Margin

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.

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

アカウント作り直したので過去絵中心にボチボチ更新していきます。

I have re-created my account.

My creator name is Nishiki Suzumori.

I will update mainly illustrations I have drawn in the past.

Hross

My dad’s favorite book is Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis and he asked if I could paint his favorite creature from it - the Hrossa. Here’s the description:

The hrossa (singular hross) resemble bipedal otters or seals, and are somewhat taller and thinner than humans. Ransom finds them beautiful: “covered, face and all, with thick black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat … glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth” (p. 59, Chap. 9). They live in the low river valleys (handramit in the speech of the eldila) and specialize in farming, fishing, and performing arts such as dancing and poetry. They are especially gifted in making poetry; yet they refuse to write it down as they believe that books ruin words and poems. Their technical level is low, and they wear only pocketed loincloths. The boats that they build are similar to our canoes. They add an initial /h/ sound to their words. Their sense of humor is “extravagant and fantastic” (Chap. 18).

I pointed it out to her and together we regarded the infant screaming.

After she left my coworker came up and informed me there was a bird on her car. I went out to look and lo, the fledgling had scrambled up onto her windshield and was pecking forlornly at its reflection.

It stayed perched there in the hot sun, trying to move higher up the car with no success but too scared to fly down. She was agitated that it was on her car since she didn’t know if it would leave on its own.

“It’s a baby,” I told her, “It’s still learning how to fly.”

“That’s a baby?! It’s so big!”

“Yeah, it’s just a little guy.”

I went out to investigate. The parents began screaming and swooping. I placated them with crackers which they accepted without relenting their screaming. My coworker said she could now see that the creature on her car was indeed a baby with the sleek black parents swooshing angrily around in the air.

We regarded the baby together. After a while I started noticing it was showing signs of fatigue and distress. Mouth gaping but not begging for food, wings drooping. I went back out to check on it.

I was debating moving the baby; the day kept getting hotter and it didn’t have the energy or skill to relocate itself. My coworker also wanted the bird to stop pooping on her car. So eventually I announced, “I’m gonna move the bird.”

“Your gonna grab it? Aren’t you scared?”

I looked at her in bafflement. I grew up around every imaginable kind of fowl. The only bird I’d be scared of would be some of the big flightless ones. Even geese/swans are manageable if you just grab their necks before they really get flapping. The parents were not gonna go for my eyes like magpies and in general crows tend to recognize when you’re trying to help. “It’s just a little baby guy. It’s fine.”

I approached the baby amidst its parents shrieking crow obscenities down upon me. I scooped it gently like the burger.

I cannot begin to convey how soft that baby crow felt. It was the downiest most pleasant tactile thing that I’ve maybe ever held and the experience was only slightly marred by the goober trying ineffectually to bite me. It was stymied by the fact that it ain’t my first rodeo.

I brought it ten feet away to a nice shady tree. I held the baby gently so it could get its feet under it on the branch. It seemed a bit confused at this point but eventually gripped the branch and I stepped back and threw peanuts in self defense while the angry parents swooped showily around at me.

It stayed there pretty much the rest of the day. Its parents both checked in to make sure I hadn’t murdered it then flew back to where we could see a nest. So best theory is that this dingus was the first to start fledging and couldn’t actually return to the nest after launching.

I told my wife afterward and they went, “You. You touched the bird?!” My coworkers husband was also flabbergasted that I’d been brave enough to grab it. My coworker said she was just gonna shove it off her car with a broom.

As if they didn’t know who they married. As if I am not someone who would confidently help a stray cat or wrangle a chicken.

You haven’t seen that meme?

In those heavy days in June,

When love became an act of defiance.

The Star Trek title card generator is over here:

The sitemaker (Josh Mayfield at https://bsky.app/profile/bean525.bsky.social) has asked for people to come in and kick its tires so he can work out any bugs they turn up. So do give him a hand, if you feel inclined. :)

(also, deeply amused by this one...)