Nienna Weeps

“Have fun training Small Lady!!! :-D :-D :-D”

“But… I’m 15?”

“Can’t hear you, busy ruling the world.”

Thing is, it’s not really Usagi or Mamoru that end up raising Chibi-Usa during that time (their interactions with her - especially Usagi’s imo - are extremely important to her development and growth as a senshi and as a person and I get that but they aren’t raising her anymore than a big sister or brother would.)

Ikuko and Kenji Tsukino are. 

Ikuko is her de facto mother. Kenji her daddy. Shingo her big brother.

NQS can do a lot of things for her daughter. She’s Queen of the Entire Freaking Planet, after all. Small Lady has the best things money and magic crystals can buy.  But that’s nothing compared to the greatest gift she thought she could give her little girl.

Because amid the mounting centuries and the crystal spires and the perfect society, NQS remembers her years growing up in the Tsukino home in the Juuban ward of 20th century Tokyo as the best years of her life. So she gave it to Small Lady.

She knows she’s not the best mother she can be, because of the burden placed on her. But to NQS, Ikuko Tsukino was.  NQS gave Small Lady the gift of a family, her family, for however brief a time.  And maybe that was part of it

Firstly, a large dose of attention and unconditional love from a dedicated family. Because for Small Lady, her bio parents don't just belong to her. They're sincerely important people, with a fuckton of responsibilities, so they can't dedicate the time to their kid as they'd want. This is probably at least part of the reason why Chibiusa is an only child. So having the Tsukinos there gives Chibiusa a family who can do that for her. Who have the time most days to make her a box lunch for school, who can show up for her events, who can help her fix her hair and ask her about her day. And keep doing for months and years, without worrying about the other responsabilities that they're ignoring to do this.

This is a great question, my dear! I'm a pretty adventurous eater myself so I can't relate. Therefore, let's turn it over to Bitch Nation!

What say you, bitchlings? How do you picky eaters try new foods without feeling overwhelmed or guilty?

And here's our grocery shopping article:

How to Shop for Groceries like a Boss 

If you do like what you try, then great! Search google for recipes by image until you find something that looks similar to what you ate and enjoyed. Start there and modify it if need be.

If you don't hate whatever you've tried, but you don't like it, then ask yourself what exactly you don't like. Is it the taste? Is it one of those things where you'd enjoy it if the red sauce was hotter/sweeter/tasted less like oregano? Or something like having the crispy coating be too crunchy compared to the gooey center? Is there some identifiable element of taste or texture that you can easily swap out at home? If there is, great again! You now have a meal idea that can be brought home and bent until it breaks. Because that's the thing, you are allowed to swap out every single part of the meal until it makes something else entirely. You have permission and nobody can stop you. One of my all time favorite recipes started life off as a Jalapeno Popper soup. It was never bad, but never quite what i wanted either. I have made so many swaps, additions, and changes in ratio, that it is now a loaded baked potato soup with jalapeno and cauliflower in it (because i still have to sneak myself vegetables). It's delicious and i gorge on it at least once a winter. The point is to find food you like that you can feasibly rotate through your cooking/meal planning/whatever system you use. If what you tried wasn't it but that led you to a variation you do like? Perfect.

So you try your new thing at the company christmas party, or that new diner down the street, but you hate everything about it. You never want to have it again, it is THE WORST. Then ok. You have lost exactly 1 meal, or less. Which sucks, but is realistically cheaper and less wasteful than spending all of the money, effort, and time to make Spicy Pork Meatball Stuffed Peppers only to realize after the fact that the taste and texture of a baked bell pepper makes you want to put your face through the table. So that little bit you just cannot eat? Is the least wasteful and most economical choice of the two. Good job expanding your palatal horizons in a conscientious manner.

Thinking about what works for you and what doesn't is also helpful. For example, if you've only eaten an ingredient prepped a certain way, maybe you'd like it if was prepared differently, or seasoned differently, or whatever. Or you can think about your favorite part of a certain dish and look for similar things.

I'm a Canadian, and I've hardly ever had to pay a damn penny for anything related to hospitals.

If I've gone to the emergency room, no charge. Had to go to outpatients for a blood draw or other sample, no charge. Getting a procedure done, no charge. The only time I've ever had a charge in my 30+ years of life was the time I was in an ambulance, and that was about $150. That's it. The only hospital bill I've ever paid in my entire life.

Like, yes, the models at parties are a good source of info, but that's mostly for women's clothes.

Bruce goes to Alfred and is like "Alfred, you know about clothes stuff, hit me up with issues you have with clothes." Alfred has many opinions and Bruce comes out of this meeting with a big stack of ideas.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

British rationing did not end until 1954 (that’s still 8 years away from the time this scene takes place).  Rations applied to all food staples, soap, clothing, fuel, and paper.  In some cases, they became worse or more stringent after the war.  In 1946, when this story takes place, Britain instituted bread rationing for the first time, food packages weighing more than 5lbs from foreign countries sent to private citizens were subtracted from that citizen’s ration book (so decreasing the amount of food they could buy), and gas was rationed again.   While America also rationed during the War, the rations were never as severe as the ones in the UK and were lifted immediately after peace was declared.

Babies gain language much earlier than they start talking. They can understand you before they know how to make the right word sounds with their mouths. Speaking, like writing, is a feat of incredible physical coordination that we generally undervalue because it's been muscle memory for years or decades, but it involves a lot of very precise coordinated physical movements that take a lot longer to learn than the words themselves do for someone who's new at this whole having a body thing. Complex language is also not all that critical for baby sign language. To a baby, communicating hunger via crying or via reaching towards your food isn't markedly different to communicating it with a hand gesture, and they don't need particularly sophisticated language skills to do any of those things, so you can start teaching them hand signs pretty much as soon as they have a concept of deliberately communicating with others.

She wants to learn photography. Do it stupid. Take a million photos. Don't think about why they're not good. Enjoy the process of taking photos.

Pick out tge ones you like the most and figure out why you like them. Is it because the subject is centered? Is it because you caught them doing something cool? Is it because the light made cool shadows?

Han: Yeah

Wedge: Womp rats?

Han: Sure. Chewie uses ‘em for bowcaster practice. Kinda gamey tasting. Sandy colored fur, lotsa teeth, little over two meters…

Wedge: Luke wasn’t lying???

There are of course the aforementioned womp rats, which are both terrifying and a fantastic way to develop shooting skills.

There’s beggar’s canyon for piloting.  And if Phantom Menace brought us nothing else, it actually showed us the living death trap that is beggar’s canyon.  He’s not like zipping around the Grand Canyon, he’s literally goofing off in a place that killed off a shit ton of professional pod racers.  So needless to say, Luke’s had a chance to develop scary good reflexes, information processing, and spacial relation skills.

The Lars’s economic status means that they had to make do with ancient, crap equipment.  Luke would have learned how to make incredibly fine tuned repairs, and keep shit going forever.  And sure, he never built a C3PO or a pod racer, but honestly, if he found the materials to do it, he probably would have used them in a moisture collector.  

BUT THEY ALSO ATTACK IN PACKS

You think you just pissed off ONE rodent as long as you are tall? Oh no. It’s calling ALL SIXTEEN OF ITS FRIENDS

AND THEY ARE ALL AIMING TO BITE YOUR CROTCH OFF. 

*THAT’S* what Luke grew up sniping to keep them away from the droids and moisture vaporators. *THAT* (and Beggar’s Canyon) is what prepared him to take down the Death Star. 

What do you think the odds are that when Luke had that first lightsaber duel with Vader he was thinking of Vader in terms of a womp rat. 

Dude towers over everyone, strikes fear into the heart of every Rebel he comes across, this massive, looming force of nature like a shape out of a nightmare.

Stormtroopers = a pack of womprats

Vader = 1 Large psychic/telekentic Womprat with lazer claws