chillest biohazard lockdown

Fidèle (May 2003–January 2016), a Belgian yellow Labrador Retriever, made famous due to his habit of sleeping on a windowsill facing the Groenerei canal in Bruges, Belgium.

“We adopted a senior doggo and he loves sleeping under our bed. This is our new morning routine”

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

Boring, sad. Full of splinters and negligent HOA policies.

Currently (WIP):

1. Hydrate yourself

2. Drill drainage holes in bottom. If you don’t have a drill and are a feral gnome, you can stab some holes in with a utility knife but this is not recommended.

3. Hydrate again.

4. Wave at your neighbors. Forget you are holding your knife while doing so.

5. Cut a swath of weed mat. Doesn’t have to be pretty or fitted, just large enough to cover the drainage holes. Weigh down with bricks so they don’t fly off with the slightest breeze and you end up accidentally chasing your neighbor. With you knife. Again.

6. D I R T

Open various bags of dirt and pour in, breaking up any particularly large clods with your hands so it areates. It’s also good for your soul to shove your hands into dirt.

7. Realize you’re really bad at math and that you will need to go get more dirt for the last 2 tubs.

So unless I REALLY fail the hell out of a Will Save I’m not planting 5 tomato plants, but the cages are real handy for keeping the soaker hose in place and indicating to Erin the HOA Snitch that what I have going on here is a GARDEN, THAT THING THAT IS TOTALLY LEGAL FOR ME TO HAVE, HAHAHAHAHA FUCK YOU.

As of right now, I don’t have running water between 8AM and 5PM because the HOA never allowed the city to do sewer maintainence because then they’d have to spend money fixing the parking lot, and now something catastrophic has happened to the pipes, and there is a colossal hole in the ground where the parking lot used to be. Also a hideous amount of noise and terrible smells. 

In addition to generally sucking, we have Erin. She was probably born in the Triassic, smokes like a factory victorian children would lose fingers in, and She’s my most recent Mortal Nemesis.

I found out about her when I came down for breakfast about a week after we moved in and found her, on a stepstool, both hands on the glass, peering into my kitchen window at 5 AM.  I slapped the window and swore at her, assuming she was the neighborhood loon*, and a week later got a letter threatening me with a $300 fine if I didn’t remove the nonapproved storage bins off the porch. She then took 9 months to approve me putting the gate the HOA had owed the property since 2012 up, and threatened me with another fine when I put up the damn thing anyway. Other neighbors have been harassed for things like having repairs she’d already approved done, having loud children, and having “too revealing” swimwear.**

She doesn’t get paid to do this, by the way.  She volunteered.

So I’ve taken two lines of precaution.  

Firstly, my reading-disordered ass went down to the library where the actual copy of the rules are kept, INSTEAD OF ONLINE, LIKE EVERY OTHER ORGANIZATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, and read the whole thing until I found a neat loophole to an issue-  The porch is very nice in the summer, but it’s also exposed and people look in the windows and my idiot dog will bound right over that wall after any rabbit he sees, so I want a tall visual barrier put up.  But the rules say no artifical fences or blinds. They do specify that having plants that just so happen to grow up over the edge of the wall are A-OK.  So I’ve planted corn and sunflowers all around the outside.  Should give me a nice 9-foot and perfectly legal fence when they’re done.

Secondly, I’ve made friends with her Priest, a Father McAffery, who runs a legit food bank.  So as far as he knows I’m running the Saint Fiacre’s Food Bank Supplemental Garden and Spiritual Refuge***.  He thinks I’m delightful and Catholic. I am probably one of those things and good at faking the other, but the illusion is enough that I can probably sic him on Erin if she sees fit to complain about the garden.

*I mean, I’m not wrong. 

**Colorado recently legalized allowing people with breasts to have them out in public regardless of gender. Karen in number 6 is also a Mortal Nemesis**** but I’m looking forward to the partially topless fight she and Erin are going to have any day now.

***By which I mean I like growing crops but only want to eat some of them and like feeding other people, and when my mind is troubled and my soul restless, I shall retreat betwixt the corn with an iced coffe and a trashy fanfic until I feel better.

Well, it’s been about a month, and everything came up really nice!  The corn is about knee-height from where it’s planted the sunflowers are going to be HUGE, and the Lemon Tree made a tiny, tiny little lemon that the birds ate.

I also found my snap pea and pumpkin seeds and stuck them in the dirt because better late than never and last year my MIL was picking tomatoes off her plant well into the middle of November

Also:  the first of the flowers has bloomed!

I don’t know what it is but it’s cute and the butterflies love it.

So the only thing I could do was have it end in tragedy. That way I wouldn’t have to break up with the guy and I could adopt his daughter to stay close to her. He passed away peacefully on fire in the kitchen. Now in previous games, when a kid is taken away by CPS, the next kid you adopt is the same kid. Welp that didn’t carry over into sims 4 so the daughter ended up being taken away and erased from the game by the great sims deity.

I’m a sentimental man, so I kept neighbor mans tombstone around. I’d occasionally chat with his ghost, but he seemed cold to me. I can’t help but thinking he was a bit mad his daughter no longer existed. But this escalated once I started seeing Mike. His ethereal visits became more frequent and more hostile, usually breaking my electronics or creating a mess. But he went overboard when he started the fire.

Being a sim the died in a fire, his ghost had certain abilities specific to his death (setting fires). He got pissed because I kissed Mike so he set my couch on fire that ended up barricading us in the bedroom. Now I couldn’t find the fire alarm in buy mode and I hadn’t had the foresight to predict my spiteful ghost died-in-a-fire ex boyfriend would be an afterlife arsonist to care about it that much so a lot of the house had burned by the time I could get the FD there.

After having almost nothing covered by insurance (thanks Obama), Mike sat me down to have a talk with me. While I couldn’t understand him, I imagine he said “What the fuck you need to deal with your crazy ass ex boyfriend ghost. This never would have happened if you weren’t a thirst little sim bitch and dated me first.”

I approached the grave. It was time to release him. He was waiting for me. He knew this was the end. That after this, there was no coming back from the afterlife. I know he tried to kill me, and he knows I got his daughter deleted, but at that moment, it was just like old times. Telling each other jokes 27 times in a row until he would have sex with me.