Flying

Anyway my thoughts on the tadc finale

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.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

"What's your point?" "My point is you should call your son." "What if he won't talk to me?" "At least you'll know. Then you could stop worrying about it. You won't have to be afraid anymore. I don't care how mad I was, I'd talk to my dad. Especially around the holidays." "I don't know." "Just give it a shot. For your granddaughter anyway. I'm sure she misses you. And the presents."

Peacock spiders performing mating dance.

FLY is a story about a boy who gets a second chance. Help his story take flight June 9th 11am EST on Kickstarter. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings I hope this story lifts the world to a brighter place.

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

My thoughts on Ayds®, in case you were wondering.

I rescued this sad box of Ayds from my grandmother’s kitchen cupboard shortly after her passing in 1993. It was trash to be discarded, covered in dust. As a passing curiosity I picked it up and did a quick calculation. Ayds had been off the market for the better part of a decade by that point. Its moniker’s unfortunate similarity to the disease of the same name had sullied the Ayds brand, to put it mildly. The popular “reducing candy” succumbed to the ensuing PR disaster, leading to a decline in sales and the product’s eventual demise sometime in the mid-1980s. And this was an earlier box design than the one I remembered from my days working at the drug store in college in the early ’80s. The smart-looking design aesthetic of the package held some clues to the brand’s eventual identity crisis; made to be sold alongside “diet pills” like Dexatrim, adjacent to Flintstone vitamins and Geritol, but within grabbing distance of the Whitman’s samplers and Haley’s M-O. This old box of science candies was designed to appeal to adults who might be attracted to the word “plan,” applied to weight-loss caramels. (I never really knew what Ayds was: Did Ayds have an appetite suppressant in it? Caffeine?? No. Turns out, Ayds was just a vitamin pill in the form of a piece of candy, a precursor, I suppose, to today’s gummy-bear vitamins. If a person was restricting their diet or skipping meals, they could just eat Ayds and still get some guilt-free nutrition as well as some of those delicious “available calories.” According to the list of ingredients, Ayds was 72.5% corn syrup, 9.9% fat. So, it’s Tootsie Rolls, basically.) There was still product inside this box, wrapped in cellophane, dried out and hardened, along with a few grocery coupons grandma had clipped, stowed in there, and forgotten about… all of it dated 1974, the year Rhoda went on the air. This, I realized, was probably the first and last box of Ayds grandma ever bought, its life spent migrating to the back of her cupboard. She’d hung on to those fossilized caramels for twenty years. Impressive. It was the kind of Depression-era household thrift she was known for and which prevented her from ever throwing anything away. Not even Ayds. This box had come so far, it seemed to me. I couldn’t bear to see it just go into the trash, so I wiped it off and put it in my suitcase. And now these reducing candies are 45 years old and hard as dice — beautiful shiny brown dice. So I keep them around, for old times’ sake, collecting dust in my kitchen.

The opening title card of the movie “HOLES” is misspelled in DVD and Blu-Ray copies of the film.

Often when a movie is transferred to DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K formats, the titles have to be redone to read more legibly. When Disney released “HOLES” in 2003, the title card itself was written in small text in the corner of the screen. If transferred to home video normally, this title would have been only five pixels tall and too faint to make out.

But in early 2004, when the time came to alter the title for home video, the digital technician responsible typed the name wrong and quality control never caught it, all the way through the film’s blu-ray release in 2018. No fans wrote in noticing the flaw, nobody in quality for the disc releases, nobody at all noticed, and so the flaw remains to this day.