beginning of a new United States. Madison, Alycia, and Strand laugh at the idea, but Nick and Travis are more open to it. After stealing supplies, weapons, and a vehicle, our crew moves on to find John's wife. Or so he thinks.
A few days later, our group finds another one of the settlements, an old ski lodge. This time, however, based on both Travis' and John's pleas, they go in as if they're just some survivors. As they are let in, they see that the lodge is heavily armed--a death sentence had they gone in guns blazing. They stay for a while, with Nick, Travis, and John warming up to the idea of a multi-settlement government. John finds out that his wife is at the capital of the settlement, Lawton. Eager to hit the road to see his wife again, he tells the group to get ready to head out. Madison, however, has no such plan. Nick argues they should go with him, but Madison argues that nothing like this could last and that it's likely all a lie. Madison and Strand want to take over the lodge, killing them all if it came to it. Travis is against it, his guilt driving him to try to stop murdering, but Madison's mind is unchanged. Survival at any cost is her plan now, and if a few nobodies have to die for it, so what? Madison is going to keep everyone together, no matter what. So, under the cover of the night, John and Nick sneak off the lodge grounds and leave.
In the morning, Madison sees they're both gone. Enraged, she prepares to go out and immediately find them until a massive snowstorm hits, forcing them to stay inside. For Nick and John, however, a test of will is what the storm becomes. Frostbite and starvation are mere days away, and they seem to be going in circles. Until a search party finds them. They're grabbed and treated as they are taken to the capital settlement. The search party wasn't for them, but for a young girl, but finding the men so close to death stopped the search. At least for now.
Back at the lodge, Madison is planning for a seize of power. People are anxious, and she has enough trust with the guards to grab some guns. But Travis stops her. He talks to her and looks at her as if she's a different person, something that seems to haunt her. They've grown apart, barely showing any physical affection.
At Lawton, Nick and John see that the settlement is large, larger than anything they've come across so far. They have large walls, farms, livestock, freshly constructed buildings, and people. Anxious to get to his wife, John meets with the mastermind behind it all: Virginia. But unlike the show, she's a genuinely kind woman. She really does want the best for people, and after some deliberation, John finally gets to see his wife. She explains that during her own supply run, she ran into the Pioneers needing help. She did, and they invited her to join. She left a note for John, telling him where to find her, but a massive herd forced them to leave early. It's a joyous moment and something that deeply saddens Nick, reminding him of Luciana.
Until he hears a voice, "Nick?" He turns around and sees Luciana standing behind him! They embrace, and she tells some story about how she found these communities. She apologizes for ever leaving him and promises to never do it again. And after this moment, Nick asks her to be his wife. She says yes, and he couldn't be happier.
Two weeks later, Madison, Travis, Alycia, and Strand are escorted to Lawton, where they reunite with Nick. He explains what happened, and in a seemingly hopeful moment, a wedding is held. Nick and Luciana get married, and all the while Madison plots.
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After five or six months, we see how the family has gotten used to this way of life. Nick and Luciana are happy and working together, Strand has become a high-ranking Pioneer, Alycia has become a rather skilled doctor, Travis has settled down with Madison (though they're still very distant), working the fields next to a small cabin, and John and his wife work as rangers. Life is good. It's peaceful. With all the communities working together, it can seem like anything is possible. But Madison isn't happy. She doesn't trust any of it. And neither does Strand. She believes that at any second, a revolt will happen. An enemy group will rise up. She feels the Pioneers are too trusting, too hopeful. She wants to keep her family safe, and she doesn't think Virginia can.
One day, a community-wide meeting is called, where all the heads of the communities will come together to discuss general going-ons and plans for the future. All the heads come to meet in an old courthouse, including Strand. That day, Madison asks Virginia to meet, and she raises her issues: how they are too trusting, and a severe lack of top-down control. Virginia assures her that those things will happen--in time, but not to rush them. Madison asks her if she will ever actually make those changes, and Virginia pauses before saying...no. Madison then pulls a gun and shoots Virginia in the head. As soon as the shot rings out, Strand leaves the main courtroom where all the heads of communities are, locks the doors, and starts a fire. In mere minutes, the entire courthouse is in flames, and everyone inside is dead.
Immediately, there is chaos, as people think it was an attack. Madison steps up, explaining that Virginia was killed, and the fire was started by anarchists. Strand then grabs a random man and drags him up to the stage where Madison stands. After making up some story about the man, she asks the people if the anarchist should live, and there is a resounding and furious flurry of "no's". She pulls out her pistol and executes the man to the horror of Travis, Nick, and John.
At night, Madison meets with John, as he's become a high-ranking ranger. He knows that that man was innocent, but Madison seems to have no remorse. She explains very calmly that he's going to help contain the chaos, or she will kill his wife. To his shock, Madison waits for a response. He finally sputters out that he'll help. She lets him go back home, knowing he'll do whatever she wants.
Then, she goes home to Travis, who's distraught. He knows everything that happened was staged, and that Strand was helping plan it from the beginning. He's enraged, but Madison remains calm, explaining that everything she did was to protect her family. Travis is beyond shocked, exclaiming that everything that was happening was protecting her family. She looks at him, cold as ice, and tells him that he's not her family. He's not blood. Nick and Alycia are all that matter to her. Travis is horrified and heartbroken--too stunned to speak. She walks over to him and explains that if all he is is against her, he's a danger to her family. She then grabs a nearby knife and stabs him in the gut. She looks away from his eyes as he gasps for air, and as she twists the knife deeper into his stomach. She rips the knife out and he collapses on the floor, dying. She watches him suffer, and just like that, both Travis and the Madison we knew, are dead.
TLDR: Madison and Co follow a good-hearted cowboy named John Dorie into Colorado in search of his wife. After a few altercations with this group's settlements, John reunites with his wife and Nick reunites with Luciana. Months later, Madison and Strand enact a plot to seize control of power. Madison kills Virginia, and Strand lights a building aflame with all head of communities inside. Madison then threatens John into working for her, and she kills Travis.
​

Season 6

"Travis was killed by the anarchists." That's the lie that's told. The one spread around. At his funeral, Nick is devastated, barely able to hold it together as he gives a speech. John is silent, suspecting that Madison is the one who killed him. She knows that he knows, but she doesn't care. She cries at the funeral. But just for a moment.
Thanks to John's help, the communities have calmed down. Order has been re-established. Madison and Strand have taken up leadership of the Pioneers, but they quickly ditch the key logos and outfits. The rangers are trained to be merciless--gone are the days of trusting new people. A new rule is established: kill on site. Thanks to this, the communities are stronger than ever. John lives in perpetual fear of Madison, worried that at any moment she'll claim his wife is a member of the Anarchists, and have her killed. In order to avoid this, he becomes a vital tool for Madison, doing anything she says.
Nick is deep in grief, numb to his now wife and the outside world...until Luciana breaks wonderful news: she's pregnant. Nick is shocked, but excited--ready to be the father his dad never was.
In the meantime, Madison uses John to round up people who would stand against her, and after planting evidence and calling them Anarchists, she has them executed. Her family and community is secure. It looks like no one can stand in her way--except one woman: Luciana. Now pregnant and fearful of the dangerous new woman in control of Lawton, she wants to leave with Nick. He argues that they need to stay, it's his mother after all, and that they can't keep running forever. But she sees the danger.
That night, Nick and Alycia and hanging out together when he proudly tells her Luciana is pregnant. Alycia is really happy for him, until Nick tells her that he's decided he's going to leave Lawton with her after she gives birth. At the same time, Madison goes to Nick's home and meets with Luciana. She plays up the whole "sympathetic mother figure" deducing rather quickly that Luciana is pregnant. Luciana then tells her that they'll be leaving soon, much to the dismay of Madison. She soon leaves once Nick returns, not acting as if she knows about the pregnancy and their plans.
The next day John offers to take Nick down to one of their outermost communities, a few days ride. He accepts, feeling on top of the world. At that time, a group of armed Rangers burst into Nick's home, searching the entire place. Luciana is confused, but she is quickly tackled to the ground. Then, they find what they're searching for: the same knife used to kill Travis. Dragged out of her home, she's thrown into a holding cell.
A few hours out from Lawton, John struggles with the immense guilt of something. Nick asks him what's wrong, and he finally explains that Strand told him to take Nick out of town for a few days while something happened. Fearing something really bad is going to happen, Nick races back to Lawton, with the help of John.
The knife is supposedly the one that killed Travis, and Luciana is scheduled for a public execution that same day. At the time of the execution, Luciana is brought up on the gallows, in front of public of view, and Strand gives a speech about order and safety. Madison is absent. Nick reaches the main gates, but is temporarily blocked. Using sheer adrenaline and channeling Travis, he fights off the two guards and races to the center of town to see Luciana, noose around her neck. He screams for them to stop, but with the crank of a lever, the trapdoor falls, and Luciana suffocates to death. Nick can't do anything as he falls over, weeping, saying, "She's pregnant...she's pregnant..." Alycia comes running from the Infirmary, unaware of what's happening. John finally makes it to the town square, and using his crackshot aim, shoots Luciana down. But it's too late. For whatever the reason, she turned fast, and John walks over and quietly puts an end to her reanimated self.
Nick is completely broken now. He lays in a ball on the ground, unable to move. Alycia attempts to comfort him, but he pushes her away. John walks over to him, attempting to apologize or make what he did right, but Nick snaps. Grabbing a knife off of Alycia, he stabs John is the gut, and begins to beat his face in. Alycia tries to stop him, but Nick kicks her away as he takes swing after swing, beating John nearly to death. Nick then stops, grabs John's rifle, and screams for Strand. Strand, still standing on the gallows, attempts to duck as Nick fires at him, hitting him in the shoulder with a bullet. Nicks keeps firing, until his gun clicks empty. He stands, surrounded by Rangers and civilians.
He's locked in a cell, fists bloody and eyes empty. Madison comes to the cell, trying to play innocence, until Nick grabs her by the throat. He squeezes, a fire lit behind his eyes. All the pieces fit together now. Everything. He begins to laugh hysterically, realizing it was his own mother who killed his pregnant wife. "You...you actually thought I would what--just fall back into your own arms? Be your own little "Nicky' again!?" He tightens his grip, but he's too good a man. He can't do it. He releases her, utterly defeated. Madison leaves, telling Strand that he'll come around.
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A long time later, months, years, we're not sure--somehow, Nick is out of the cell. It's wintertime in Colorado, and he's living in the wilderness now, sporting much longer hair and a beard. Using tricks he learned while in Mexico and from Travis, he lives as a nomad. But no matter how far he travels, he's still hunted by the Pioneers.
In a flashback, we see that is was Strand who let Nick out of the cell. Nick just about kills him, but seeing the guilt Strand feels, Nick decides to just leave. He's quiet and stealthy, just stealing one of Travis' jackets and a machete. But before he leaves, he sneaks to Alycia, and pleads with her to come with him. She refuses, deciding to stay with Madison. He's sad, but he doesn't stick around. He climbs over one of the walls, and slips away.
In the present, we follow Nick as he lives in the woods of Colorado. He's almost completely silent, barely even grunting. He dispatches walkers with ease, and because of Travis, he knows how to live purely off the land alone. He's almost unrecognizable. One day, while cooking a rabbit, two Pioneers come across him on horseback. They dismount, holding him up at gunpoint, and tell him that he's going to return to Lawton with them. He doesn't speak as he pulls out his machete and cleaves one of the Pioneers' arms off. The man screams in agony as Nick impales the other one mercilessly. He kills the second man, then turns and grabs the other man's rifle. He checks its ammo, slings it across his back, and begins to raise his machete at the first Pioneer--before the man begins to weep. He begins blubbering about his wife, how they have a child on the way. Nick lowers his blade, wipes the blood on his sleeve, and sheathes it. The Pioneer begs for bandage, medicine, anything, but Nick just leaves, saying, "Tell her to stop coming after me."
The problem for Nick is that, essentially, he's trapped. Because of the thirteen-community network Madison now controls, he's surrounded, on all sides, by people attempting to capture him. It miles of land, sure, but not something easily escaped. So he's done what little he can--evade the larger search parties, and deal with the smaller pairs of rangers he encounters.
His new plan is to head farther north, hopefully into Wyoming or Montana. So for an episode he heads north, evading capture.
At the same time, Madison continues to rule the communities with an iron fist. But there's a problem: people have been disappearing from within the communities. Alicia has matured over this time, taking up a leadership position under her mother. She's an advocate for letting Nick go, but Madison can't. Strand still works for her, though he has become more brazen after his secret releasing of Nick. Madison suspects it was him who did it, but she waits to act. John has become the head of tracking Nick down, but he does his job in a way that slows down the process.
Madison calls him in for a meeting, and explains that his new mission will be discovering where her citizens are going. Thankful to be off of Nick, he accepts.
Nick makes his way to the furthermost community after days of travel, called "The Lanes". Sneaking past guards and the occasional walker, he makes it to Colorado border, and stops. He feels horribly guilty for leaving his sister with his mother, and he can't seem to shake the feeling. Then, he sees something odd: a small group of civilians sneaking out of the Lanes. He watches them, then decides to follow. After traveling deeper into the woods than he's gone before, he stumbles upon the civilians destination: The Copse.
An idyllic home deep in the Colorado woods, Nick is greeted by an old eccentric man: Teddy. Teddy is kind and wise, offering to take Nick's weapons, as he won't need them there. Nick cautiously obliges, and after a few days, falls in love with the place. Everyone who's fled from the communities has come here, and it's perfect. Until John finds it.
With six rangers vs an entire commune, Nick prepares for battle. But Teddy tells him to stop, and to let happen what needs to happen. Confused by his order, he steps down. John sees the place, and realizes that this is what the communities can be. He decides not to tell Madison about the commune, and he returns to his wife, and they leave together in secret.
After more drama and death, Madison stops all her rangers from looking for Nick, and switches the mission to finding this rumored commune. Nick catches wind of this, and warns Teddy that this is coming. Teddy refuses to arm, but Nick circumvents this by talking to the people of the commune. He finally steps into a position of leadership, rallying the citizens into protecting what they have. The citizens come together and form a fighting force, right as the first Rangers arrive.
It's a bloody battle, but the Rangers are defeated. Nick realizes that the people cannot defeat 13 communities, but they can convert them. After more fights, persuading, and uprising, nearly half of all the communities have rallied under Nick against Madison and her army.
Eager to get out from under her thumb of oppression, people from within Lawton begin to revolt. Madison, of course, shuts this down--brutally beating anyone who stands against her. Alicia sees now that her mother is truly gone, and begins to communicate with Nick, planning a final stand.
After weeks of fighting and plotting, it all comes to a head. All of Nick's forces, now seven communities, rally together to charge, all at once, to Madison's six community army stationed at Lawton. Strand, however, attempts to sabotage Madison's army by destroying their ammo reserves. He's caught, tortured for his involvement in the civil war, and in one final act of brutality by Madison, beheaded in view of both her own and Nick's armies.
On this, both sides clash, resulting in a massive firefight. Hundreds are killed between the two groups, and in the end, Lawton is in flames and Nick is within Madison's home. They fight, and it's brutal and hard to watch as we see our once mother and son duo trade blows. Nick finally gets the upper hand, and a mortally wounded Madison makes one last remark, "I kept you and Alicia safe. I did that no matter what. I tried to keep us all together..." Nick shakes his head. "You tore us apart Mom. I love you, even after what you did to us. To me. But this can't go on."
Madison hears these words, and sheds a tear. Nick looks away as Madison Clark dies. Nick leaves the house, teary-eyed, and explains what happened to the people. The war is ended. The Communities are reunited.
A few weeks later, Nick and Alicia share one last moment together--embracing at Lawton's gates. Alicia has become the leader of these communities, and peace has now truly been established. But Nick can't stay. The memories here haunt him. He's decided to leave. Go north. He shares one last goodbye to everyone he's met over the past years, and he departs, once again alone and on the road.
TLDR: After a brutal betrayal by Madison, Nick leaves Lawton. After a long time spent in the woods, he finds a new home: a peaceful commune. but realizing his mother will never stop searching for him, he rallies together the people of the commune and half of all the others. After betrayals, beheadings, and losses. The war is ended, and peace returns to the Colorado Communities. Nick decides to leave, and he's once again alone on the road.
THE END
I know that this was a long read, and I appreciate all of those who did. A few parts need work, but overall, this is a very rough draft for how I would have handled Fear.
Thanks to AI, attached are some admittedly rough designs for what our characters could have looked like in the later seasons:
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Nick in season 6.
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Nick on the road.
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Alicia in Colorado.
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An older Travis and Madison in one of the Pioneer's communities.
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John Dorie at a snowy Lawton.

When I was brand new to NovelAi I had no idea how 2048 tokens really looked as text. So for anyone looking at the tiers, trying to decide how many tokens they want for Clio with the new update, I've tokenized Part of The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald (public domain since 2021).
That way new users can more easily visualize what the AI's maximum context is for each tier. According to the UI Clio uses the NerdStash Tokenizer, as different tokenizers will convert text to tokens their own way.
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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
“I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”
She
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laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see her. She’s—”
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nick?”
“I’m a bond man.”
“Who with?”
I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”
“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously.
“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single—”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a—”
“I hate that word ‘hulking,’ ” objected Tom crossly, “even in kidding.”
“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”
I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his nose—”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position.”
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why—” she said hesitantly. “Tom’s got some woman in New York.”
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away—” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.
“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she
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didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
“Her family.”
“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—”
“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.
“Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait!”
“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”
“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”
“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumoured into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
II
About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to
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We have been best friends since the beginning of high school. We roomed together throughout college. We've been there for each other through literally everything in recent memory. I've never had someone else in my life who I felt saw things so similarly to the way that I do, and I didn't (don't?) really expect to ever find that in someone else. Until yesterday, I was 100% sure we would be best friends for life.
In our last year of college, we lived in a place with a girl I would go on to date for two years after college. The three of us were great friends, before and during the time that her and I started dating. A year ago I moved to a less than ideal place for grad school, and our relationship ended due to the circumstance of the careers we wanted to pursue requiring us to be in completely different places (or at least I thought?). Her and my best friend remained close after our breakup, and ended up moving nearby to each other several months ago. Despite my ex and I saying we wanted to stay close, it just didn't happen. It's complicated, but I guess my feelings for her never went away, and six months ago I told her I was still in love with her and wanted to try long distance, and she basically told me she doesn't feel the same way.
So it hasn't been the easiest start to my time in this new place. I struggled to find friends here I connect with in the same way. Luckily, my best friend was always there for me, we talked on the phone multiple times a week. When I first got back after the holidays, he helped talk me through my feelings, and reassured me that I wasn't crazy for feeling what I felt.
Last night we were on the phone, I filled him in on what was going on here, then asked about him. He kind of abruptly said "I want to tell you that (your ex) and I started dating. It kind of happened out of no where... but I'm really happy". I told him I needed to process what he said and hung up.
We haven't spoken since. I'm surprised he hasn't even tried to explain himself after I hung up. I've been feeling every possible emotion, but mostly shock. The idea that he could do something like this would have been completely unfathomable to me 48 hours ago. I don't know what to say. I definitely feel hurt by my ex as well, but I thought my relationship with my friend was so far beyond this. I think what hurts the most is that they both had to have known exactly how their decision would impact me, but chose to do it anyway.
I have people caring for me now, but my head is just spinning so much I had to vent somewhere. Happy to listen to thoughts or advice, or if anyone has experienced something similar. I don't think I will ever forgive either of them.

Welcome to Paws and Claws, a PvE ARK cluster on PC!
We are a small, but active community looking for more players like you! So here’s the quick TLDR I know you’re wanting to know about before we get into the detailed stuff: https://discord.gg/JyTU4V2R
Overview:

• Beginner Friendly
• Maps: Fjordur, Gen 2, Ragnarok (With Primal Fear!) + Varying Rotating Servers
• Active Discord Server! (I'd recommend joining this to keep up with updates!)
• No Wipes!
• Active and Friendly Admins!
• Steam Only PC
• Admin sponsored events with prizing!

Rates
TamingHarvesting 5x
FarmingXP 5x
Egg Hatch 25x
Baby GrowthRate 25x
Other Stuff

• Loot Quality: 10
• Fishing Loot Quality: 10
• Max Wild Dino level: 150
• Tribe Tame Limit : Unlimited (We do however recommend that you ball up most of your dinos that are not in use to reduce server lag!)

Mod List

• Structure Plus (S+)
• Dino Storage v2
• HazeStacks
• Dino Tracker
• Awesome spyglass
• MarniiMods: Wildlife
• Extra QoL Items
• Peachy Decor
• Peachy Furniture
• Castles, Keeps, and Forts Remastered
• Peachy Vikings Decor
• TC Auto Rewards Vault v1.12.16
• (Other mods may be added by community vote or on rotating servers for various events!)

Short Rule List

• No harassment
• No PvP behavior (Insiding, dropping dinos in bases, drowning players, stealing items etc)
• Loot beacons are claimed by whoever landed first
• No cave/obelisk building or resource blocking
• Build out of render distance of other bases
• 1 Land Base - 1 Water base (Exceptions may be made but we’re aiming for longevity and avoiding server lag)
• No Littering (Pick up your taming traps please!)

Community
We are a laid back, active community that is also very active in the Discord! If you ever have any questions or concerns we’re there to help! And its a great place to ask for a little assistance when you’ve found yourself in a sticky situation. We have a variety of new and veteran players so wherever you fall on that scale, we’d love to have you! We also have two Conan Exiles servers as well if that interests you! We also have people playing a variety of other games as well if that interests you!
Maps
In our cluster we have two main maps, Fjordur and Gen 2. These maps do not wipe, and the only changes made to them are event based, or adding mods by community vote. We have a 3rd map that rotates every week, giving players a chance to do bosses and obtain tames not available on any of the ‘home’ servers. (Extended for tough maps like Extinction by community vote).
Our 4th server is set up with Primal Fear! Transfers are open so feel free to take dinos and items over but remember, Primal Fear dinos cannot be transferred to a non PF server.
Starter Packs
Starting on a new ARK server can be fun but the early game grind can really be a chore. If you’d like a little boost to get you started, we have a free starter pack in the TC Auto Rewards Vault! Just head on over to our Welcome Center and use the one located inside the doors. If you are unable to locate the welcome center you can teleport there with an Omni Tool! Just make one with 1 thatch. There are also other items in the community center you can take, graciously donated by other players on the map.
TC Auto Rewards Vault
One of the mods that we utilize is the TC Auto Rewards Vault. This allows us to give you a currency to purchase different items in the store! We have rotating dino packs with various dinos and one specifically for modded dinos (They can be tough or impossible to get on some servers). We also have hard to get items like honey and milk(mod)!You will receive 10 ARc for every 15 minutes of gameplay, along with 100 per week that trickles in daily.
Events
We host a whole slew of events like hide-and-seek, geocaching, various races and other unique challenges! These events come with prizing that can range anywhere from sets of breeding dinos to dino recolors, or element and other resources/items!
We also tend to run bosses together on the rotating maps and there is always someone providing armor and resources so you can join in on the fun even if you yourself aren’t prepared to run bosses yet!
We also rotate out events based on community interest such as the Easter event, Halloween etc. We know this doesn’t give all of the benefits of the event when its the wrong time of the year, however it does allow different dino colors to spawn! Giving a little variation to your tames.

The forest is black. Pitch black.
I pound over the dirt trail, my feet turning the pedals like twin pistons. The bicycle bounces and jolts, shuddering as it rolls across the wooden bridge. There’s something in the air tonight. A chill.
But it isn’t the chill of autumn. No, this is the chill of unease. It crawls up my spine carrying the deep-rooted knowledge that something about these woods, something about this trail isn’t right. It’s the unmistakable dread of being watched.
Pursued.
I stand up and ride harder. My lungs burn with every push of the pedals but I can’t shake the feeling that I need to get out of these woods fast. The hospital is twenty minutes away. I just need to make it there.
I’m close.
So close.
WOMP
Bass rumbles behind me. It’s followed by a rush of wind, enough to throw me forward while ravishing the forest like a tempest. Trees groan. Their frames break and kneel, surrendering to the gale. Branches and leaves come loose. They ricochet through the air like shrapnel, cutting into my cheek and and I throw up an arm to keep myself from losing an eye.
This is insanity.
It’s lunacy.
I don’t know what’s happening, but I know I have to make it through this. I have to get out of these woods, get back to the hospital to see my sister before the heart monitor flatlines.
She’s not doing well. Are your mother and father home?
No, ma’am.
Can you get here to be with her? She doesn’t have long.
Yes ma’am. No matter what.
The distant bass nears, growing thunderous. It’s as though the whole world is shaking, like the Earth might split in two and swallow me whole. I grit my teeth. I let loose a defiant roar, sweat pouring down my temples as my legs tremble, willing my bike forward.
Faster, dammit!
Faster!
There’s a flash. Then another.
Lightning?
No.
I’m answered by an explosion of light, so violent and bright that I can’t see a damn thing. I holler. Scream. My body jerks forward as my front wheel collides with what feels like a fallen branch. Next thing I know, I’m flying over my handlebars.
What’s the phrase?
Ass-over-tea-kettle.
Yeah, that’s it.
I brace myself for a broken arm, maybe worse, but the pain never comes. Nothing comes. It’s as though I’m floating in limbo, like gravity’s unable to finish what it started. I can’t feel a thing– not the dirt beneath me, not my face pressed against the bark of a tree. For a little while, I think I’m dead. That I’m in purgatory.
But then my eyes adjust. The world comes into focus, beginning as a blurry smudge, but soon becoming a picture-perfect recreation of my worst nightmare.
I’m not in the forest anymore.
I’m above it.
I’m looking down at the mess of trees and I’m terrified at how small they are, how much smaller they’re getting with every passing second.
I’m floating into the sky, being carried by a narrow beam of light.
​
___________________________
​
That was a long time ago. Thirty years, give or take.
A lot’s changed since then, but one thing’s remained the same: the nightmares. I have them every night. I dream about that blinding light, that same low bass and that same gut-churning horror of being eaten by the sky.
I used to think they were a coping mechanism. I figured that since the dreams came shortly after my older sister passed, that maybe they were just how my eleven-year-old brain was dealing with the grief. My therapist seemed to agree.
“You’re quite right that there may be a link there,” she’d tell me, lowering her glasses and offering a medical-grade smile. “It’s very likely that these dreams are a form of abstract healing, a means to allow your mind to come to terms with its trauma.”
For a long time, I thought she was right. Or better put, I hoped she was. Now though? Well, I think maybe we were both wrong.
Shit.
Where are my manners?
I’m over here rambling about my childhood, and you’re wondering who the hell I am.
My name is Isaiah Mitchell. I’m a boogeyman, but not the cool kind. I don’t hide in closets or haunt old houses. I’m the type that your parents rant about while watching the evening news, the sort that tinfoil hats point to whenever things go wrong.
I’m what you might call a Man in Black.
The work I do is classified. It’s the sort of work that happens behind the scenes, with shadowy people in shadowy circles. So when I tell you that last night something catastrophic happened, I’m not talking about the stock market dipping a couple percentage points. I'm not talking about increased traffic on your morning commute.
I’m talking about trouble.
Lots of it.
It’s the kind of trouble that’s making me do something I don’t generally do, which is break rules. By the end of this, I might break all of them. But this is important, and in moments like these I find myself thinking about my late sister, Hope, and how she would have wanted me to do the right thing. It’s how she raised me, after all.
So here goes nothing.
This begins with a story, but it ends with a decision. The story is mine, and the decision is yours. When I’m finished, you get to choose whether you spend the time you have left a little wiser, or laugh this off as the ramblings of a lunatic.
Whatever you choose, I’ll have made my peace.
The story is a personal one. It’s about me, but it’s also about you– it’s about everything in the universe, right down to the last atom, and how all of us are facing a horror the likes of which we can’t begin to imagine.
It’s the story of the worst night of my life, and what might one day be the worst night of yours.
It goes like this.
​
_______________________
​
The beam of light sucks me up and spits me into absolute darkness. The sensory whiplash is enough to give me a headache, something like a migraine that pulses near my temples and feels like a bulldozer inside my skull.
It’s uncomfortable.
But not half as uncomfortable as the situation I’m in.
“Hello?” I mumble to the dark. I stumble to my feet, feeling around my environment blindly. It’s cold. Hard. It feels like I might be in a room full of metal, but I can’t imagine where that would be. A warehouse?
Footsteps echo in the distance. They’re closing in.
“Who’s there?” I sputter, and I think maybe I’ve been drugged. People don’t just up and float into the sky in the middle of the night. It isn’t a thing.
That means I’m hallucinating.
That means whoever kidnapped me knows a thing or two about stealing kids.
That means they’re a professional.
What’s the phrase?
Serial killer.
Yeah, that’s it.
WOOOOMP
I clap my hands to my ears. It’s that same bass from the forest, except now it’s reverberating all around me. Another bass joins it. This one is different… coming from a new direction, with a lower tone. It’s almost like they’re communicating– like morse code.
“Please,” I beg. “Just let me go. I swear I won’t tell anybody!”
Static crackles. It’s followed by a sharp squeal of microphone feedback, then the buzz of modulating frequency. “Communication calibrated,” a digital voice says. “Subject identified: homosapien. Geographic location: New Mexico. Language model: English.”
There’s a pause, it’s long and silent enough that I can hear my pulse rushing through my veins. I’m positive I’m going to die. These things don’t happen to people who live to tell the tale.
“Can you understand us, homosapien?” the voice asks.
Yes, I say.
Can you turn on the lights? I ask.
The only thing worse than being murdered is being murdered in the dark.
Yes, they say.
I’m blinded for the third time in as many minutes. I blink, my eyes adjusting to the green glow as it fills the chamber. Wherever I am, it’s strange. Alien. Tall vats of liquid are scattered around a large, circular room, each hosting tubes that extend outward to a central console. Everything is metallic. I can’t make out any labels– any sort of identification at all.
“Is this level of light sufficient?” another voice asks, this one right behind me.
I wheel around, and my breath catches in my chest. In front of me is something that doesn’t exist– can’t exist. It’s roughly ten feet tall, and it’s got sharp teeth, sharp claws, scaled skin, and a tail. It’s a monster. A living, breathing monster.
Fuck.
I scramble backward. My back collides with one of the vats, and blue liquid sloshes against the glass. “Thehellareyou?” I shout all at once.
“We are the Chosen,” says the first voice, approaching my other side. “We are lifeforms from many galaxies away, and we have come to save humanity.”
They stare at me through giant eyes, and each of those eyes are filled with dozens of pulsing pupils. Almost like ink blots.
“I’ve been abducted…” I sputter, hardly able to breathe. “By aliens. Aliens… are real… and I’ve been abducted…”
“Correct,” says one of the aliens. I realize this one has gray scales, while the other has teal. At least I can tell them apart.
Gray looks at his arm, and a digital screen comes to life. He taps at it with a crooked finger. “Readings indicate heightened levels of cortisol and increased adrenal flow. Source: Fight or flight response. Biologically rational, but devoid of purpose.” He looks at me, cocks his over-large head to the side. “You have neither the option to fight us or flee us, so it would be best to comply. Do you understand?”
My jaw hangs open. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. Are these aliens really standing there reading me my Miranda Rights? “Are you going to probe me?” I ask. “Like the movies?”
Teal blinks at me, his pupils dilating. “Negative.” He points to a vat. “We will break down your genetic tissue into usable material, harvesting your most compatible DNA strands while discarding the rest. It is for the greater good.”
I follow his finger to the tank, and now that I’m right up against it, I can see clearly what’s floating inside. My stomach twists into a knot. Inside of it is a human body. Everything from the man’s waist down has been dissolved, and what’s left of his intestines are dangling freely.
“Jesus Christ!”
“There is no cause for concern,” Teal says. He lumbers across the chamber to the metallic console that all the tubes are feeding into. “Your disappearance will be accounted for. A clone will be deployed to resume your life, preventing suspicion and avoiding social disruption.”
“Let me get this straight,” I say, trying to ignore how faint I’m starting to feel. “You’re going to kill me… to save humanity?”
“Correct.”
The room spins. My chest gets tight and my vision becomes a scrambled mess. My ears are ringing like church bells. I stumble, losing my sense of equilibrium and I think I taste vomit in my throat.
“No,” I mutter. “This isn’t happening… Can’t be happening…”
I steady myself against a vat, looking up to see a dead woman’s face staring back at me. Pieces of her skull have been eaten away. I can see the wrinkles of her brain underneath.
“Heart rate out of range,” Gray says, but I hardly hear him. He grabs my wrist, presses a device against the center of my hand.
I struggle. Fight. I try to use my teeth, but he’s strong, much stronger than me. A coldness pulses against my palm, almost like an ice cube, and soon that frigid sensation is traveling across my fingertips. Up my arm.
“What did you…” I mutter, but the sensation is rolling through the rest of my body. It’s soothing. My eyes find my palm and I see a strange shape seared into the skin, a scatter of dots surrounding a black square. Suddenly I can’t remember the thought I was trying to finish. Was any of this really worth panicking over?
It was just a few corpses in vats, after all.
“You have been administered a sedative,” Gray explains.
My heart rate slows. My ears stop ringing. The ghost of a smile sneaks across my face.
Gray’s staring at his display. “Cortisol levels reduced. Adrenal response suppressed. Biometric readings indicate subject has achieved a suitable level of suggestibility to proceed.”
“Affirmative,” says Teal, working the console.
I feel like I’m drifting through the lake on a warm summer day. My heart is full. I’m in absolute bliss, and all I can think is that Hope should get to experience this before she dies…
“Pulse is quickening,” Gray says with a frown.
Hope.
My sister.
My dying sister, alone in the hospital wondering why her little brother abandoned her.
“Sedation effect dropping,” Gray says. “98%. 94%. Emotional instability reaching unacceptable levels.”
“Hope,” I sputter, feeling like I’m coming out of a daze. “I have to get to the hospital– please! My sister is sick! She needs me!”
Gray presses the device against my other hand, and another pulse of relaxation courses through me. “Invalid concern,” he tells me. “Clone will be a perfect recreation of you, body and mind. It will retain all memories allowing it to continue your life uninterrupted. Conclusion: your expiring sibling will receive suitable emotional support prior to her decomposition.”
Fucking aliens. It takes everything I have to fight against the sedative, to make my case. “How?” I groan. “How is my DNA supposed to save humanity? What the hell is it saving us from anyway?”
Teal turns from the console to face us. His giant eyes are narrowed in a thoroughly displeased manner. “Invalid request. Information too critical to risk dissemination.”
“Rebuttal,” says Gray. “Clone’s memory can be modified. Current biometric readings indicate high levels of emotional discontent, placing likelihood of a compromised harvest at 34%. Solution: permit subject to understand purpose of sacrifice. Result: sense of closure and enhanced probability of project success.”
Teal turns back to the console. “Rebuttal accepted. Proceed.”
Gray looks at me. He places his scaly fingers against my head, and I squirm a little. “Brace yourself for disorientation,” he tells me. “You will experience physical unease and hyperstimulation. After, you will understand the horror that awaits your species in the dark.”
​
______________________________
​
For a long time, that’s as far as the nightmare gets. Gray prattles on that I’m about to see the truth, some twisted fate that justifies melting humans into sludge, but before he can deliver the goods, I wake up.
Every. Time.
Blue balls doesn’t begin to describe it.
Last night, it happens again. The nightmare, I mean. Same aliens, same tanks of human soup, but this time I wake up in a cold sweat. My phone is ringing on the bedside table. There’s a name on the screen that I hate to see.
“Whatisit?” I grumble.
“Jesus Christ, Mitchell. I’ve been calling for ten minutes!”
My boss. Lisa.
She goes off. The words are coming out like machine-gun fire, and from the background chatter I figure she’s speaking to more than just me. It sounds like there’s a crowd around her, like she’s briefing suits as she jogs down a hallway.
“Got all that?” she asks.
Something about a shitstorm. Something about an F35. The air force just shot down a UAP, which is how we say UFO these days to avoid getting laughed out of the room. Apparently it happened in New Mexico. My backyard.
This calls for a liter of coffee. Maybe two.
I stumble into the kitchen and put a pot on. I have some time while she holds the phone to her chest and barks orders at the drones around her. One cream. One sugar. My spoon clinks against the side of the mug as her voice blares through the speaker.
“Mitchell?” she says. “Still there?”
She says she’s got coordinates. I take a sip of scalding java. I’m dazed enough I barely feel it burn my tongue. My fingers punch the coordinates into my laptop, bringing up the location the supposed UAP was shot down.
I spit my coffee over my screen.
“The fuck?” I mutter, leaning forward and doing a double take at the map.
“What is it?” she’s asking.
“Nothing,” I’m saying.
But it’s a lie. The truth is, the coordinates are a dead match for the forest where I had my waltz with psychosis thirty years ago. They’re the coordinates from my dream. Right down to the rickety old bridge.
I ask her if she’s sure the numbers are correct.
“Am I sure?” she snaps. “Look, if you’re asking me if this is another Chinese spy balloon then the answer is go fuck yourself. I’ve been pulling my hair out for the past twenty minutes. This is the real deal, so suit up and get ready to go. I’ve got a bird on the way.”
The clock on my microwave reads 2:34 a.m. and my stomach is telling me to sort my life out. “Do I have time for breakfast?” I ask.
Click.
The line goes dead.
Twenty minutes later, a helicopter is landing on my lawn. I board it in a daze, and we take off in the direction of the crash like we’re trying to outrun a cruise missile. I’m watching the lights of the countryside drift by, and it occurs to me that from all the way up here, in the dead of night, they almost look like stars.
I wonder how long it’d take to snuff them out.
How long it’d take to burn a whole galaxy to ashes?
To crush a universe in the palm of your hand?
Things to consider.
The closer we get to the crash site, the worse my thoughts become. They’re bordering on obsessive. I’m tangoing with darkness. Radio chatter is coming through the com line, something about aliens and extraterrestrials, but all I’m thinking about is controlling my bladder.
I’m drowning in hypotheticals.
I’m wondering what happens if I lose my mind between here and the crash site, what the protocols are, where they’ll take me. Do I get the night off? The week?
“Everything okay, sir?”
It’s the co-pilot. She’s turning in her seat and looking at me like I’m having a medical emergency.
“You look a bit pale,” she tells me.
My muscles work overtime as I twist my mouth into a smile. “Never better,” I lie. “How far out are we?”
“Twenty miles,” she says with a reassuring grin. She turns back in her seat and I take the opportunity to let out an exhausted sigh.
I close my eyes. Take a dozen deep breaths.
Happy thoughts.
I try to ignore how dry my mouth is, how badly my hands are shaking. I try to ignore the fact that every time I look down at my palms, I see that same scatter of dots, that same faded square that no doctor has been able to explain. “I’ve never seen scars like that,” they tell me. “How’d you get them?”
I don’t know, I tell them.
I don’t know.
But I do.
I’ve known this entire time, probably, but I’ve just been too terrified to accept it. I’m not what I think I am– this world isn’t what I think it is either. It’s all of this that’s making me want to curl into a ball. It’s making me want to weep on the floor, to scream at the top of my lungs and pull my hair out with everything I have.
It’s making me want to throw open the helicopter door, take a breath of fresh air and then plunge head-first into the dirt like a human turnip. And if I thought it was that easy, I might just do it.
But somehow, I know it isn’t.
I know it won’t save me– won’t save us, from what’s coming.
See, last night I had the same dream I’ve had for the last thirty years. The same abduction. The same aliens. But last night, I got to see the director’s cut. The Extended Edition. Last night, when Gray told me he was going to show me just how fucked we all are, he actually came through.
Imagine that.
What I saw was everything.
I saw how all of this ends. How all of it began. What I saw is what’s waiting for us in the black infinity of space. And the more that I think about it, the more I think it might be driving me mad.
“Just up ahead,” says the pilot. “Ten minutes to touch down.”
Eight minutes.
Five.
“Jesus,” he says, at the three minute mark. “Are you two seeing this?”
And up ahead is a plume of smoke, rising into the night sky. There’s the faint flicker of fading fires, the haphazard glow of industrial lighting, and there, at the center of it all, is the unmistakable shape of something that shouldn’t exist.
“That… doesn’t look like it’s from this planet…” the co-pilot mutters over the com line.
“No,” the pilot replies, and his voice is shaking. “It doesn't.”
They’re right. They both are. What it looks like is something extra-terrestrial, something alien. It looks like something ripped straight from my worst nightmares.
And really, that’s just where I wish it had stayed.

What would you say as your final last words to whoever you want to say it to (TL, STL, Regional, Global, whoever) if you knew you were leaving for good, never needing a reference (they don’t give one anyway), and they asked you if you had any feedback or comments to give before you head on out?
I feel like most of us really need this.
To my STL: forget work for a second, forget numbers, forget you ever worked here and what you do for a living or for your career… look at the type of a person you are. Cold, emotionless, caring only about numbers and forgetting that you deal with actual living PEOPLE. You seem like you have no soul, you allow the most toxic leaders to bully others and do horrible things over and over again without consequences, yet are quick to punish the ones who make one small mistake, and completely fail to make any real connections to ANYONE at your OWN store. You’re not approachable, you’re not warm, you’re not funny and you’re not fun. You don’t make any efforts to make team members appreciated, not even on the store’s birthday or team member appreciation week, and don’t even mention holidays. If we’re so “broke” that we can’t do anything for team members, then when is the last time you have wrapped up your sleeves to do some VOLUNTEERING, whether simple cooking or decorating or fun games or even setting up appreciation posters for other team members to write on? Shame on the person you are. Look in the mirror once and see if you’re able to reflect on the type of a person you either have become, or maybe have always been. You’re not remembered in a good way, I’ll tell you that. So many others are.
Phew that felt good!

Can't choose between 2 companies
Hi guys! Sorry for the long post but Just wanted to get your opinion or advice. I am currently torn between 2 choices right now.
I am currently 28yo, single and currently employed under Company Day but was previously employed under Company Night. I am renting a place in Makati for 13k/mo includes parking and I spend around 4k on Gas. I had the junior role under Company Night which was about 6k less than what their offering now on the senior role.
I received an offer from my old boss from Company Night for a senior role, very similar role from what I did. Now, I enjoyed it but I enjoy my current work but the thing is, Company Day is full RTO while Company Night is only 2x RTO per week. Base pay from Company Night is lower vs Company Day. Below are the details:
1) Company Day
Compensation
- Base Pay: 66,XXX/mo
- Net: 54,XXX/mo
- Allowance(s): 650/mo non-taxable
- Monthly Total Take Home: 55,XXX/mo
- Yearly Benefits: Medicine & 13th month
- Annual Total: 773,XXX/yr
- Leaves: 12 per year available only after regularization
- Insurance: 160,XXX
- Follows PH Holidays
Culture
- Pinoy Culture, vertical management
- Blaming culture is present. No investigation whatsoever for any mistakes
- OT is expected but I dont do OT
- Career-growth is sort of hard because management most of the time doesn't allow internal movements due to staffing problems
- Very laid back in the morning but sometimes hassle in the afternoon. Pinoy time culture.
NO WORK FROM HOME.
DAYSHIFT - No issue working with day.
2) Company Night
Compensation
- Base Pay: 56,XXX/mo
- Net: 55,XXX/mo (with Night Shift Premium)
- Allowance(s): 8,XXX/mo non-taxable
- Monthly Total Take Home: 64,XXX/mo
- Yearly Benefits: Medicine, Xmas Gift, 13th month
- Annual Totl: 841,XXX/yr
- Leaves: 15 per year available immediately
- Insurance: 250,XXX
- Follows US Holidays (Approval to have day off on PH holidays)
Culture
- American/Western Culture, horizontal type of management
- Investigation culture is highly regarded to prevent mistakes from happening again
- OT is sometimes unavoidable but not encouraged. Most people time-in and time-out on time and doesnt work outside of working hours.
- Career-growth opportunity is immense. One can get hired internally to other business units and can sometimes be exposed to international projects/roles
- Very strict in time-in, time-out, break schedules.
- High importance on office related repetitive injuries
WORK FROM HOME 3x and RTO 2x per week
NIGHTSHIFT - Okay working 10PM to 7AM shift.
BURNING QUESTIONS IN MY HEAD...
Is the 14K monthly net difference worth the night shift? Or should I stay in Company Day? I've got good friends from both Companies and I enjoy working in both. Should I be practical and get the higher take home pay + less expenses due to WFH? Is taking a dip in the Base Pay really worth it considering its a night shift?

Pt 1 If you haven't read it.
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Pt 2 If you haven't read it.
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Pt 3 If you haven't read it.
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Hope you enjoy Pt 4 and happy reading!
​
*Flick* "Aligning descent profile for re-entry." I had made all the final preparations
*Flick* "Prepare for comms black out in 10" William began the countdown.
"9"
"8"
"7"
"6"
"5- when you get back I absolutely *have* to show you this really old movie, interstellar, its a classic" Will interjected.
"4-Oh my stars we're about to enter the atmosphere of Ix-5 at 7km/s and all you can think about is showing me some old movie when we get back?!"
"3- Fine."
"2"
The plasma had begun to lick around the edges of the heat shield and up onto the windows.
"1"
The comms began to make a static hissing sound.
"Just breathe." Will muttered to himself.
The whole shuttle began to shake violently.
"PASSING MAX-Q" Will had to shout to be heard over all the rattling.
Just like that, it began to quiet down, the fiery inferno of re-entry plasma died down and we began our coast down to find a suitable landing spot. Comms had also returned.
*Click* "I'd just like to let everyone know that we made it through re-entry just fine." Will had radioed back to the ship.
The sound of faint cheers from bridge could be heard.
"Engaging cloaking device" *Flick*
A loud hum could be heard as the cloaking device not only prevented us from being seen by eyes, but also seen by any radar, sonar, or other means of detection spun to life.
"So where should we land?"
"Oh just a few more kilometers to shore, then I'll just find a nice, secluded spot and we'll spend the next couple of days getting to know the locals!" I responded gleefully, as this was my first time with a civilization that didn't just learn how to farm.
After carefully gliding down we landed in a patch of grass-like vegetation. Will pointed out all the leaves were all black, to which I responded by telling him that the vegetation had to adapt to capture more of the light spectrum than the vegetation on Earth, because of the dimmer, red dwarf this planet orbited.
We had set up the basics, communications equipment, synthesizers, and a variety of other scientific tools.
"Hey, remember when you said you wanted to see an example of human food! Because I do!" Will exclaimed giddily.
After plugging in a drive and pressing a few buttons, the machine whirred to action, printing out a most unusual dish.
"So keep in mind this is just one dish out of... out of well I don't really know how many different kinds of dishes we have, all you need to know is that it's a very large number... But here's too hoping you enjoy it!"
What came out were this white, almost sphere like but more so a squat raindrop shaped... things. Will called them "Dumplings", and they smelled delicious, though he had dipped them in this brown liquid he called "Soy Sauce" that I really did not care for as far as smell goes.
I carefully picked one of these dumplings and bit into it.
"Oh my" I said, albeit muffled by the food.
"It's good isn't it! I told you!" Will grinned.
"That's quite the... texture. I don't really know how to process this. It's so soft and yet firm. Nutrient packs are so much easier, they don't make a mess and they're just so efficient, I mean, you could probably play around with the recipe, make them tastier. Right?"
"You just don't get it do you." Will said, shaking his head.
"Oh well, more for me." He grabbed at my half eaten dumpling.
"Hey! That's mine!"
"So you DO like it then!"
"No, just, ugh, leave me and my dumpling alone, I've already had my Nutrient Pack for the day I'm going to hibernate now."
Will rolled his eyes at my response.
"Fine." He said in that same begrudging manner as before.
I walked on over to the hibernation chamber, a circular area just big enough for me with a warm, gentle breeze flowing over. As I was going inside I heard Will behind me closing up the door after bringing everything inside.
"Wait... you were going to tell me about.... sleep..." I muttered out.
"Oh yes so hold one, could you just fully wake up for a little bit so I can explain, so your species, and for that matter every other alien species I've met, sleeps one hemisphere or one part of their brain at a time, but humans sleep the whole brain all at once."
"What's that like?" I replied, still in the grip of hibernation.
"So for starters we are like, FULLY unconscious the whole time, we can be woken up but we have a very, VERY limited understanding of what's going on around us. We also go limp so we don't move around accidentally, we still do. It's not perfect but it works enough to where I can say, "yeah we go limp"."
"But aren't you... what happens... if... someone ambushes you at night?"
"In all likelihood unless we happen to be right next to a weapon or something good enough, we die."
"Oh my. How... how did this not drive your species extinct?"
"I'm left wondering that same question too Tomō."
This might be the first time I've heard about a human ever being truly defenseless. Will had disappeared off into another room to change, returning in only a pair of shorts. Which left me examining his exposed torso. Human skin is wrapped quite tightly around the internal structure, and there seems to be very little, if any, loose skin, it also seemed to only be composed of one layer, most others I've meet without loose skin have special layers that can break off. Perhaps humans might be less sturdy than I had come to expect. No no that can't possibly be true I thought to myself, or as much as I could with half a brain working.
The morning was punctured by this infernal clattering from Will's bed, his arm swung up and smashed down on a small table next to him, causing the sound to stop.
"What was that?! Did someone find us?!"
"No... it was just my [Yawns] Alarm, we need to be startled to wake up and that [Will yawned again] was the startling noise."
Will climbed out of bed, shuffled over to another table (Those humans have a lot of tables) grabbed a fresh change of clothes and made his way over to the bathroom to change.
That's when I heard it, a loud SHHHHH sound from the bathroom, I made my way over to the locked door and shouted:
"EVERYTHING OKAY IN THERE WILL?"
"YEAH, JUST TAKING A SHOWER."
"A WHAT?"
"SHOWER"
"WHAT'S THAT?"
"I DON'T CARE FOR THIS CONVERSATION RIGHT NOW."
"OH OKAY."
I shuffled back over to my hibernation chamber, pulling the divider closed I took in a bath of UV sterilizing light and changed out of yesterday's uniform, and into todays, which on scout missions is always a set of cloths made to imitate the look of whatever cloths are common on whatever world we're scouting. In this case it was a brown turtleneck sweater, some black pants, 6 pairs of gloves as the basic orbital scan of their unencrypted communications revealed they obsess over cleanliness, often sporting multiple pairs of gloves for specific tasks, kept in separate pockets, land lastly, a sort of shawl like piece of fabric, apparently used to protect yourself from the midday dust and wind storms.
The disguise of our more... alien features was provided by some makeup, changing our skin to a sort of pale grey. We also made use of some printed prosthetic noses, wigs, and ears, which made our faces impossible to distinguish from the local inhabitants.
Once I had finished applying all my disguises, I exited my chamber and walked over to where Will was, standing by the synthesizer watching it print up a breakfast.
Will, who hadn't even donned the appropriate clothing at this point (he was wearing a simple outfit of black shorts and a grey t-shirt), was oddly enough, sopping wet. His hair had turned a jet black color due to its saturation of water, releasing its store down his face and his neck, resulting in the back of his shirt, and the front collar turning a visibly darker shade and sticking to his body, at this point I also noticed that his skin was covered in beads of moisture glinting in the sun.
"Why are you so wet?" I asked him.
"It has to do with a shower, I get myself under this sort of, simulated rainfall, only the temperature is nice and hot, and use soap, not the same kind you use to clean your hands, but the function is still the same, I then put some stuff in my hair which gets rid of oily build up, the water rinses everything off, but by the end I'm soaking wet, I will need to dry off properly though before I put on all the disguises."
As he grabbed his tray with his hands, still damp from the shower, and the skin around his fingers was all shriveled up.
"Your fingers look like mine now! See!" I asked, moving right up next to him to better show him my fingers.
"It just increases the surface area so I can grip things better underwater, only happens if they get wet."
"Why wouldn't they be like that all the time?"
"Once again I'm left wondering that question myself."
"So what's on the menu for "break-fast"?" I asked
"Well for starters, it's just one word, breakfast, and secondly, I'm having two slices of buttered toast, an egg, and a black tea. Standard human breakfast, though Coffee is more popular."
"Black tea...?" I had heard of Coffee before and its danger to other species, and was hoping that this tea drink lacked any of this substance known as Caffeine.
"Yeah just a little caffeine to wake me up."
"CAFFEINE?! That's... that's a.... that's a Class IV chemical weapon! They banned that centuries ago! How?! What?! Oh my... Oh my..." I began to hyperventilate.
"Relax! There's only what... 50 milligrams in a cup."
"FIFTY?! FIFTY!?! ONLY FIFTY?!? THAT'S TEN TIMES THE DEADLY DOSE! WHAT ARE YOUR THINKING!" I shrieked, though deep down I did take note of how that was less than that of Coffee.
"Shhh, you'll risk us getting caught, calm down, don't worry I'll have the cup disposed of properly, I've done this every day and so far, no one's gotten hurt." Will said in his standard, nonchalant attitude that has become so typical of him, a tone which did not seem anywhere near appropriate for the situation.
"SO FAR?!" I was not heeding his instructions to calm down, it's typically very hard to do so when faced with something that could lead to a violent death.
"Look, look, it's totally harmless for us humans, besides, the Federation strictly manages our recreational use of substances highly dangerous to other species, such as but not limited too: Caffeine, Capsaicin, and Cocoa. I make one wrong move and my ass is sent to jail."
I was shocked, frozen with shock, at least I wasn't screaming but I felt like I couldn't move a muscle. Capsaicin was last used by the Rx'lac to murder billions, Cocoa I hadn't heard of before so it must have been something unique to Earth, but it terrified me still. In my frozen state I waited for the cup he drank from to be destroyed, and at this moment I began to regain my motor functions.
After rigorously drying himself off with a towel and this awfully loud machine he pointed at his hair, Will began to
"Now, could you help me apply the makeup?"
Human hands, while much sturdier than what most of us use, in the case of Captain Reloxyn, she has 6 tentacles which can vary their diameter, and in the case of Zorxians like myself, we have the two hands attached to their respective arm much like a human, but the geometry of the fingers themselves are different, each finger is made up of 3 fluid filled sacs, attached one after another in segments, each sack is attached to the previous with a variety of muscles, which gives each joint the ability to make movements with a full 120 degree range of motion, in any direction. While this makes them far more fragile, due to the lack of skeletal structure, this makes us quite dextrous.
But yet, I noticed that Will's right hand, arm, and ankle were already painted, which puzzled me, if he could paint his right side, then why couldn't he paint his left?
"Do you really need my help? You did just fine painting the right side of your body."
"Tomō, do you really know so little about humans?"
"You know you're the first human I've met!"
"Humans tend to have what's called a dominant hand, what it means is that there's one hand I am really good at using, and another that I'm not so great at using, I *could* train myself to use both hands equally well, but I never really had a need, and even when it would've come in handy, there's always been someone else who can help me. Like you!"
"Aww, thanks!" I responded.
"In my case, my dominant hand is my left one, fairly uncommon. Only about 10% of people are like that, the rest are right handed, and a very small number are born with both hands being of equal capability."
"But you really should get on it with the whole training your right hand. There won't always be someone to help you."
"And yet there always has." Will responded jokingly.
"We ready?" I asked.
"Just have to get some things ready, hold on, if this society is so obsessed with cleanliness, how come they don't wear face masks? I doubt they've gotten to a point where they've already eradicated all diseases. That should take them at least another century."
"Oh, this is the really cool thing about this planet! So basically, airborne diseases never evolved! They just... don't exist here!"
"Absolutely fascinating." Will responded.
"Everything we need is now in the bag." He pointed to the black bag slung over his shoulder made from the local flora.
"And we should be ready to go!" Will enthusiastically marched over to the shuttle door, opening it at saying;
"After you!" With a look of pride on his face, odd, if anyone should be proud, it should be me, after all, this mission is already off to a good start considering he's a rookie.
The red light of Ix bathed the planet in this warm glow, Ix was rare for a red-dwarf system, as most habitable planets are tidally locked, but we marched through the woods, noting observations of the local ecosystem that we stopped periodically to jot down in our notepad.
About halfway through the forest Will stopped suddenly, turning back to face me.
"You forgot to tell me what bridge came up with for our secret identities? Oh stars, saying it like that makes me feel like some kind of super-spy!"
"Oh yes, I must have gotten distracted..." I reached for my communicator.
"Okay, so we're two hikers, you named Po'ol and I named Gra'aul, and we just finished up a nice long hike and so we're off back to Hl'Ix, population 12.8 million, and about a 2 hour train ride. Oh by the way, I have to share the language file hold on... yup that should do it! Congratulations you are now fluent in Ix!"
A requirement of working for any Federation job was the implantation of a language chip which allowed the user to become fluent in all 608 languages and, what they called "Significant Dialects" spoken in the Federation, though for people working on exploration vessels like me and Will, we had access to a file sharing system so we could download new languages for the planets we visited after the central computer processed them.
"Thanks!" Will responded from a meter or so ahead of me.
We continued our march down to the road, where we walked parallel to it as cars zipped by. Eventually the forest we had landed in cleared way for farmland, which after about 5 kilometers or so more walking, started to turn to houses with expansive yards, which gradually became smaller and smaller as we neared the center of town.
"You getting tired yet?" Will asked me, we had decided it was best for him to walk behind me, so we could make sure we stayed together.
"Yeah, but just a bit longer until we make it into... whatever the name of this town is."
"Alright."
We continued to make our way into the town, named Urup and with a population of about 3 thousand. When we got there it was almost devoid of any activity, and the wind had started to pick up, which carried in dust. Thankfully we anticipated this, having donned contact lenses to keep debris out of our eyes, and using the shawl to cover up our mouth and nose. At this point will stopped to pull out a small, and very thin, weather sheet, which he released into the wind. This device would record the weather conditions as it gets carried by the wind. Just after doing this, he turned to me and said,
"Weather at time of release: Temperature: 10 degrees Celsius. Wind speed: 56 Kph, rising. Feels like: 5.2 Degrees Celsius, falling. It wasn't able to get a good reading on dust concentration because it's rising too fast so that should tell you everything you need to know."
The wind nearly blew Will's shawl off, but he grabbed it just in time, and me, being too focused on Will, had let my own shawl blow away in the wind, and while Will had tried to reach for it, the wind carried it away far too quickly for him to get it in time, only missing his fingers by a handful of centimeters. I quickly covered my mouth with my sweater, though this did leave part of my midsection exposed to the elements, a suboptimal position to be in during a dust storm of this magnitude.
"Dammit! Almost had the blasted thing!" Will shouted, the rush of the wind was beginning to drown out our voices.
He put his hand in one of the many pockets on his pants, that's something everyone can appreciate about Ix fashion, anything below 10 pockets is simply unacceptable. Anyways, Will pulled out a small pair of scissors, and quickly removed his shawl.
"What are you doing you can't remove your shawl in these conditions!" I shouted back at him.
"I'll be quick, don't worry!" Will responded as he cut his cloth in two.
"Here!" He said handing me the now removed half of his shawl, and quickly covering his face with the remaining half.
We continued on, though this time much slower than before, as we didn't want to loose our balance and be toppled by the wind. Never before had I ever had to deal with wind this intense, no wonder they assigned the human.
"Squat down! Boundary layer winds should be slower!" He shouted to me while bending down to waddle his way across the street to the hotel.
Squatting down only provided minimal relief, as I suppose one would have to crawl to truly take advantage of this effect. Slowly but surely we made our way across the road, over to the hotel. Opening the first set of doors we were met with a powerful blast of air, which prevented any dust from getting in. Only until after the doors had closed, and our clothes were sufficiently purged of any particulates that had somehow lodged their way into the remarkably dense fabrics. Eventually though, the blast died down, and the second doors opened automatically.
The doors opened to reveal an interior with a largely brown, beige, and black color pattern. The whole lobby was lit with a quite warm color tone, with the lightbulbs occasionally flickering and all the windows had been sealed off behind steel plates. Eventually Will turned his head to face a desk spanning quite a large distance, located just in front of a large board with all the room numbers located next to a light.
We could vaguely hear someone talking to another person, emanating from behind a door marked "Employees Only", Will glanced at me, pulling my attention to his gloves, which he began to swap out for a new pair. I quickly followed suit. Eventually, just moments after I finished putting on a new pair of gloves, one of the people from behind the door exited.
"Why on Ix would there ever be customers walking in during the middle of the storm! We issued the alert 2 hours ago!" The woman said to the man who stayed in the room as the door closed behind her.
Turning around to face the two of us, and walking over to the main part of the check in desk, she began to speak to us.
"Hi my name us Za'ul!" She said, showing us her name tag.
"Now what can I do for the two of you! Must've been miserable trapped out there in the storm!"
Will began to approach the desk, seeing this I decided to sit down and catch my breath, the 10 kilometer walk had exhausted me, it was remarkable to see Will barley fazed by it.
"Hi my name is Po'ol and this is my hiking buddy Gra'aul, we just finished up the most beautiful of hikes through that nearby forest, so we're on our way back to Hl'ix! I was wondering if you could get us a room please and thank you ma'am." He said in a sort of folksy manner, not too dissimilar from the way Za'ul spoke.
"Alright you want one bed or two?" She responded.
"-Two please." He said, almost cutting Za'ul off.
"All right! You want first floor or second floor?"
"Oh second floor would be lovely."
"Well here's your key and have a lovely stay!"
Will walked over to me.
"Got us a key for room 203, here's your key" Will had switched from his folksy mannerisms to a soft whisper, but I just let the key hit me, I was far to tired to catch it.
"Well I see our hike took quite a bit out of you, so just come up when your ready, I got the bags don't worry."
I nodded my head in silent agreement, I was exhausted, but I knew I should probably go upstairs to the room with him.
"Hold on.." I said, slowly lifting myself up onto my feet and carefully making my way over to the elevator.
Standing in the cramped elevator I noticed Will suddenly had this terrible and persistent oder.
"You okay?" I asked him
"Yeah... why do you ask?"
"It's just... you smell kind of... bad."
"Oh!" He chuckled with that same old chuckle I had heard a million times before.
"Yeah, uh, I'm sure after I explained to you what a shower was you were probably perplexed as to why we don't do the standard UV bath, but basically humans smell bad after a long day, or after a long enough, or intense enough period of physical exertion. Showering gets rid of the smell. I did notice the Ix had only a single layer of skin, and hopefully this means they too have the scent issues that humans have, and thus also make use of showering."
"I see. Can you take another shower when we get to the hotel?"
"Tomō! That's... don't say that to other humans okay, you can be direct with me like that but... a lot of other humans will not take that kindly. Just letting you know that."
ding
The elevator had made its way up to the second floor.
"Let's see, 203... 203... here it is!"
Will unlocked the door and opened it.
"Oh thank the stars they have actual beds and it wasn't just a translational error!" He cried out in relief.
Will ran over to the bathroom.
"And they have showers too! Just Wonderful! Don't worry a shower should adequately clean you too."
"Oh I brought my own portable UV sterilizer, I'll be fine."
"You just relax down I'll take care of the report back to bridge."
I made my way over to the beds and just collapsed into it. Hibernating while laying down was not ideal, but at this point I'd do anything not to be on my feet anymore. Eventually I decided that I didn't care for lying face down, and instead rolled over to face Will, just to make sure he didn't botch the report.
Eventually once he finished his report, he walked over to the rooms corners and placed the sound barriers, which would cancel out our voices making sure nobody heard us. Which he, well, I was supposed to do first thing upon entering, though I was far to tired, and Will must've only just noticed. You know, when he first got here he really just annoyed me to no end, but now, he's really settled in and has gotten really into the hang of things, and sure, he's weird, but you know what, he's a human, he's not weird, just... different.
​
I think I'm going to leave it off here, I know I promised some action but this is just where the story lead me, and it was already getting long. Part 5 will be out tomorrow. Hope you enjoyed reading!

On Friday the 19th the person (21F) I (21M) was seeing stopped contact rather abruptly, with little to no explanation. I should mention we were together for a very short while, about a week really.
However in that short week she changed my world. I improved my workout regimens, took my personal hygiene twice as serious, etc. I was happy, I had purpose, I hade hope, life was good.
Now, after 2 weeks since I’ve seen or heard from her, she is still in my head. Just about every other thought I have is about her one way or another, longingly. I can’t stop thinking about how everything could’ve gone differently, as well as just how I made her feel and why she felt she needed to break contact.
(More details in part 1 https://www.reddit.com/Advice/comments/13o9uxh/short_but_great_relationship_ended_abruptly/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
Yesterday I sent what I believe to be a well-worded, non-intrusive text asking if she could explain a little further in the hopes of getting some closure, but if there is no response or if hers fails to bring me peace I don’t really know what I will do.
I live and work on my family farm 30 minutes from Madison Wi, the nearest city, with no other employees besides my father, and damn it gets lonely. I get through my days easily enough, but she’s right in the back of my head the whole time.
I don’t have any regular contact with people besides my main friend group and I guess I’m asking not only how to move on and move forward, but even just meeting people. I use dating apps, but I’m too far from town to get any consistency. Life is hard, and it feels like I’m just a couple inches away from reaching the fruit of happiness, but I’m stagnant at my current rate.
Not only do I miss her and long to be back with her, but just the thought of her makes any other candidate for love seem second-class. I’ve never been with someone so special, and my lenses are so fogged, it’s hard to believe anybody else is.
This is a long read, but if anyone takes the time to take everything in and maybe help me figure out what I need and need to do, I will be incredibly grateful, thank you.

Hi guys! Sorry for the long post but Just wanted to get your opinion or advice. I am currently torn between 2 choices right now.
I am currently 28yo, single and currently employed under Company Day but was previously employed under Company Night. I am renting a place in Makati for 13k/mo includes parking and I spend around 4k on Gas. I had the junior role under Company Night which was about 6k less than what their offering now on the senior role.
I received an offer from my old boss from Company Night for a senior role, very similar role from what I did. Now, I enjoyed it but I enjoy my current work but the thing is, Company Day is full RTO while Company Night is only 2x RTO per week. Base pay from Company Night is lower vs Company Day. Below are the details:
1) Company Day
Compensation
- Base Pay: 66,XXX/mo
- Net: 54,XXX/mo
- Allowance(s): 650/mo non-taxable
- Monthly Total Take Home: 55,XXX/mo
- Yearly Benefits: Medicine & 13th month
- Annual Total: 773,XXX/yr
- Leaves: 12 per year available only after regularization
- Insurance: 160,XXX
- Follows PH Holidays
Culture
- Pinoy Culture, vertical management
- Blaming culture is present. No investigation whatsoever for any mistakes
- OT is expected but I dont do OT
- Career-growth is sort of hard because management most of the time doesn't allow internal movements due to staffing problems
- Very laid back in the morning but sometimes hassle in the afternoon. Pinoy time culture.
NO WORK FROM HOME.
DAYSHIFT - No issue working with day.
2) Company Night
Compensation
- Base Pay: 56,XXX/mo
- Net: 55,XXX/mo (with Night Shift Premium)
- Allowance(s): 8,XXX/mo non-taxable
- Monthly Total Take Home: 64,XXX/mo
- Yearly Benefits: Medicine, Xmas Gift, 13th month
- Annual Totl: 841,XXX/yr
- Leaves: 15 per year available immediately
- Insurance: 250,XXX
- Follows US Holidays (Approval to have day off on PH holidays)
Culture
- American/Western Culture, horizontal type of management
- Investigation culture is highly regarded to prevent mistakes from happening again
- OT is sometimes unavoidable but not encouraged. Most people time-in and time-out on time and doesnt work outside of working hours.
- Career-growth opportunity is immense. One can get hired internally to other business units and can sometimes be exposed to international projects/roles
- Very strict in time-in, time-out, break schedules.
- High importance on office related repetitive injuries
WORK FROM HOME 3x and RTO 2x per week
NIGHTSHIFT - Okay working 10PM to 7AM shift.
BURNING QUESTIONS IN MY HEAD...
Is the 14K monthly net difference worth the night shift? Or should I stay in Company Day? I've got good friends from both Companies and I enjoy working in both. Should I be practical and get the higher take home pay + less expenses due to WFH? Is taking a dip in the Base Pay really worth it considering its a night shift?

I’m looking for another active solo like me who can easily hold their own on pvp, isn’t anti-farm and most importantly someone who isn’t toxic
Just a heads up I’m on PSN, i play weekly servers on main branch
If this sounds like your play style hmu

Started using the app (among others) in 2021 just as I was finally accepting my first and only LTR was done. As a dating app practice: I look through an entire profile and really only consider those with pictureS, prompts with detailed or engaging answers, and seeking more than casual- all of which were present on MY profile too. My opening message is always a question based on something they shared.
There were interesting matches here and there, expired matches, extended and re-expired matches, a few interactions shared here, but the majority hardly went past conversation that fizzled by the end of the week. One Bumble match went past 3 dates, started to get physical (only as far as second base), then got told they had some things to work on and offered "we can be friends," which wasn't what I was looking for. Even though it had been slow going and fast ending, I'd always get a little surprised when I swiped right and saw "it's a match." It's been an experience learning and refining what I'm looking for in communication, companionship, and courtship- things I had been giving, wanting, and asking for in my LTR, but told wasn't possible (not impossible, but not interested in providing).
In the midst of this I had someone I was hoping would rescue me from the apps completely, and again got a list of reasons why it wasn't possible that ultimately boiled down to not being interested in committing to a relationship with me with the level of the 3 C's I was asking for (and was prepared to reciprocate). For what seemed like the thousandth time I heard "I hope you find what you're looking for" in addition to "you deserve all that and more," but this time I only had one retort:
"He's on his way."
It was certain in a way I hadn't been before. It was reassuring. It felt strange, but right. It felt like I was passing on a message from someone else to us both. It felt like everything shifted with those words.
12/4/22
I Bumble upon this profile. He stands out in ways that are instantly intriguing and attractive. I swipe right.
"It's a match"
I send my opening question, bracing a bit for the possibility that the match will expire
12/5/22
His first message back- a greeting, answers with lively words and volleys the conversation back to me.
We continue chatting through the month- making first date plans. Questions are back and forth. Somewhere within the holidays the app decides to send our messages whenever it wants to. I can sense something's off, but not with him. He's been consistent. I learn later he's also fending off a cold that he hasn't told me about so the first date is still pending as we hit New Year's. I'm shocked and happy the conversation is still going. I tell him to send his number. We abandon the app.
Since then there hasn't been a single day we haven't talked. Our first date was a movie. He invites me to karaoke that night (something I've been wanting to get into- he does not know this when he asks). I meet his friends. This is one of their regular activities. It's a blast. We're impressed by each other. It ends with a hug and "text me when you get home." There is now a duet song list being drafted.
On the second date I ask a little more about his dating style- if he goes for multiple matches or one person at a time. He half smiles/half blushes as he confirms he focuses on one match at a time and that his experiences with Bumble matches have been brief and not great. Apparently a match's actual boyfriend showed up one time. My profile showed up just as he was considering deleting the app. He rests a hand on my knee every once in a while. We hug and have our first set of kisses when we leave for the night. He squeezes my hand before he heads for his car.
By the next karaoke date he's introducing me to other friends with "This is my girl." Unprompted, smiling, his arm around me. I introduce him to my girlfriends. Karaoke invites are extended to them. I ask what he's doing for Valentine's Day...if it's just another day... like it has been before- even in a relationship
"I'm getting you something😋"
"I know this is important to you"
I'm stunned
We plan to cook dinner at his place. We get gifts. I end up at his place the weekend before and in a soft panic he stops me at the front door and tells me to wait because "your gift got here and I unboxed it and need to move it." For the first time in years I have a Valentine who's all in. He gifts me with chocolate and a giant teddy bear so I can feel like he's with me- knowing I love stuffed animals and that I sleep better when I'm not alone. He tells me how he panicked when it was delivered vacuum sealed in a small box and thought he'd misread the dimensions when he placed the order. I gift him his favorite candy and a matcha tea set- he's into tea and recently gotten into matcha, and I drink it most mornings. Our night ends up unexpectedly crashed by what we later learned was norovirus- we thought we'd botched dinner.
From here it's dates, hugs, kisses, handholding, cuddling. I'm not a great sleeper but I find myself falling asleep in his arms. We laugh and have inside jokes. He remembers the little things. He asks about things. He's telling strangers in the middle of my karaoke song "that's my girlfriend." He's showing his co-workers my picture and adores the picture he took of me with my Valentine's teddy bear. He walks me to my car with a hand on my back or hand in hand. I'm smitten. I'm joking with people that he's not from Earth.
Communication, companionship, courtship
Commitment
He tells my girlfriends as they grill him about his goals and intentions (which I warned him about and unsuccessfully tried to stop) that there wouldn't have been a second date if he didn't feel like this had the potential to be a long term relationship. He wins them over. I'm beaming even though he's said most of this to me before.
He keeps saying "My Girlfriend." It's certain. It's strange, but feels right.
The last time I was a girlfriend, I decided that's what I was because we said I Love You. I wasn't asked. This time, HE'S decided. But I worry. Because I wasn't asked.
I should be asked, right? What does it mean if he tells everybody but hasn't asked me about it? ("is it lovebombing?" "Is he rushing things?" "Some other red flag?" "Am I overthinking?" "I'm always overthinking." "I like him and I like being with him and I'd like to be his girlfriend. I'd like it if he asked me and I'd really like to know what it's like to hear that for the first time from a man.")
I bring it up- it's not our first deep or serious conversation. It's March and it's amazing this has continued to blossom. I appreciate that he's been direct with where he's at. I hadn't yet taken to calling him my boyfriend out loud. It felt like something we should confirm together. I told him what I needed. He asked. It's official for me, he's just solidifying what it's already been for him.
He's been present. He's been a safe space. He wants to be a boyfriend. Time has flown and I'm grateful and happy to know him. I look over the things I've written about my ideal partner and the ideal partner I want to be... those words are real. Those qualities and actions are more than possible. I've never felt like I've asked him for too much. It's crazy that he came via Bumble, but I'm so glad he's here.

You could fall into the "your peach vinaigrette dressing is so good you should bottle and sell it" trap where you give up a promising but boring career trajectory in favor of "taking a risk" and trying to become the dressing king of the tri-state area. You start by mixing larger batches in your kitchen and desperately hawking them by the case to boutique food stores within a 50 mile radius of you, turning your once solid hybrid Camry into a high-milage nightmare that constantly reeks of peaches and vinegar. Your wife is understanding even though you hardly see the kids any more because you are constantly out on sales calls or delivery runs desperately trying to generate cash flow to cover your increasing credit card debt. Then one day it happens... you get the call to the big leagues... the manager of a reasonably priced grocery store two towns over wants to carry your dressing. This is your shot! In order to guarantee your best chance at success you agree to a grueling in-store promo schedule, hand-build an elaborate peach tree display and sample stand for your dressing, and start mixing dressing batches at night so you'll have enough supply. The big day has arrived and you're standing in front of a homemade display presenting your work and are having flashbacks to your high-school science fair. You spend the next 5 days on your feet for 11 straight hours trying to convince disinterested strangers to part with $5 for a bottle of your peach vinaigrette dressing (which, to be honest, you're starting to lose the taste for) until it's time to pack up your display and head home. Your house is dark when you get home. It's still dark when you leave again the next morning. You suspect you've forgotten what your kids look like. Two weeks of solid effort later and you've convinced the store manager that your product will sell. His 6 case order is the biggest you've ever had and the adrenaline rush from that moment is the most intense thing you've experienced in ten years. You rush home and take the family to Dave and Buster's to celebrate. You can't lose focus for long, though, because you have 6 cases of dressing to make tonight. The next week, buoyed by this incredible success and motivated by your long-suffering wife's pleas to move your production line out of her kitchen, you rent a small commercial space and set up a tiny production facility. You credit cards are long overused. You are now well into 2nd mortgage securing an SBA loan territory. You focus on selling your dressing in case quantity to other grocery chains and mom-and-pop stores you're still making the occasional delivery but most of your goods are going out on delivery services. You hire two assistants to help pit and puree the peaches, combine the spices into large batches, mix them with the vinegar and oil, and bottle the final product. You're still not sleeping because you spend evenings cleaning the commercial kitchen anticipating the next health inspection. Your fingers constantly smell like salad dressing. You spend the next 6 years of your life sampling in stores, running stalls at farmer's markets on the weekends, displaying at grocery conventions, and looking for the next big hit to boost your business. In the meantime you have developed 5 new flavors of dressing including a creamy peach and cucumber that is a massive chore to make but rapidly becomes your best seller. You are packaging holiday gift packs, baskets for mother's day, and Christmas assortments. Your online store requires constant maintenance but continually sells a few dozen bottles a week. All the while you have slowly begun to lose enthusiasm for the dressing game. Your kids are in high school. They don't hug you any more and they hate salad. Your wife took a job to help make ends meet. She enjoys it but you can't help but feel she resents you a little. The dressing company is still earning more than she is, but only barely. As time goes on, tastes begin to evolve and vinaigrettes go out of fashion. Your sales drop off slightly but it's enough that the interest payments on your loans are catching up to you. You have to let several members of your production staff go and you're fulfilling all the web orders by yourself. The unsold returns from your large grocery customers start increasing in size and you can see the writing on the wall. It's time to close the dressing company. After it's all over, you've sunk ten years of your life chasing a dream that, now that you look back on it, was really driven by the excitement of other people. You're pickled, your wife is exhausted, your kids are off to college, and your credit card companies seem to care more about you than any of the people that used to be your friends. Years later, you're pushing a cart down the condiments aisle when you run into someone you graduated with. As you chat, he puts a bottle of generic dressing into his cart and remarks "hey, I remember you used to make a really good peach vinaigrette. You should try selling it."

Hi Go Wild Friends! In case anyone wants to know about beautiful Costa Rica I went there using my Go Wild pass so I thought I would do a story about what happened in Costa Rica. There aren’t really a lot of travel tips in here, its just the wild shit I got into in Costa Rica. I did another write up with actual tips about South Beach in Miami on a budget here if you want to read that one.
Okay, Costa Rica, so fuckin amazing! I want to fly to all the international places Frontier goes so I decided to do Costa Rica second (Cancun is an easy trip for me in Kansas City, they go nonstop there every weekend). The hardest part about Costa Rica is just getting there, I took a bit of a circuitous route.
I always take a big vacation each year after tax season, its fun for me to turn my phone off and go somewhere off the grid and not even think about work. Last year I went to Argentina and Uruguay and it was wild but honestly, this year was even better! I first wanted to stay with my brother and see my nieces and nephews in Orlando so I booked a one way flight from St. Louis to Orlando for only $19 with my Go Wild pass. I got to take a train from Kansas City to St. Louis, it was only $37 and I loved it actually, something about trains is so fun for me, probably because I took one to Chicago in college and stayed in a homeless shelter, my first real experience solo traveling, I loved it!
I spent the afternoon in St. Louis riding around downtown on those fun scooters and eating chicken wings and walking around the baseball experience place they had, it was a good afternoon. I had a late flight to Orlando but I fucked up the terminal (don't google which terminal is Frontier, its wrong). I went through security and bag check only to find out I was in the wrong terminal so that stunk but I had plenty of time for two security checks so no big deal. The flight was delayed so I didn’t get into Orlando until almost 2am and there was a long line for the rental car. I regret not doing the one you can pick up without talking to an agent so much, it was only like $5 more, do the self check car rental if possible. Orlando was fun, got to see my nieces and nephews and my brother and his wife put a little guest bedroom in the shed, easy to get into at 2am without waking anyone up.
After two days in Orlando it was time for my big flight to Costa Rica! So excited! This flight was only $51 with my Go Wild pass, an absolute steal. It stopped in Atlanta and then I was in Costa Rica in no time. On the plane a bunch of us were excitedly talking about our Go Wild passes, its kind of fun to do the spiderman meme thing and be like, you have a Go Wild pass? Me Too! The ringleader told me there were wild sloths if I went to a place called Manuel Antonio. I said what the fuck did you just say, wild sloths? Oh yes! I literally had no plans for a whole week so I mentally added sloths to the list of things I wanted to see. I have a travel buddy I met in Mexico to visit in San Jose and I wanted to see the volcano and the beaches of course but that was it.
At the airport you will want to get some cash, they have an ATM right there when you walk out. Don’t do the currency exchange, those people were giving really shitty rates. After you get cash walk around outside the airport to the backside, it’s a short walk and that’s where all the city buses come. There are buses to San Jose every 15 minutes, just jump on one of those its only like $1.50 and it goes 25 minutes to downtown. I have a huge aversion to taxis in Latin America, I’ve been ripped off a lot and airports are especially bad.
Once in San Jose you can walk most places, it’s a fun city to walk around. I stayed at the Costa Rica Backpackers hostel which I do not recommend for one big reason. Its so fuckin hot. I didn’t even think about checking for air conditioning, most places have it now. Also, I like hostels and the common areas and the hammocks and I always set up my chess board and play at night with beers. But I really like to have my own room at a hostel. This private room was I think $35 a night which is pretty good but it did not have air conditioning, just a fan recirculating hot air and it was right off the street so yeah, no recommendation for that one, I only stayed one night. That’s the fun thing about how I travel though, no reservations and no plans, if its not great I just go to a different place. I hung out with my travel buddy that night and we smoked a lot of um… cigarettes and went to this place where locals hang out. It was like some fuckin fast and furious movie but with Ticos, guys were just flying around on motorcycles on wheelies. I bought a huge meal for my friend and me, empanadas, a bunch of other Costa Rican food, it was so fuckin good and the whole meal was only $7, ha!
The next morning I set my chess board out at the hostel and I put $10 out on the money clip like I normally do when I travel. It’s a fun way to get people to play, if you beat me you get $10 if I win, nothing. My chess is kind of like a parlor trick too because I play in less than 5 seconds every move so everyone is thinking through it and Im having beers and going quick, usually at a hostel there gets to be a crowd and Im playing four dutch people on warm night in Mexico, so fuckin fun. On this morning a kid came up to play and I was teaching him chess for awhile nervously, I didn’t see his mom anywhere and secondly who brings a kid to a hostel? I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen one. He starts just taking my pieces off the board and then he takes the $10 and says welp I guess I won. I laughed and I said alright then, good job buddy. Just then his mom hobbled over, a Danish hippy with a broken foot. She thanked me for hanging out with him and told me the doctor said not to walk too much but it was hard with a six year old. I said sit down, sit down and I got her breakfast and helped her out. We talked for a bit and I told a funny Mexico story and helped them get their stuff together and she said oh you have to come to our hippy community in Puerto Viejo, you can stay in our shack by the ocean. I said oh that sounds fun today Im going to see a volcano but maybe later. She said they are the most beautiful beaches in Costa Rica, one is entirely black sand. I said Im listening. She said they were poor in a little shack by the rainforest and they have monkeys and sloths in their backyard. I said um what the fuck did you just say? Wild sloths? She said yeah, tons of them. I booked a ticket right away for the 6am bus the next day. I went with my friend to the active volcano and then he dropped me off at my hotel. I booked the Radisson the second night because I really wanted Air Conditioning. Im soft like that, sorry. And it had a hot tub. I’ve never seen that many people in one hot tub, ha. At night I did a Tinder date, I found out all the cabs are pretty much $6 in San Jose so it was easy to get there and back and I went out with a fun lady who told me in Costa Rica they eat chicken wings with gloves, did you guys know that?
I got up at 4:30am and packed up for my 6am bus. At the front desk I asked them if they could call me a cab and they said its an additional $30 US. I was like nah, fuck that, $30? What a ripoff, I’ll just walk, its only 2 miles. So I walk pretty far into downtown San Jose and whoooooooosh, a bottle explodes near me! I go what the fuck and look up, theres a drunk Costa Rican man in a soccer jersey like two blocks away screaming at me in Spanish! I had so many questions, the first of course was who is balling out of control at 5am in the morning? The second was, who the fuck is that Latino Roger Clemens? I could barely see the guy from two streets away and he was (presumably) drunk getting that close to me with a full bottle of beer? The last question of course was who is drunk and throwing FULL bottles of beer? I walked away from his direction and then saw that there was a whole bar full of drunk soccer fans like him and I noped the fuck out and ran to the taxi stand and got a taxi. I said you know what, a taxi isn’t such a bad idea!
I regretted not Googling anything because my phone didn’t work at all in Costa Rica. They said I could buy a sim card but I didn’t want to, I kind of liked being off the grid. But I really wanted to find wild sloths. Maybe the person beside me will help I thought as I stood in line for the 6am bus. Damn, I hope its not someone rapid firing Spanish at me though, my Spanish is not great. Most of my Spanish I’ve learned from the music of Bad Bunny. I was relieved to see my seat in 44 was next to a Japanese man in 45. Oh that’s awesome I thought, he will struggle with Spanish too and we can find wild sloths together. Nope, turns out Im a racist asshole, he was a Japanese Argentinian who spoke perfect Spanish and no English, none. His phone worked too and he was putting all these upside down house letters in Japanese and beautiful beaches were popping up, I really needed his help. I tried to befriend him but they speak a different kind of Spanish in Argentina, cajes instead of calles and so fast, so fuckin fast! His had like a little stall in it before it winded up too, like a UUUUUU mi esposa no esta aqui! His wife was either sleeping back in San Jose or dead, I couldn’t really understand. I noticed he had a bear avatar on his phone so I knew he liked animals so half way through the ride I decided to try to tell him they had sloths there. Hay peresozos en Puerto Viejo I said but he didn’t understand what I was saying. I said peresozos again and put up three fingers mimicking a sloth and then I panicked, I was like shit, what do sloths do? Its an animal famous for not doing anything. I pretended to hang up side down and he is (loudly) guessing animals in Spanish and Im like no, peresozos! Maybe I was saying it wrong but I had no Google so I said es posible tu telefono? And I typed in sloths and all these upside down houses came up and the words Oso Peresozo. And he goes UUUUUU OSO PERESOZO! I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a bus traveling through rural Costa Rica and seen a Japanese Argentinian get excited in Spanish about wild sloths but it is… ADORABLE!
Si SI! Oso Peresozo! I yelled. People are turning around now, they are like why the fuck are the American and Japanese guys back there in 44 and 45 playing charades two hours into a 6am bus ride? I said juntos? (Together) and he said si si! He told me where we could get bikes to rent and what to eat, he was the perfect travel partner! He said Yelp dices Jerk Chicken is the best to eat here. I said thanks Juan, you are my favorite travel partner! We had an amazing day in Puerto Viejo, beautiful beaches, monkeys, wild sloths, God damn that was an amazing day. He even showed me where my hostel was and I dropped off my bag. This hostel was called 456 hostel which I also do not recommend because no AC and there are weird animals running on the roof but I didn’t care, I just wanted to throw down my bag and get back to looking for wild sloths. The lady said we can’t just take your bag you need to check in first, I said listen lady you see that God damn excited Japanese man out there? We got wild sloths to find! I had no desire to spend one second in that hostel but Juan goes “Esta bien, cerveza” and then he had a beer by the ocean while I checked in. I joined him for a beer and it turns out that is a beautiful setting for a hostel. Still don’t recommend though, so fuckin hot.
Juan and I had an amazing day in Puerto Viejo, God damn that place is beautiful. We saw wild sloths, monkeys, and had an amazing time on the beach. I was sad to see him go, what a great travel partner! He pointed to where my hostel was but I said I would ride back into town with him. To be honest, I forgot to write down the name of the bike rental and there was like a hundred in Puerto. I turned my bike in with his to his surprise because we had rented for a full day but I told him I wanted a motorcycle. He used his expert Googling skills to get me to the cheapest motorcycle place. It was only $30 a day for a motorcycle which I thought was very reasonable. And I didn’t have enough cash on me and they didn’t take cards so the rental guy just said no worries man, take de bike to the ATM. That was pretty trusting! I came back with the money and got the bike and I can’t tell you guys the drugs part because the mods said no talking about drugs.
That was such a fast motorcycle. I turned my Bluetooth speaker up all the way and floored it and zoomed down the coast in time for the sunset, so God damn beautiful! Something about that warm Costa Rican sun on your shoulders and the sound of Khalid and the smell of salt in the air riding along the beautiful ocean, it will change your life. After the sunset I went to Cat’s house and her beautiful German friend Alina was there. There were three kids too and as soon as I got there they went riffling through my bag looking for candy. I had two caramels but was one short so I gave the little kid my chips. This was her sad face for not getting candy!
Cat was hobbling around on crutches so Alina and I said sit down we will take care of dinner. I went to the store down the street and got so much stuff for that poor family- toilet paper, rice, peppers and Barbies for the kids and a soccer ball for Marcello. Gringo santa claus when I came back, both the ladies cried, Alina said her girls had never had a Barbie doll. Alina and I cranked up the music in that little hippy house by the ocean and made dinner and drank wine and laughed while the kids played with their new toys and Cat relaxed and finished her remote work. We ate the food and drank the wine and smoked…cigarettes and had an amazing night. Alina asked if I wanted to share the Tuk Tuk and I said yes. She said it in kind of a mischievous way so I thought maybe she wanted to make out. And she was very beautiful so I said yes. We got in the Tuk Tuk and rode back towards town passing my hostel, she winked and said your hostel was back there you know and then put her hand on my arm.
I thought Cat was poor but Alina was super poor. She told the tuk tuk driver to turn left by the trash dump and we pulled up to an even tinier house right next to the rainforest. She said wait out here and I’ll put the kids to bed. So I waited on the porch. The kitchen was actually outside, a little refrigerator and a little stove and a sink. I sat in the chairs and she came out and we smoke a um cigarette together and then she said wait here. I was like fuck, wait her for what? Is she going to rob me or something but she didn’t seem scary, she seemed sweet. She came back out with a big giant mattress and threw it on the porch floor. Then she took off her shirt and said in her German accent, “Un now we share our bodies.” I thought that was a pretty sexy thing to say so I took off my shirt too and joined her except I didn’t want to have unprotected sex with a hippy so we just made out.
Sometime after she slipped back inside so I was alone on the mattress on the backporch by the rainforest. I thought that was a pretty good place to spend my first night in Puerto Viejo and I looked up and saw a hundred million stars lighting up the sky and fell asleep. But not too many hours later, God damn I awoke to a caucophony of jungle sounds! So many monkeys, just fuckin howling. And there were these weird rat things running around, they weren’t small at all, if you’ve ever seen the Princess Bride fucking ROS. (Rodents of Unusual Size). I honestly thought the monkeys were coming on the porch, that’s how loud they were.
I jumped up and leaned the mattress against the house and started walking, past the trash dump and out to the ocean. The first beach I came across was the black beach, it was amazing and I sat there until the sun came up. I had no watch or anything and my phone was dead so I walked for a long ways until I found a Tuk Tuk driver who took me to Cats. I got my motorcycle and went back to the hostel but when I charged my phone I found it was only 6am so I went back to sleep. But the hostel had no AC and there were some fuckin animals on the roof right over my head so I couldn’t sleep much. I went to the beach and found more wild monkeys and then sent Cat a WhatsApp message to see if she needed my help since she had the broken foot and Marcello was home, it was some kind of Costa Rican holiday.
She said sure come over and so I drove my motorcycle back down the coast and went back to the store and got more supplies and cooked them a big lunch. I had asked before if they eat meat because some hippies don’t and she said sure but its expensive here I don’t know if you want to buy it. It was $4 ha, I got some ham and rice and peppers and made a huge lunch and drank some beers and cooked while Cat did her remote work. She took a picture and I asked if she mind taking a short video of me cooking. IT wasn’t for social media or friends or anything, that video was for me so I could remember when I could be happy. A trip to Costa Rica for only $51 with my Go Wild pass and I got to be by the ocean and I met new friends and I was actually helping someone, I realized that day that’s what made me the most happy, that’s why I wanted the video.
After lunch I cleaned up and then Marcello and I played some chess. She asked if I minded watching Marcello while she ran to town with a client and I said sure, no problem. I was wrong, it was a huge fuckin problem! She said she would be back in an hour and then we could go to the hippy get-together on the beach. She was NOT back in an hour and I fuckin panicked. I didn’t know this lady’s last name, I didn’t know Marcello really, I called Cat and she didn’t answer and I tried texting her, nothing. I thought fuck, she must have abandoned me with this kid. And I don’t know how to get ahold of the authorities and it was a holiday, this shit was basically the plot to the Adam Sandler movie Big Daddy. I started pounding beers because I was so nervous. I asked Marcello if he knew Alina’s number and this little dude said, and I quote, “Who’s Alina?” What the fuck? I said buddy, the lady that was here last night with the kids? He said he didn’t know them very much. Oh my God I thought, I’ve definitely been saddled with a kid. But then I was thinking, you know what, I could raise this kid, wouldn’t be that bad, live in this $400 a month house by the ocean, sounds good. But I have my own kids back home in Kansas City and that made me panic even more, now Im fuckin slammin beers so worried. Every car that goes down this little side road Im like oh please be Cat. Now this kid is starting to yell at me to come back out in Norwegian, I don’t know Norwegian and he wants me to read him books, which are also in Norwegian, Im full panicky at this time.
Finally Cat came back I said Cat, I wasn’t comfortable with that, I don’t even know your last name or anything. She goes, why, whats wrong? And goes running in to see Marcello, I said oh no, he’s fine, nothing happened its just that I thought you left and weren’t coming back. She said why would I leave my kid I love him more than anything in the world. I said I know, okay, its just that I was panicking. She said calm down, all good, lets go to the hippy fire circle. I was not going to go, I was going to get the fuck out but I really wanted to go to the fire circle, I was hoping they would let me spin the fire. So we went to the fire circle, Marcello and Cat with the client and me following behind on the motorcycle. We relaxed on the blanket and then up came beautiful Alina looking like a million bucks in the sun tucking her brown hair behind her ears. She got on the blanket with us close to me and I retold the story about how I thought Cat abandoned her kid with me and we all laughed and smoked again and had beers and then watched the sun go down. I didn’t know Marcello didn’t know how to swim so I showed him how to swim a bit, a little lesson in front of the beautiful sunset. After the sun went down it was time for the fire circle and the main guy said brother, thank you for helping Cat, you are in our circle now, whats ours is yours. I said oh man thank you so much can I do the fire spinning? And he said that you can not do. Damn.
So I watched the others spin it jealously and then I got us some appetizer snacks from the restaurant. After the fire circle and the singing and everything we decided to have a picnic at the black beach. They went to the store to get the food and I went to go get my motorcycle. When I got back I guess Alina had stolen something from the store because the workers were all around her and the police were coming. It was equally sad and scary. They took everything she bought away and Cat said its okay she had enough so we all walked to the black sand beach and I gave Alina a hard time for being a thief until we all were laughing. We had a great night by the ocean and then they both got Tuk Tuks and I got on my motorcycle and drove back to the hot hostel and fell asleep and I never saw those hippies again. The end.

To give a bit of context, my (M29) older brother (M32) and I have had a rocky relationship in the last ten years or so. Growing up, we were close, but as we got older and became more ourselves, we had very different looks on life. When my dad had an affair and we found out, my brother was angry. Meanwhile, I developed the very healthy coping mechanism of shutting down, which has since grown into anxiety about being good enough, imposter syndrome, and getting so frustrated that I don't finish a task. I have a habit of starting a project and not seeing it through because I feel like no one helps me so I just think fuck it.
As we got older, I turned a bit more left leaning while he maintained a hardline conservative view. I became a creature of leisure while working full time at a bank, starting a vinyl collection, getting into DND and fantasy sports. He, meanwhile, started working in the oil patch, planned out hunting sessions, going "mudding", that type of thing.
Inevitably, we grew apart, and both of us being blessed with dad's gift of stubbornness, have a hard time finding common ground, let alone agree on a singular topic, and neither of us know when to shut up and back off, and when we do, there's fireworks.
It all came to a head when he kept hounding me to get off my phone when I was talking to my LDR. He deemed it to be rude and I felt like it was rude to impede on my relationship. Eventually, I went to school in a city while he stayed in a town. We didn't talk much, but the 3-hour drive didn't help. I eventually started to learn how to put up barriers, and only grant access to those closest to me. I had been burnt in the past.
At some point, he crossed those lines related to my relationship, and I felt like it was worthy of cutting off contact with him. We didn't talk for a year and a half. He focused on his relationship and work, while I focused on my relationship and my studies. It was ugly, we wouldn't talk to each other, and my parents tried to intervene, with them saying it wasn't worth it (even though that statement is hypocritical - they don't talk to some of their siblings) and that we should just squash the beef, with me being the one to extend the olive branch.
Talking to my oldest sister, who I trust dearly, she was able to talk me off that ledge and I reached out to him. We talked a lot that evening, catching up a bit, but more importantly burying the hatchet, recognizing the barriers we put up, and for the first time in a very long time, finding some common ground. That night, he asked if I would be his best man because he was preparing to propose to his girlfriend. I was very flattered, accepted, and it seemed to be like a reinforcement of the new found relationship.
Our relationship was still a bit strained, but we were able to disengage whenever things got too tense - this is progress. I would visit him at his farm, he would help me fix my truck, we'd make time to try and see each other. We were able to bond over my grandma's death. We were both really upset by it, but we were able to get through it together. Neither of us really grieved though.
Fast forward to mid-April, and him and his now wife ask to get together with my parents, my younger sister and myself to get together at a restaurant. This is a tad inconvenient as I'm right in the midst of exams, but it's a Friday, so we meet up to which, after some laughs and supper, he breaks the news - they're very newly pregnant. Somewhere between 3 and 5 weeks. He asks us to not make any posts about it on Facebook and to keep the knowledge limited for now. We go about our business, I finish my exams and at the beginning of May, move south for my placement. I am currently 6 or so hours away from the farm, and a further hour or so from my parents.
I tell my girlfriend, which is fine, but make the mistake of telling my best friend and now roommate. When we travel back north to get my mom's car (my truck broke down), we have to do minor repairs at the farm, and my best friend didn't keep his damn mouth shut and blabbed about it. My brother went with it a bit, to which my friend kept talking. Nothing seemed out of the norm, and I felt as though like my brother wasn't upset I told him. I'm on the fence about this, but keep it to myself.
Last week, or the week before, I get a phone call from my brother. I figure "sure, it's been a little bit since we chatted I suppose" and picked up the call. They miscarried. His wife went for an ultra-sound, and they couldn't find the heartbeat, so now they are forcing a miscarriage. He tells me not to contact her as it's very fresh wound, and that he was very pissed off that I told my friend and that I should've just kept my mouth shut. We sheepishly caught up about work, but obviously it was very uncomfortable and very tense.
I do a bit of reading and find out that miscarriages are fairly common, 1 out of 5 pregnancies are miscarried in the first trimester. I also read a bit, and find out that it's bad luck to talk about it at all while they're in their first trimester, which was just an awesome thing to read. I'm not very superstitious, but I am enough to believe in luck and karma. Why test waters?
I feel horrible about the whole thing. I believe in science enough to know that there was a chance for it to happen anyways, but finding out that it's bad luck and that me spilling the beans could've maybe, probably not, but possibly have affected the trajectory just makes me feel horrible.
I was talking to my older sister, who is one of my best friends, someone I go to to confide in, relate with and use as a logic check and emotional soundboard (her answers are usually ones that are the best course of action and the right thing to do), and she didn't want to comment on me spilling the beans. To me, if she doesn't have anything to say about it leads me to believe that she agrees with my brother on this and that I severely fucked up.
Again, I legitimately feel horrible. No one wants to go through this, especially so early in their marriage. And I do love my sister-in-law; she's really good at tempering my brother.
When I think of my friend blabbing, or more importantly, his cavalier and cold attitude about life and death (paraphrasing: well that sucks, and I wish them well, but it's science can explain it away) pisses me off. It really sucked when my grandma died and all he could really muster was "that sucks...I'll give you some space, but at least she's not suffering" didn't help with my grieving.
Whenever I think about the day I told him, I get mad and sad at myself, knowing what I know now about the luck. Knowing that my brother probably believes in that and won't trust me with information like that again, and perhaps warranted, I blabbed, it just upsets me.
I haven't had a lot of good going for me in my life the last couple years. I did well in school. My girlfriend loves me, my parents love me, and I have friends....but I just can't seem to get happy, and when I do, it doesn't stay long. I try to keep busy, because of my other unhealthy coping mechanism of "I can't be sad if I'm too focused on 'x' task". I know I have undiagnosed issues of depression, anxiety and probably a healthy dose of ADHD (both sisters have been diagnosed and are treating it). I was really excited for this.
And now it's gone.
Everything sucks. I'm doing my best, it just never seems to be good enough.
ETA TL;DR: Rocky relationship with brother, and buried the hatchet. Recently had a miscarriage and probably resents me for sharing the news to my girlfriend and my close friend.