apricot’s corner of the blogosphere yay ❤️

I'm taking the subway home...

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

wednesday food on a thursday

His final spasms had been mesmerizingly acrobatic. The fall down the steps leading up to his iron throne had pretzelled his body quite impressively, both arms folded behind his back and one leg bent at a jaunty angle.

The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.

"Shit," said the goblin.

"Shit," said the orc.

"We're likely to get blamed for this," the goblin said. She walked over to the head of the glittering mangled heap and started pulling the helmet off.

"It's not our fault," the orc said. "It's hard to help someone choking when they wear two-hundred pounds of spiked armor at all times."

"Yeah, well," the goblin grunted. The helmet came free, and the bald head of the Overlord bounced on the stone with a hollow, coconut noise. "You know how it is in this bloody country - thieves get their heads cut off so they can't think about thieving, and all that." She fished in the Overlord's mouth with a finger and pulled out the obstructing olive on the end of her claw.

She popped it into her mouth and chewed. "What do you reckon they do for a regicide?" she said.

"We should run," the orc said. She had started bouncing her leg. "I hear that there's some places in the Alliance where they just kill you and let you stay dead. That's got to be nicer than what'll happen if we stay here."

The goblin started to nod - and then her gaze fell on the helmet.

It looked like a pineapple designed by a deranged blacksmith. It was all thorns and spikes and hard edges, as though the maker had been very determined to not let pigeons roost on it. The only bits that weren't solid iron were eyeholes. Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face.

She held up the helmet and squinted from it to the orc. One of the thorns had been bent badly in the fall.

Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face...

"Right," she muttered. "Right. Could work - or."

The orc had a sudden vision of the immediate future. "No," she said.

"I mean you're about his height-"

"No."

"It would just be for a-"

"Absolutely not."

"Just hear me out," the goblin said. "Outside of this room are two-thousand men and orcs and goblins who are absolutely gonzo about this man, and there's a whole country of them outside of the castle, and at any moment someone's going to walk in that door and see one dead tit in black armor and two unbelievably dead idiots next to him.

"Or." She tossed the helmet up like a basketball to the orc, who fumbled and tried to find somewhere to hold it that wasn't a knife's edge. "We chuck him out the window now, walk out the door in the armor, and ditch the armor as soon as nobody sees us."

The orc had started bouncing her leg again. "They'll know something's up the second I walk out of the room."

"No worries," said the goblin. "Leave that to me."

---

It had been a very strange year for the Empire.

Change had rolled across the land as slow and inevitable as a glacier. Roads and bridges carved the gray, blasted wildlands, and a number of social reforms had made the country a place where you could be miserable, yes, but miserable in comfort and safety, and that was an improvement.

Barely anyone got boiled alive in molten metal, and even if the disgusted sun never rose to light the Empire, at least you had a roof over your head to protect yourself from the acid rain.

They haven't got the hang of pronouns yet, everyone is a 'he' because that's what they're called even if I just referred to Grandma as 'she' in the previous sentence. They've only recently stopped saying 'Good boy, Mumma!' when I do something like wash my hands. They're pretty good with understanding different biology but, on a social and language level, they've never divided people into different categories based on that or gender identity. They do know that I'm a girl/woman, it's just that the term holds similar weight to saying someone is tall or short or mentioning the colour of the eyes, and they apply the terms inconsistently. Their default setting to people and language has been gender neutral.

It makes sense that they've got a shaky grasp of the whole concept: they're four. They're starting to spell out words and do some addition but also still learning how to correctly say my full not-mum name and understand that their dad was once a little baby in Nanna's 'tummy'. They'll probably keep referring to every human on earth as a 'he' for awhile longer.

But over the last few days they've started insisting that pink is my second favourite colour (it isn't) after purple (which they know is my favourite and will remind me of multiple times a day). They don't do this to their dad.

When I said 'it's a nice colour, but no it's not a favourite' there was genuine confusion from one of them. Awhile later, he asked 'Mumma, you're a girl?' I said I was, and he was quiet and thoughtful.

Later that night he told me pink is one of my favourite colours again. When I asked why he thinks that he could give me no explanation other than a confused 'it's pretty?'

I said 'It is pretty. Do you like it?'

Keep in mind pink was, very recently, one of his favourite colours. But he shook his head adamantly, eyes wide.

His brother thought about it too, and said 'Oh yeah, it is pretty! I love pink!' which confused the newly-pink-disliking twin further and you could practically see the gears turning in his head as he remained silent.

He's four. Last month he loved pink. He still loves cuddling his (very pink) rainbow kitty-cat fluffy toy and telling me how cute it is, so I doubt it's a genuine aversion to the colour. And he seems to be insisting he doesn't like it because it's 'pretty,' and assumes that girls must like it for the same reason.

We think he learnt it from one of the few days they're at kindy, from another four-year-old.

Only four and already being taught that prettiness and certain colours aren't for them, and are only for girls.

Then last night, as we were getting ready for bed, he casually said 'Girls are bad at swimming.' The same way he'll tell me 'Spinosaurus looked a bit like a crocodile,' 'octopuses have three hearts,' or 'a hexagon has six sides.'

I gently asked him what he said, he repeated it, and when I asked why does he think girls aren't good at swimming he said 'because girls aren't, boys are good at swimming.'

I told him that wasn't true, girls and boys can both be good at swimming.

He accepted it easily, just a happy 'Oh!' to receive new information. Smiling at me.

'Am I a girl?' I asked him.

'Yeah, you're a girl Mumma.'

'And do you think I'm good at swimming?'

'Oh, yeah!'

He was actually very excited with this revelation, that I'm a girl and good at swimming. He was happy to know girls aren't bad at swimming, this wasn't some inherent belief. And it definitely didn't form from his own experiences - we're Australian, the twins have never been swimming with anyone who isn't good at it. And I'm the one normally in the pool with them and I'm a good swimmer even by Australian standards.

I don't think it came from their kindy teachers either.

This is something else another four-year-old has said.

They're four. FOUR. And already sexism and toxic masculinity is creeping into their conversations, pressuring them to stop liking certain colours and pretty things, and to diminish the capabilities of girls.

I was worried about the manosphere influence my boys would be exposed to as they got older, and how to talk to them about that and the rising numbers of young men who think women aren't as smart as them and shouldn't be able to vote or work after marriage, etc.

I didn't think it would start in kindergarten.

And if my boys have heard it, the little girls in their class probably have too. Do they disagree with it openly? Internalise it? Will they mention it to their parents and have it corrected? (Did one of them hear it from their parents - it could be a little girl sharing it, this does coincide with two new girls joining the class.)

Just... what the fuck.

What if you clipped out of the backrooms?