I Want to Be a Dragon

Pokemon Heritage Post

A real thing that happened is me as a teenager.

I had what turned out to be a dangerous walking pneumonia, for a week, but the manager at Burger King wouldn’t let me off.  My breathing was very loud and ragged.  I was coughing on and breathing on the food.

I wasn’t allowed to leave.  I was told if i called out, I was fired.

So Im shuffling around wheezing loudly swaying with my high fever as I work drive thru by myself, and a paramedic walked in to order dinner.

He goes ballistic, My friends.  He demands to see the Manager.  he chews him out at the top of his lungs so the whole restaurant can here.  Guys working the back came up to watch.  Customers staring and thinking hard about the infectious food they were eating.  Dude losing his shit about how infectious I was and all the people management had been endangering for days judging from my breathing and I needed to be home on antibiotics RIGHT NOW and the health Department was going to hear about this.

I went home.  i got the week off.  Didn’t even need a doctor’s note.

Getting friends management doesn’t know to do this WOULD WORK.

Same manager not letting me take my influenza home a year later  despite repeated vomiting?  Threw up in front of customers.  Customers demanded money back and started threatening the manager with lawsuits.

I got to go home and got time off until I stopped vomitting.

GO AHEAD and THROW UP in front of Customers.  THEY will Complain.

Don’t be shy.  

They are supposed to let you stay home when you are sick.  Stop protecting management. (Hiding how sick you are protects management).  They are abusing you.  Let them reap what they sow.

A white kangaroo. Nothing special apart from that this was taken in Finland.

A bit lost

My guy off the shits

Odd mouse

let me tell you driving from Ohio to Washington in a SmartCar with everything I owned was funny enough on its own but once I got west of the Rockies, every. single. time. I stopped ar a gas station, random dads would just spawn beside my car. like there was some sort of dad portal following me. and they’d see my ohio plates and go, “did you DRIVE through the mountains in that?” and every. single. time. I’d go, “well, they didn’t airlift me!”

it killed. it absolutely cleared ever time. never failed to make the dads laugh. they were obsessed. i said it the same every time. it was like I was in a groundhog day timeloop on interstate 70 westbound gas stations. and i you know what? I was happy.

the fact that it was smaller than my tent….

truly took this little transmission places it was never supposed to go.

talking to people while holding a beverage is awesome because you don't have to know what to do with your hands and when you don't know what to do with your face you can just take a sip

I walked up to a restaurant entrance at the same time as this guy and he held the first door for me and then I held the second door for him and he said "we call that the Midwestern two-step" with a laugh and I've been thinking about it all day.

This is privilege. My partner had an "essential job" all through the pandemic. He was not allowed to work from home either. If he'd pulled this he would've been fired.

Well, yeah. But if people who have enough privilege to take a stand against workplace exploitation do take a stand, that helps slow down the ongoing creep of how much they're allowed to dick you around at work.

Make no mistake, by "not allowed to work from home," this employer meant "you will not be paid for work you do at home," while clearly expecting the employee to do work (such as answering work emails and taking work calls) while at home. (If the employer didn't expect that, then they wouldn't have noticed when the worker stopped doing it.)

If you're expected to respond when the boss summons you outside of work hours, you are on-call. If you're on-call, you should be paid.

Expecting white-collar workers to be on-call for no extra pay is wage theft, no different from if a retail or food service employee is told to, "Clock out before you clean up/close out your station, so you don't go over your hours."

(And yes, this example happens a lot. If it happens to you, in the US, you should report it to the Department of Labor. It's confidential; your employer will never find out it was you who turned them in.)

my manager just asked me what my hobbies are outside of work and i cannot accurately describe how surreal it was. it was like being asked by the guy who locked you in the dungeon if you used to do anything fun before they locked you in the dungeon.

she also asked me by saying "do you... do anything?" which. HOW are you supposed to respond to that.

i was tempted to tell her that i just go home and stare at my bedroom wall in silence until its time for my next shift but the thing is i think she would have believed me

it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.

"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.

Allow people to like you, to enjoy your company, to want to be your friend. Allow them to compliment you, allow others to think you're cool and funny even if you think you're not. It is not up to you to tell others how to feel, and remember that people might see the positive things in you and qualities that you have been failing to see while being too self-critical. Allow yourself to be liked by other people, even when you don't see why they should. Don't self-isolate because you think you are not good enough for other people.

did you know? if you do your laundry you can get your clothes back

not the socks.

My real beef with Discord is that it's its own monstrosity. Scrolling, continuous chat boxes (as Discord essentially is to me) should only ever exist attached to an immaculately themed fandom rp message board.

idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol

One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine

scientist when you don't take the medicine they developed to help your pain

As long as you are taking a SAFE dose of it, then it's *good* for you. Pain is bad for the body. The inflammation from prolonged pain can worsen chronic issues and make it harder to heal.

Ibuprofen is best for pain that has inflammation, while acetaminophen doesn't help with inflammation but is more broadly effective on other types of pain. As long as you are taking the recommended dose, you can even take them TOGETHER, since they have different mechanisms of action.

You do need to be aware of how much and how often you are taking any pain medication. Overdoses can be very painful (even lethal.) And if you are in chronic pain often enough that you need more than the safe dose, then you need to look into other medications to manage that pain.

(Also, if you are specifically taking Acetaminophen/Tylenol for your go-to pain management, getting some NAC and taking that with it reduces the risk of overdose AND may strengthen the effect.)

One other thing: NSAIDS (ibuprofen, aspirin, and naproxen being the three big ones) can cause digestive issues with chronic use, including stomach ulcers. That doesn't mean "don't take them," it means "if you're at the point where you're on them all the time, every day, constantly, you should talk to a doctor about either reducing that risk or switching to another medication that doesn't have those side effects."

I don’t have the source for this table anymore but I felt it should be added to this post.

Also please please please consult your doctor if you are on any other type of medication that put large strains on your liver or kidneys before taking any kind of NSAIDs as they can recommend alternatives.

Deimos, Dragan Bibin, 2023

Dragan Bibin (Serbian, b. 1984), Deimos

Oil on panel, 24 x 30 cm