Read the stars

“Nori-senpai - you’re fighting with us aren’t you?” How dare you make me cry at 5AM Daiya? I know they can’t do merch for everyone- the cast is too big but that’s ok - I’ll create for you my sweet squirrel son.

Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid.

Patrick Swayze, specifically in Dirty Dancing because his mom would watch that movie whenever it came on and nine year old Shane would join her, watching with an innocent but fixed fascination he usually only ever showed for hockey related things.

Li Shang in Mulan.

An 8th grade classmate who occasionally told the other boys to knock it off when they made jokes at Shane's expense. He had that 90s popular boy curtain bangs haircut and Shane would sometimes fantasize about brushing the hair away from his face.

The boy who was the Captain of his U15 team the year he joined. Confused it for hero worship. He had a habit of ruffling Shane's hair and of teasing him in a way that sometimes crossed the line from affectionate to mean. Both gave Shane butterflies.

Scott Hunter, also confused for hero worship.

A 12th grade classmate who was on the basketball team and who always stood just a little bit too close whenever he talked to Shane, forcing Shane to crane his neck to look up at him.

Ilya Rozanov, unfortunately.

Carter Vaughn. He's cute, he's friendly, and he throws his arm around Shane's shoulders whenever they meet.

Ilya Rozanov, still.

A photographer who takes Shane's pictures for one of his many brand deals and is a little more hands-on than most, without touching Shane in any way that could be construed as inappropriate. Tells Shane "good job, kid, you're a natural" once the shoot is over, his voice warm and deep.

His boyfriend, Ilya Rozanov.

J.J. Boiziau, after J.J. takes him out to a gay club post Shane coming out and forces him onto the dancefloor with him. This crush is swiftly snuffed out the next week when J.J. tosses his socks at him in the locker room and the smell nearly knocks Shane out cold.

This situation is spiraling out of control, with no safeguards in place to protect people, the environment, or our future.

When decisions are driven purely by profit, the outcomes are rarely positive; greed without conscience leads nowhere good.

Not seeing Rozanov is not an option, so instead Shane picks out a few other cities to regularly go out by himself in. He'll go for a long walk, maybe sit down somewhere for a drink, and then catch a taxi back to the hotel an appropriate amount of time later. It's honestly pretty nice, unwinding by himself in this way, and now disappearing after games is not a thing specific to Boston! It's just another strange Hollander quirk!

Unfortunately, he fails to account for the guys on the team jumping on the most obvious explanation for all these disappearances, which is that Shane now has a girl in every port.

Word about this starts to spread quick, because it is so out of character for Shane, and pretty soon half the league is under the impression that he's some secret playboy.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.