Update: It is not, in fact, the Richards, who don’t actually have the surname Richard, that’s just the name of the eldest boy that I hear screamed over the fence all the time. Richard is probably nine, maybe 10 and his younger borthers are twins of seven becuase I happened to run into them on thier birthday. They pointedly refused to tell me thier names, instead giggling ominously after I introduced myself and running away. This is the gang of boys that I’ve had to stop from torturing small animals on more than one occasion, and whose mother is the one that gets crying-drunk on the front porch late at night.
Lovely family.
Around this time last year thier grandmother came to visit and gave them honest-to-goodness home-made black-powder Cherry bombs direct from Texas, which the boys immediately took to the most flammable patch of chaparral in the neighborhood and set off six of them at once, resulting in a small wildfire, seven emergency response units and a helicopter, a Long Stern talk from the fire department and Karen getting in a screaming match with Child Protective Services and a sizeable crater in the middle of the field.
At least according to Olivia the ER nurse and neighborhood gossip. I was out of town at the time and believe about 80% of that becuase I saw the crater where there had not been a crater a week before, and becuase karen threw a shoe at me the one time I asked if she was alright when she was having her weekly drunk-cry on the porch.
But I Digress.
The Airhorn in fact belongs to one of the ladies at the Old Folks Home. Diane is very excited about the upcoming NBA playoffs and was having a bit of a pre-celebration in the park with her family and hadn’t realized the noise would carry. She’s rooting for Golden State becuase that’s where her grandson goes.
so when i was 7 or 8 i’d “write letters to hermione granger” and set them out on the piano in the living room every night with my stuffed toy owl and every morning i’d have a letter from hermione back, sitting at the foot of my bed, and hermione and i corresponded like that for months and i’d just like to thank my mom for writing out a “letter from hermione” for me every single night
That is the cutest thing I’ve ever read oh my god
so when i was about the same age i got really into both ciphers and james madison (idk don’t ask) so i just randomly started writing these letters like i was james madison writing to my own spy ring, using all kinds of ciphers. constantly writing that WE MUST SWITCH CIPHERS THE BRITISH ARE ON TO US. and it wasn’t every night because the ciphers kept getting more complex, but it was about one every week for six months and my mother always responded. and she always found the letters, because i took to hiding them in increasingly more obscure locations because spies, obviously.
i didn’t realize how much work this was until i snuck down late one night for a cookie. and saw my mother bent over my giant book of ciphers and muttering to the dog “is this another code or can she not spell?” (i could not and still can not spell) and i was a bit angry at first but i kept watching and she KEPT AT IT. checking everything in that book against my letter and i never felt so loved. my mom with a full time job sitting up to figure out my silly letters said just because i enjoyed the game.
i got her this bio of james madison a few years ago for xmas with a simple number substitution cipher on the inside saying “In thanks for your dedicated years of service, your daughter and occasional President.” She still has it pride of place on her desk next to the obligatory kid pics
so yeah cute mom story for the day.
These are some of the best secret mom stories I’ve ever read, omg.
when i was like eight years old, i set up a tiny fairy house in the garden out of twigs and flower petals (the house needed decorations!). i’d put out letters next to the house every once in a while as well as tiny treats and sure enough i’d get letters back, written in gel pen, thanking me for the treats and often complaining about how hard it was to hold a gel pen when fairies were so tiny. i’d just like to thank my mom for humoring me.
this… this is really modern art. this is a level 1 shiny dialga in an event ball is on the gts and the only thing this person wants in exchange for it? a… male… ditto.
once, on my copy of X, probably like 5 years ago, i wonder traded away a much beloved, level 100 shiny mewtwo named Biohazard. In return, i recieved a level 1 Giratina, named Dave, knowing only the moves Scary Face and a low-power dragon type move. I was so stunned and pleased by my new friend that I vowed to raise him from level 1 all the way to 100, but shortly afterward i misplaced my copy of the game and lost him. Fast-forward to the present, after cleaning my old backpack out i discover my old copy of X, and delightedly bring my old friends into my copy of Moon, including Dave. Literally as I am doing this, I hear my little brother yell ‘holy shit its HIM’ and come running up the stairs. He opens the door and shows me that he had, in fact, just wonder-traded away a baby starter and had recieved Biohazard, the original boy. Five years later. He hadnt been released, or altered in the slightest, except for the countless ribbons he now proudly wore. I am now raising Dave, who is level 25, alongside my trusty old friend, Biohazard.
i found my yiff bracelet in my cupboard before and frankly i don’t know how to feel because it invokes my fight or flight response on visual contact
I both want to see it and forget this post exists
It’s also got a nifty story to boot:
When I was about 12, my family and I went on holiday to the Greek isles or something, and there’s this one island called Santorini which was placed lovingly at the top of some stupid high hill. You could either take the at least 400+ stairs to the top, or a rickety ass gondola to the top. we decided to not take the rickety ass gondola, but instead haul obese me up the stairs.
It was like nearly 40 degrees Celsius as we went up the stairs, it sucked. After about 45 minutes of trudging up these stairs and getting booted in the hip by some stupid fuckin’ donkeys, we finally made it to the top, and we were all fucking exhausted, but we wanted to find a cafe before we were going to actually rest.
On the way to the cafe, I saw this shop that sold “custom bracelets and necklaces” for like the equivalent of 5 pounds. Now 12 year old me was this unbearable gremlin of a furry. Y’know, the kind that will let you know within 30 seconds of meeting you that they are a furry, and wouldn’t shut up about anything furry-related ever, so I think you and I both know what kind of custom bracelet 12 year old me was going to buy. I walked into this shop with the biggest fucking shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen. Imagine a fat version of young Dylan Sprouse kicking down the door of this old woman’s corner shop and Chad striding towards the counter.
“Just 4 letters. These ones, please” I told the lady, clutching a Y, an I and two F’s in my hand. The poor lady didn’t know any better, she just placed the letter blocks on the string and asked for the money. I walked out of that shop as the most confident little fat blonde kid on the planet. I mean, I wasn’t going to walk up all those stairs and leave empty handed, was I?
I wore that bracelet with pride through the rest of the entire holiday, on the way home and even through the first week of school. But only the first week.
There were a small group of people in my Computing class that knew that I was a furry. Only 3. But they all endured my constant blabbering about nonsensical furry shit, and they were fine with it. Cut to about 5 days after I came back from the holiday, and I was sitting in my computing class, displaying in all glory a colourful bracelet bearing the word “YIFF”, engraved in 4 wooden blocks. People ignored it, my friends thought it was pretty funny and novelty, and so life just went on.
And then it happened.
“Yiff? What’s that?”
I snap around at mach 9, and there was my 40 year old computing teacher, towering over my arm to read the bracelet. The moment that word was uttered from his mouth, my 3 friends shot up and turned around like a pack of bleeding prairie dogs. They were eyes and ears on deck to this conversation. All of that childlike confidence I had gathered from this bracelet was just eviscerated right out of my head and replaced with the realization that I was just wearing a bracelet that just had the furry equivalent of the word “Porn” written on it.
“Uhhhh.. It’s, um… An inside joke.” I muttered desperately, giving death glares to my friends who were on the verge of exploding. The teacher just kinda shrugged his shoulders and moved on with the lesson, but that 10 seconds was fucking petrifying. After the lesson had ended, and we were packing our bags and leaving to go to lunch, I noticed the teacher switch off the projector, and kinda swivel his PC monitor away from the class. Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk. Four key presses from his keyboard and I knew exactly what the fuck was going on. I increased my pace, and darted towards the exit of the classroom.
The last thing I saw before I left was his face. It’s hard to describe, but imagine the face of somebody being confronted by the four horses of the apocalypse, and seeing cutie marks.
He looked at me for a solid half-second. We exchanged eye contact. At this point my life had finished. The old Securipun was dead, and like a fawn born in a wolfden, I fucking legged it. I think we both understood the next day that the day prior was single handedly the most jarring and uncomfortable moment of our entire lives, and that it should never be mentioned again, for the mental state of each other. The bracelet also never saw the life of day again, until I found it in a drawer like an hour ago.
i’m reading a reddit thread about embarrassing/cringey things people did in their first relationships and have been losing my shit at this response for the past five minutes
for years i have lived this lie telling everyone i am allergic to peanuts because i hate the smell of peanut butter and don’t really like peanut butter that much but whenever i used to tell people i don’t like peanut butter they’d get all defensive like “peanut butter is amazing how do you not like it?!” and then i’d have to go into this whole thing to defend my taste buds.
but then i got tired of it and started telling people that i’m just allergic to peanuts because that way it’s not my fault that i hate the smell of peanut butter – it’s now like i’m a sad little baby who will never get to taste peanut butter ever in her life and everyone feels sad for me.
but the problem is that i really love peanut m&ms and so now i can only eat peanut m&ms when i’m at home in secret. the only person who knows my lie is my husband. and so at work this evening we had a small celebration for someone and they had peanut m&ms and i really wanted some but obviously couldn’t eat them in public because then people would know my peanut secret.
and so when we got home after work my husband tipped his jacket over and emptied his pockets and at least thirty or so peanut m&ms fell out of his pockets and he whispered, “i was sneakily accumulating them all night for you because i could see the pain in your eyes.”
When I was about ten years old, my dad called me into his home office for a moment. There was a bunch of incomprehensible code up on his computer screen.
“Press the enter key,” he said. I did. “Thanks,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to do it myself.”
And that’s the story of how I sent out one of the largest spam email campaigns of the 1990s.
i don’t know if i’ve ever told you this story but once when i was a small child i went to a petting zoo and i sat down because animals are less intimidated and one chicken came up and was friendly and sat in my lap and let me pet her and was cuddly and then got up and walked away
and there was an egg in my lap
the chicken laid an egg in my lap and walked away like “okay kid you got this”
i just went up to the petting zoo lady like “i found this?” and she was like “oh where did you find it”
“the chicken laid it. in my lap. what… do i do with it???”
and nothing in her life had prepared her to deal with that moment
i saw this post earlier about therapists and it reminded me of my old therapist paul, who in my opinion is one of the greatest men alive and who did not put up with my bullshit for even one second
anyway i go in to see paul one week in the summer of 2016, and i’m doing my usual bullshit which consists of me talking shit about myself, and paul is staring at me, and then he cuts me off and says that he’s got a new tool for helping people recognize when they’re using negative language, and gets up and goes over to his desk
and i’m like alright hit me with that sweet sweet self-help article my man, because i’m a linguistic learner and whenever paul’s like here i have a tool for you to use it’s pretty much always an article or a book or something
paul opens a drawer, takes something out, and turns back around. i stare.
i say, paul.
is that a nerf gun.
yeah, says paul.
i say, are you gonna shoot me with a nerf gun in this professional setting.
he happily informs me that that’s really up to me, isn’t it. and sits back down. and gestures, like, go ahead, what were you saying?
and i squint suspiciously and start back up about how i’m having too much anxiety to leave the house to run errands, like it was a miracle to even get here, like i’ve forgone getting groceries for the past week and that’s so stupid, what a stupid issue, i’m an idiot, how could i–
a foam dart hits me in the leg.
i go, hey! because my therapist just shot me in the leg. paul blinks at me placidly and raises an eyebrow. i squint again.
i say, slowly, it’s– not a stupid issue, i’m not stupid, but it’s frustrating me and i don’t want it to be a problem i’m having.
no dart this time. okay. sweet.
so the rest of the hour passes with me intermittently getting nailed with tiny foam darts and then swearing and then fixing my language and, wouldn’t you know it, i start liking myself a little more by the end of the session, which is mildly infuriating because paul can tell and he’s very smug about it
anyway i leave his office and the lady having the next appointment walks in and i hear what’s all over the floor? and paul very seriously says cognitive behavioral therapy tools.
In Dutch, when you boil an egg and then place it into cold water to make it easier to peel an egg, it’s called “to scare” the eggs.
One day when I was about 6 or 7, my mom asked me to “scare” the eggs. So, little joker I was, lifted the lid of the pan and yelled “BOOO!”
My mom cracked up and has been telling this story ever since, for over 20 years. She’s come to love the story and still truly thinks that I wanted to really “scare” the eggs. Truth is I knew what “scaring an egg” meant and only wanted to make her laugh because she was in a sad place and time back then.
It’s made her laugh for over 20 fucking years, that means it’s the best joke I’ve ever pulled off and I’d die before I’d let her find out I was just kidding.
well i guess this is it 