Heather Erwin's tumblr

DO NOT DO THIS.

This makes me so angry.

If you work in a movie theater and you do this I have no respect for you.

My younger brother is Type 1 Diabetic.

When we go to a movie theater, we always get him diet soda. If he were to get regular when we asked for diet, we would not give him the insulin he would need for it. If that happens, his blood sugar level could go so high he could go into a coma, go blind, or even die.

If somebody gave him regular soda instead of diet without telling us, that person could be responsible for a nine-year-old being killed or blinded.

Just thinking about that makes me so angry. I get scared every time we take him to a movie in case the people working there saw this picture and decide to do the same thing.

I am very sensitive to lactose, not Lactose intolerant but because of stomach ulcers that are still healing. A couple years ago I went to Starbucks right after my classes with some friends and asked for a green tea latte with soy milk. The barista, for some reason out of malice and/or hate for her life so she took it out on me, gave me whole milk in my latte.

5 minutes after my first sip of latte, my stomach cramped BAD. Not the “Oh! time to poop!” kind of cramp but it felt like someone had stabbed me with a knife and twisted it. Now I’ve had this happen before so I knew the cause of it. I went up to the barista clutching my gut screaming at her that she put dairy in my latte rather than soy LIKE I REQUESTED. She denied it and called me a “pretentious white girl for wanting soy”and so my friends got the manager. I had to explain that I had stomach ulcers that were still healing and if I were to go to the hospital for this incident, they would be responsible for it.

Manager flipped his shit and the barista was terrified out of her mind. Pretty sure both thought i was gonna sue. Manager actually fired her on the spot because of the negligence. My friends managed to get me home in one piece while I stayed home for 3 days in absolute agony and missed my midterm.

Last month I went out to dinner with a friend at an italian restaurant that had a small gluten free menu. I had been there once before and had their gluten free pasta and it was great! I think one of the managers had been there and was super helpful when taking my order to make sure that everything was gluten free for me. When I ordered the gluten free pasta again this time though, the waitress who took my order all but rolled her eyes at me. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because the restaurant was so accommodating before, I just assumed it would be the same this time.

But sure enough, they brought out my pasta, I ate it, and about an hour later I had extreme stomach pains and was throwing up (in a movie theater no less).

Barfing and agonizing pain aside, eating gluten when you have celiac causes a lot of internal damage that’s hard to notice. The biggest thing is that it damages your intestines, preventing your body from absorbing nutrients properly, which can take months to heal.

90% of people don’t take my cats and dog allergies seriously when I tell them I’m allergic and wondering if a cat or a dog is present at X place. They think it’s just watery eyes. Nope. Well yeah, watery and itchy eyes, but I start wo wheeze and have trouble breathing. They don’t give epi-pen for those (anyway you have to go to the hospital after) just inhaler. It’s no miracle, specially if I didn’t take other meds before.

Now when people are assholes and fuck with my food / don’t provide, say, almond milk in place of whole milk in a frappuccino at Starbucks, nothing bad will happen to me like mentioned above.

No credit is viewed as the same as bad credit. Which means you could be denied if you ever do need to rent an apartment or a car. Hospitals and clinics are also less likely to allow payment plan programs for people without good credit.

Think of it this way. You have a credit card, which is your credit tracking device. You use the card to tell someone “I will pay for this thing with borrowed money.” They agree to allow you to pay with borrowed money. You then turn around to your credit card company and say “Thank you for allowing me to borrow your money, I will now pay you back with my own money.” (which, if you repay them promptly enough, you can repay them the exact same amount you borrowed, rather than paying them more than you borrowed [which is what interest is])

The credit card company then recognizes that you successfully borrowed their money AND returned it safely, and they pass that information along to credit tracking companies. Each time you do this, you gain credibility. If you do this enough times, you are considered a credible borrower of money, so that if you ever are in a situation where you need to borrow a large sum of money (for example, a mortgage or a car or a hospital bill or whatever), companies with money will look at how well you have returned money in the past, and say Ah yes, this person repays their debts well, so we can lend them our money this time.

1. get your first baby credit card with the bank that you already bank with. If it has cashback rewards, even better (that’ll be free money later).

2. set that shit up so it pays the full amount, automatically, every month. you don’t have to remember to go home and pay it off, or worry about it at all. You won’t pay interest.

Your first card, especially if you have no credit, is going to have a small limit. Like $500. This is important: credit companies want you to use a certain percentage of the card every month. This is 1-9%. I usually just go straight 5%. If you use too much, you look like a wild card (even if you pay it off every month) and if you use nothing than you’re not proving to them you can be trusted.

So your first card has a $500 limit. 5% of 500 is $25.

Your goal is to use $25/month.

This is about a tank of gas for me. So once a month, I would fill up with this card, and then put it in the back of my wallet until next month. The payment was made automatically by my bank from one account (debit) to the other (credit). Rinse and repeat. I did this for a year.

Then after a year, my credit had skyrocketed (because I had nothing before, and added this good habit for a year). So I called up my bank and asked for them to increase my limit based on my new credit. I had shown them I was good at borrowing a good amount of money and paying it back on time every time.

The bank increased my limit to $5,500. Like holy shit, at the time I was definitely not expecting that.

So new math. 5% of 5500 is $225. So now instead of gas, I put my cell phone bill ($50), my car insurance ($130), and my dog food automatic order ($40) on it.

The best part is everything is automatic. I keep this card in the back of my wallet permanently; all these bills and the automatic payments are, well, automatic. My credit goes up, I rack up cash back rewards, there’s nothing to it.

And, if I ever get in an emergency, like a vet bill for one of my dogs, I can use that card to pay the $3,000 emergency bill without worrying about whether the place will take my dog if I have no money. I can then go home, change the settings from “pay in full every month” to “pay $X every month” (more than the minimum!) until it’s paid off, and then go back to just my bills. My credit might take a little dip during that time, but will bounce back pretty quickly.

There’s several other factors to credit (hit me up if you want more info) but this was literally the only measure I took for my first year, and my credit went from 525 to 700 in a year. Another year later, I’m now at 753, have a mortgage with a great rate, and can get a monster ass loan if I really need it in case an emergency or hard times fall.

And if you do online banking, check if your financial institution has an option to apply for a credit card online. It can save you an appointment if that gives you anxiety, and all the same information on interest rates and annual fees and rewards incentives, whether it be points or cash back, should be readily available on your bank’s website. Another option would be to call your bank’s advice line (there’s usually a 1-800 number on the back of your debit card, or find the number online) if you want to speak to someone but don’t want to or can’t make it into a branch.

Credit cards aren’t the only way to build credit. 

After the shower: … So I think I had… some words planned. And maybe some punctuation… Hm.

Millennials do not cope well with meaningless busy work so their boss looks better.  They don’t cope with being talked down to or not being assisted by their boss when they have a problem.  They do not deal well with their innovative ideas being shut down because “that’s not how we do it here.” and I don’t see how any of those things is a problem.

Millennials are also the first generation since the internet was a prominent thing to utilize it as a source of information in a way that is empowering for each other.  A single millennial can buy a product and then inform anyone who wants to know about the quality of said product.  It only takes a handful of millennials to say “this is a substandard product” to render all the millions of dollars spent on advertising that product completely useless.

Big business has been a blotch on millennials lives since before most of you could even assume a role in adulthood to effect it, so you trust one another more than you trust advertisements or sponsorship, etc.  

On the flip side, though, you enthusiastically will push and promote things that you love.

Big business and their baby boomer CEOs and presidents HATE this.  Because it means that they can no longer provide a substandard product while making the consumer feel there is nothing better out there.

In the past, if every dish soap was awful, you just had to continue using awful dish soap.  Now, you can crowd source an alternative.  You can post in a forum, your facebook, a mass text, etc and say “I hate every dish soap, what can I do?” and you will be directed to actual good brands or you will be taught how to brew your own.

I’d love to buy a house, but I can’t afford a down payment and can’t be certain that I’ll have the same income levels for thirty years and I don’t actually know whether the banks will accept my highly-fluctuating, self-employed-and-seasonal-labor income as stable enough or high enough to be approved for a mortgage.

And also every new housing development I’ve seen in the past five years has been “Executive Housing, Starting At 390K” and the realtor websites are full of last decade’s foreclosed subdivision homes in the $275K region, and there’s legit no one, including the zoning board, that’s going to help me find or make a cute little house on a tenth of an acre in the region of $50-60K, let alone every other millennial who might like to settle down in a place that suits her desires and means.

Oh, and that same zoning means five people aren’t allowed to share that $300K, 5-bedroom McMansion, because fuck us, that’s why.

And what else? The refrigerator that recently conked out on me was manufactured in 1967. That thing lasted almost fifty years, and today if I walk into a big box store’s appliance department to buy a new refrigerator they will tell me I should really buy a warranty to cover the apparently-substantial risk that it will break within two to five years.

Oh, and there’s apparently a $400ish premium to buy one with a convenient configuration because if you want the refrigerator on top and accessible without bending down for anyone taller than your average first grader there aren’t any of those in the entry-level price range. Once again, fuck us.

Then there’s the labor market itself, where “entry level” positions want three-to-five years of experience, and everybody won’t shut up about the trades but even that requires a $5K+ outlay to go to school for it, and every fast-food restaurant out there has a permanent “Now Hiring” sign up because they drive employees away as fast as they can replace them.

And so many food-service jobs involve being forced to throw away loads of food as it expires but if you eat it or take it home it’s viewed as stealing, and retail jobs sometimes require you to smash perfectly good computers with a sledgehammer so nobody can use them, and fuck all of this, yes, I’m gonna make my own goddamn laundry detergent from a recipe I found on the internet, and I’m gonna buy as much of my vegetables as possible in seed form, and I’m gonna fucking read the consumer reviews on shit before I buy it and I’m going to source a refrigerator from Cragislist for approximately the price of the warranty on a new one, and if The Market wants me to buy a house, it can bloody well wait for me to have the money.

just watch this. 

“blablabla, disloyalty”

“oooh!”