one of the little gay people in your phone

This is what would occur if grace and Rocky had a kid

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.

“i think [celebrity] is secretly a Klingklang” better, still a conspiracy but paying dues to undervalued objectmon

like the regular kid enthusiasm of yeah that Grace guy met an alien, cleaned the sun blah blah blah. Eridians are regular visitors on Earth and it's boooooooooring.

and then the kid opens Wikipedia and that asshole is all over the thing. no easy essay of important person invented important thing that is so important that I have to write some bullshit on it. nope.

guy pops up all over the history section. yeah sure. diplomacy? wait wasn't he an astronaut. biology? what? oh he had PhD in something biology. oh he named astophage "astophage"! is that the end of an essay? oh no it continues. xenobiology, xenolinguistics, all the space exploration and, oh, a first contact! are we done yet? no. fuck. wait, metallurgy???? wtf is this dude doing in the metallurgy section. wasn't he a biologist?

and then some kids would get a little bit into it and read through early life section to find oh he got kicked out of his field for being a weirdo alien guy. oh that's a great story! with the hard work and the incredible strength of the will he proved everybody wrong!

no wait

he was just some scrungly guy that got dragged kicking and screaming into this whole bs just to pull the most lock tf in in the history of locking tf in

wtf?!

and then they dig deep enough to find the video logs

the procedure to remove me is medically and legally a late term abortion. i was aborted, and it saved my life. if they hadn’t aborted me, my mother and i would both be dead, my siblings would have been left with a dead mother, and i would have never even gotten a chance to live a single day. and now, people are being denied this procedure and dying because it’s literally an abortion!! mothers and their babies are being killed because their doctors are not allowed to perform life-saving abortions.

on the same note, my sister was recently denied an abortion. which is to say, cleaning out the already dead fetus after she had a miscarriage from a wanted pregnancy. they refused treatment unless the DEAD fetus was actively killing her, because the procedure to remove it is medically and legally an abortion. they basically said to her “come back when you’re dying of an infection or sepsis or something, until then you just have to bleed out.” my sister could have died from this, people HAVE died from being denied abortions after having a miscarriage. if she was one of these people, my sister would have been dead, my mother would have to live the rest of her life without her daughter, and my nephew would have had to live the rest of his life without a mother.

read it, now read it again.

this procedure is an abortion from a legal and medical standpoint. laws that target "abortion" include this and more.

miscarriages are abortions ffs

and Shirley Exemptions are no way to protect anything

They straight up do not care that people have, will, and continue to die. Especially the 'wrong' kinds of people.

And keep in mind the people signing these bills, rich mfs that they are? They'll always ALWAYS have access to getting their mistresses, daughters, anybody THEY want, to get an abortion.

They had a woman come in maybe 2 months after Roe v Wade was overturned. She was a day or so post-miscarriage. It was her 2nd miscarriage. She and her husband had been trying for YEARS. They were paying THOUSANDS for fertility treatments and thought it would work this time. She was sobbing. Her husband was sobbing.

But more importantly... they came in because she had just collapsed and was having bouts of dizziness.

An ultrasound my friend performed confirmed 2 things:

She had had an incomplete natural evacuation. There was still a fair amount of tissue in her uterus, which would definitely be decomposing by that point (the uterus is not a sterile environment).

There was no heartbeat. None. Not a single contracting cell.

They called Legal, because they knew exactly what was going to happen. This woman, unless given an artificial evacuation (aka... an abortion), would become septic. Legal said, "You can't until her vitals drop. In the eyes of the law, if she could technically pass the tissue naturally until the moment before you intervene, you have performed a medically unnecessary abortion. Anyone who assists will be stripped of their medical credentials and put on trial for murder, and the hospital cannot defend you and will not be held responsible."

There was nothing the woman or the family could sign. There was no loophole. My friend went over the vitals collected by her nurse all night, but she hadn't crashed yet. Just slowly became more and more delirious from the infection spreading from the dead tissue. The only medications they could even give to ease her suffering were meds/doses approved for actively pregnant women.

Her husband could only sit there and watch.

When the woman's blood pressure suddenly dropped, they rushed her into the OR for the evacuation/abortion, which they'd had prepped for her. At that point, my friend's line of care was over. The doctors who took over the case said she was being recommended to internal surgery because her uterine tissue has started going necrotic as well, and would need to be removed.

This meant her chance to have her own baby would drop to almost nothing.

Before Roe v Wade was overturned, this would have been an upsetting in-and-out trip to the ER after a terrible, terrible day. My friend barely would have batted an eye after the 5 minutes of sympathy she could have afforded before moving to the next patient.

But because it happened after, this woman lost her baby, nearly lost her life, and permanently lost any ability to carry a child to term in one long, shitty, horrific weekend. Infections like that are extremely damaging to the body as well; she may have permanent side effects.

FOR DEAD TISSUE. Dead. The baby was dead already. It was already gone. It was so dead and gone that it was ROTTING inside her.

While much less damaging, my friend and her team were permanently scarred by this event. She'd been in this small town ER for almost a decade by that point, she went through the COVID shutdown in that hospital, she's seen UGLY, haunting things and told me the HIPPA versions with a completely straight face.

She could barely get the words out on this story. She choked on the guilt. She cried, and she'd never cried over a medical story to me before.

I told a Pro-Life woman this story once. I told her, "If your daughter has complications with her pregnancy, you have to get her to [state where abortion is legal] immediately, no matter what it costs. This is what is happening here."

She cried. She cried just hearing about it, third-hand. Because of course she did. It's horrifying. It's undeniably WRONG.

And when she claimed that this must have been some cruel twist of a law taken too far, some unfortunate, unforeseen side effect... I reminded her that this is what was happening before Roe v. Wade, and in living memory of the Supreme Court and sitting members of congress. Because Roe v Wade was ruled on in 1973. And those old fucks all remember 1972.

They just don't care about making exceptions, because exceptions mean loopholes to them, and what's the trauma of a few unknown nobodies to politicians when they have their pearls to clutch and votes to secure?