I (19f) said I would take my friends (19f) boyfriends dog bc they were going to take her to a kill shelter. The reason they stated was Daisy the dog was food agressive and bit a kid. They also told me that they had left her unattended with the child that was One. Year. Old. They told me that she knew a lot of things she didnt. Daisy was not suppsed to stay with me long term. I was supposed to find her a new home. But since she has stayed with me, I have become attached and have since already changed her tags and microchip over to my name. Along with the fact they said she would come with a lot of things she didn't for example her food. Yes they gave me her bed and cage and bowls. The boyfriend (21m) has admitted to trying to "train" the food aggression out of her by bopping her on the nose. First off you can't train a dog not to be food aggressive if it's food aggressive you have to work around it. He has also confirmed that when she bit the Child in a moment of rage he punched her in the neck, then through her in the cage till I came to get her.
I have since getting her spent over $200 on this dog bc I have found various conditions with her, like hip displasia, elbow displasia, and possibly the starting of arthritis. So far every thing they have told me about Daisy has been a lie. Leading me to believe that the child had to of done something to Daisy in order for her to bite. They only time she has bit has been playfully. When I through around her toy. And now they have texted me about them getting an apartment together soon and taking back the dog. I don't know what to do in this situation.
Sry it's so disorganized I kinda just started ranting

Full disclosure: I liked Klaine but I never got into it and even in season 2 I felt they were more ‘best friends who started dating cause they were some of the only gay guys’ and in season 3 it went ‘wow Blaine is kind of an asshole and has double standards when a guy he KNOWS is into him has been flirting with him is texting but let's blow up at my boyfriend who is doing the same thing’. I don't hate Blaine. I just think he was a dumbass teenager who didn't know better. The whole Scandals thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth but again I chalked it up to really dumbass teenager shit who dont realize what they're doing is wrong. (Teeangers are idiots and trying to pressure a partner is always wrong but a drunk teenager being stupid is normal) I only started disliking him more when it seemed EVERYONE was trying to put them back together. I never saw them as endgame- more the ‘oh hey my first actual boyfriend. Wow we were messy’. I found Blaine to be flat and boring to as time went on and we didn't get much of a story with him. (Also if I remember right he blamed Kurt for cheating which no. Ick. Fair it may be fanon messing with me though. But I just have a hard ‘no’ about cheating. Which I dont count the texting as given Blaine texts Sebastian and I cannot see that being family friendly sorry, so it was a double standard and shitty of him but again: teenager)
But Kadam? I had no opinion on it. I found it flat. I classified Adam as a rebound from Blaine. He was nice to Kurt and good looking and that was it. Nothing else.
I think a lot of people latched onto Adam because he was Kurt’s adult boyfriend and was ‘better’ then Blaine but I just… he was there? He was boring? Oh British- and? What else was there?
I didn't want Klaine as endgame. I wanted Kurt to explore his options. Date around, have a few flings. I love StarKurt and I always felt it had more chemistry them Kadam. It just… it felt more like they were good friends who shared interests and whom had this deep connection to one another. Elliot and Kurt started off badly, but they patched it up and Elliot just… I don't know. I wish we could have seen it blossom. I think they'd have been a strong couple, while Kadam… eh. They were more ‘first adult boyfriend’ vibes and never felt like there was a connection to me.
Then Kurtbastian: holy shit those two had PASSION. I loved it. Yeah Sebastian was a douche but after he repented and worked through it, I could see it. I mean we have Kurt being thrown into dumpsters, called slurs, have pee balloons thrown at him and more by the jocks but they all ended up friends.
I just really think Kadam was a weak ship and Adam leaving wasn't bad. Maybe he was on a student visa and their relationship had a deadline. Maybe they just didn't click. Maybe it was Kurt rebounding and he knew it.
I'll read Kadam. Some days I just want a good old bashing fic to read and feast upon for fun. There are a few good ones there. But really? It was not that good a ship.

I(piercing is 2 years healed) Is it normal to be really sore and actually in pain 2 days after opening up a piercing? I had my nostril out for 10 days and finally went to my shop to get it back open. Got a stud in there and it fking hurts to even flare my nose or talk! I went back today cause the post looked short but she said it was fine and normal but idk if it’s normal for this much pain? I didn’t even have a tenth of this pain after getting it pierced.

hey everyone, please help me. im so convinced i have a brain tumor. okay so a week ago, i noticed this head pressure. mainly when i get up, bend down, it's like a squeezing for a few seconds..and then i get headaches on my right side, does that mean that mean there's a tumor there ?! if it was big enough to be causing headaches on one side wouldn't there be more symptoms? the headache is mostly when i get up to do things. and head just feels weird when i stand up, like weird. lightheaded, fuzzy, pressure , and idk it feels tight by my nose. please reassure me this isn't a brain tumor. im making a appointment tomorrow and if it's to far im just gonna go to the ER but I'm terrified to sleep because I'm like what if I die in my sleep? how would I know if it's a brain tumor ??? I'm only 21. i have bad anxiety. this is so scary if it's not a brain tumor my anxiety is saying what if it's a vitamin deficiency and it stops my heart it won't right?.. also the spot below my eyebrow is twitching non stop my head mainly hurts when I get up and do things UPDATE: was at the ER today. told him about this. he said he didn't feel like a CT scan was needed plus I was already having a stomach ultra sound so he said he didn't want to use to much radiation. he checked my pupils, had me follow his fingers with my eyes, walk in lines and do more stuff with my hands and I passed. does that mean I'm okay? I'll def go back if I feel worse .

I'm already bipolar and feel so ugly and worthless and unwanted more than ever in my life currently
I have wanted a nose hoop since 2017. 4 piercings later it finally felt healed after 2 years of trying with this new piercing in
I go in to finally switch it to my hoop and this fucking jack ass "upsized" me for a hoop that's the same size.
I go home, wake up and it hurts and crusted because it's a brand new piercing.
I took it out because I wanted that stud out of my nose for so long and its fucked up again
The scar is big because I've pierced it so many times over the years.
I have already felt so ugly and this looks so ugly I want to kill myself. I need the scar covered so I'm going back in tomorrow to repierce it to hide the scar or I'm going to be stressed every time I look in the mirror for the rest of my life
I cannot do bumps I am losing my fucking mind right now.

Just found this subreddit and would love some advice. My baby got a cold from daycare and I got it from him. I thought it just the typical cold, some congestion, sore throat. By end of day 1,(Tuesday) I was shivering from a fever and my throat hurt like crazy. Ibuprofen helped the fever and after a couple days my throat got better. However the entire time I had the worst congestion I've ever had. I have to blow my nose every ten minutes, sometimes even less, and it's always lots of thick yellow green mucus. I've been taking mucinex and chugging water. It's now Saturday night, so five days, and the congestion has not gotten any better. I'm surprised at how much mucus comes out each time I blow my nose and it's still the yellow green color. There's even some pressure under my eye even though it doesn't look swollen. Does this mean it could be bacterial? I'm so miserable and baby is still sick, I feel so bad I have no energy to take care of him the way I would if I wasn't sick. My husband has been doing everything.

One of the things that has stuck with me after the meetings so far is the number of people who have told me that things have dramatically changed in the past 5-10 years.
There is so much more data now, which has put great pressure on the Infrastructure teams to keep performance at the same levels it has always been. This is increasingly becoming difficult and complex as time goes by.
Let me underline that: They are not trying to improve performance; they are merely trying to maintain the performance their users are already used to.
More than one person told me that they can see a time when they will reach the end of the line with:

• Sharding
• Query Tuning
• Database Tuning

The only thing left would be to add hardware. Univocally, they are all paying too much for what they already do and expect costs to reach the stratosphere on D-day.
Tools like Power BI don't solve the problem because even though they make it easy for people to run custom queries on the database/ data warehouse, in most cases, these end users don't know how to tune the queries to use the right partition keys.
This means they end up with very slow responses (10+ minutes) as well as degrading the system for everyone else. More than one person told me they spend a good amount of time fixing this kind of operational issue daily.
Everyone wants more ML, AI, and predictive analytics. However, companies cannot provide these features because they don't have time for everything else in their workday.
We can't advance as the past is pulling us back with old issues we should have solved by now.
Another member mentioned a scenario in which they could not deliver important reports to the customer because they did not have the people or resources to get the queries working across their databases.
So, the inability to productionize these queries and change the data pipeline to produce the aggregated data needed meant that even if they could give the reports to the customer, they could not provide them with a self-service platform.
People rely on the cache to reduce the database's read load in all these scenarios. This is why caching is an important area, and companies adopt Redis.

databases #caching #redis #performance #scalability

I’m one of the good people, I say to myself – ah, but on the borderline, says my contrarian voice, wagging a finger at some abstract wall of my mind, on which likely hangs a mirror, making the futility of the gesture complete. At the silent Buddhist retreat, I fight the urge to sexualize every single person in the room, one by one, all day long, instead of meditate, and I resist that – but I do indeed sexualize a bit, not graphically so, just the willingness of the mind to wander, which is such a strange thing to do under any circumstance, like your mind is a restless dog that paces from room to room or like the shadows on the floor decide to leap up, make love on the ceiling. The light seems to flicker now and then when the silent retreat folks and I lean into it. I picture high school meditation teams taking on other high school meditation teams, tournaments even.
I don’t want to make too much of this, but there’s an obvious contrarian dimension to the ethos of silent retreats – this is my take – in that they seem so serious from the outside, but once you get into it, you notice the essential feeling is erotic, as least on an interpersonal level. See, when you commit to staying silent all day – as you sit together, as you pass each other in the hall, as you hold doors open for each other – you are hearing the body, and you are listening to your own. The body is the star of the show at a silent retreat, as least among those new to it, meeting as strangers, and when bodies are principally speaking to bodies, if you aren’t actively forcing each other to grow crops or dig minerals out of the ground – if what you are all doing is sitting on big pillows and comfy chairs – then eroticism is in the air. Pleasure is adjacent to inner peace.
The petal in the rose oil is that some of us are living through two-fold consciousness and thus, in various stages of suffering and duress, and so the eroticism must be steered toward empathy and not, for instance, condemnation, which is like what bad bosses get off on. The silent retreat is very anti-bad boss, punctuated by the sort of crises that distinguish mature human concerns from all the rest, and many people in the room are grieving. A father dies. A mother dies. Some part of our lives comes apart – you open the door to see, and the room once there is missing – open air, blue sky, some scrap of a curtain where a window used to be. When the time comes to dedicate the retreat to others outside of the circle, a third of the room says Gaza. Faith and the encampment protestors, I add. Anti-bad boss – may a benevolent spirit make the world right.
Over lunch, I sit in the grass, eat seasoned tofu and pasta, then lay back and let the sunshine throw cosmic fragments through my body, which distinguishes between the impermeable and the permeable by heating up my skin. The rest, which is most of it, goes right through me and then right through the planet, on its way to the end of the universe probably. What I remember, though, is the heat – my body listening to the sun like its singing high notes, especially across my clavicle and along the bridge of my nose. A clavier is the keyboard of a musical instrument, and adversaries swap prisoners every time I sneeze. Does that make sense? The sun is investing my body with a belief in levitation, like its growing the way a dandelion does, and soon I’ll float away. Maybe gravity is going to seed – carried inside lighter-than-air clouds of indeterminacy.
The clouds – my gosh, the clouds – cumulonimbus sweethearts with passion blooming in their breasts. When someone says clouds look like curds of cauliflower, they mean that the same sort of influence that makes cauliflower look that way is likewise producing these formations on the cloud deck. Or maybe they look like mashed potatoes, scoops of lemon sorbet, but none of this really captures the manifestation of such things in the sky. When the edges of the clouds catch the sun, I have to squint to look at them, and the potential for transmogrification seems present – like the clouds become beach sand, the sky the absence of our discontent. The clouds become flashbulbs, and fame-seekers down below keep waiting for it to rain. The clouds are utterly still, like a personal insight that causes the body to stop, the mind to freeze – hours that way. Years.
Later, sitting on a set of steps miles away from the silent retreat, I see the clouds from a different angle, as different seeds float past. Someday the former will pour forth upon the land, and then the latter will pour forth into the air – one tiny seed producing a plant that grows taller than me, like tossing a brick down a well and watching a whole city erupt from it. Above and behind me, beneath the eaves of the auditorium, the sudden and familiar sound of baby birds cheeping for a meal, and I picture a parent pouring everything their child will ever need into their wide open beaks, one after another. The cheeping is continuous, like a rolling metal wheel, so my attention turns to a photographer snapping pics of a recent graduate in white heels, tasteful skirt and red lipstick. A clicking sound comes from a shutter opening and closing, camera set on burst mode.

Throwaway because some of the people in this story know my real reddit.
I (25M) am married. My wife (28F) and I are separated, and will probably, eventually, divorce. She lives in the Midwest, I live in New York. She's close (geographically) to her parents, I'm an immigrant and all the people I love live so far away they may as well be on the moon. My likely soon-to-be ex-wife and I have a decently good relationship - there wasn't any big fighting before the split. She just didn't like me anymore. According to herself, she still cares a lot about me and wants to see me do well and be happy. She wants us to remain friends, but plainly I don't fucking want to. It makes me violently sick to my stomach to imagine myself bearing witness to the woman I loved getting together with some other dude, no matter how much she says she "doesn't think about it in terms of betteworse, just 'right' for her". This is important context.
I have a good career making alright money (enough to live on, at least - not many luxuries) in probably the most prestigious institution of its kind in the US. I graduated from a meh university in a field I never intended to work in. I'm not anything special at my job, just an office drone that occasionally plans events for my section of the company, but it's a hell of a thing to put on a resume. I don't have many friends here in NY outside of my cubicle buddy - lots of acquaintances that I make at the bar every time I go, because people love me when I'm wasted and funny, but nobody that stuck around after I stopped drinking for fitness reasons. I live in a tiny bedroom in an apartment shared with 4 people. I don't go out to save money. I occasionally engage with my hobby, which is scale models of military stuff, but lately I've had little will to do so. I spend close to 1/4 of my salary on a personal trainer, because I can't get the idea out of my head that my ex dumped me for not being hot enough, and I spend two hours every morning before work and three hours on Saturday at the gym, which is basically my main hobby right now. All this is to say, I'm a vain boring guy with no friends stuck in a shitty office job.
I wasn't like this when I was younger. I went to every party back in my hometown. Every time I visited on Spring Break or Summer people would fall over themselves to invite me to parties, when I left for college at 18 something like 200 people got together to burn an effigy of me as a big joke farewell. I was somebody. Every time I used to talk about this to my STB ex, she would get this look on her face like I was telling her I used to do heroin and crack. She's very proper, very ladylike, very respectable. I used to do keg-stands and break into abandoned water parks to smoke weed and graffiti the walls. I also come from a respectable family, so I had triple pressure between my parents and my sister and her to become an upstanding member of society. So now I don't do any of the shit that used to make me happy, and I'm no longer with the person who used to make me happy. It's not even like I can go back to doing that, either - my alcohol tolerance plummeted, I get bad hangovers since I turned 23, and I just don't really *feel* like it anymore.
My best friend back home and I were military otaku. We were always going off about how we'd join the French Foreign Legion together, or the Spanish Legion, or whatever mercenary army would take us. Back then I was out of shape so it was a pie in the sky dream, literally teenage bullshit. My best friend recently lost his long term girlfriend to leukemia, and he called me to tell me he's going to go enlist in the Spanish Legion. I knew he was telling me because he wants me to go with him. The way I am now I could absolutely crush the physical portion of enlistment and being that I have no criminal record and a college degree, the other requirements are taken care of. Absolute worst case scenario, this being the military, I get shot or blown up and die or end up disabled. Best case scenario, I survive the tour and get to live in Spain, with a nice climate, people of a familiar and less friendless culture, and lots of cultural things I like to do. Compared to here, even if I have no friends over there, I could at least go watch my favorite football team play on a regular basis.
Every time I've told my family that I want to go back home, they freak out, because they think I have the perfect life, making shitloads of money working in a super-prestigious office, helping the needy, in the "world capital", so I know that if they found out that I ditched all of that to go march around in tight green pants for a flag that isn't even mine they'd likely disown me. My stb ex-wife also would probably freak out. They all think I have such a great life, that this was all a great opportunity and that I'm living the dream, and yet I'm miserable and lonely and literally purposeless. I just wake up every Monday and go put in a shift at a place I couldn't give less of a shit about and go home to do nothing except play FIFA and chat with my guys on Discord. If I just fucking die over there, I don't have to see my ex build her life without me. I thought Midwest-New York would be enough miles. It isn't. If I leave, I would just get rid of all my devices and tell my friends back home to tell my sister, who would probably filter it to everyone. I want to just disappear and be unreachable so I don't have to hear about their happy lives ever again.
Would I be the asshole if I ditch this supposedly perfect life to follow my friend into the military of a country that isn't ours in a completely different continent? Would I be the asshole for rejecting the "opportunity" to live the way I live?

I have been married to my husband for 3 months and I am NOT HAPPY. We have been dating for 7 years, lived together for 4 years and it was the happiest part of our relationship. Everything was smooth until we got married. For context, we're both South Asians, I am a big city girl and he's from a small village and our families follow separate religions. We wanted to get married here in Canada but had to go back home to get married because of the family pressure. Our families wanted us to marry in a traditional way so we agreed. We were suppose to get married following his family's religion rituals at first and both of our families agreed however we decided to change that and get married in my familiy's religion as the rituals were easier. My family agreed however his family created a huge issue over this and argued with my husband for couple of days stating that this will bring shame to the family and people will laugh at them.The situation was so stressful that I asked my husband to just put the wedding on hold. He somehow got his parents to agree. Since then, his family started hating me saying that I brainwashed him and that I want everything done my way. Once we got married, everything went downhill. They started showing how much they really hate me and telling me how I am not fulfilling my duties as DIL. Fast forward, now I only talk to them once a week on my husband's presence. My husband and I have been going through a really tough time in our marriage because of all the drama with my monster in-laws. It's been tearing us apart, and we're both feeling really upset about everything that's happened and continues to happen. Open to any suggestions or comments.

Probably going to get lost on this sub and thats ok i just need to get this off my chest more than anything TLDR at the end. I also apologize for the bad sentence structure.
Preface information: Gay 23 Year old male living in a rural/small town area diagnosed with Depression Anxiety Asthma and ADHD (ADHD was not diagnosed as a child)
Exactly as the titles says i just want to run away and start over but i can't. Is it healthy no but I just don't know what else to do at this point. Compared to most people probably has a decent life with a supportive family, but I am unhappy with all of it and haven't been happy since I was 16.
I have been to multiple therapists but have yet to have a consistent one and currently my newest one I see maybe once a month due to high demand in my area. And we have not even begun to actually begin helping my issues. (Have been seeing her for 2 months now. I believe I am being properly medicated however I forget even with alarms set to take my meds (and lost my depression meds which yes I know is not helping).
I just got hired for a 3rd shift job making decent pay and hopefully can start a decent saving so i can eventually move away. I also have a prior commitment working for someone during the day watching their storefront while they are out with a trailer at different places. This is not every day but more like every other weekend for now until summer when i am excreted to watch the store more frequently. This will have me working 10pm-6am and 11am-6pm some days which I know won't work. I need to tell the store owner I can't do it but I don't want them to get mad and screw them over as they won't be able to find someone to cover their store if I don't. (And yes that's their problem not mine but still)
I have aging grandparents and my mom/dad doesn't have the time to help them or spend a lot of time with them nor does my sister make an effort to most of the time either. My grandfather on my dad's side is more worse off than my grandmother on my mom's side due to his age and having a stroke (but not telling anyone he had one). He constantly answers obvious scam calls and orders stuff off the TV or elsewhere and when we try to help him he fights with us because he doesn't want to be the steotypical old person (which he is) my dad's brothers still live at home mooch off him and do not acknowledge his existence 99% of the time as well.
I have tried to go to college twice couldn't get into the institution I wanted and flunked out both times due to the pressure, teachers insulting me, and my mental issues that were the colleges refused to acknowledge even with my attempting to give them the paperwork to do so through proper channels. This is to the point where I don't even know if it is worth going back as everyone I graduated with for the most part is either graduated already, have great careers, have kids, or just are overall very happy and content with their lives.
One of my best friends also died in early 2022 and I could not attend the funeral as I was working and had moved away for college (or attempted to) and everyone back home completely forgot I even existed as a friend to him. I had to beg and plead to get something to remember him by (one of his deckboxes for card games) and I'm still not even over his death as he and I spent almost every night playing video games together and I can't even touch those games without being reminded of him. This also includes the card games I play too mainly Yu-Gi-Oh as he played that slong with my other best friend but it's just not the same.
Most of my issues stemmed from high school where I feel my life just ended. I was diagnosed with asthma at 16 after having a lot of issues with cross country and swimming and subsequently diagnosed with Depression and anxiety a couple of months later due to constantly bullying from teammates and one of the cross country coaches that I was either faking it or that asthma is not real. I was one of the star swimmers in our school until our original coach left and one of the cross country coaches took over. Because of my asthma my mental illness and non supportive coaching staff I just drifted to a point where I was basically one of the worst on the team and had no idea what I was doing with my life and still don't to this day. I was the gifted kid growing up but once I got to high school and asked for help I was told I would just figure it out like I always do I was a smart kid so my cries for help were always ignored.
EDIT: almost forgot but I have 0 love life no one around me wants to date and I have very little options where I live one guy I went to school with moved to a big city close by and seems to have no trouble finding guys who actually want to date so I guess I'm just also jealous of that and want the same options he has.
TLDR: I want to run away and start over because of 1. No consistent mental health 2. I don't like people depending on me 3. I have too many commitments and I don't know to say no 4. Aging grandparents that expect me to be at their beck and call 5. Issues with School feeling left out/behind 6. Death of a close friend and not being able to get over it 7. Issues stemming from High school where I feel my life ended. 8. Issues with lack of love life.
If anyone has any advice I'm all ears otherwise just needed to air it out to someone/people that wasn't someone I know basically. Thanks.

Child Allergic to Cat but Other Child Loves the Cat
I have four children and we own a three year old Ragdoll cat as well as a two year old Rottweiler. My children are young (ages 11, 8, 6, and 4). My 8 year old daughter absolutely loves the cat to pieces!! GBut we just discovered that my 6 year old son is allergic to cats. His nose is consistently stuffy, his eyes are watery and his skin can get irritated/itchy.
An allergy specialist confirmed my son is allergic to cats (my son also has a minor allergy to dust mites and dogs). But to rehome the cat would destroy my daughter. My daughter has already given away her bunny when we needed the space for her grandfather to move in (as well as other reasons). She also had to give up half of her room to make space for her younger brother to share. I would hate to have to take the cat away from her without exhausting all of our options.
So far we have: - switched to PurinaPro LiveClear Cat Allergen Reducing Food - I use Allerpet once a week (this is a daunting task) and groom the cat - I sprayed Allersearch Cat Dander Spray (waited two hours and vacuumed and wiped everything I possibly could) - I vacuum consistently and washed all coverings and drapes with a HEPA vacuum - his room is cat free (the entire upstairs is cat free) - bought HEPA Air Purifiers
The allergy specialist suggested washing the cat once a week but that would be traumatizing for the cat and no way for the cat to live as she hates water.
The allergy specialist also did not recommend allergy shots for a six year old. It is intensive and expensive. He would have to go 2x a week to get a needle for months. Plus it’s near unaffordable.
We tried the allergy medication prescribed but my son’s stomach could not handle the steroid spray or pills.
I don’t know what to do. I am so lost. I told my daughter we will give this new cat food a month or two to see if it helps with the dander. My time is already limited as I school my kids at home so incessantly vacuuming, washing clothes that come into contact with the cat plus then washing the washer machine is becoming unsustainable.
I am open to any further suggestions as my heart is breaking for both of my kids. Thank you kindly.

I have been married to my husband for 3 months and I am NOT HAPPY. We have been dating for 7 years, lived together for 4 years and it was the happiest part of our relationship. Everything was smooth until we got married. For context, we're both South Asians, I am a big city girl and he's from a small village and our families follow separate religions. We wanted to get married here in Canada but had to go back home to get married because of the family pressure. Our families wanted us to marry in a traditional way so we agreed. We were suppose to get married following his family's religion rituals at first and both of our families agreed however we decided to change that and get married in my familiy's religion as the rituals were easier. My family agreed however his family created a huge issue over this and argued with my husband for couple of days stating that this will bring shame to the family and people will laugh at them.The situation was so stressful that I asked my husband to just put the wedding on hold. He somehow got his parents to agree. Since then, his family started hating me saying that I brainwashed him and that I want everything done my way. Once we got married, everything went downhill. They started showing how much they really hate me and telling me how I am not fulfilling my duties as DIL. Fast forward, now I only talk to them once a week on my husband's presence. My husband and I have been going through a really tough time in our marriage because of all the drama with my monster in-laws. It's been tearing us apart, and we're both feeling really upset about everything that's happened and continues to happen. Open to any suggestions or comments.

So it's me again, back for another rant! Life is tough, and I don't have anyone I can talk to. I'm just so tired of the way things are!
Last night me and my bestie decided to have a few drinks and just unwind, it was actually a lot of fun. We had some drinks and sang along to some music, it was overall just great. Unfortunately if everything went good, it wouldn't be much of a rant would it. The night was going fine, I had 3 cans of Mike's Hard Black cherry (super yummy and definitely recommend it) and I had 2 glasses of rum & coke, so nothing all that crazy for me compared to how much I have drank in the past. Around 3am I got hit with some mild chest pain...
The chest pain turned into a really intense pressure through my chest that ended up radiating through my back, it was nothing like what I've felt before, I get stress chest pains and honestly this experience made them seem somehow diminished in comparison. As the pain got worse I noticed I was having trouble breathing, it got so bad that I started getting nervous. Within 20 minutes of the chest pains starting I got genuinely scared and asked my bestie to take me to the hospital, anyone who knows me knows that I will avoid it at all cost so she knew that it had to be serious enough. She went into panic mode and in spite of everything I managed to stay calm and take control of the situation. As we pulled into the hospital parking lot I started feeling an almost primal fear, the type of fear you get when you think you're truly about to die.
I got to the front desk and was immediately told to come in and take vitals, they couldn't get a BP despite having the cuff on my arm for about 10 minutes, she finally gave up and asked me the usual questions about pain and stuff. Weirdly enough my arms decided to shift between pain and numbness and I suddenly started slurring while trying to explain myself, that was when all "care" was off limits to me. Our hospital has a bad habit of sweeping people under the rug if they even remotely suspect alcohol use, but the thing is I was fine moments before going in... I was perfectly coherent and I actually felt completely sober thanks probably to adrenaline or fear. I was sent back to the waiting area and told to just wait my turn, and things went from bad to worse quickly.
I didn't know that I had passed out, my bestie filled in the blanks for me. Apparently while we sat there waiting I kept coughing roughly, my eyes rolled to the back of my head, and apparently I kept making weird movements with my tongue sticking out. She said the best way of describing it is "I was behaving like I'd been severely drugged and suddenly seemed to spiral quickly". When I came too I was still in the waiting room, freezing, in severe pain (I don't do well in cold environments and the hospital is always freezing), and feeling just beyond exhausted. When I asked her about if we were even checked on she confirmed my thoughts... we were left there, away from other patients, out of sight of anyone who could help if things got deadly.
After managing to stand up I looked at my bestie and said that I didn't want to be there anymore because no one cared about me, she agreed with me on the terms that if anything else happened we'd go back immediately. When I went back to triage to tell them I was leaving the nurse gave me a smug look and asked if I was feeling better or do I just want to leave, so I answered with "better isn't the word I'd use but dying at home seems like a better option". She ripped the IV plug out of my arm (which I frankly don't remember having one inserted), and told me to have a good day. I felt so angry! The experience triggered my PTSD from the last time I went to the hospital (long story short, I was kept isolated in a room soaking wet and freezing until the department I needed decided to take me in).
I could have died, and no one would've cared because they suspected I was drunk!!! What if no one came to check on me at all?! What if they only found out I died because my bestie couldn't wake me?! Would they have maybe cared than? Or would they have just said "oh well she drank"? It's infuriating to be treated like nothing just because there was a little bit of alcohol involved, like I said I wasn't drunk and actually felt sober! My condition deteriorated rapidly over the course of a 5 minute car ride. I spent the whole day just feeling rough!
After we left the hospital my body just doesn't feel right. My chest feels fuzzy/bubbly, I don't know how to better describe the feeling as well as feeling tight. My breathing still feels really labored like it's taking a lot of effort to just keep going, and small things are leaving me feeling winded. All day I couldn't shake this weird chronic fatigue, I'm just drained of all energy. And I've been noticing my arms go completely numb if I lean on them, which is super alarming. As long as nothing else happens in between I'm planning on following up with my doctor because at least she's taking me seriously, if something else does happen though were gonna take the 3+ hour drive to the next nearest hospital. The scary thing is, that weird primal fear still hasn't gone away and I'm nervous about that!

So I noticed this small bump on my nose like a week into accutane and I thought it was just like a spot I missed of sunscreen and thought it’s just a bad sunburn. It seemed to heal but it kept coming back overtime and just today I got a bloody nose and noticed it looked like a lot more redder (the inner line part). I’m on my second month now and I’m getting nervous as to what this is. My next dermo appointment is scheduled for the first week of june and i was wondering had any similar experiences to this?

It’s currently 12:02am on Sunday morning. My last blood pressure reading at the doctor was 195 over 110. They put me on amlodipine and gave me a referral to a doctor that can help me because I’m now aware this could be fatal (I’m 23). I’m having a microdiscectomy on my lower back from a work injury (groundskeeper at a cemetery) tomorrow, Monday morning. They said with blood pressure that high they’d have to postpone it. I’ve been taking 10mg of amlodipine since Thursday. Admittedly, I took 20mg the first day, morning and night and 15mg morning and at night the next day until reading about how that’s fatal and how stupid I was… (because amlodipine takes a while to work, I was trying to make it work faster) after learning from such irresponsibility of taking this stuff into my own hands, my high blood pressure, and while I begin my journey to a healthier life, I still have to overcome this surgery with a blood pressure problem. Is there anything I can do for 1 day that would lower my blood pressure? Things that would not harm me such as taking 20mg of amlodipine…. I believe anything above 180 over 100 would postpone surgery. I took my blood pressure at home and it ranged from 164 over 93 to 179 over 100 so possible white coat syndrome in addition to high blood pressure Edit: Also important notes, high blood pressure runs in just about everybody in both sides of my family, and I’ve become pretty much bed ridden since my injury and eating a lot of junk. Two dangerous combos, both ready to be solved as soon as possible

i love my friends very much and i am so happy for them. and they're amazing people 🥹💕but sometimes i cant help but be pressured to be as successful as they are. they got into big schools, starting businesses. and im here stuck in our current school (which isn't necessarily bad). overall, they're just really successful and focused people. i cant help but feel so terrible that i cant achieve that
my friends have that "idgaf mindset" that i so dearly strive for. or yung mga "fake it till you make it" mindset but its so hard to keep up that mindset when im down. and obviously, hindi po talaga maiiwasan pumalpak .
when im on the high, i feel so free and happy. but when im down, its so hard to get back up because i start to take up all the pressure tapos biglang hindi ko na alam anong gagawin. nakakalimutan ko yung mindset, and i just go back to being so negative. ang dami kong iniisip, at sa dami ko gustong gawin (or ma-accomplish) wala na tuloy ako nagawa.
i guess the answer is in front of me, "wag mong isipin ang ginagawa ng iba." their success doesn't mean I'll fail. and i should focus on one thing because we can't juggle everything all at once. at dapat, kung may focus ka, ituloy mo lang kahit ano mangyari. pero yun din problema ko, walang focus
yun lang😭😭😭i was originally tagging this as "needing advice" pero naging rant tuloy HAHAHA

I’ve been dealing with LPR for 8 years now. Constant throat clearing, weak/horse voice, headaches/pressure, fatigue. It’s been a real blast. I’ve come a long way in my journey, but sometimes it seems like it’ll never end. I suppose I’m just needing to vent, and I hope you’ll Hear me, but more than anything… I just want my voice back. I used to sing and write songs. I used to be social. Even when my symptoms are managed to the best of my ability, my voice is weak and it feels as though I’m straining to talk through inflamed pipes. Try being yourself, being social, doing anything really when you can’t talk and really be yourself. I’m so fucking done with this shit. - Wishing you all health and healing.

First / Previous
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Suzanne thought it was absolutely brilliant of me to put books on a flash drive for Sun. She explained that Sun wasn’t as sophant (her word, not mine) as she might seem, more of a repository of information, but she was fairly intelligent. It was how she was able to connect Andrew being in pain to the fact that I was friends with Andrew, and that I would want to know that he was in trouble. Apparently some of Sun’s species had given some ‘wisdom’ to others in the past and it had made its way into mythology.
The key fact was that she was not smart enough to protect herself and her kind from the clever, organized poachers. With that information in mind, it was fascinating for me to think of how Sun took in and organized what she learned. It was almost as if she was a walking, talking library.
On the topic of tours, my first one went wonderfully, and I’m almost hoping Suzanne lets me do more of them. I know not all the tourists are going to be as awesome as these people were, but Suzanne gave me a lot of slack when it comes to dealing with them. She actually said that being a smartass is not grounds for dismissal, and that if I’m sarcastic or facetious to guests who are being ‘daft’ and they complain, she really doesn’t care. Is this the perfect job for me or what?
There were four guests in this party, two adults who were sisters and two children of one of the women, brothers aged thirteen and seventeen. The tour was a birthday gift for the older of the boys from his aunt, since apparently he was passionate about animal protection and conservation.
When they arrived at the front gate, I was sitting at Andrew’s desk, going over the booklet of information one last time. When the visitors pressed the button that sounded the alert buzzer, I tucked away in a drawer and let them in. I did have a cheat sheet with information about the animals on my phone just in case, a brief notation of each of them and which enclosure they were in, but I really didn’t need to use it.
Exiting through the front door, I saw them walk up the path toward me. “Hi, I’m Ripley,” I said, holding out a hand toward the woman closest to me.
She shook it firmly. “I’m Denise. This is my sister Carla and my nephews, Wesley and Jason,” she said, motioning to each of them in turn.
“I heard it’s your birthday,” I said to Wesley, giving him a smile. “You’re interested in animal conversation?”
“Back where we live, yeah,” he said, nodding. “The animals that you’ve got here are incredible. I can’t wait to see them.”
“Well, I can’t wait to show them to you,” I said. “Right this way.”
I led them on the path around the building, toward enclosure one. Despite the horrific memories of the animal killing Stanley’s friends, I knew it was just an animal, and I had to push past my feelings on what had happened. Keeping a small smile on my face, I motioned to the enclosure. “Fiercely territorial and amazing hunters, despite their large size, they’re arboreal and known to dart from tree to tree with barely a sound. This is one of only about two thousand left in existence.”
“Two thousand, three hundred and fifty six at last count,” spoke Wesley, his eyes on the trees.
I blinked, surprised and impressed. “Well that was fantastic. Do you plan on stealing my job when you graduate?”
Wesley looked at me with a grin. “Nah, everyone knows Suzanne only offers humans this gig. And I want to help animals like this one get off the endangered species list. The zoos are great for awareness and fundraising, but then the money has to go somewhere. I want to be doing the real work.”
“That’s really great,” I told him. “I wish you all the best in that career path.” At that, we saw the animal climb down from the tree, wandering a few yards from the tree line. This was because 90% of the time, when humans were at their enclosure and making noise, whether it was speaking to each other or calling out to the animal, it was someone bringing them prey to eat. Or, in my case, enrichment toys to play with.
“Whoa,” Wesley whispered.
“How close can we get?” spoke up Jason.
“The warding starts at the fence,” I told him with a small gesture. “So, just there.”
Both boys wandered closer and I glanced at their parents. It seemed that Suzanne’s zoo had a serious reputation for high quality invisible walls, because they didn’t look worried in the slightest about the boys being hurt or killed.
“They prefer dense forest as their home and have been known to make their nests in trees up to twenty meter in the air,” I continued. “And when hunting, they’ve been seen dropping eight meters straight down. They have incredibly dense yet flexible musculature, which allows them to tackle their prey without injuring themselves.”
There was more information about the animal that I continued to rattle off, though Wesley chimed in at certain points with the info I was about to convey. That was highly entertaining and very cool. When I’d been in school, I’d never met anyone who had my level of passion about endangered animals. I wondered if things were better where these folks came from, but realized that considering there were so few of these animals left, I guessed not.
The animal paced a little bit, seemingly waiting to see if we were the kind of humans that came bearing food, before deciding we weren’t and climbing back up into the trees as easily as I would climb some stairs.
As we moved onto enclosure two, Jason spoke up. “Are there any animals here we can touch or feed or something?”
I sighed inwardly before slowing to a stop. “Well, can you show me your hands?” Jason looked bemused, holding out his hands. “I mean…they both look like they’re in great shape. You can stand to lose one.”
The two women chuckled and Wesley smirked as Jason shoved his hands into his pockets. “Very funny.”
Grinning, I started walking again. “The animals here are all carnivores and all predators. You get to see them, but that’s it.”
“Alright.”
When we reached enclosure two, I started on my next spiel. “We’ve got three reanimated dead in this enclosure,” I spoke. They were just coming out from the trees as we arrived, presumably having heard our approach. “Marissa, Connor, and Bradley. They were donated by families who knew where they would be exhibited. Their next of kin, whoever they are, can’t stand the idea of putting them down. But we need to make sure they don’t have access to corpses, because one of them plus one corpse equals two of them.”
“They eat flesh though, don’t they?” Wesley asked.
I nodded. “Oh, yeah, but it’s from bodies that have already been dismembered. There’s no chance of them being affected by the transformation because it’s all parts.”
“Oh, got it.”
The creatures with blueish-white skin had superhuman strength, which is why they qualified for the security of Suzanne’s zoo. They also were likely the source of any Earth tales of people being brought back to life as zombies, specifically draugr, according to my research. They smelled like rotting flesh, so even as I kept talking about them and giving a background to the people they used to be, we were quick to move on once Wesley had gotten a good, long look at them.
“Enclosure four’s animal is a vampiric spirit. He’s a small, hairy humanoid creature with pointed ears. He wears a hat, and if he somehow loses it, he freaks out,” I said.
“They eat horses,” Wesley noted. “Also anything that gives them the chance to sit on it, usually catching them by surprise while they’re sleeping.”
The creature came out from the brush, giving us a suspicious look. He wasn’t in his humanoid form though; for some reason, he’d chosen to shapeshift to a dog.
I nodded. “Yep, indeed. Once the prey is dead, then he’ll eat it, and he has a voracious appetite. We have two wolves and two bears in the forest, which is one of the reasons I’ve got some self-defense items,” I said, patting my belt where my pepper spray (rated for bear) and my taser. “But the wards keep them out of this area of the zoo, so it’s really not much of a worry. It’s also a known shapeshifter, preferring the form of a dog, as you can see, as well as a cat, a snake, or even white butterflies, though the last one is rare.”
“The white butterflies are supposed to be a sign of good luck,” Wesley said, glancing to me. “Too bad we got the dog.”
“Yeah, otherwise you might be able to talk your mom into getting scratch-offs on your way home, huh?”
Wesley smirked at me.
The next enclosure was Spike, and he was waiting for us, dripping wet from having just emerged from the lake. I gave the introductory information about him, which included his propensity for eating animal eyes, nails, and teeth. “Recently, I’ve given him some enrichment activities, and I learned he likes artichokes, pecans, and hazelnuts,” I said, taking a bag out from my cargo shorts. “Wesley, do you want to toss this bag into the enclosure?”
The boy’s eyes widened and he nodded excitedly. He took a look into the paper bag before wrapping down the top to make sure nothing would fly out. Then he chucked it underhand past the fence. It landed a few yards from Spike, who waddled over to it quickly and tearing the bag open, spilling out the prizes inside. As the animal ate the pecans and hazelnuts, Wesley asked, “How’d you figure out he likes those?”
“It’s not all about taste,” I told him. “It’s mainly the difficulty of getting them out of the shells. He’s used to having to work for the parts of his prey he likes the most, so this mimics that activity, and he enjoys the process. I tried a bunch of different foods to find a few he liked.”
“Cool,” Wesley murmured, staring at him.
We watched Spike eat until he’d finished and then he went back into the woods, leaving us to move onto enclosure five. Japanese camellia were plentiful here, a type of pink flower, and that was because they grew anywhere near one of his species made their den. “This girl spends most of her time in the lake also,” I said, as the creature made its way toward the fence separating us from it. “But as you can see, she’s just as curious as the rest about what we’re doing here and whether we have food for her. She eats fish mostly, but she also regularly gets live prey.”
This creature was a spider-like monster, having six legs with long claws on each, and the head of an ox with two sharp horns. She was capable of shapeshifting to look like a human, but I guessed that she wasn’t fond of it, since I hadn’t yet seen her in that form.
“She prefers the easy way of catching prey, so to speak, by hiding in the lake and pouncing when something comes for a drink of water,” I explained. “Apparently humans are some of her favorite prey. She has an advantage of being able to spit poison, which often hits her prey in the eyes. But it’s usually used in defense rather than offense, since it secretes a limited amount.”
“What kind of animal would even go after something like this?” Jason asked, staring at her.
“Never discount one of its own species when you’re thinking about what might attack an animal,” I replied. “There are places that are breeding all of the animals here, but competition for mates is common. That means an advantage in a fight, like poison or venom, can make or break who the winner is.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
“It can’t spit past the warding, right?” Carla suddenly asked.
“Oh, no,” I assured her. “We’re fine. The wards wouldn’t let anything cross over.” She nodded, appeased.
The animal in enclosure six was the ginormous seal-hippo, Fiona, and she was looking at us as if she was imagining sprinkling us with herbs and spices and stuffing us in an oven. “This girl is one animal I’m going to work on enrichment activities for next,” I told them. “She prefers to feed on crayfish, though she’s happy to eat any humans that wander into her territory. She’ll even make a sound like a baby crying to reel us in. I’ve heard it a bunch of times.”
“Can you get her to make the sound?” Jason asked, perking up.
I grinned. “Not on command, sorry.”
“What enrichment are you thinking of trying?” Wesley asked.
“Possibly food placed in puzzle feeders,” I told him, “since she has claws that are pretty dexterous. Maybe a piñata made out of newspaper with flour inside, or a scarecrow that mimics a human.”
“Awesome,” he muttered.
After a little more educational tidbits, we moved onto Yui’s enclosure. “What is that?” Wesley asked, smiling.
“I got Yui the closest thing I could to a ping-pong ball,” I replied. “She quite likes it.”
“That’s so funny,” he said as she came out of the trees in her spider form. “I mean, the idea of her being a bloodthirsty hunter who seduces men to their deaths and eats them alive, but then on the other hand, she likes playing with something like this.”
“It is a little funny,” I agreed. “But when it comes down to it, all the animals here enjoy activities besides hunting.”
“She can shapeshift to look human, right?” asked Jason, trying to be casual about knowing something factual like his nerdy brother.
I nodded. “She looks like a woman from a region of Earth called Japan. And she’ll use strategies like holding out a hand to shake to get you closer. She tried that on me when I first got here but, as you can see,” I said, holding up my hands and waving them, “I didn’t fall for it.”
The boys both laughed as they got closer to the fence, watching her slowly pace near the trees.
Next was Sun, but she didn’t make an appearance as I spoke about her species. “Well…unfortunately we can’t guarantee that every animal comes out to say hi,” I sighed. “But…oh wait, here she is.”
The green lion with several horns and many eyes along her flank came out from the forest. “Hello,” she spoke.
“Hi, Sun,” I replied. “We have visitors.”
“What’s that?” Wesley asked suddenly, pointing at the small plastic bag that was still where I’d left it.
“Oh! That is Sun’s enrichment,” I said with a smile. “I put dozens of books on a flash drive and found that she can read them just like she’d read a shelf of books.”
Wesley’s eyes widened. “Wow. I don’t think I’ve read about anyone trying that before. That’s really cool.”
“The books are new and interesting,” Sun spoke, drawing our attention. “I’m grateful for them.”
I nodded to her. “You’re quite welcome.”
The next animal, unfortunately, wasn’t there, and we waited around for ten minutes as we discussed him. He was large and reptile-like with red eyes, with its hind legs and tail making him look vaguely like a kangaroo. Then, enclosure ten was a terrifyingly disturbing creature, the not-a-centaur with no skin, that I’d only seen a few times while walking my route. It gave a good demonstration of its ferocity, showing its sharp teeth and snapping at us a few times.
“I’m thinking of trying salt licks and other horse enrichment like a big bouncy ball,” I told Wesley, whose eyebrows went up at that. “Maybe give him more things to forage like scattered grains or a box filled with pinecones and seeds. Foraging is a huge part of a horse’s life in the wild, and humans have to do a lot of activities like that to keep pet horses busy. Of course, he also loves the little salt-water lake that was built for him.”
We spent some time looking at the animal before moving past our last stop, the empty enclosure of the animal was stolen. Carla glanced at me with a sad smile, knowing what had happened, it seemed. I gave her a nod as we continued on our way, walking into the office. “So, I hope everyone enjoyed themselves!” I said with a smile.
“That was the coolest birthday present I’ve ever gotten,” Wesley said, looking to Denise. “Thanks so much, seriously.”
“It was my pleasure,” she said with a nod. “I’d never been here before, and knew I’d find it fascinating. Thank you for the educational aspect,” Denise said, glancing at me. “I learned quite a lot.”
“Happy to hear it,” I said, returning the nod.
As I escorted the guests out of the zoo and locked the door behind them, I reflected on how much I’d changed. The first time I’d seen Yui’s tarantula form, I’d nearly passed out from fear. Now here I was, walking tourists around like it was no big deal. Humans really can adapt to anything, it seems.
That afternoon, Suzanne had texted me that she was coming by after my shift, and I met her in Andrew’s office, shutting the door to the security room behind me. “How’s Andrew?” I asked first thing.
“He’s doing well,” she said with a wide smile. “Back on non-hospital food. He’s allowed to order food on his phone, and to hear it from him, that’s the best news he’d received in a long time.”
I chuckled. “I guess some clichés are true for a reason.”
“Indeed.” She took a breath. “All right. Ripley…I would like to discuss something with you.”
My face went slack at the serious tone in her voice. “I’m not… Am I being fired?”
“What? No!” she exclaimed. Then she chuckled softly. “No, it’s nothing like that. Just, here, let’s have a seat.” Suzanne walked over to the couch and sat at one end, and I took the other. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve kept from you, that I wanted to keep from you until you found your sea legs here.”
“Well…I have,” I said with a nod. “So, what is it?”
Suzanne took a breath. “I knew your mother.”
The words hung in the air for a moment before making their way to my ears. It was a perfectly logical sentence, and yet it didn’t make any sense. “What?” I finally managed.
“When you graduated college, I decided to move the zoo from Italy to within driving distance of your home,” she said softly. “Near enough to your town that you’d see the advert. We ignored any other applicants and I hoped you’d apply. Actually, I expected you’d apply. Not just for the money, but considering the field you wanted to go into. As soon as I’d found out your major, I knew.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, holding up a hand. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “How do you know Patricia?”
“She owned the zoo before I did,” Susan explained. “Fourteen years ago…she was working to track an injured animal that we could bring into the zoo and she was killed by poachers.”
My heart calcified in my chest and a lump lodged in my throat. As my breaths became shaky, I stared at her in shock. “She…she’s really dead?”
“You suspected?” she asked softly.
“It…” I swallowed hard. “We had her declared legally dead after…I don’t know, seven years I think. My dad wanted to go after her for child support, but the police said…they said they couldn’t find…” Tears came to my eyes and I blinked them back before I met Suzanne’s gaze. “She owned the zoo?”
Suzanne nodded. “It was her baby, you’d say. When Patricia passed, I inherited it, which we’d discussed beforehand, a legal just-in-case that I never expected her to need. I’m under the impression that you were told she went to Africa for her photography career, but she was in fact going to remote areas back in my home world almost every time.”
“But I-I saw the photos,” I said, my eyes narrowing. “You’re telling me she put on a show of getting pictures that someone else took for us to see every time she visited? Did my dad even know?”
“I suppose that’s an accurate way to put it, putting on a show. And no, your father was never told. It’s not the way of things to tell humans unless it’s necessary. I won’t bore you with the details, but us and humans, we’re distant relatives, so we can still have children. But it wasn’t planned. Your mother fell in love with your father despite herself; she hadn’t meant to find love. Then she became pregnant with you and…well, the rest is history.”
“I think she had a different definition of love than the one I have,” I said tightly. “You’d think she’d have put her survival as more of a priority. Put being with the man she ‘loved’ as a priority. Her kids needed her. I needed her. She signed up when she became a mom. She could’ve screwed up all the time but she couldn’t even manage that one job: be there. When I was in the hospital, I kept thinking, ‘Where is she?’ and now you’re telling me that she put these animals above being there for her kids, and this whole time she’s been dead.”
“The hospital?” she asked, furrowing her brows.
“Never mind,” I said tersely, averting my gaze.
Suzanne hesitated before she nodded slowly. “I’m sorry for your loss, and not just for her death, Ripley,” she told me. “Patricia was…well, a ‘free spirit’ would be putting it gently. She always assumed the world would be there for her whenever she needed it.”
Staring at her for a long moment, I shook my head. “Why? Why come here and hire me?”
“I thought that would be obvious,” she said, smiling. “Your mother was so passionate about this place and once I found out your college major, I figured you would be as well.”
“Did you know that I hate her?” At that, Suzanne’s expression froze on the edge of shock. “She…she left us,” I whispered. “Didn’t tell us who she was or what she really did for a living and gave us no closure. And even when she was here, it was just visiting. Her real home was her work. She could give me all the presents she wanted, but even when she was here, half the time she was still on her computer doing work. It’s not like that stereotype of never making it to my tennis practice or something; it’s that it always felt like she was only partially here, even when I was sitting next to her. I don’t even know if I appreciate her turning me into a wildlife fanatic because it…it…makes me feel like I’m close to her in a way that’s just infuriating. She loved the animals more than she loved us.”
“Oh, Ripley-”
“Don’t,” I said, shoving myself to my feet. “Don’t try to convince me otherwise.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she said quietly. I pursed my lips. “I was going to say that I’m sorry that was the case. Your mother was…flawed, just like any other person. She had two loves in this world: her family and her work. And often, her work overcame her, her zeal for environmentalism getting in the way of being a good mum. She left your father trying to fill the role of two parents, holding your family together. You and your brother and your father, you all deserved better than that.”
My lower lip quivered but I bit down on it hard. It would’ve been a lot easier for me if she’d been speaking from a place of clueless reassurance about all this. But everything she said was making sense and that meant I didn’t have someone in front of me to be angry with.
“Why didn’t you tell me when Andrew hired me?” I sighed, sitting back down on the couch.
“Well, like I said, I wanted you to find your sea legs,” she said with a small smile. “I didn’t want the truth affecting whether or not you wanted to work here, whether you wanted to stay here after finding out about what the animals are. It would’ve complicated things, the emotions you’ll have to work through now that you know the truth. Whether or not you decide to give another tour, you also know what they’re like. That’s the benchmark I wanted you to reach before you found out about who you are.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Who I-” My face went slack. “Wait.”
Suzanne nodded slowly. “You’re only half human. Your brother too.”
The room seemed to tilt on an axis for a moment. “That means I’m also half…what?”
“We call ourselves Eldritch, these days,” she replied.
My eyes bugged out. “What?” I exclaimed. “So you’re all, like, gods or something?”
Suzanne burst out laughing. “Oh no, goodness, no,” she chuckled. “It’s just a word. We live in a very different world from this one, and a few generations ago we discovered the word and it made its way into our lexicon. But it does mean you can see all the animals. Indeed you did, on the tour you gave.”
“Wait, no, I had the glasses that…” I stopped. “Did those glasses do anything?”
She gave a sly smile and shook her head. “Not a thing. You made incredibly quick progress, and then when it came time for the tour, all you needed was to expect to see the animals, and you did.”
Genetics. That’s what Andrew had said during our interview, that part of how many animals you could see was determined by genetics. I guess having a mother who was originally from the other dimension gave me all the genes I needed to see everything here. “Could I…visit your world?” I asked tentatively. “You said that my mom took photos of the animals there. Could I…” My voice trailed off, not even sure if or how I wanted to finish that sentence.
“Those who are half human, especially those who are raised on Earth, don’t come visit,” she said gently. “I could show you some photos of other animals, and I could loan you as many books as you’d like, but it’s simply not a place where you’d be safe.”
“Oh,” I said, leaning into the couch cushion as I pictured the animals in the zoo. “Yeah, actually that…makes sense.” I paused. “So, what now?”
“It’s up to you,” she said. “I wanted to wait until I was sure you were comfortable with your position here, and then put the ball in your court. And so it is. What do you want to do now?”
What did I want to do? It wasn’t that difficult a question, just a deep, serious one.
I wanted to thrive, as the animals did. This is my enrichment now, working at an incredible, wonderful, terrifying zoo. The experience so far hasn’t been perfect, and I know there are risks, but life isn’t about staying safe. It’s about learning new things and making a difference in the world. And, if you’re lucky, having a job that’s something really special.
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THE END
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