Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?
Just let that marinate for a moment.
Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.
Not for nothing, but this is literally part of the entire point of Universal Basic Income.
When abused people can just literally walk away, knowing they can still have enough money to live, the world will be a lot less sheltering of abusers and that is a massive fucking benefit.
It gets better than that, if we go with my ideal UBI scenario, in which we peg UBI to “enough to live in any major metropolitan city in the country” and do NOT adjust it for cost of living.
Suddenly, the poverty and scrabbling for survival of rural areas? Gone. That UBI will go a whole long fucking way out there. Suddenly, people who had to move to the cities to get jobs that paid enough? Can afford to move back. Heck, they can afford to get decent fucking broadband out there and continue working, just, not in the city. Suddenly, people who live in rural areas but want to move to the cities with like-minded people? That’s affordable, too. Suddenly, people who want to have a bigger house, but are stuck in a tiny apartment in a city? They can afford to move out to where there are bigger houses.
Universal Basic Income would realign our whole damn society, and I think it would long-term be for the better.
it’s very funny to grow up and become the age you used to think adults were so old and wise at and realize that their inner monologue was ABSOLUTELY “shit shit shit shit shit shit” the whole time
guys my mom’s new boyfriend is trying to be supportive of me being a trans guy and he said “i got you a gift, a boy gift”
it’s a mountain dew nascar trucker hat. i wanna scream, like it’s nice he got me a gift and it’s nice he’s trying but…. I wanna Sc r EAM
Guys drink MOUNTAIN DEW
And drive
N ASC AR
And wear
Tr u ck hA ts
i love parental figures who try especially straight cis men who like dont know shit but theyre like oh boy? i know boy things. heres a boy item for you, a freshly declared boy. welcome to the club :)
forget the Internet things that would be incomprehensible 2 years ago phenomenon
where is the appreciation for Internet things that you could show to someone from 3000 BC and be almost sure they’d get a kick out of it
A short list of things that probably would be funny to humans in any time ever:
objects shaped like dicks
funky dances
dancing badly to bangin music
dogs being stupid (we’ve had those idiots domesticated for 30,000 years)
teenage boys being stupid
slapstick
that video where the guy is singing/chanting while bouncing on a tree branch and it abruptly breaks under him
that video where two guys are trying to get their phone out from behind a fence with sticks and one loses his stick so the other climbs the fence, gets the stick, and ignores the phone
literally any video with animals acting like people
Now what I need is like a bunch of memes and funny shit arranged on a timeline showing the earliest time period where they would be funny/understandable.
Obviously you’d have a lot that’s based on really recent pop culture references, but by like, 2,000 BC…a lot of tropes our stories still use have been established, there are stringed instruments, people have pet cats and dogs…so much would be familiar you know…Ancient Egyptians would love funny cat compilations and you know this is the case and they would probably love the videos of people playing guitars for pleased or unimpressed pets.
Historians 20,000 years from now: “We are unable to precisely date the rise of Shrek memes, but the domestication of donkeys in the fourth millennium BC sets an upper bound.”
I cannot believe nobody has mentioned Ea-Nasir and the copper ingots
it’s always a good day to complain about English speakers
Important addition: Maria Skłodowska-Curie was born during partitions, which means Poland didn’t exist, which means her insistence that she was Polish was a significant act of defiance against the occupation, which means that you should respect that instead of arguing that ‘well she had French citizenship’. She couldn’t have Polish citizenship despite being Polish, that’s kinda the point she was making by keeping her maiden name and naming a chemical element she discovered ‘Polonium’ .
HOW TO PRONOUNCE: Skłodowska
L with a dash through it (ł) makes a “W” sound. and W makes a “V” sound.
A tumblr devoted to pretty dresses, history (especially Age of Sail), cute animals, feminist analysis of pop culture, pictures of actors I fancy, the usual proportion of Doctor Who and BBC Sherlock, and a whole LOT of Horatio Hornblower. And kvetching about my writing. It's a crucial part of my process.
