Stuck in my fantasy

"The type of love that this song sings about is unconditional love. People say that term all the time and they kinda think that they know what unconditional love is, but I think true unconditional love is, like, do you love someone so much that you would even love them if they didn't love you anymore? That is unconditional love."

Um, "hoax" has entered the chat. 😳

I feel like that goes a long way to explaining why she may have believed "hoax" was romantic, and why "grey skies everyday, would you still stay" was the ultimate expression of love. "Your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in" makes a lot more sense in this context, holding onto someone who's drifting away or showing that they may not love you in the way you need or in the way you'd once been. It's kind of heartbreaking because she's so earnest and so emphatic about it, but it's actually so sad in the context of ~everything~.

Help me hold onto you. That's the kind of heartbreak time could never mend. And I can't talk to you when you're like this, staring out the window like I'm not your favorite town. Your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in. Don't want know other shade of blue but you. I'll be getting over you my whole life. Like waiting for a bus that never shows you just start walkin' on. Pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away. I left all I knew, you left me at the house by the Heath.

(My personal opinion is that unconditional love isn't loving someone even if they leave you; it's loving someone for who they are, including their challenges, and not seeing it as a transaction but an action. ANYWAY. Semantics I guess. I find the way she explains it really devastating tbh.)

(video timestamped @ 19:27)

No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to

It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!

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.