I’m 39 weeks today and was diagnosed with viral pink eye two days ago because WHY NOT. Do my husband or my 6yr old have it? No of course not. 😒😒😒 just the massively pregnant me. How did I get this you ask? WHO KNOWS ! After a massively frustrating urgent care trip and a very dismissive doctor who pretty much said I could have gotten it “anywhere” I’m just left feeling frustrated and so sick of everything. My entire pregnancy I’ve been sick like 6 times, including this and the flu. Oh and I had “morning” sickness for 22 weeks, and still get sick at the smell of Costco pizza which every single birthday party I’ve been dragged to by my 6yr old seems to serve.
Thank you for listening to my rant. 😇 I’ve just had a very frustrating pregnancy this time around and it’s making me insane. The actual pregnancy itself has been very low key and easy (other than the morning sickness) compared to my first who was high risk and needed all the things (failed twin pregnancy) but it feels like this is a never ending loop and I am SO READY to be done. Fingers crossed that my labors are at least similar since my first was only 4hrs and 20mins of pushing with no epidural, but who knows what’s in store at this point.

They made the delivery in 2 days from Delhi to West Bengal. The packaging was really good and the perfume came in perfect condition. They also game me a small discount [ code : BELVISH99 ] and an official sample of Dolce and Gabbana dolce edp.
The perfume bottle is beautiful with heavy lid and bottle which looks like whiskey glass. The scent is mostly honey and sweet with bitterness coming through with slight hint of giner spice. Then the light florals kick in. Overall it's sweet but not obnoxiously so. It's gourmand with maturity. It reminds me of a sophisticated woman drinking earl grey in a beautiful garden setup than a woman at night in a party. Definitely sexy but in a more mature sense. And for the price, it's damn good bang for the buck according to me.

Hey, i was introduced to your channel by a friend of mine and completely got sucked into your channel im no writer so please edit anything to make it more appealing if needed!
I live in Arkansas, lived here majority if not all my life. I had experiences in all forms, UFO sighting’s, ghosts, demons(including the HATMAN), & the occasional sleep paralysis or a dream in another dream that i couldnt wake up from either! Those are other stories though, I want to tell you about the current duplex I’ve been living in for almost a yr now(my lease ends this month thank god!!) the events arent in any particular order because i didnt keep up with dates/times it all happened the time i first moved in til i do move out!
They say when a place looks appealing & draws you close is because of an entity, although I’m not bothered by them i simply ignore them i still decided i wanted to live at this duplex its a nice 3bd 2bath; After signing all paperwork, i came by first week (july) i always clean my places with doors open im just superstitious, well i was completely alone when i started hearing loud banging on my hallway walls, kid’s soon to be bedroom & closets (this happened in complete daylight) again i just ignore it cause i had a feeling.
Another time (Id say a good month later) after i moved everything into my new place & my kids were home including their dad (we’re divorced but he helped me move) he was on the couch sleeping while i was organizing stuff in my bedroom when my doorbell rang, which i thought was odd because i knew i wasn’t expecting any company, my son and i heard it we were both confused so I went to open the door and NOBODY WAS OUTSIDE I instantly closed it cause i do believe an entity can enter your home if you open the door!!
During the time living here I’ve heard up to 3 entities (woman & 2 men; i think it’s a demon since it can be one only) they are in my attic mostly or on the other side i hear footsteps all over day and night. There was a time my neighbor was gone for 2-3 months, i would hear music, entities opening and closing doors, talking, laughter, even turning on the showers, & turning the neighbors porch lights on and off (which i took pictures of might have to find them). I’ve recorded before too its hard to hear but with earbuds its clear as day you hear the entity.
I was so scared one time i asked my best friend ( I’ll call her M) to come stay the night with me, that night it seemed like it was going to be peaceful…oh how wrong we were..we both heard doors closing, banging, and like the neighbor was throwing a party!! M said when we all went to bed, she heard banging on all the windows in the guest room aka toy room across to the living room & mine. I was DEAD ASLEEP, i didnt hear anything that night other than the earlier noises before bedtime.
Afterwards,(fast forwarding) Id come home from work & instantly hear footsteps or banging in the attic while in my room and closet or i hear it in my kids room…i didn’t mention but the duplex is all brick so i know i shouldnt hear anything in the kids closets or mine, the banging is all around. I sometimes stay alone here too since i coparent, one night i heard someone banging extremely hard on my back door( my room has accessed to a porch outside) the door is glass too so you can imagine how loud !! I stayed frozen, before checking with nobody outside!! I also heard footsteps on my porch with nobody outside when i would check!! I’ve told my kids father who didn’t believe it til he heard banging one night around 9/10pm when we were in my bedroom.
Fast forward a bit again around February my brother said i should Sage the place..i didn’t think it would work.. which it didn’t because during the time i started saging with prayers in Spanish the entity just followed me i felt the presence just mocking me !! He doesnt want to leave this place, ive saged my place 4x and the banging continues.
My neighbor finally did come back at one point and the entity is here still i hear it dragging something heavy as if someone mightve been murdered and put away in a big box to be discarded!! When i hear my neighbor snoring (the walls pretty thin so not my fault) i would hear the entity dragging something heavy again or even the loud footsteps/banging in the attic area so i know it’s definitely not the neighbor in the attic or doing all the other stuff! The entity follows me around when I’m alone, itll follow me all the way to the kitchen(front area) to my bedroom (back area) of my place.
One night alone I experienced almost sleep paralysis i felt the energy of 2 entities one was a female i heard her speaking to me but since i just kept fighting them i really couldnt make out what she was trying to tell me but i would feel the heaviness of sleep paralysis trying to overcome me so i fought much harder that urge into falling captive in their presence til i broke free and everything disappeared and i could breathe again & felt less sweaty!!
During springbreak, my kids father took them on a trip to florida for a week; im not sure why i had woken up from a deep sleep til i looked at the time (3:40am) I instantly knew what woken me up…while i laid awake trying to go back to sleep i heard my laundry door close (the laundry room is in the middle of my place so in my hallway) I get goosebumps!! I told my little sister (R) about it and she said “couldve been the wind” I totally disagreed and i said “biiitchh where when its in my hallway with sealed everything!!”
Back in april i think during my nieces birthday weekends, i had my older sister (I’ll call her C) come over to stay the night, she heard nothing which is fine so at first she didn’t believe me.
Fast forward to this month i keep telling C about my place and i would ask her if shes sure she didnt sense anything (were all pretty sensitive to the paranormal and my sister has the ability to see spirits) she says no of course. Soo yesterday (June 2) C came over to hang out all day & I decided to just tell her more about whats been happening here & i refuse to speak about it in English or inside so we both step out to my porch. While outside I was smoking my bowl just talking away til she got goosebumps all over her body & she said she felt the entity extremely COLD and that she believes me now.. the entity wouldn’t leave her alone and kept touching her arms and legs; shed get goosebumps where he touched her, the entity followed us inside so he continued to touch her; she confirmed it’s a man who seems evil and like i said before she said he is mocking me & will not leave. Its best to move out asap because he is a demon!!!
If you guys want the pictures of my neighbors porch light and the audio I’ll gather what i do have and post it in the comments!!

Does anyone else just feel like absolute crap? I feel tired, I have no energy, I’m definitely depressed but I feel more like my body is just a mess, I’m aching, walking makes my legs hurt for days, my back hurts, I’m 5 week pp. I am really low on iron so I imagine it’s something to do with that (I am being checked!) but I just wanted to know if anyone feels like this? I had a c section 34 weeks, they say it was planned but it was pretty much if I didn’t have a c section my baby could die, It feels like it’s ruined my idea of having babies, all my family keep joking how I can’t ever have another because it’s too much worry(really troublesome pregnancy) and I agree, I really don’t think I could go through all this again. it was a really successful surgery, it was quick, my baby was healthier than expected but the whole urgency of it, I was in hospital every other day since 31 weeks, I just don’t feel like I’m enjoying this as much as I did with my first, I haven’t had my super mum in me yet, I just can’t wait for bed much nights to watch tv. My due date is in a few a days and I can’t help but feel cheated I never got to experience going into labour etc. Idk what I really want just to see if anyone else is just down pp!

I keep seeing people post about getting a $7,500 refund for purchasing Tesla. This is not what the federal tax credit incentive is. The federal tax credit for EV eligible buyers is non-refundable, which means it just helps covers the federal tax dollars that you owe. For example, if you owed $3,000 in federal taxes then the $7,500 tax credit would cover up to $3,000, but won’t reimburse the remaining $4,500. Just something to keep in mind when making a Tesla purchasing decision.
Source: https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/credits-for-new-clean-vehicles-purchased-in-2023-or-after
“Who Qualifies You may qualify for a credit up to $7,500 under Internal Revenue Code Section 30D if you buy a new, qualified plug-in EV or fuel cell electric vehicle (FCV). The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 changed the rules for this credit for vehicles purchased from 2023 to 2032.
The credit is available to individuals and their businesses.
To qualify, you must:
Buy it for your own use, not for resale Use it primarily in the U.S. In addition, your modified adjusted gross income (AGI) may not exceed:
$300,000 for married couples filing jointly $225,000 for heads of households $150,000 for all other filers You can use your modified AGI from the year you take delivery of the vehicle or the year before, whichever is less. If your modified AGI is below the threshold in 1 of the two years, you can claim the credit.
The credit is nonrefundable, so you can't get back more on the credit than you owe in taxes. You can't apply any excess credit to future tax years.”

From chat support agents randomly disconnecting, or not even allowing you to fully connect with the agent and explain what happened…or the system just flat out denying you any opportunity to plead your case in any way just goes to show how evil and incompetent the leadership at DoorDash has gotten. I guess trying to professionally and maturely ask for a refund or something similar with these guys is like trying to ask them to give me their wallet! 🤣
Yesterday evening I ordered a 9” pizza with a bottle of water for myself, and the restaurant did not mention that their pizza sauces are sweet; on DoorDash it was only mentioned as their ‘original sauce’. The driver did nothing wrong but the pizza was not good at all. So when I tried to to talk to a support agent about it and possibly ask for a refund…moments later, without any consideration or looking at my photos for my order that clearly listed the pizza restaurant name, he was like: ‘I would have to escalate your case to a special team,’ and I was like I spent $16 for this order, the pizza being $14, tipped $3 and paid $3 for the express delivery fee so my pizza wouldn’t be cold…I had $10 worth of credit to use with this order so this order could have easily been $30.
After he randomly disconnected from the conversation because I was asking him why did we have to go that route, a few minutes literally I got a refund for $10. I was relieved, but then again, whoever came up with these procedures are either very dumb or extremely stupid. Not even a supervisor was able to help me with a refund, only a specialized team. It’s like dealing with Uber rides and not DoorDash, how is this supposed to be difficult for these morons? There were so many instances where I let these people see all the evidence I had just so I wait days for a response…over food.
Most of these chat agents are outside the US, and that includes call center teams which I find extremely weird. Some of them are nice but there are some who just don’t even care about you as a customer.
DoorDash is the worst company to be in business right now. Prove me wrong.
I hope everyone has a great weekend and I apologize for ranting :)

So far living alone to attend college has had ups and downs. I’m staying over the summer to work an easy job on campus, and my landlords were kind enough to lower my rent significantly, which is straight up one of the only ways I’m here. I thank God for that. But, I’m not making a million bucks on campus in Florida.
Here’s what I’ve learned and been able to do so far so I’m not starving but I’m also saving stuff.

• Minute rice is a savior. If you can find a 72 ounce box, and save it in plastic containers, it’ll last a good few weeks depending on how often you use it.
  
• Refrigerate cereal bars if you have a fridge. It’s been almost 6 months and I’m not out of cereal bars, and there’s always a day where I absolutely need to eat something and just having one in a bag is a lifesaver.
  
• Burgers and fries. If you can order 4 lbs of burgers, that comes up to 12 burgers depending on how big you get em. You don’t have to actually make burgers every time, you could just mince them up with minute rice and make another type of meal. Or, split them in half to make two smaller meals. Fries can help be filling, and a big bag of frozen fries will last quite a while because you don’t need to make a crazy amount. Most fries sold are bigger than fast food fries, so you’ll make less but feed yourself more.
  
• Beans. Canned beans won’t go bad for months, and have been a life saver. It helps my Puerto Rican self loves rice and beans, and while it can be boring, a small bowl of it for lunch can give you enough of an energy boost to survive another few hours.
  

-Nuts. Having cheap trail mix bags at home will help cut down on buying chips and stuff. And if you bring them with you to work or school, that should help you save when over there.
-PB&J and bread can help stave off hunger a bit if you need an energy boost or just to get rid feeling hungry for a bit.
I’m not perfect and I’m still figuring stuff out. I have family that can and is willing to help me out, and goodness knows they’ve saved my life a lot, but I’m trying not to be a burden doing life on my own. Just wanted to it put this out there in case there’s another college student trying to figure stuff out. God Bless.

I've shared fiction here before and it didn't go altogether too poorly, so I'm going to press my luck and do it again. This was written about a year ago, and I'm tired of trying to peddle it to lit magazines. Might as well share it here, know that it met a few eyeballs, and have done with it.
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.

Age 27
Sex Male
Height 6 “2
Weight 390
Race Caucasian
Duration of complaint 3 weeks
Location Orlando Florida
Any existing relevant medical issues No
Current medications N/a
Include a photo if relevant
I’ve been starting to work out a lot, eating healthier, and drinking a gallon of water a day for about a month now. About 3 weeks ago I was doing bicep curls and felt a sharp pain in my arm. I immediately stopped and noticed I had a rather large bump on my bicep near the elbow. Since then I tried taking it easy for about a week and it did go down a good bit but was still noticeably swollen. Also anytime I do workout with it it swells up really big again. I went to a walk in clinic and they said it was probably a burst blood vessel but I haven’t had any bruising or signs of blood underneath the skin at all. I decided to bite the bullet and go to a family doctor and they had me get it ultrasoundEd and concluded it was just fatty tissue that might have just disconnected from the muscle. I even asked if it was worth getting an MRI and they said no. I dont feel any pain, have full range of motion, and from what I can tell normal strength but the swelling is not really getting better. Does anyone know what this is? I’m really worried I ruptured my bicep but the doctors dont seem to be that worried about it. My bicep essentially looks like a butt with a big lump near my shoulder and another near the elbow. I’ve also noticed that my forearm is a bit more swollen than the other. Am I being crazy? Does this sound like a ruptured bicep? I’ve felt zero pain except for the half second when it initially happened. Immediately after it seemed fine. Any advice would be helpful I just dont want to fuck Up my arm.

I have been dashing for over a year now. I am in college and it is great for when I am in school because I can dash in the big city I live in on weekends. Recently tho…. I have been getting less and less money per hour including my gas over the last six months. I’m talking orders being sent to my top dasher account that are $2.50 for over ten miles of driving and typically that’s also to the middle of nowhere with at least five miles back to zone or anywhere I could catch another order. Just curious what the hell is going on because doordash is allowing these types of orders and letting their workers be PUNISHED for not accepting a job that will LOSE MONEY. Gas is no cheaper than 2.95 on the best weeks, with 3.25 being average here…. This is insane and I am thinking of changing jobs at this point because I care about the orders, I made fifty or more deliveries a week and now my acceptance rate is in the ground because I can’t lose money trying to make some?!?
Just curious if anyone else is having this issue :/

I've been very overweight my whole life. I'm 18 now, and still live with my parents because I can't afford to move out whilst attending uni due to the cost of living crisis. So, for the forseeable future it seems I'll just be getting a job and paying my parents rent. I reallly want to lose weight, but I'm struggling to do so. My parents basically only buy junk food like frozen pizza, instant noodles, etc, or just food that I can't stand (hooray, autism). We only ever have limited fresh fruit and veg in the house. I'm also wary of our tapwater as I'm suspicious that it often makes me feel ill or has dirt in it, and since we don't buy bottled unless I can take some water home from school I just drink juice... which is obviously not exactly healthy. I'm not sure how to exercise either. If I go out more than a couple of times a week my parents get suspicious and don't allow me out (yes, I know), and even when I am out I'm never really sure what to do and just go for walks. I'm very lucky and have my own room and so I've attempted following exercise videos at home, but I only really have like 1mx1m of empty floor space to stand which makes things difficult.
I really want to finally be a healthy weight, but all of this combined with mental health stuff just leaves me with zero motivation or hope.

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I think it’s safe to say that Graham is the most fondly remembered companion of the Thirteens first team. Despite the fact that he was clearly devised for comic relief purposes he manages to be the most engaging member of he ‘fan’, he gets some great character development in his time aboard the tardis and arguably he’s the character that works with Thirteen the best. Part of this is down to Bradley Walsh’s fantastic performance, but part of it is because Graham breaks the companion template and manages to be somewhat unique compared to what we’ve had previously. As the ‘daggy dad’ archetype he gets to be both insightful and comical at times and it makes him consistently enjoyable to watch.
Most of Grahams development comes from his maturing relationship with Ryan, the grandson who never wanted him, but he also gets some great moments coming to terms with Graces death and expressing his fear of his cancer returning. He also chooses not to take revenge on the creature that killed his wife, Walsh excels in his delivery of those moments and manages to make them convincing even in the face of some not so stellar dialogue at times. Indeed I would’ve liked to see more of Graham, and you can tell he would’ve liked to stay in the tardis longer had Ryan decided to leave. (I almost wish they’d just married Ryan and Yaz off so we could’ve had Graham stay).
He’s relationship with the doctor is interesting in that it seems a bit more equal than what she has with Yaz and Ryan up to the same point (although people never fail to point out her failing to console him about his cancer). But they get on well enough and usually whenever they share the screen it’s enjoyable to watch. Graham also makes a great case for having kept Grace around as the two work really well together onscreen. However it’s his relationship with Ryan that takes the centre stage as they go from almost strangers to as close as family, with Ryan finally accepting him as his Grandpa, and their final scene together is actually quite sweet.
Overall Graham was a fantastic addition to the tardis team and one of the most engaging characters of the Chibnall era, and I hope we get more characters like him in the future.
And now we remember him, by looking back at his very best appearances and his very worst.
Five best appearances:

1. It takes you away - (It’s touching to see how Graham reacts to seeing Grace again, and in many ways this episode helps to explore his grief in a way we haven’t seen so far. This helps to wrap up this part of his character arc as Graham finally accepts her death and moves on while realising that Ryan needs him).
   
2. Resolution - (Here we can see how far Graham and Ryan’s relationship has come, with Graham supporting him throughout the episode as he comes into contact with his deadbeat dad. We also get to see him express his anger as he shreds Ryan’s dad for avoiding Graces funeral, and Walsh portrays this brilliantly and realistically without being over the top).
   
3. The Woman Who Fell to Earth - (Graham gets a great introduction here and is immediately the most likeable of the new team. All his scenes with Grace are sublime and really sell just how important their relationship is to him in such a short space of time).
   
4. Can you hear me? - (Getting to hear his fears and feelings about his cancer returning lends Graham some depth that the other members of the team lacked. It was also good to see him remembering grace again. And seeing him open up to the doctor is really nice to see, despite the fact that the fandom hasn’t received how she responded all too well).
   
5. The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos - (Despite the fact that this is a poor story, this is a defining one for Graham as he comes up against the monster that killed his wife. And instead of taking revenge we see that he’s grown enough to take the high road and instead focus on his relationship with Ryan rather than needlessly throwing his life away).
   

Very worst appearance:

• The Power of the doctor - (While it was good to see Graham again he was poorly used here and having him appear in a volcano on the other side of the world made little sense; as a result his return gets overshadowed by so many other returns and he doesn’t get to be as great as he was for most of his tenure).

So what do you think? Do yo I agree/disagree? Let us know in the comments!