What a horrible night to have a curse

cupid blues

can you tell me what's the symbol on row four

and if you close one eye

Nah besties, don’t keep this one in the tags, how many people on this hellsite even know what a salter is?

I think you have completely misread what OP is doing, because the whole point is that they are not taking the job. What, do you think the employer’s going to have the salter come in and decline the job and go “well, guess we’re not going to hire someone for that position after all”? No. If they’re interviewing for the position, it’s not a bogus position, it’s one they actually need to hire someone for. Someone is still going to get that job. It might take another round of interviews, but that job will be filled by someone who is genuinely looking for a job.

but when that person gets hired, they will have a better chance of successfully negotiating for a good salary.

and yet…

instead?

Pure vitriolic hatred. Loathing. The swooning was, as it should have been, firmly placed on Jonathan. Mina’s husband. Mina’s soulmate.

If you had told me that the prevailing sentiment on my dash at the end of the year would be “Fuck Dracula, all my homies hate Dracula” back in May, I would not have believed you.

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

[…]

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!

Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.

Vampires are and always have been a symbol of the Other. Dracula can be read as a queer or racialized Other, specifically, a “beast from the east” bent on destroying the Beautiful And Totally Not Evil Country Of England. He intends to steal the women with his powers of sexy conversation and biting. This conclusion is drawn from the things Jonathan fears most about Dracula, namely his ability to blend in, his extensive knowledge of Western culture, and his talents for “charming”/manipulating others.

Also, let’s talk about the Victorian Travel Trope! In Barry McCrea’s essay “Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot” he states:

The novel opens with a physical movement from West to mysterious East, with a detailed account by Jonathan of his train and coach trips across Europe to Transylvania… The further east he goes, the stranger his surroundings and encounters become. As is standard narrative practice, the reader is a step ahead of the naive Jonathan; we know that all is not well; we know that things will get stranger before they get more familiar. Narrative convention trains us to expect the domestic world that opens the novel to fall away in importance as the occult disaster story takes over. Yet the narrative perspective will fail to follow this trajectory in Dracula… On the broadest structural level, as we move from England to Transylvania, the novel moves from adolescence to maturity, from struggling bachelorhood to married stability.

In many Victorian/gothic novels, the feminine protagonist moves from her place of residence to her future spouse’s home (Jane Eyre, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Rebecca, In a Glass Darkly etc.). In Dracula, we see Jonathan acting out this role, “the novel begins with an engagement (between Jonathan and Mina) and moves to a cohabiting couple (Jonathan and Dracula)” (McCrea 259). In that way, their relationship is very queer-coded.

HOWEVER! Because Dracula never drinks from Jonathan (ie: never penetrates him to fully consummate their ‘marriage’), Jonathan is allowed to return to England and Mina, restoring a heterosexual lens to the story and further vilifying vampirism.

Additionally, vampires are free from the standards of binary gender performance because “with both the male and the female of the species obtaining this phallic symbol [fangs], distinctions between the sexes are blurred… through being able to penetrate and be penetrated by either the male or females of the species, heteronormative binaries of sexuality are transgressed” (Stepniak, Anthony. “Actualising Abjection: Drusilla, the Whedonverse’s Queen of Queerness.” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies, 2017. Page 3). So for all intents and purposes, anyone who doesn’t fit the heteronormative, cisgender, white expectations of the English upper-middle class is in vampire territory.

TLDR: Vampires are hot because they break every possible binary and also because queer, non-white, and non-English readers have been identifying with their social ostracization for hundreds of years.

"you look great!" - normal. Anyone could say this. Could be true or could just be lying to be nice. Very normal expected thing to say to someone