Maladaptive DayDrafting

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.

it’s been 9 years since i wrote this. i was experiencing 24/7 anxiety so badly that i needed serious medication. these days in the back of my car is an “emergency party box.” when people admit they no longer really celebrate their birthday; i tell them to put the sash on and queue up kesha, we’re going bowling or something. these days i can’t spin around without finding something i am enamored with. these days i list 3 things i’m grateful for before i fall asleep. you’re probably one of them, just by virtue of you existing.

at the time i wrote this, i was suffering through a severe panic attack literally every night. i tortured my brother with constant 2 AM calls just to hear someone else breathing, because i couldn’t be alone in the silence.

i rarely wish i was still 23 even though ironically i had more hope back then. what i can tell you is this: i love the same way, but bigger now. i’ve worn the velvet cape to several business meetings. i spent thursday in a crop top without caring what my stomach looked like.

i told her i like her; i often dress as a witch. i still got glass in my foot this morning. i’ve kissed maybe a thousand people since then and met a million more than that; passing like the shadow of a hammerhead in trains and planes and buses.

i saw you, beloved, there, maybe, on platform in south station. you didn’t speak, but you said: i struggle to give the nothing meaning. the nothing fills up everything. it is just loud and yellowed panicked silence. i can’t stop shaking.

on the roof, birds curl together against the chilled spring wind. the sky outside of the craft store was an iridescent pink. the nothing already had meaning; you are giving it meaning by witnessing.

fall in love again and again...

They routinely have entire conversations where Ilya is very softly smacking Shane's foot the entire time. Shane enjoys the percussive feedback.

Ilya mispronounces the word "Application" and they just sit there mutually whispering 'Aaap-li-caaa-shun' at each other for the next thirty seconds.

Ilya comes up behind Shane while he's trying to make a smoothie and says 'HELPING HANDS' and puts his arms under Shane's armpits.

Ilya sees Shane undressing in the bathroom and yells, "Take it all off!"

Shane carries Anya into the bedroom and holds her over Ilya's chest and moves her paws and says, "Papa it is me. Papa it has been an whole hour since I ate. Papa I am so hungry and sad." then drops her on his stomach.

Shane comes into the home office and grabs a pen off the desk and puts it against Ilya's cheek and says, "Any last words?" and Ilya says, "I wish I had eaten more dumplings."

Ilya spends an entire episode of House Hunters International with his hand down Shane's pants. It's not doing anything in there either it's just keeping warm.

Sometimes they are just mutually awake at three AM for No Reason and they go stand on the porch and stare at the empty street together.

Sometimes they are laying there playing footsie on the couch while on their phones (Parallel play) and Shane says, "Does your mouth ever do that squeezing thing. You know. When you eat." And Ilya says "Explain" and they spend the next ten minutes dissecting whether this is a Human Experience or a Shane Experience.

Sometimes Ilya will put his head on Shane's stomach and say, "Show me your boooones" and wait for Shane to lift his shirt so he can burrow under it.

When Shane gets frustrated he's liable to mutter, "One of these fucking days" under his breath. Ilya's job is to respond "Straight to the moon," and mime an uppercut.

Sometimes Ilya gets very excited especially before/after very intense games and in order to release some of this energy he does this WOOP thing with the back of his throat. Shane will respond with an echoing WOOP from wherever he is, even the showers. Sometimes other people on the team will echo them and it becomes a sort of hype-up but Shane and Ilya will even do it when they're alone. If Ilya is particularly excited he will say, "Louder, baby!" and Shane will WOOP again, big grin splitting his face.

Ilya sings songs under his breath and replaces half the lyrics with Shane and Anya's names. After he hears Blinding Lights by The Weeknd for the first time he spends WEEKS just periodically muttering "I said Shaaaane...I'm blinded by the Shaaaane..."

Ilya lays down flat on Shane's back and says, "Do you like this?" and if Shane says, "Yeah," he'll bite the back of his neck and say, "How about now?" And the way Shane responds decides if Ilya puts his hand in his pants or just weighs him down and takes a nap.

Shane holds out his hand to Ilya and says, "Do the thing," and Ilya spends the next three minutes carefully cracking all of Shane's knuckles.

Their finance guy is named Hezekiah Patterson and they ONLY refer to him as Hezekiah Patterson, AAMS. Did you talk to Hezekiah Patterson, AAMS about those assets? Shane, Hezekiah Patterson, AAMS is calling us. We just got a Christmas card from Hezekiah Patterson, AAMS. That was very nice of Heze--

Something I've noticed is the infinite layers you get in Hudson's Shane performance when you rewatch and look for them in different ways. The way he uses his breathing is IMPECCABLE, actually. In the scene where Shane is having a panic attack at the cottage after his dad sees them, a surface read is that he isn't doing much. His voice is highly moderated, his physicality controlled, but then you catch the way his breathing is reedy and catching in his chest. His stomach muscles are tense, he can't draw a full breath. He's truly cycling up the physical manifestations of an actual panic attack here.

And then! Then he reaches his hands up for Ilya and they are *shaking*. To the untrained eye, Shane is understated and controlled but actually the spiral is happening before our eyes. Ilya catches these little signs and throws a wrench in the spiral to stop it. He touches Shane, encourages him into a hug, and that's the first deep breath Hudson takes the whole scene.

Ilya has always been so direct with his expectations and his expectations have always been sex but now he’s suddenly acting differently and it’s nice but Shane also has no idea how to interpret this change. He doesn’t know what prompted it and he doesn’t know how he’s expected to react to it.

So Ilya hugs him to his chest and it feels really good but is he supposed to hug him back? No, right? That would be crossing a line, surely. Is he supposed to just lay exactly where Ilya placed him? How long can he do that until it becomes weird for Ilya?

ICE violently detained a Virginia mother while she was driving her daughter to school because she couldn’t recite her Social Security number from memory.

'When she stumbled, the agent got flustered and just lunged at her,' said her 16-year-old daughter. The mother immediately showed proof of her legal status: work permit, Social Security card, driver’s license, and car registration."

"ICE arrested her anyway.

Jaykie Funez-Andrade is now being held in Rockingham County Jail with no criminal charges, reportedly as a 'courtesy' to ICE. The arrest occurred on Route 11 North in Harrisonburg, VA.

I remember being at the monitor and my intimacy coordinator and producer were like, “Is that kiss too sweet?” I remember just being like, “I don’t care. It’s so good. It’s sweet. I want it to exist.” It wasn’t scripted that way, but at the same time it was Episode 2 so there had to be hesitation. But I was like, “I love it. I just want to watch them kiss each other.” When Ilya takes his hoodie [from Shane], they just had it.