I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she wishes she could spend more time in it but her husband is waiting in the car (OH! I BETTER BUY HIM SOME CHOCOLATE!), she piles a bunch of art supplies on the counter and then stops and tells me how my bangs are beautiful and remind her of the ocean (“Wooooosh” she says, making a wave gesture with her hand)
Ok. I think to myself. Awesomely happy, weird little old ladies are my favorite kind of customer. They’re thrilled about everything and they’re comfortably bananas. I can have a good time with this one. So we chat and it’s nice.
Then this kid, who’s been up my counter a few times to gather his school textbooks, comes up in line behind her (we’re connected to a major university in the city so we have a lot of harried students pass through). She turns around to him and, out of nowhere, demands that he put his textbooks on the counter. He’s confused but she explains that she’s going to buy his textbooks.
He goes sheetrock white. He refuses and adamantly insists that she can’t do that. It’s like, $400 worth of textbooks. She, this tiny old woman, bodily takes them out of her hands, throws them on the counter and turns to me with a intense stare and tells me to put them on her bill. The kid at this point is practically in tears. He’s confused and shocked and grateful. Then she turns to him and says “you need chocolate.” She starts grabbing handfuls of chocolates and putting them in her pile.
He keeps asking her “why are you doing this?” She responds “Do you like Harry Potter?“ and throws a copy of the new Cursed Child on the pile too.
Finally she’s done and I ring her up for a crazy amount of money. She pays and asks me to please give the kid a few bags for his stuff. While I’m bagging up her merchandise the kid hugs her. We’re both telling her how amazing she is and what an awesome thing she’s done. She turns to both of us and says probably one of the most profound, unscripted things I’ve ever had someone say:
“It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.”
The kid thanks her again and leaves. I tell her again how awesome she is. She’s staring out the door after him and says to me: “My son is a homeless meth addict. I don’t know what I did. I see that boy and I see the man my son could have been if someone had chosen to be kind to him at just the right time.”
I’ve bagged up all her stuff and at this point am super awkward and feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. Then she turns to me and says: I wish I could have bangs like that but my darn hair is just too curly.“ And leaves.
And that is the story of the best customer I’ve ever had. Be kind to somebody today.
I want an all-human AU where Stiles’s parents are divorced and his mom (not Claudia, some other meaner woman) sends him off to boarding school in Georgia or something, where he meets Scott as his roommate. The fic starts out with Stiles being miserable at this no-nonsense behavior school, and the other kids are assholes who decide to make him and asthmatic Scott their punching bag, so Stiles makes a plan to escape and find his dad in New York. Scott wants to join but knows he’d slow Stiles down with his condition, so he gives Stiles his small stash of savings and tells him to “make me proud and break out of here, dude. Pay me back when you find your dad.”
So BAM Stiles manages to escape via awesome cunning plan and he’s dashing down the wintery streets to the train station (he was sent to boarding school for a reason so he’s super badass and mischievous and uses this to his advantage to travel distance) BUT THEN after obstacles (being forced to jump train, wander on foot, eventually jumped and robbed by a gang) he runs out of money in Vermont.
So he’s stumbling down the street all tired and dirty and he uses his last five dollars to order a burger at some 24-hour diner at three in the morning. He savors it, tries to ignore the way that hot-but-creepy waiter guy is eyeing him distastefully (he hasn’t showered since like, that gym in North Carolina), and eventually decides that he’s going to steal from the register on his way out (and then just pay the diner back someday. Probably).
Unsure where this came from, if not the palsied hands of the good Lord himself.
Simple premise: Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” slipped from 45 to 33 rpm. Nothing more; no studio trickery, no trip hop drum breaks. The guitar lopes back in and around itself. The bass becomes elastic, hot rubber. The violin stabs become sustained cello lines. The backing choir’s split harmony rattles around, slinking ghostly into the corner. And most importantly, Parton’s once-frantic vocal is transformed from bubblegum country scrawl into something approximating field holler reverence.
An already perfect song made transcendental..
This was already one of my favorite songs, now I love it more.
Sorcerer’s Stones: 76,944 Chamber of Secrets: 85,141 Prisoner of Azkaban: 107,253 Goblet of Fire: 190,637 Order of the Phoenix: 257,045 Half-Blood Prince: 168,923 Deathly Hallows: 198,227
Word count in the LOTR Series:
The Hobbit: 95,022 Fellowship of the Ring: 177,227 Two Towers: 143,436 Return of the King: 134,462
This changed me
I’ve read/ am reading fic that are upwards to 150,000 – 200,000. You’re telling me that authors that write for fun are writing a full-length book for the fun of it? They have earned my respect 10 fold.
i sleep nude because if someone ever breaks into my house they gotta fight me while im naked and i dare you to try and swing on a nigga when his dick is out
You are grade A guarenteed to get yourself hurt with this mindset? You think I’m afraid to grab a dick and yank it, bruh? You think I won’t get my hands dirty on your dick in order to end you? You got the wrong one, man—and your ass better hope I don’t have a knife.
Okay weirdly this exact situation has happened to me. It was summer so I was sleeping naked, but then I heard the lock on the front door being opened. I thought someone was breaking into my house and I had enough time to either grab my sword or my nightgown, not both.
Two things I learned.
One, sometimes apartment complexes will flat out forget to tell you they’re sending someone over from the fire department to check your fire extinguishers.
Two, no matter how bad ass a person thinks they are, a naked person swinging a sword at them will knock them off balance both physically and mentally.
However, the fireman was very nice about it and accepted my apology.
didn’t think it could get any better, yet here we are
I am dying because this song is stuck in my head after one listen and I genuinely like it. Like I wasn’t super into boy bands so I don’t think it is a nostalgia effect. Also, I love that AJ is still committed to his Aesthetic
I found a little book of star trek trivia at my favorite used book store and the book was published in the 80s and I’m flipping through it and it’s like “dedicated Fans taping episodes of star trek ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy the series” which is such a weird sort of technology whiplash like we went from VHS tapes being THE way to consume media on demand and I’m over here in 2018 watching this show on my smartphone on Netflix and?? When the show came out VHS wasn’t even a wildly avaliable thing??? Sometimes little things give me hope, like a tiny book reminding me how much humanity has accomplished in 50 years.
Oh my goodness, there was no such thing as media on demand when TOS aired! We could not have imagined such a thing.
Around 1970-71 a group of original fans in the LA area did what we could to make a record of what happened in each episode, because it could easily be a year or more before our local station might run any given episode again. Whenever a rerun was shown, we worked as a team, taking Polaroid photos of the TV screen at each scene change and writing a quick description of what happens in the scene. These we glued onto poster boards, one for each episode, building up the collection over a couple of years (the rate at which we were able to see the episodes in reruns). The poster boards hung in a couple of our garages and were available for any fan to view with an appointment.
We would have been so jealous of fans now, had we known the day would come when we could see episodes any time we wanted. I still find it somewhat miraculous!
shealwaysreads 