Reddit medical school

i really hope someone takes time to actually read this! throwaway bc ppl i know irl know my reddit username and im embarrassed to admit a lot of this.
about six months ago i was living in a college apartment with my own room, but i had across the hall two disgusting room mates who trashed the common area. i also worked full time and went to college full time. i dont want to say addicted - because i know how physical addiction works, but i was…very reliant on weed to get through these days due to all my stresses. the job I worked at was a front facing retail position. the stress plus the weed meant i put on a lot of weight quickly, and was commonly bullied by customers. but, at the end of the day, i knew I could go home and talk to my slightly long distance girlfriend (about 200 miles apart due to school, saw each other every other weekend). it wasn’t perfect of course…we didn’t listen to the same music, like the same movies, and she took issue with a lot of the video games I played . yet, she was literally the kindest person ive ever met. she was one of very few people I’ve ever met who understood me and my neurotic behavior, and tried to actually challenge it and help me be a better person. after a few months of the aforementioned living situation, i had a complete mental breakdown, dumped her out of pure anxiety that I couldn’t see her more often, and tried to kill myself 3 times. i waited until the end of the semester and dropped out and moved home after so that I could seek mental health treatment, and get sober. im doing a lot better now! i even started to lose the weight I put on. but I miss her and think about her nearly every day…it’s pathetic. it was full no contact. i tried to text her a week after and apologize, but she never even opened it. I think I’m mature enough to understand, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am so unbelievably lonely every day now. my friends are all online. the few in person friends I do have I’m embarrassed to see because of the weight i gained (extremely self conscious). my therapist and I don’t really talk about this stuff - I chose to speak to him about work life balance and such because it’s something I really struggle with.
i guess I just don’t know what to do anymore…i think theres something genuinely wrong with me most days. i have a total inability to put myself out there to even be friends with people, and i always assume that when people do ask me to come places with them it’s out of pity because it’s pretty obvious when you look at me how exhausted and burnt out i am. i fantasize at work all day about being friends and hanging out with my coworkers, think about the life I could have with the women around me, but i can’t act on anything…i feel like the fucking child i was with no friends again. how do you guys cope with feelings like this? how do I move on?

Each of these bosses boast totally unique rewards. My goal was to create a variety of items specifically designed to NOT be BIS, instead offer interesting mechanics and solutions to areas of the game.
Over 80 hours have gone into these concepts. The rewards were designed with the sole purpose to not replace BIS items but instead be it's own unique item, using totally new traits and abilities.
Special care was taken to prevent any powercreep.
​
The Chomperpillar! A behemoth creature causing rumbles throughout the forests near Gwenith... Offering unique rewards including a new grapple, new potion, a Barbed Whip, and last but certainly not least.. AN UPGRADE FOR SEERCULL!
____https://www.reddit.com/2007scape/comments/12hy33f/chomperpillar_boss/____
​
The Bone Wyrm... OldSchool Runescape's largest boss. Boasting unique mechanics and plenty of totally unique rewards!
____https://www.reddit.com/2007scape/comments/12i4gzk/the_archaelogists_on_fossil_island_have_made_some/____
​
The Spectral Queen... A hauntingly beautiful woman, gone mad being stuck in her ethereal existence. Totally unique rewards including an Ethereal Robe set, Ethereal Sword, and Ethereal Shield. All rewards offer unique mechanics and traits!
____https://www.reddit.com/2007scape/comments/12lij6f/the_spectral_queen/____
​
Slug Boss. This could be unlocked via continuing the Slug Menace questline, or added in the heart of the Morytania swamps...
____https://www.reddit.com/2007scape/comments/12hpr8s/slug_boss/____

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/cna/comments/13lcm0e/cna_student_program/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
I have decided that if i am offered the internship that I would accept it. The contract is 2 years but I have yet to know the specifics (whether it is x amount of hours to fulfill)
However I did one interview where the woman i was in contact with was going over the terms and conditions of the schooling and the working contract. The only question that was asked of me was explaining a time you had to resolve an issue.
After that i was told to expect a second video call interview with the hiring manager. What questions should I think about answering and practice before I meet with them?

Motivation — A Close Reading of Tea Time

"I'm six feet from the edge and I'm thinking: maybe six feet ain't so far down?"
Nimander Golit
Chapter V of Weathered
2002 BS
Click Here for the Introduction to the essay series.

Prelude to the Close Reading

Why, hello there, again. It’s been a few weeks but I promise that this endeavor is still moving forward. For those that don’t know, this essay is a part of a collection I’ll be putting together which investigates the Eleint, their blood, and sorcery within the Malazan shared secondary universe. We’re still laying down our foundations, and today we’ll be covering a sequence of scenes in Chapter 8 of Toll the Hounds.
My intentions were to cover all of the scenes in a single post, but that has proven itself to be difficult. As such, I’ll cover the first scene in this sequence in this post. There’ll be one or two follow-up posts.
There are ten scenes that are in this sequence:

1. Nimander 1
2. Desra 1
3. Desra 2
4. Skintick 1
5. Desra 3
6. Nimander 2
7. Desra 4
8. Kedeviss 1
9. Nimander 3
10. Kedeviss 2

I’ll be approaching these scenes (including the one discussed today) through a few lenses.

A ringing of bells.

In his musings on writing, Erikson discusses the notion of a bell. I’ll let him speak for himself.
In the scenes we’ll be looking at, some of the bells that I believe are used are (and not all of these are represented in this first particular scene):

• Past versus present — ancestors/parents vs. living/children
• How others see us, and how we see others
• The word ‘beast’ and its many meanings
• The words ‘child/children’ and their many meanings
• The relationships between gods and mortals
• Portals/thresholds

Existentialism.

Particularly the genealogy of continental philosophy that led to Sartre’s existentialism and the shared/adapted/bifurcated philosophies of his contemporaries (such as de Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty). This wasn’t my initial intention when I decided to use this sequence of scenes as a launch pad into my collection of essays. However, the beauty of close-reading is that you go into a text with a hypothesis seeking evidence and support, and then end up with new insights.
Some of the concepts that will be brought up are:

• Anxiety
• Facticity and transcendence; Authenticity and bad faith
• The Look/Gaze and being-for-others
• The Absurd and Revolution
• Perception

Genre conventions as grammar.

Particularly, we’ll look at Erikson’s use of genre conventions from the likes of Gothic literature and Weird Fiction — namely the Sublime, cosmic horror, and the Weird — as the subtle language used to convey tension that is congruent with some of the other subtexts. If these grammars are subverted, we’ll try to point that out too.
We will later delve more into Malazan’s literary genealogy in other essays, but I want this lens to be present during the reading to see how Erikson aligns or subverts these genre conventions.
We’ll be using Professor Michael Moir’s YouTube lectures on Weird Fiction as reference.

What the fuck is happening?

This is a question about plot that I will answer at the end of all of the scenes, but keep it in mind as we go through. It has less to do with existentialism and Gothic literature and more on what Gothos was trying to do during these scenes.

Pre-TtH Context

We first meet Nimander and his siblings (unnamed) in House of Chains on Drift Avalii. By Bonehunters, they had left Drift Avalii and ended up at Malaz City, where they then joined Tavore Paran’s fleet while fleeing Malaz City. In Reaper’s Gale, we find the siblings had been ‘adopted’ by Sandalath while they traveled to Lether with the Malazans. Phaed wanted to kill Sandalath. Nimander stopped Phaed from killing Sandalath. Withal (Sandalath’s husband) throws Phaed out a window. The murder is taken as a suicide. The siblings intern Phaed and then meet Clip, who offers to lead them to Anomander in Black Coral via Kurald Galain.
This gets us to Toll the Hounds, where Nimander is being haunted by Phaed. They’ve left Kurald Galain and are now on Genabackis (but not yet to Black Coral). Nimander fears the future meeting his father and the rest of the Tiste Andii. The siblings and Clip ‘stumble’ on Morsko, where Clip is curious about its cult of the Dying God. A ritual takes place there. Nimander and Skintick are nearly enthralled, but are saved by Aranatha (and thus Mother Dark herself). The group then find Clip, who is in a coma. They collect him, and set off in a wagon to follow the Dying God’s priests to Bastion. Along that journey, the siblings stumble upon the High King, Kallor, who reluctantly chooses to not kill them and instead travels with them.
The sequence of scenes in Chapter 8 that we’ll be discussing follows some time after Kallor joins the siblings.
Now that the administrative stuff is out of the way, let’s dive into the first scene.

Nimander 1

Rum-induced memories.

We start this sequence thrust into Nimander’s introspection on ‘rage’ as a breaking of a vessel, impossible to fix. He recalls Deadsmell’s musings that ‘rage in battle’ was a gift while the two drank rum. Rum that awakened memories once ignored by Nimander.
(Note: in Scene 2, we’ll see Desra’s view of Nimander, and we’ll see that Nimander’s ruminations on rage here are what inform Desra’s view of him, and not in the way that Nimander’s doubt imagines.)
In the previous post, we discussed memories and their decay. So much of this series and the lore surrounding it is driven by the memories of ancient beings. Nimander is younger with respect to ancient beings (but ancient nonetheless), and even he struggles with his memories. Perhaps this is a result of the traumas he’s experienced with respect to his being in diaspora and perceived abandonment by his father (a symmetry itself with Rake’s — and the Tiste Andii as a whole — relationship with Mother Dark).
He recalls the rum lighting “a fire in [his] brain, casting red light on a host of memories gathered ghostly round the unwelcoming heart.” He reminisces on the time after Kurald Galain (but before Drift Avalii) and his father’s emotional indifference. He recalls the pranks him and his kin would pull on Endest Silann; the arrival of Andarist and his arguments with Anomander. It is unclear what the arguments were — if you’ve read Forge of Darkness, you might be able to infer what’s likely, but I’m curious if the argument is Andarist asking to take the siblings and Anomander refusing, or Anomander asking Andarist to take the children and Andarist was reluctant? Was the argument about Anomander thrusting the Hust blade, T’an Aros/K’orladis (i.e., Vengeance / Grief), onto Andarist or did Andarist already possess the blade? We don’t know exactly to my knowledge, but it’s fun to speculate.
Regardless, Nimander recalls, like a certain inscribed hearthstone, there was peace. Andarist was to take them all through a threshold, a portal elsewhere (as mentioned, portals end up being a rung bell, so pay attention). Nimander remembers Endest’s weeping as the children were pulled through a “portalway into an unknown, mysterious new world where anything was possible.”
Andarist raised the Tiste Andii children on that portal’s other side, on Drift Avalii. We know (or can infer) that this was a task to protect the Throne of Shadow, but Nimander and his kin didn’t understand this as children. But Andarist led them with his pragmatism, he ensured they learned how the world was. With our knowledge of Kharkanas, this is so powerful. We know Anomander’s hubris was abused as a motivating factor for Hunn Raal’s despicable acts. We know that Andarist likely lacks children of his own in response to this, and so his taking on guardianship over the children of his brother — that very same brother that rejected Andarist’s grief in favour of vengeance (and materialised in the T’an Aros/K’orladis dichotomy) — is a stark, challenging, and ultimately selfless decision.
But this pragmatism created child soldiers. The collision of reality’s necessity to survive and carry out the duty of protecting the Throne of Shadow came at the expense of what little remaining childhood innocence Rake’s brood still had (even as a people on the run, exiled from their home due to a sociopolitical schism). Andarist became a stern teacher, juxtaposed to the echoes of Endest’s gentleness. “The games ended. The world turned suddenly serious.” Nonetheless, the Tiste Andii siblings grew to love Andarist.
Nimander continues his introspection:

See a bored child with a stick — and see how every beast nearby flees, understanding well what is now possible and, indeed, probable.

This reminds me of a general rule of advice: ‘never fuck around when a child has gun.’ Tiste Andii or not, children can be cruel especially when mixed with unknown doses of trauma and violence. Regardless, I want to call attention here that this notion of children and beasts are each bells rung. To Nimander, Andarist “unleash[ed] them, these children with avid eyes.” He “had made them good soldiers,” ones that know rage.
Vessels broken.
As such, from his own experience, Nimander suspects that the Dying God is a child. He speaks to the dialectic between gods and their worshippers (another bell rung):

The mad priests poured him full, knowing the vessel leaked, and then drank of that puerile seepage. Because he was a child, the Dying God’s thirst and need were without end, never satiated.

The group stumbles on desiccated bodies staked among fields: dried up, tapped of their libations. This speaks to a particular exploitation between mortal and god, symbolised literally as worshippers feeding a god to then become the harvested. This perpetuates the Dying God’s power to accumulate more worshippers via addictive kelyk. The language here shows that the Dying God has stumbled upon a sort of cheat code, an exploitation of the god-mortal dialectic that allows him and his priests to arbitrage power. Like a cancer that, via the law of large numbers, is equipped with the mechanisms to divert a body’s resources to it while it slowly destroys the body.
The scarecrows being in fields is such a perfect choice of this analogy: things to be harvested. A product, a commodity — a thing with both use-value and exchange-value, for our Marxians out there. I believe Erikson has said that he was thinking of oil here, and that is fine by itself, but I do like the mirroring to Eucharistic transubstantiation in Catholicism (due to my being a very-very-lapsed Catholic). Especially with wine, an extremely addictive substance, transcending into God’s blood to cleanse us as cannibalistic sacrament.

Dal Honese burial practices.

Nimander sees these fields as “bizarre cemeteries, where some local aberration of belief insisted that the dead be staked upright, that they ever stand ready for whatever may come." This makes him recall some shipwrecked Dal Honese on Drift Avalii. He thinks on the ancestor cult and burial practices of Dal Hon: literally constructing their homes with their dead in the walls as both material and essence, the building stretching out with additional rooms as time moved on and kin died.
This reminds me of the Neolithic proto-city, Çatalhöyük, found in Anatolia within modern-day Türkiye where ancestors have been found to be buried beneath platforms in living quarters. See: Chapter 6 of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow.
With or without intention, I like to view this ritual via an existentialist lens, particularly Sartre’s notion of the Look. To Sartre — in contrast to other phenomenologies — being is in flux, some path of a given chaotic double-pendulum switching to and from poles of being-in-itself***\**¹* and being-for-itself***\**²*. The Look, to Sartre, is a sort of symmetry breaking — a realisation by being-for-itselves that decentralises it, the sudden awareness of its being an object, an Other, to Other consciousnesses.
A heuristic often used to showcase Sartre’s notion of the Look (or Gaze) is that of a voyeur peeping through a keyhole into someone’s room that hears a noise down the hall. Regardless if that noise is from another person (another being-for-itself) or not (say, the house settling), the subjective voyeur suddenly objectifies themselves, collapsing the chaotic pendulum from being-for-itself (nothingness as "no thing-ness") to their facticity — their being-in-itself, their thing-ness — whose meaning to Other being-for-themselves is relative to a separate centre than the voyeur’s own.
To Sartre, the resulting anxiety experienced snapping from subject to object is a proof against any nihilistic approach to solipsism. The fact that we can Other our own being-for-itself means that we can also recognise being-for-itself external to us since those we Other too can Other us as we Other ourselves. The reflexivity as a result of the Look is evidence against solipsism to Sartre.
As a result, this Dal Honese practice is a cultural self-burdening via Sartre’s Look by literally having your ancestors clay-filled bodies decentralise your subjectivity and externalise you as an object that can be judged by its facticity. This results in a sort of collective Dal Honese being-for-others, Sartre would argue. This isn’t inherently good or bad to existentialists, but it does necessitate a calculus that discerns if the living descendants are authentically expressing their freedom with each moment they accept this practice, or if they are living in bad faith.
Regardless, though, this is a haunting of the Past. This haunting isn’t something that is only important to existentialism or other philosophical traditions (such as post-structuralism — see: Derrida’s hauntology), but to the genre conventions and tropes of Gothic horror and its descendants (such as cosmic horror, weird fiction, and their influences on sword and sorcery, etc.).
There are mappings (some more subtle than others) between the Sublime and the existential anxiety and dread experienced in phenomena similar to the Look. The experience of looking upon the vastness of the sea, of stumbling upon an ancient statue, of learning of the size of the universe — which are described as the Sublime, the Weird, or Eldritch in some literary traditions (e.g., Romantic, Gothic, Horror, the Weird, etc.) — are the same experiences that are often analysed in continental philosophies using words such as angst/anxiety/despaiabsurdity/alienation.
Nimander goes on to further expose the relationship between this Dal Honese ancestor cult and inter-tribal conflicts that lead to deaths and stolen bodies that leave physical voids in Dal Honese architecture. He muses how this physical representation of wounds begets a cycle of vengeance (a cultural tradition, a product of facticity and bad faith): “blood back and forth,” he says. He mentions that this cycle is what pushed the shipwrecked Dal Honese from their homes, an act of revolt and perhaps even authenticity to Sartre. Eventually the Dal Honese recovered and “paddled away — not back home, but to some unknown place, a place devoid of unblinking ghosts staring out from every wall.”
I love that Erikson has this whole little short story in this scene, especially in the contrast of its being some rum-induced reflection by Nimander on his own past’s haunting of him and his siblings. Moreover, these Tiste Andii are travelling with Kallor, the Undying Unascendant: a being-for-itself that literally manifests the past’s haunting on the present — a man cursed, jaded, who carries the past with him wherever he travels. All of these together show that one’s freedom can have one flee (even be redeemed — which balances with other plotlines in TtH), but that doesn’t necessarily — nor sufficiently so — annihilate the past.

Finding a tower.

After this, Nimander’s reminiscing is interrupted by his hearing Kallor nearby (like a footstep in a hallway). Kallor comments on the use of the corpses and notes that the flora “[is] not even native to this world, after all.” Nimander replies that the corpses are being used for saemankelyk. The mention of the plants not being native to this world should orient the reader back to the Weird, especially since it brings upon a sense of unease, an Othering — the house settling that again serves to reduce both Nimander and the readers to our thing-ness
‘The past’ versus ‘the present’ versus ‘the future’ (and their hauntings of one another) bubble up again with some banter between Skintick and Kallor about the state of things. Kallor states ‘nothing changes.’ Skintick counters ‘it keeps getting worse,’ to which Kallor claims is but an illusion.
I find this dialogue to be a comical little conflict between Kallor’s perceived-postmodern, nihilistic judgement of the state of things being inert versus Skintick’s pseudo-Rousseauian, inverted-Hegalian, modernist grand narrative of things getting worse.
Again, it alludes to a haunting of the past on the current generation. Interestingly, this is a trend within the Book of the Fallen in general: not as an espousing of the ‘old vs. young’, but Erikson’s decentering/challenging/deconstruction of that binary. Think of Raest in GotM; Menandore, Sukul and Sheltatha in RG; Karsa in HoC; the Witness trilogy. He does this via a sort of Ancient's Hubris colliding with its differences to the Present’s Ingenuity, and this being dual to the Present’s Naivety colliding with the Ancient Wisdom.
Kallor eventually hits a sore spot with the Tiste: he brings up Rake. Unlike the Dal Honese whose freedom had them flee the cultural practices of letting their ancestors haunt both literally and figuratively, Nimander and his siblings were pulled/pushed away from their father (and people) as children — by what very well could be their father’s request. The Tiste siblings are haunted by Anomander’s active absence. Their continued distance from their father isn’t an act of expressing their freedom against an Ancestor’s Gaze — it isn’t an act of revolution — it is their facticity and a source for their Othering of themselves. We often see this from Nimander’s POVs up to and including this sequence.
Kallor sniffs out this weakness and presses upon the wound. Nimander gets flustered and retorts. To which Kallor responds:

'Anomander Rake is a genius at beginning things. It’s finishing them he has trouble with.'

Damn, Kallor.
Also, I didn’t need my ADHD called out so harshly, dude. What the fuck.
Without diving into what Erikson was dealing with while writing this book, this hits hard for Nimander, and is an interesting commentary nonetheless. His father, Anomander, is the leader of a diasporic people who’ve been without home, without a centre, for 400,000 years. I think Kallor’s words hurt Nimander so much because the Tiste siblings don’t know Anomander’s current plans nor have they experienced the "settling-down" from the unveiling of Kurald Galain in what is now Black Coral. They are unaware of Rake’s teleology for his people, for himself even. Regardless, we see again and again that Kallor isn’t just a strong skirmisher, his words cut nearly as well as his blades.
Kallor goes on to confirm that he knows Rake before the group notices a ruined tower among the alien plants and scarecrows. Kallor says its Jaghut. Kallor trudges forth indifferently, pushing corpses out of his way as he bee-lines it to the ruined tower. I don’t think such a sequence of action has ever described Kallor’s whole raison d’être and modus operandi so well: just a man seemingly indifferent to the corpses in his path as his will pulls him forward.
We get a small interaction between Skintick and Nimander that reveals Skintick’s acuity in reading Kallor’s take on Rake. Kallor sees their father as an equal (it isn’t just the readers that need to be keen to subtext, characters do too).
Skintick offers the idea of sicking Kallor on the Dying God, hoping he “decid[es] to do something for his own reasons, but something that ends up solving our problem.” I like the use of “deciding to do something for his own reasons,” as this aligns so well with authenticity in existentialism (and the absence of some absolute morality for authenticity).
As Nimander approaches the tower behind Kallor, both Nimander and the readers get a great sense of horror, the weird, the uncanny, and the sublime with how Erikson describes the scenery:

Drawing closer to the ruin, they fell silent. Decrepit as it was, the tower was imposing. The air around it seemed grainy, somehow brittle, ominously cold despite the sun’s fierce heat.
The highest of the walls revealed a section of ceiling just below the uppermost set of stones, projecting without any other obvious support to cast a deep shadow upon the ground floor beneath it. The facing wall reached only high enough to encompass a narrow, steeply arched doorway. Just outside this entrance and to one side was a belly-shaped pot in which grew a few straggly plants with drooping flowers, so incongruous amid the air of abandonment that Nimander simply stared down at them, disbelieving.

Nimander notes an incongruity of this place — its aesthetic of abandonment juxtaposed with a curated garden. “The cold despite the sun’s fierce heat.” This evokes a certain unsettledness to Nimander (and thus, the reader). These genre conventions are sources of tension and anxiety, similar to non-diegetic violins building up to a real or false jump-scare in a slasher flick.
Arrogantly, Kallor chooses to go out of his way and insult the presumed Jaghut within the tower. Classic Kallor. The Jaghut replies “nothing changes,” resulting in Kallor shooting Skintick and Nimander a “pleased smirk.”

Tea time, but before falling into a rabbit-hole and not after.

Before Kallor can announce himself, the Jaghut lists off Kallor’s titles, his facticity. Kallor’s reputation precedes him and there’s an asymmetry here in which the Jaghut knows who Kallor is but Kallor doesn’t yet know who the Jaghut is. This is our first hint that this meeting isn’t serendipitous, and is instead an intentional interaction with regards to the plot. And if this Jaghut knows of Kallor, does he know those who Kallor travels with? Who is this Jaghut’s intended audience among those options?
I also like the play here with facticity: the Jaghut lists out things about Kallor, but is Kallor some sum of those thing-nesses? How many are true, how many are manufactured myths? It’s an act by this Jaghut to Gaze upon Kallor, to show to Kallor that he’s being seen. It’s a deliberate tactic to destabilise and decenter Kallor: an offensive.
We as readers are informed of Kallor’s limitations from the Azathanai curses via Draconus, K’rul and Nightchill, but these limitations on Kallor don’t necessarily restrict his freedom until Kallor allows them.
We get a flash of Jaghut humour and guest rites — this ancient dismisses Kallor while inviting everyone in for tea. Interestingly, Erikson has this Jaghut use the proper noun of ‘Others’ which lends me to think that an existentialist lens hasn’t been the worst pick (not that ‘Othering’ is strictly existentialist by any means).
So, we’ve had corpses drained dry for kelyk, alien plant-life, a ruined tower of an unknown age stumbled upon beyond the urban, a preternatural creature to Nimander and his kin (something they’ve maybe only witnessed a handful of times) and then we get this description:

The air of the two-walled chamber was frigid, the stones sheathed in amber-streaked hoarfrost. Where the other two walls should have been rose black, glimmering barriers of some unknown substance, and to look upon them too long was to feel vertiginous — Nimander almost pitched forward, drawn up only by Skintick’s sudden grip, and his friend whispered, ‘Never mind the ice, cousin.’
Ice, yes, it was just that. Astonishingly transparent ice–

I love this. First: “it was just that” screams “no it isn’t” to anyone paying attention to the words Erikson is using to make the reader uncomfortable. We know: Jaghut + Ice = Omtose Phellack. The atmospheric setting here is directly being called out in not just a sublime way, but his description has an added layer of horror to Omtose Phellack.
Erikson uses “vertiginous,” giving both Nimander and us a sense of vertigo, being decentred and unoriented. This isn’t too different from descriptions found in works like Vandermeer’s Annihilation or other New Weird authors. This ice wall calls to Nimander, draws from him feelings of unknown when he’s caught himself staring for too long — emphasis on staring.
For all intents and purposes, this ice wall is a thing, a being-in-itself, neither active nor passive. But its effect on Nimander is similar to the Dal Honese ancestors’ Gaze — this ice wall objectifies him, calls to him, evokes his being-for-others, and emotionally alienates him. The pull Nimander feels is his submitting his being-for-itself with the freedom of those that Gaze upon him. A justification of his facticity, his bad faith. This will be important later.
Eventually we get this awesome line from the Jaghut host:

’Once, long ago, a wolf god came before me. Tell me, Kallor, do you understand the nature of beast gods? Of course not. You are only a beast in the unfairly pejorative sense — unfair to beasts, that is. How is it, then, that the most ancient gods of this world were, one and all, beasts?’

There’s so much going on to unpack in this paragraph.

• He’s called Kallor a beast, but says his doing so is unfair to beasts (damn, this ice orc just roasted Kallor).
• It calls back to Nimander’s thoughts on children wielding sticks and beasts fleeing as a result. With or without knowing it, this Jaghut is calling Kallor a child, too, in the pejorative sense, unfair to children.
• He says the first gods were beasts, but does he mean these early gods were explicitly Beasts (in essence, not the pejorative sense) or that they were beast-like akin to the pejorative sense used on Kallor (or some combination of both)?
  • Interestingly, we know that this wolf god is possibly an Azathanai d’ivers from FoL — with this knowledge, would Fanderay and Togg count as a Beast-as-literal-beast beast-god?

Later, again, we get this Jaghut saying Others as a proper noun, and then the Others are called Tiste Andii.

‘Ah, and what of the Others with you? Might not they be interested?’
Clearing his throat, Skintick said, ‘Venerable one, we possess nothing of worth to one such as you.’
‘You are too modest, Tiste Andii.’
‘I am?’
'Each creature is born from one not its kind. This is a wonder, a miracle forged in the fires of chaos, for chaos indeed whispers in our blood, no matter its particular hue. If I but scrape your skin, so lightly as to leave but a momentary streak, that which I take from you beneath my nail contains every truth of you, your life, even your death, assuming violence does not claim you. A code, if you will, seemingly precise and so very ordered. Yet chaos churns. For all your similarities to your father, neither you nor the one named Nimander — nor any of your brothers and sisters — is identical to Anomander Dragnipurake. Do you refute this?’

Above, the Jaghut goes on to describe genetics, but also calls out the fact that they are children of Anomander — dude definitely knows more than he’s leading on, that’s for sure, and is winking directly to us readers, seemingly going over the heads of both Kallor and the Tiste. Also, the bit about chaos in blood will come up again and again in later scenes and later essays.
Moreover, we see that the Jaghut says that which he scrapes "contains every truth of you, your life, even your death" — our genetics are facticities, among our thing-nesses. "Yet chaos churns," the Jaghut rebuts. That chaos in our blood is a source of our "no thing-ness," from which we may express our freedom against the determinism of genetics — of facticities — and transcend.

For each kind of beast there is a first such beast, more different from its parents than the rest of its kin, from which a new breed in due course emerges. Is this firstborn then a god?’

I love this for two reasons. One, it speaks to a criticism of the assumption that a prime-mover is necessarily divine. But, through the existentialist lens, it’s a challenge and criticism of the presumed Authority of Genealogy. Jumping back to the early musings on ancestry: if ancestors haunt us and dictate our facticity as a result of suppressing our being-for-itself, then where does that chain of dictating/suppressing end? And is that terminus also an Authority above all generations below it just due to its being something new, something sufficiently different from its own genealogy, its ancestors ‘behind’ it?
I also like the subtext of trauma as hereditary here with the double entendre behind ‘beast’, we can think of this Jaghut as asking if the primordial source of generational trauma has authority over its descendants? What does this dialogue mean for Nimander and his siblings and their place with respect to their father and the rest of the Tiste Andii people? Does this inform an analysis of Nimander’s chaotic double-pendulum between being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and his being-for-others?
A huge thing I would like to point out here, too, is that neither Skintick, Nimander, nor Kallor have used the Tiste Andii’s names, yet this Jaghut knows them by name. Kallor could deduce they were Rake’s children, but he didn’t know their names. Even though Skintick showcased an acuity to subtext when considering Kallor’s opinions of Rake, he doesn’t catch onto this subtlety. This Jaghut not only knows of Kallor, he knows of Nimander and his siblings. The evidence that this meeting isn’t serendipity continues to build.

‘You spoke of a wolf god,’ Skintick said. ‘You began to tell us a story.’
‘So I did. But you must be made to understand. It is a question of essences. To see a wolf and know it as pure, one must possess an image in oneself of a pure wolf, a perfect wolf.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Kallor grunted. ‘See a strange beast and someone tells you it is a wolf — and from this one memory, and perhaps a few more to follow, you have fashioned your image of a wolf. In my empires, philosophers spewed such rubbish for centuries, until, of course, I grew tired of them and had them tortured and executed.’

This sequence of dialogue is fantastic and reminds me of arguments foagainst the strong/weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/es. We see the Jaghut musing on a seemingly prescriptive Platonic idealism that Kallor interrupts with a more descriptive, pragmatic, empirical framework in which he follows with a jest of torturing and executing philosophers (remind me to never live in the Kallorian Empire).
Kallor speaks as if his words contradict the Jaghut and show the assumed idealism to be wrong. But, by Kallor’s own argument, the Jaghut’s words of ‘pure’ and ‘perfect’ are just as empirically contingent to one’s memories as ‘wolf’ is. The combinations of signs and symbols language users use give flesh to those signs’ and symbols’ own meaning — but bury that meaning beneath the flesh by doing so. The concept of a ‘perfect wolf’ (i.e., ‘perfect’ + ‘wolf’) emerging from one’s own contingency with the notion of ‘perfect’ and ‘wolf’ is entirely possible without that imagined ‘perfect wolf’ being actually some idealisation, i.e., some Platonic Perfect Wolf.
The Jaghut responds with laughter to Kallor’s absurdity: both in his misinterpretation of the Jaghut’s musings as well as the nature of Kallor’s brutal reaction to those that question things he finds to be rubbish. This pairs well with Skintick’s future POV in this sequence, but the contrast between Kallor and this Jaghut is entertaining nonetheless. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish when Kallor is telling the truth about his brutality or if his mutterings are just words congruent to his reputation.
The two then have a pissing contest. We find out the Jaghut was in disguise — I don’t have the evidence or time here to say, but there are ideas that this particular Jaghut is a d'ivers and it is fucking awesome even if untrue. The discussion here points to some T’lan Imass’ Jaghut War. It being the Kron, I’m inclined to wonder if there is a relationship with the bones Karsa stumbles upon in HoC (where he and his war party find Calm).

Skintick squatted to pick up two of the cups, straightening to hand one to Nimander. The steam rising from the tea was heady, hinting of mint and cloves and something else. The taste numbed his tongue.

Don’t take candy from strangers tea from Jaghut, people.
We find out that Raest is this Jaghut’s child. We find out that this Jaghut took on 43 T’lan Imass and a Bonecaster, killing them all. This is a threat rallied back against Kallor’s assertion that he’s killed Jaghut.

Teeth bared, Kallor bent down to retrieve his cup.
The Jaghut’s left hand shot out, closing about Kallor’s wrist. ‘You wounded that wolf god,’ he said.

Oh shit. What follows is one of the first times I can recall that Kallor is scared. Contrast with his earlier treatment of Rake as equal.

'Oh, be quiet, Kallor. This tower was an Azath once. Shall I awaken it for you?’
Wondering, Nimander watched as Kallor backed towards the entrance, eyes wide in that weathered, pallid face, the look of raw recognition dawning. ‘Gothos, what are you doing here?’
‘Where else should I be? Now remain outside — these two Tiste Andii must go away for a while.’

The revelation: the Jaghut is none other than the Lord of Hate himself, Gothos. You can understand why Kallor, always so arrogant, submits to Gothos and listens to his instruction.
Immediately after the reveal, Skintick and Nimander succumb to the effects of whatever extra ingredient Gothos had slipped into their tea. We get this final sequence:

Nimander’s eyes were drawn once more to the walls of ice. Black depths, shapes moving within.
He staggered, reached out his hands–
‘Oh, don’t step in there–’
And then he was falling forward, his hands passing into the wall before him, no resistance at all.
‘Nimander, do not–’
Blackness.

Again, the readers eyes are drawn along with Nimander's to the icy, abyss-like, objectifying, Gazing threshold. Here's where the sublime and the weird really flavour the setting in this scene.
There's a bell’s echo here from the start of this scene: this sequence starts with Nimander discussing the uncertainty related to moving through a portal with Andarist away from the rest of his kin, a breaching. During these final lines of this first scene, we get a tension between us and the unknown, between what has happened and that-which-is-to-come, between what we’ve imagined about Malazan’s cosmos and some contorting of those assumptions. What’s beyond the veil decentres not only Nimander in its draw and pushing him to being-for-others, but it decentres the readers too. Hic sunt dracones, terra incognita, the sublime, the enigmatic, the terror. We’re made to feel small and inconsequential by this icy threshold.
It isn’t mysterious because it evades our Gaze like other fantastical things (e.g., many renditions of some archetypal tricksters found within various folklores), instead it invites our Gaze eventually since It Gazes back (almost Nietzschean).

Thoughts

Calling back to the genre conventions, this extended scene is one that definitely plays with the established conventions of Gothic literature and its descendants. Constantly, Erikson hits us with tension sewn into his choice of words in Nimander’s ruminations, his angst associated to diaspora, the notion of Dal Honese ancestors gazing upon their descendants from clay walls, absent ancestors that too haunt the same, the fields of scarecrows as desiccated (and harvested) bodies of worshippers, the alien plant-life, the ancient Jaghut tower, the ice threshold. Each of these (and those unmentioned) add onto to the dissociation (de-centering) of both Nimander and us, the readers. Each of us seem small and inconsequential to the dynamism of the cosmos: everything we know, including that of what we already know about the Malazan universe (and our own) can be challenged. We’re each just travellers who have stumbled upon a shattered visage in the desert that reads: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
This stands in contrast to — almost a revolution against — the modalities one can garnish from the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment that favour an almost religious rationalism and positivism. This is why I believe (and hope I have shown) that the existentialist (and those schools of thought peripheral to it) lens is apt. The genealogy of Gothic literature serves as a grammatical sandbox that gives way to exploring the things that existentialism tries to frame in its study, such as the dread and anxieties — the nothingness (no thing-ness) — of being.
Not only are the Dal Honese clay-filled ancestors present to alienate the reader by entertaining a certain ‘exoticism’ (by the readers’ juxtaposing such practices against what we consider ‘normal’ — here's where Sartre is applied to White or Male Gazes), but they are there as conduits for understanding how Nimander is affected by Others, by their Looks — his siblings, his absent father, his dead uncle, Kallor, Gothos, and the icy threshold — even if this ‘othering’ is one done only by Nimander onto himself (the house settling perceived as a footfall). This becomes more important in the scenes that follow.
So, how does this relate to the Eleint, dragonblood or sorcery? If you want to know now, please read ahead in the text — i.e., he future scenes in this sequence in Chapter 8 of TtH — you’ll find out. Otherwise, I’ll attempt to provide more clarity in the follow-up post(s). Until then, I just want put forth some questions:

• Are the Eleint actually dragons in the usual fantastical/conventional sense, or are they something different, something alien, something terrifying, something that evokes horror?
• If meaning-making (and, as such, essentializing) — according to my reading of existentialism — is a choice of ascribing/burying the Real with its facticity, what does this mean for K’rul’s warrenification and the birth of sorcery? What does this mean for aspecting, particularly for the Eleint and the Azathanai?

Beyond those questions (which align with my grander narrative shared in this collection of essays) — in regards to the plot, I think it is smart to continue asking, ‘why has Gothos ensured that Anomander’s children and Kallor would stumble upon his tower?’
¹ the facticity of what can be understood as objective states ascribed to things, including social constructions — thing-ness — e.g., how things are thrown into the world, a mode of existence that simply is, the contingent being of ordinary things, such the language(s) one speaks, one’s occupation, etc.
² the mode of existence of consciousness that stands in contrast to being-in-itself, “no thing-ness”, that which negates being-in-itself

For a little context when I was younger my father wouldn’t show off his abusive side even when I was younger I remember when I was younger my mother was pushed into the wall by my father when she was pregnant with my little brother I also remember being hugged by my older sister well my mother and father had a screaming match
My father’s abusive signage was more prominent when I was in my teens going in high school any time I wanted to go to school early to do homework or to get a project done you would call me a slut or whore saying that I would be messing with the boys that would be there but I was doing well and all my classes and whenever I show to my grades it wasn’t enough he didn’t care
His abuse was physical emotional and mental through things and push me into things he even jumped over the couch when me and my mum were just having a small fight he smacked my head into the ground and I ended up crying my eyes out saying my mum just watching me with a blank look on her face
When I was a little bit older my father suspected me sending nudes to a boy I liked I need took me straight to the police station to get me in trouble but it was never the case and I told the police officer that I just had a little episode in self harm to myself and I had sent photo to your friend as more of a concern
High school whenever I was sick he would say that I would have to stay at school are you didn’t care when I was sick or not they just wanted me out of the house he also didn’t understand the concept of menstrual cycle and then he would say that it was just a phase angel up passing out vomiting and the only person to look after me with my younger brother they gave me a plate of food mainly fruit
And whenever my mum and father were having a screaming match I would get involved so my mother wouldn’t have to deal with his abuse
but soon enough I couldn’t take it any more and I found my older brother on a live stream I told my brother but I couldn’t take it any more and for him to pick me up when it came for me to leave I packed everything I could say goodbye to my cat and just leaving saying goodbye to my Younger brother and when my father realised I was not at the house he kicked my mother out and told her to look for me she ended up walking all night and my sister had to help her go home again My father ended up texting me multiple times to get my ass home even resulted to guilt tripping me telling my mum and brother were upset and crying bawling their eyes out but my brother helped me pack my stuff and he knew about it I just wish that I could take him with me
And I knew when I finally turned 19 they couldn’t do anything about me leaving home and they couldn’t get the police involved I visited my sister a few times even my little brother and my mum my mum insisted of me going to the house and seeing my father I was scared but I agreed stupidly when I was face-to-face with my father he told me to take off my mask that I had on my face and that masks are not allowed in the house when I said I didn’t want to he left he just left the house and you go with his drinking buddies so I also left
When I was visiting my mum a second time I told her about what happened in high school and I was sexually assaulted 3 time by three different people but all she said was that she didn’t want to hear about it it seems like she didn’t really give two shits I told my younger brother what I told my mum and he ended up punching the wall telling me that he would hurt them for hurting me but I just hugged him saying that I’m okay now and I have been talking to a psychiatrist talking about my problems
last year was just a big whole year for me moving into different houses because of drama issues with family members finally I found a house with me and my boyfriend to live I’m doing better now and I’ve got medication to deal with mental issues I’ve got because of David my father
While being diagnosed at Sonder they told me I had to split personality disorder associated disorder social anxiety depression and I’m even getting tested for autism
I’m not talking to my mom as she just wants to push a relationship on to me with my father but I do talk to my sister and I try to talk to my Younger brother but my mum told me that David won’t get a Wi-Fi router so then I can talk to him right now I’m just dealing with myself right now trying to heal from the scars that my father caused me
But I am happy that I have people by my side especially my boyfriend‘s been there with me every step of the way helping me and caring for me and even supporting me when my family couldn’t even do that
So am I the jerk for not wanting a relationship with my abusive father

A few months ago I was looking for a psychiatrist after not being on any psych meds for a little over a year and since my city is heavily underserved for psych, I ended up in the hands of an NP listed in the psychiatry section online. I believe she was fulfilling the role of psychiatrist in a clinic where an MSW was fulfilling the role of psychologist.
My goal was to resume my old medications my psychiatrist prescribed years before (adderal and ambien) because I started studying for the MCAT and had trouble managing everything at once and at this time in my life. I have a long history of ADHD and insomnia, both starting in elementary school, and I’ve been on many different medications for both conditions for the past 10 years. I managed it pretty well without medications for my senior year of college but my grades and personal life both took a massive hit by doing this. When i started studying for the MCAT i realized i needed to be back on these meds, but couldn’t get in as a “new patient” with my old psych or any other psychiatrist within 100 miles.
I was upfront with her and she told me I was drug seeking and relapsing, called me an addict, told me to find a therapist for the ADHD, and gave me gabapentin for the sleep. She literally sat there with google open, googling medications and their uses. She referred to gabapentin as a “brand new sleeping pill,” and said that ambien was an opioid. When I corrected her and told her to check my PMP for previous prescriptions she told me “I have a medical degree and you’re struggling to even study for the MCAT” then laughed. I walked out so fast and didn’t even pay. She referred to herself as a psychiatrist and a “medical practitioner” on her page and in person, she was very defensive about it too… real psychiatrists don’t need google to decide what prescriptions to write for lol
I then found a clinic which has several PA’s working under an MD. I have been very happy with how cautious and diligent my PA has been. She doesn’t blindly write and she always asks me about side effects, day to day symptoms, etc. She restarted my adderal at 2.5mgs a day, then 5mgs, and now 10mgs, replaced ambien with quiviviq. She goes above and beyond, and I feel good knowing that she is very careful with medication management and works closely with her supervising MD between appointments. This mid level’s practice is night/day with the other one, she doesn’t pretend to be a physician, and she’s very careful, and open to input from other clinicians (and the patient).

Hi Reddit, let me give you some background first I've been dating my BF for 3 years but I've lived with him and his mom for a year( Yes I know, we moved way too fast but unfortunately both our circumstances led to it) we started dating at the end of high school, and I didn't start thinking about college till my senior year because where my parents moved I would have a great opportunity's for School and another important note is that 6 months ago I asked if we could ever do long distance and he immediately said no, we'd break up. Now to the point of the post, I recently found out that I'm required to live on campus my Freshmen year which is fine and I'm actually really excited about it but its mostly because I lost most of my Social skills in addition to feeling like me and my BF are too codependent on each other. I've been feeling really crappy about it though and I feel like I'm a bad person for not telling him yet because from our previous plans, he was going to join me and he'd work with my dad but now that's not an option for at least a year. A couple months ago I told him that he wasn't going to join me because a lot of my needs weren't being met but unfortunately I wussed out because he got really emotional and said I was punishing him so I feel like he'll have the same reaction or he'll blow a fuse, say stuff he doesn't mean and/or kick me out (which isn't a problem because this is his moms place and it would be an understandable reaction). I'm really conflicted because I have no idea how/ when I can bring this up.
Side note: Him coming with me my Freshmen year is not an option and I apologize that this post is all other the place, I'm overwhelmed and stressed lol.

I hate Kardashians.
I’m 24 and grew up with huge boobs, wide hips and fat lips, dyed my hair forever because it was dark and with my hazel eyes, khloe colored hair and curved body in high school I was constantly compared to the Kardashian’s in their prime.
“Did you get a fake butt like kim k?!”
“Wow you must have gotten a boob job to look like a Kardashian” when I hit puberty at !!! 11 years old !!! by a female gym teacher?!
“You should model for lipstick companies, kylie jenner did it” in high school when I started wearing lipstick on my ‘fat’ hispanic lips that don’t match my ‘pretty’ caucasian features.
People I’ve met in this world have actually told me hey you look like a Kardashian (paraphrased obvs) and question me on my stances on plastic surgery, ozempic use and aquirement strategies(lost 35 lbs recently) or accuse me of having big boobs/big butt via having augmentations of Kardashian severity.
I have so many reasons to resent these women.
I’m mixed raced white and Hispanic and tired of being fetishized as and frankly compared to this 1/2 white family. Like other half white people with “trendy” features are “Kardashian-like”. I joined this sub when I was petty and tired.
People in this sub love to talk about how whorish and slutty these women are to LOVE sex and LOVE sexual attention, and how everything they do is for sexual attention of MEN and SEX and…..
Complain, call other women slutty whore bitches, complaining some more…
Yet never putting 2x2 together and realizing the Kardashian’s are running a sex ring for global access to instagram bro level clientele and Kris has pimped them all out. If you could big brain energy this shit, you would realize none of it is worth your watch time (cable, hulu, tiktok reddit or otherwise)
Whoever needs to hear this:
The Kardashian advertising isn’t for you as a woman. It’s for dumbass men with the money to buy their time, socially or otherwise.
The plastic surgery and “trendsetting” with the constant changes to their bodies, also is not for you. It is for them to appeal to the younger, more internet and p*rn obsessed clientele.
You guys are literally watching prostitution happen and complaining about how similar to escorts/prostitutes these women are.
Ask yourself, why are you so triggered about Kylie Jenner wearing a mini dress in her Paris outfit collage that you just need to comment how nasty and slutty she is?
Why do you need to make fun of Khloe Jenners’ botched plastic surgery face ceaselessly when you will acknowledge in the same disparaging comment that she has body dysmorphia to the Nth degree?
Would you complain about seeing a strippeescort/streetside prostitute in real daily life to the same level and degree you would complain about a Kardashian online? If not, re-evaluate your positions. They are common Calabasas sex workers or “high class escorts” whom you give way to much of your energy towards. Why do you care SO MUCH about an instagram hooker?
Leaving this sub, too many women shaming sex work and other women in an attempt to validate themselves out of slut shaming ideology. This whole sub screams of internalized misogyny.
Any outfit worn on a Kardashian is subject to scrutiny in this sub. Plain clothes I have seen scrutinized on this sub include sweatpants, branded loungewear, crop tops, high thigh boots, mid thigh dresses, excessive cleavage outfits, literally them in jeans and a plain t-shirt, let alone the t-shirt has a logo or branding y’all lose your conspiracy theory minds, which all happen to be similar types of clothing that me and many other women including your critical selves would also wear.
I’ve even encountered someone in this sub so convinced that KKW was slang for KKK (Klu Klux Klan advertising) instead of Kim Kardashian West, her actual initials of her married name at the time of her launching her brand.
Y’all so deep in the woman hating mentality that you don’t even realize you’re critical of normal ass people things when it’s actually normal and mindlessly choose to indulge in media conspiracy fueled hate bait.
Please downvote this dumpster fire post and roast me on my way out, I really don’t want to come back to this toxic ass sub.

If I want a law passed, what should I do?
I heard that members of Congress can write bills and pass bills.
Should I email, call, or write a letter to my Senator or House of Representative to convince them to write a bill and introduce it to Congress?
In college, I had an undiagnosed disability that caused me to get a low cumulative GPA (3.11).
However, during my 5th year of college, I had DSP (Disabled Student Program) accommodations like having notetakers, extra time on exams, the ability to type in-class essays, etc. and I got a 3.8 GPA my 5th year.
I want to get a PhD in materials science engineering from a top school like Stanford, but these schools require a high undergraduate GPA.
Most schools only allow you to expunge grades if you have a medical excuse.
Would it be realistically possible for me to ask my House of Representative in my local district to write a bill giving stronger protections to disabled people by giving disabled people the power to expunge grades earned before a disability is diagnosed, so that I can redo my entire undergraduate education and get a higher GPA?

Here's my life :
Demographics: 2nd gen Asian female, upper-middle class, private school, rising senior
Stats:
3.93uw GPA (4.0 9th and 10th, 3.78 11th), 1580 SAT (800 math, 780 reading)
my school doesn't do APs, but I took rigorous classes all 3 years
ECs:
Founder and Co-lead of Debate Club
- recruited 50+ members
- teach kids how to debate PF, debate PF
​
Founder and Co-lead of Innovation Club
- recruited 20+ members
- invented a machine to generate medical oxygen to patients
- placed in top 2% of prestigious international innovation competition
​
Co-lead of school community service club
- organize community service initiatives
- hosted multi-school community service conference
​
Director of non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness to current events in Asia
​
Head Writing/Research Peer Tutor
- organize peer tutor training sessions
- tutor students in writing 1hr each week
​
Co-captain of JV Basketball team
- I didn't rlly do much but it's a blast
​
Peer Orientation leader
- one of 44 out of 154 chosen to help new students settle into school next year
​
Theater
- had supporting roles in 2 plays/musicals
​
Guitar
- perform at school's annual guitar show
- starting rock band next year
​
Pioneer
- am going to research philosophy in Pioneer research program
​
Awards:
High Honor Roll
NACLO invitational qualifier
(That innovation competition mentioned above)
National Latin Exam - Gold Summa Cum Laude
​
​
Writing my college essay about how debate helped me escape dogmatic and fundamentalist religion.
I plan to apply as a philosophy/theology major and eventually minor in computer science

I’m a rising junior in high school, and I’ve been working towards a pre-med route for quite some time now.
I have a huge passion for the medical field, and landed a spot volunteering at a hospital as part of a selective program this summer. Everything about my interests and the field of medicine clicks just right.
Except that I have severe health anxiety. Hearing about severe illnesses has one of two effects: becoming vastly interested and immersed, or descending down a spiral of panic. I can’t control which one happens to me, and when. I’m scared that pre-med isn’t the right choice for me if even the prospect of terminal illnesses sends me into a cold sweat.
Is this something I will grow out of before I graduate? What do you all think, as current pre-med students/graduates?
Thank you for your time.

I’m(19M) sure this is a common thing that everyone goes through, but it finally hit me. It was my sister’s graduation party from high school and I was thinking about how she would be the last person in our immediate family to attend high school. Then I started thinking about how empty the house is going to be since my sister and I will be going to college and staying on campus.
Then I saw my dad talking on the couch and how his hair was more gray than black, and my heart broke into two.
I’ve known it was coming, he hit his sixties recently, but it was never real to me. And now it’s stuck in my head and I can’t get over it. We just played poker together and I kept thinking that I wouldn’t be able to do it again one day.
We’re on vacation right now, so obviously I can’t say anything like this, and I don’t want to burden my friends online with this sort of trouble which will be at least a decade away. I made myself write it out on paper so that it wouldn’t just build up, but now all I have to show for it was an ugly cry, so now I’m writing to reddit.
I know there’s nothing I can do, and that all I can is to make his twilight a little easier. But it still scares me that I haven’t had this realization about my mom too, and that one day she’s also going to go.
I don’t know what else to say, so I guess you guys have my heart now.

That stuff shouldn't be allowed

Just context, you can skip this long ass read. Tl;dr, everything was okay, for several years of varying stress levels, until it VERY suddenly wasn't. If you can, at least just skim the important bits and advise me on how the fuck to cope with this.
Everything was okay around a month ago. Our situation hasn't been good, but we were handling it and excited for a growth opportunity like we've never had.
She has PTSD, but she's always managed herself well, aside from a brief period years back where some impending doom set in while confronting some of her trauma. She sought out therapy, and even just by the end of her first session she was improving a ton. It wasn't long before she was back to her normal self, but even better for it.
Problem is, we've been under tremendous stress for around two years.
Our rescue macaw passed away from a viral wasting disease, and he was the closest thing we'd had to a child. We had him for most of our ten years together.
We had our (rental) home sold out from under us in the middle of a rental crisis. Basically the only option we had left was to move in with her family 2,400 miles away, onto their ranch. She couldn't continue therapy when we moved.
They were contributors to her childhood traumas, but she was so sure they'd changed and were ready to be the people she needed them to be many years ago.
I was extremely skeptical that the people who hadn't extended a finger to us, let alone a hand, through several years of struggling through a lot of hard shit, suddenly wanted to give us a near-free ride. But I think her sheer optimism for it just made me feel like I was being an awful cynic, so I just shoved it down and bought into her fantasy. For her sake, as I thought at the time. Maybe she was right, after all.
She was wrong, and it went about as well as you'd expect. Honestly probably a lot worse. Her grandmother and father are manipulative, narcissistic assholes, whether or not they realize that's what they are. They bait and switched on us hard, whether they meant to or not.
The picture that was painted was that we'd live in the spare trailer on their property and pay our portion of the taxes and the insurance, and obviously just do our share of stuff like yard work. Maybe occasionally helping out with some cows and fences.
We spent most of our savings to get there, and after a four and a half day U-Haul trip, they started moving us in.. to her grandmother's house. In a tiny spare room. For two (at the time) 26 year old adults, a dog, a cat, and a snake. We had to get a storage unit for the vast majority of our stuff, since we'd had nearly ten years of building a life together in the back of that truck.
That spare trailer stayed empty for the whole year and a half of us being there, by the way.
All the responsibilities were then handed off to us. We were expected to cook the meals for everyone, clean the house, do all the ranch work, fix anything that broke, etc.. Her father and grandmother just sat in bed, collected their retirement/inheritance/disability, and popped their pills.
Then on top of it, we were also expected to pay "half" of the bills, so we had to find employment on top of all the other full-time responsibilities.
We weren't allowed to see the bills, they would just tell us what we owed, but I'll tell you right now that I'd never in twelve years of being out on my own now, in comparably sized homes, paid $800 for a month of electricity. But allegedly the "half" we were expected to pay was $400.
My grandfather passed away, and I soft inherited my grandparents' property. My grandfather and I never had a good relationship, so it was a huge surprise. But with what little we'd managed to save up in that time, it got us off her family's ranch, and it also got us out of the vicious poverty inducing rent cycle, so it seemed like we'd finally gotten a massive break.
Then the housing problems set in.
I've replaced about half of the plumbing myself, because new stuff just kept breaking down all the time.
I wasn't confident doing a new gas water heater myself, so we had to get work to save up for a new one. Until that indeterminate future date, we had to boil water on the stove and shower with a pitcher out of a cooler. We took it in humor as best as we could.
Then our vehicles started breaking down, and became unreliable enough we couldn't leave the small town we're living in. Our savings at that point weren't nearly enough to get new vehicles, or even to get the level of work required done in a shop, and I didn't have the means to do that level of work.
She's been in healthcare (a very desperate field) for her whole working life, and is a fantastic worker, so she found work right away, four minutes from our house.
I sat on Google refreshing the job listing probably forty times per day, looking for anything even marginally close enough that the car could make it to, and I could plausibly continue to find a way to work even if it suddenly couldn't. I've done remote work before and would've been happy to go that route again.. except the best we get here is 7mbps internet, and I couldn't find a single fucking place that would accept that.
We're an equal home. Bills, large purchases that benefit both of us, food, housework, everything except stuff like the vehicle/house maintenance which she wasn't comfortable doing (though even that she was interested in learning). This was killing me to feel like I was leaching off of her, and I know it was really stressing her out being the only source of income.
Then set in the job problems. Put simply, she'd wound up in a very toxic work environment. To make matters worse, one of the people there is almost like a 40 year younger version of her grandmother, whom we'd just escaped.
My S.O. started to lose her identity there, just trying to mask and mirror her way through the social dynamics, which were more like a cliquey high school than a workplace. She felt her job depended on it. Gossip, cruelty, passive aggression, all completely out of character for her, but she felt like she didn't have a choice but to participate in it.
The manager also didn't want to do her own job, and given my S.O.'s glowing experience, resume, and letter of recommendation from her previous job, started putting the job of managing people on her..
But without the title, authority, or pay of a manager. So naturally, nobody gave a shit what she had to say. It still all fell down onto her anyway, and she was treated like shit every time her attempts to lead didn't go as they should've.
But she felt she couldn't leave, because the way she (understandably) saw it, our survival depended on it.
I did finally find work as lower management in a small casino in town, but she never lost that survival mode mindset, and had no interest in quitting despite all the stress it was putting on her.
How we landed here, per the title. This is where my heart breaks down completely. Mostly for her, but quite honestly, also for myself
About three weeks ago, she came home from work one day. She started her normal "today's bullshit at work" vent session, like we've always done for each other every day.. but this was different. First she seemed a bit disconnected, but it quickly devolved into extreme emotional reactions.
All of a sudden she starts talking about how everyone's behavior is changing around her. Suddenly the girls at work were chipper and kind. Everyone was doing their job correctly. She became convinced there was some kind of investigation for a hostile work environment or something happening, and that was causing the change.
It didn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility, especially because they'd just finished berating a transgender coworker out of there. And my S.O. has always been pretty sound of mind (albeit occasionally a little prone to unlikely fantasies of optimism, but I personally love that about her despite what it had just resulted in with her family). I agreed that it did sound like a possibility.
Pretty quick, she started getting squinty-eyed, told me my behavior has been changing too, and started asking me what I knew about the investigation. Caught me completely off guard, and I guess she saw that in my body language, but misread it as me trying to hide something.
She asked me what I was hiding, and at this point I was just massively confused how this went from a normal vent session about work, like we've had for ten years, to an interrogation.
Before I could answer, suddenly she jumps to angrily asking if I'm cheating on her, a look of almost intense hatred in her widened eyes.
Every question just confusing me more in terms of where she's getting any of this from. We have great communication, loyalty, honesty, trust, the whole package. I had no idea what was happening.
She ran to the bedroom and started packing to leave, and I was begging her to slow down and stop so I could catch up on what the fuck was happening. She told me I was in on the investigation but wouldn't tell her anything, and I was cheating on her with one of her coworkers (who has a loose link to my boss at the casino.. small town shit), and that's all she needed to know.
It finally clicked for me that this was some kind of stress breakdown, and I suggested as much. She finally slowed down and thought about it. Suddenly she's calling her sister, who lives in a completely different state a thousand plus miles away, surrounded by ocean. "Do you know anything about an investigation? Have any of the girls from my work contacted you?"
Her sister was also caught off guard, but honestly responded much better than I did, and I'll always feel like my uncoordinated response did damage here. Maybe because they share a lot of the same traumatic experiences, and the diagnosis, so she understood what was happening much more quickly? I'm not sure.
My S.O. backed down, had a good long cry while we cuddled, and it seemed like that was it. She understood that it was some kind of mental snap, and her grip on reality had basically fully returned. She said she didn't think she could go back to work there, and I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agreed after what I'd just witnessed. WHOLE. FUCKING. HEARTEDLY. Scared the shit out of me, but after hours of it, I was just glad it was over.
The next day, "I just wish someone would be honest with me. There is FACTUALLY an investigation happening, you all know something about it, and I know you're cheating on me. I need to just get away from everyone." Cue an hours long conversation trying to talk her down again, but this time on my own, because she'd decided her sister "wasn't in the loop enough to see what was going on anyway."
It went on like this for about three weeks. Off and on. All day. All night. Moment of clarity, back down the rabbit hole 30 minutes later. Moment of clarity, back down the rabbit hole.
She started making all these "seeing god in the stars" types of connections. Suddenly everyone on Facebook knew something she didn't now too, evidenced by how these posts they're sharing relate back to it. My family was also allegedly talking about her mental breakdown on Facebook, which meant that I'd told them everything about it and taken away her choice to control that information.
Neither of us were sleeping, eating, drinking, basically neglecting all forms of self care to sit there and hash, rehash, and rehash this out again. I'd guess I was averaging 5 hours of sleep per week, right alongside her, while still having to go to work and pretend everything was fine.
I tried to suggest returning to therapy god knows how many times, or even something in-patient since this was SO much worse than her last episode years back, but initially she was convinced this was me trying to manipulate her. Gaslight her. Convince her she's crazy.
I tried to get her to just think it through, like what evidence does she actually have for any of it beyond her gut feeling? The evidence doesn't exist because we're all smart enough to get rid of it and keep it from her. She just kept repeating that she trusts her body, and that's all she needed.
During one of her moments of clarity, she finally booked a therapy appointment.. but unfortunately not through her old therapist, who had been fantastic with her. She no longer lives here. Instead, she went through that BetterHelp app.
Her first appointment, she starts going into the stuff she needs to get working through, and in response she gets, "Holy smokes!" Yeah. That's it. Holy smokes. To be clear here, this is evidently not a platform for people in crisis, this is a platform for people whose dad yelled at them that one time and it makes them sad to think about, because these people are clearly not equipped for anything more serious than that. What kind of fucking psychology professional responds like that?
Anyway, the therapist also went on to say about the job situation, "I would've quit too." Now, this seems innocent enough when you're dealing with someone who's with it, but my S.O.'s currently fractured mind took that as validation for everything, not just the general toxicity of the work environment like the therapist was speaking to. Again, a psychology professional should've known better. And it was back on full force for a while.
A massive divergence happened a few days after this. I'm not even sure how or why. We had our usual rehashing session, and suddenly.. she just accepted it. She accepted that she's in perpetual fight or flight mode right now, and her mind is looking for any explanation to grasp at, any possible danger imaginable. She just had to trust us, the people who've loved and supported her all along and have no reason to betray her, and keep with the therapy.
For three or four days, she was totally with it. I mean, almost fully back to normal. All apologies for what she put us through, all forgiveness and "just happy to have you back" from us. Then on the final night, she sees that my step mother is Facebook friends with one of her coworkers. And we're back on.
Fast forward to the past few days, and she's become very despondent about the way she's feeling. She's fairly consistently aware that something is happening to her internally, rather than externally with everyone else, basically just seeking regular reassurances that we're being as honest as possible about everything. But her fight or flight just.. Will. Not. Disengage.
We had a conversation about trying another therapist, and she agreed, but she still didn't feel she needed in-patient care. She booked an in person session with one who specializes in behavioral health and trauma.
Then she starts experiencing distortions in her perception. Shadows when she closes her eyes. Rooms appearing smaller than they should. The voice track on TV shows not appearing to line up with actors' lip movements. Just little distortions, but they scared the absolute living shit out of her.
That fear led to some horrific dissociation, where it's like she's losing context on everything. She doesn't know what's happening and feels like nothing is real anymore. Nothing makes sense.
She was still stuck on there being an investigation, but it was evolving. It wasn't her old job being investigated anymore, it was her father for child abuse from when she was young. Then it was us for neglecting our pets (because we don't take our snake out very often and occasionally forget a regular nail trimming for the dog, but they're otherwise very well cared for). Then it was her father again, but for elder abuse, because her grandmother (who insists on managing her own medications) accidentally overdosed one day.
She became even more despondent, frequently breaking out into panic attacks and crying fits, which I just continued to try and help her through. Ice packs, reassurances that she was safe, there was no threat, etc. Truth be told, I was terrified too.
Finally, two days before her appointment, she had a massive panic attack about it being Memorial Day weekend. She couldn't explain why, just that it didn't make sense. She finally says she thinks she needs a hospital, which she's been completely opposed to until this point.
I rushed her to the emergency room, and that was a mess because it was the middle of the night so they couldn't find a bed anywhere in a more appropriate facility that late. They didn't really have any mental health resources themselves, so all they could do was give her some medications to calm her nerves and help her sleep through the night until they could find a bed.
The hospital.. was not good for her either. After a while, she just kept begging me to take her home. She just wanted to sleep together in our own bed, but they'd decided that between the bouts of confusion, paranoia, and admitting that she has had thoughts of suicide in the past, she was a danger to herself and couldn't leave.
They took her phone, leaving her in a blank room, and thanks to her work and the fact the most recent retraumatizing came from a healthcare environment, constantly triggered by the sounds of call lights and such in the emergency room outside.
All I could do was hold her, and keep reminding her that she's safe, and that everyone there just wants to help, but they're just limited in the ways they can until they find a bed somewhere. She just kept repeating that she wasn't actually getting any treatment, and to be fair she basically wasn't, but I just had to keep asking her to hold out a little longer, because they were trying to find her a facility that had the ability to.
They did finally, this morning, but it was about 130 miles away. They let me take her there myself though, which was a huge plus to know we'd get that last bit of time together.
On the way, however, she starts telling me how horrible of a person she is. At one point, she asks if I'm taking her to prison. I asked her what she could possibly go to prison for, and she just says incredibly minor things from the past like downloading a movie, (very rarely) doing this or that drug, etc.
I just kept reassuring her that I'm taking her to a crisis center where they'll be able to help her figure out where this is coming from, and that in no way is she in trouble legally. Everyone involved in this just wants to help her.
It's at this point I realize.. they took her phone. All these little connections she was making via Facebook and such, suddenly unavailable. She'd also decided once and for all that I wasn't the problem. So now all she had left was herself. She was being held at the hospital against her will. The "investigation" was no longer into her work, it was into her, because that's all that was left.
She tells me she's going to go away (to prison) for a long time, but to just know how much she loves me. She wishes we could've just had a simple life together, but she ruined that for us. She was just so sorry. I just kept reassuring her that nothing was ruined, and we can and will still work towards that life together, she just needs help that's beyond what I can provide so we can get back to that.
Then finally, after a long goodbye.. I dropped her off.
The facility is very small (literally a regular house in a regular neighborhood, so only a few patients getting a lot of 1x1 care), and very soft spoken and compassionate staff. Practically everything is optional right down to the daily therapy, which made me really happy to hear given it seems like that should ease her mind on the prison train of thought. She's even allowed to leave for good whenever she wants, with the one caveat being that I or a family member would need to pick her up.
It doesn't have visiting hours though, and I couldn't even go in with her.. that kills me. They don't have HIPAA forms, so just walking through the door is a violation. But she gets to keep her phone at all times with the exception of bedtime, just to make sure she gets some sleep. She told me a bit ago that she's nervous coming into this new environment, but everyone there has been nothing but incredibly welcoming and empathetic towards her.
Not to make this situation about me, because it's so far from it, but my heart is just so broken.
I've never felt anything so horrible. Not even remotely close. I feel like I, myself, need therapy after this.
I'm still so confused. Did I just miss the cracks of this coming on? Or was it really that sudden? I swear I would've noticed her behavior change.
I'm so angry with her toxic fucking coworkers, who it seems like ultimately sent her into this downward spiral. I'm so angry with her family for being.. well, who they are.
I'm so angry with myself for not trying harder to get her to leave that job sooner, just because I didn't want to press the issue since she's her own person and capable of making her own decisions. But I saw the stress it was putting on her. I should've done more.
I'm so scared of what comes next. Will she ever normalize out and heal? If so, when? Days? Weeks? Months? How is this experience going to change her? Admittedly, given we live in the US, how in the fuck are we going to afford this (though as long as she's getting the help she needs, that's far from my primary concern, but still something I have to figure out)?
It feels like my whole world came crashing down around me. She is my person. She's one of the biggest reasons I get out of bed in the morning. My favorite parts of the day are crawling into bed together and waking up to each other, like we've been doing for ten fucking years.
Her absence in our home is utterly suffocating, knowing the hell she's going through while there's practically nothing I can do for her except be there for her when she wants to text or talk on the phone.
I doubt anyone is going to read this whole book I've written here, but just being able to type it all out sequentially like this has been a bit cathartic. But I still just have no idea how to feel. What to do. I'm so lost.

Hello all. Long time lurker and it is finally time to toss my hat in the ring.
Stats:

• 3.77 GPA, 512 MCAT; Graduated 2023 w/ BS in Biology with Honors
• ORM White Male, NJ Resident

ECs:

• 4600 hours 4 Year D1 Rower on a T20 Team (competitive member, many accolades)
• 1200 hours of research with poster presentation and certificate of distinction
• 260 Hours Shadowing mainly orthopedics (another 400 in pediatrics however that was before college)
• 170 Non-Clinical Volunteering (soup kitchen + rowing team affiliated events)
• 400 Hours on a U23 High Performance Summer Club for 2021
• 75 Hours As a Tutor in the academic center for athletes
• 100 Hours in other clubs (just member, no significant role)

For Gap Year

• Will be working as a Behavior Health Technician where I will be working one on one with autistic children (~40 hours a week & company has both research and associated physician that I am able to get involved with)
• Will continue consistently at the soup kitchen I go to
• Will also most likely continue rowing at a semi competitive level

Schools List: I am looking to stay in the East because of family and my s/o, however am considering a few Chicago and Ohio schools. I am looking to apply to around 20-25 and am just having trouble weighing out if I have too many reaches or whatnot. Due to the hectic end of the season I will be applying early next week to finish smoothing out my writing. In order from complete reach to above stat (ordered by Avg MCAT then Avg GPA):

• Columbia
• Northwestern
• Duke
• Icahn
• BU
• Ohio State
• Albert Einstein
• Warren Alpert (Brown)
• U Cincinnati
• Geisel (Dartmouth)
• Emory
• Sidney Kimmel
• Tufts
• Rutgers NJ Medical
• Georgetown
• Cooper
• Rutgers RWJ
• Virginia Tech Carilion
• Wake Forest
• Lewis Katz
• Drexel
• Larner at UVM
• George Washington
• SUNY Upstate
• Rush Medical

21M/18F couple back home from college for the summer (remote internships) and we’re looking for someone to make our lives a little more exciting once we finish at 5:00pm.
We’re open to the types of play and how involved I’ll (21M) be involved with it. We’re open to anything from light cucking to threesome and most other things involving a third, but I have to be in the same room as her while you’re with her (for sexy and safety reasons). We’re open to men of most ages but prefer someone who’s taller and/or more dominant.
((Bonus points if you graduated from a high school in Fremont in the last few years. Seriously))
Slide into our Reddit chats with an introduction (pictures always welcome but let’s try to stay sfw in the first message as she checks this account as well). We have only done this a couple of times before and are hoping to expand our experience. Thanks!

I feel like my husband and I are spiraling. We're both in our late 30s, and we have two teenagers (one works a few hours a week between their marching band and school commitments). I am only 4 months into remission with leukemia, and have another 'non-benign' tumor that was found a couole months ago that is being watch for the possibility of removing the humerus bone in a few months.
Now due to the cancer and all my doctors appointments for my muscular dystrophy, I had to rely on credit cards, there was no other way to receive treatment. I have a total of 39k in CC debt and still owe two hospitalsabout $500 each. My husband was utilizing his credit cards to pay our monthly bills then he'd pay them off each month to earn his points/rewards, but, somehow that stopped or something because he informed me this past week that he's about 45k in debt to his CCs. I also have 85k in student loans, I was halfway through my masters when I got my leukemia diagnoses and have been on a medical leave of absence since. My husband owes 19k in student loans.
I've tried using spread sheets to budget, but I'm struggling finding a way to make it all work.
Our monthly breakdown is:
Loans/expenses:

• My monthly CC payments at minimum $1330 (interest varies 18-30%)
• Husband's monthly CC payments at minimum ~ $1600 (same interest ranges)
• Rent: $1875 (it will go up in Nov. on lease renewal about $200)
• Car payment: $375
• Car insurance: $150
• Electric in the desert: ~$200
• Internet/Hulu/Netflix: ~$195
• Gas (house) $45
• Water $60
• Student loan: $ukn at this time
• Food: ~$700
• Dog food: $45

Other info:

• Husbands IRA: ~ $6k
• Husbands 401k: $ukn, not much though
• I have a pension, no other retirement accounts, I'm not vested until my 5 year mark in September.

I just got a promotion and will be making $63,600 gross per year (I was at $42,900), net is lower due to 12.29% pension taken out, taxes, short & long term disability, and health insurance for the 4 of us ($150/check) monthly. My husband makes $70,720 gross, his net has the normal taxes, and his 401k. We both get paid every 2 weeks (opposite weeks).
On top of all these bills spiraling out of control both of our teens are in Marching Band at high school and we have until August 25th to pay the participation fees totaling ~ $3600.
I tried to look through all the tools on the sub, but feel so lost and confused. We are 5 years of from a bankruptcy from making stupid choices before and dumbly for sick and right back into it. I tried hard through my cancer treatment to look for a higher paying job in my company (our health insurance is fairly good, they paid almost half a million of my treatment), and finally succeeded, but the $20k gross increase in pay doesn't seem like it's going to help anything. I thought about maybe each of us getting a consolidation loan, but our credit scores are in the mid 500s, so no one will lend.
Any further advice or direction to look would be very appreciated and helpful.

Hi all! So I’ll likely be taking a year off from school (till next summer) and I’d still like to stay up to date with the science community and continue to grow and gain experience. I’d love to stay in the lab (not medical based if possible) and since I’m still a bit new, would like to know what are some great ideas. Is it possible to still work in a research lab? Should I apply for regular lab based jobs? Thanks In advance!

Human Dave, on his implant: "Hey, Doctor? I have a few questions to ask you, and I was wondering if I could get a few answers."
Alien Doctor: "Certainly, Human Dave. What would you like to know?"
HD: "I'm heading to Medbay now, so I'll just ask when I get there."
AD: "Very well, Human Dave. I shall remain here and await your arrival."
Human Dave sprints into the room, visibly panting, hunched over, trying to suck air into his lungs.
AD: "Human Dave, are you alright?"
Human Dave takes a deep breath, and straightens himself up.
Human Dave lifts his hand, and shows Doctor a small red plastic wrapper, which is surrounding a hardened brown substance shaped into multiple trapezoidal prisms, all seemingly connected to each other, but with what appears to be some rough, possibly broken parts on one side.
HD, with forced calmness: "Doctor, can I ask you to run a chemical analysis on this particular food item, and compare whether or not any of those particular chemicals would affect Cradelian or Aflarrian physiology, whether through ingestion or physical contact?"
AD: "... Human Dave, that is a very specific set of questions you have. May I ask if something has happened?"
HD: "You may."
AD: "..."
HD: "..."
AD: "Well?"
HD: "Well what, Doctor?"
AD, exasperated: "What has happened, Human Dave?"
HD: "Well, I may have received a care package a while back, which may have contained this particular food item, but wanted to save it for another day. And I may have left it out while bringing the Aflarrians around the ship, which may have led them to give it an exploratory taste, which may or may not have put them into an unconscious but stable state."
AD: "... HUMAN DAVE, THAT IS MORE THAN JUST A FEW QUESTIONS! WHY DID YOU NOT ALERT TO ME THAT THERE IS A MEDICAL EMERGENCY?!"
HD: "Because Captain saw them sleeping, and thought to throw away what he believed was the substance responsible, but is now on the floor of my quarters, acting like he's gone through my stash of alcohol?"
AD: "... WHAT THE FUCK, HUMAN DAVE?!"
...
Human Dave and Doctor are running through the hallways, heading towards Human Dave's quarters.
AD: "WHY DID YOU NOT SIMPLY ALERT ME TO THE FACT THAT THERE IS A MEDICAL EMERGENCY, HUMAN DAVE?!"
HD: "Because they're not going anywhere, and I figured it would be somewhat prudent to make sure that they haven't been poisoned by it, instead of trying to treat them and possibly making things worse!"
AD: "I recognise that you made a judgement call, Human Dave, but making sure that they are safe first is the priority!"
HD: "I know, I know! The human is a dumbass!"
AD: "No. The Alora are dumbasses. You humans are far smarter than you believe yourselves to be."
HD: "What's an Alora?"
Doctor is saved from having to answer as they both reach Human Dave's quarters and burst through the door.
The Aflarrians are rolling around on their spiny backs, seemingly content, whereas Captain is stumbling around, seeming as though he is looking for something.
Alien Captain, slurring: "Doctor! Dave! Welcome to my humble quarters. I'd offer you a seat, but someone seems to have taken all my stuff and replaced it!"
Captain stumbles over a pile of technical books, and begins to fall before reaching out, and grabbing the edge of the table.
AC, still slurring: "See this table?"
Captain glares at the table, and jabs a small digit at it.
AC: "I hate this table. It thinks it's better than me because it can STAND UPRIGHT AND WON'T FALL DOWN ON IT'S OWN!"
Captain grabs ahold of the edge again with both hands, and begins to strain his arms.
AC: "Well, FUCK YOU, TABLE!"
Captain strains to try and lift, not realising it is bolted to the floor, and gives up after a moment, slumping on top of it, with a defeated look on his face.
AC, slurring, and lifting his arm: "... you've beaten me this time, table, but I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!"
Captain trails off, and slips into unconsciousness, as his arm hits the table with a 'THUNK.'
AD: "..."
HD: "..."
AD: "... please tell me that you recorded that, Human Dave."
HD: "It's been recording since I asked you those questions, just in case I forgot something."
AD, grinning: "Excellent."
...
Captain gradually regains consciousness in the Medbay, and immediately attempts to grab his head, only to find his arms have been restrained.
AC, weakly: "Aaaah, too bright!"
AD: "Captain! Oh, sorry, I'll turn down the lights."
Doctor moves to the wall panel, and reduces the brightness of the lights in Medbay.
AD: "How do you feel, Captain?"
AC: "What happened?"
AD: "You came into contact with a human food item, which had an extreme adverse reaction with our physiology, Captain."
AC: "... how extreme?"
AD: "... I will just wait for Human Dave to send me the recording first. It was quite amusing, watching you try to fight an inanimate object."
AC: "... I did what?"
...
AC: "Oh, I can never show my face amongst other sentient beings ever again!"
HD: "Oh, come on, Captain. It really wasn't that bad."
AC: "Human Dave, I laid claim to your quarters, destroyed your property, and attempted to fight a table! A TABLE, HUMAN DAVE!"
Human Dave responds by laughing out loud.
AC: "THIS IS NOT FUNNY, HUMAN DAVE! HOW CAN I EVER MAKE UP FOR SUCH HUMILIATING ACTIONS?!"
HD, smiling: "Captain, you were, for lack of a better term, drunk. Intoxicated. You had no clue what you were doing, since this was your first time ever experiencing the sensation. Remember how Doctor acted when she got there a month ago?"
AC: "Vividly. But she at least looked as through she was enjoying herself."
HD: "Speaking of her, I actually got the reports back. Apparently, chocolate has a narcotic effect on your biology, but it acts like catnip for the Aflarrians."
AC: "What is catnip, Human Dave?"
HD: "Something of a drug to cats of my cradle-world. Ser Claws-a-lot loved the stuff, so we had to keep it locked up tight. He always managed to find it, even if he could never get the bottle open."
AC: "Remind me again why your parents sent you drugs?"
HD: "They sent me food, Captain. It just happens to have narcotic effects on more than half the crew."
AC: "... please keep it in an area where no crew, or Aflarrian, can get at it again, Human Dave. I do not enjoy being relegated to confinement in Medbay."
HD: "I'll do my best, Captain."
First
Previous

Recently graduated High School, wanting to help others (even the non-medical stuff).
Due to family issues, I need to get out of the house and even the state.
Because of that, i'm short on money and need to save it for a car to live out of while I get a job and save for an apartment.
I looked at an EMT program at my local CC but it was too much money for me to spend under my circumstances, but I heard that I could get my Certificate for free through a Fire Department or Ambulance Service, just have to sign a contract working for them for x amount of years, is this true or false?
Any advice will be appreciated,
Thanks.

I don't know why I'm even doing this but it doesn't feel like there are any other avenues to just throw my thoughts into. I don't want people to read this, but I want the idea that someone has read it and now knows what's going on. I'm being vague about stuff but granted I don't really know why or even if I feel this way. Really all this post is is me getting desperate and throwing my thoughts and recent experiences into the world, it's not a cry for help or anything like that, I don't want attention, it's more or less just a brain dump.
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A couple of months ago, in March, I took about 50 mg of my medication before going to bed, when I was only prescribed 10 mg daily. It was sort of a suicide attempt but not really, I have no idea why I did it. Anyways recently the word got out about it to like everybody at the school I go to (I'm a high schooler), so I've felt like a mental patient in my own home for the past few weeks. A lot of people are concerned and asking if there is any way they can help me. I always brush them off and say everything is fine, yet really it's not. I've been so incredibly confused, stuff has been surreal and sort of liminal in the mental health department. It got to the point where I was considered an Imminent threat to myself. I'm rambling here, and I apologize. I just don't know what's wrong with me anymore. I know I'm a freak but I just don't know how. I've been looking at self harm and suicide stuff again, and have been gaining a fond interest in it, which weirdly doesn't even scare me that much. I can't tell a soul because then the same fiasco that happened a couple of weeks ago will happen again, and probably escalate further. Everyone tells me to be honest but I've never wanted to, especially when the threat of being locked up is looming over my head.
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I'm sorry to all of the people here who read this. This is technically for no one to see, but if you happened to read it and have some lingering questions about me or what happened feel free to ask. I feel like I'm an attention seeker right now even though I know I'm not doing this for attention. Just one thing, please don't say anything supportive or encouraging, I understand that it's genuine and that you care, but why should you care about me if I don't even care about myself anymore? I'm sorry.