u/Remarkable_Log1596

I’m sure this question has been asked before about a bazillion times, but mine has a bit of added anxiety/extenuating circumstances.

I (16M), am getting by license soon, and I’m going to be traveling to Colorado this summer to visit my brother (late30somethingM), who is a certified Mercedes and BMW mechanic. He’s gonna teach me to drive manual (presumably) in his tracked BMW E36 M3.

I’m not the world’s biggest car nerd, but I can’t help but be a little anxious not to break anything on this very beautiful but also very expensive M3.

So far, I’ve gathered that patience is gonna be key, and that moneyshifting is really bad because it works the transmission a lot harder than normal by downshifting to a higher rev.

Entering my Forza Horizon 1 era ig

In 2001, 12 years before the release of Random Access Memories, Pharrell Williams, then a member of the Neptunes, remixed Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger for what would become Daft Club. He only received individual credit as a mixing engineer, however his vocals can clearly be heard on the track starting at 2:20

So I(16M), was recently cut from 16U single A, and I don’t know what to do. This season was supposed to be my last at the level before presumably playing AAA 18U the next town over. But apparently I’m not even good enough for Single A.

For reference, over this last season, I’ve been training at a TPH franchise, and I easily put on 30 pounds of muscle, and developed quite a bit both as a player and a person. Right before the start of the season, I made the difficult but ultimately correct decision to leave the 16U A team that I was on. The long and short of it is that the team had 10 skaters and 1 goalie, and the organization itself was and still is horribly mismanaged, to the point where they were ignoring safe sport issues in the locker room in order to protect their best players.

After leaving the team, I put my head to the grindstone at TPH, and since a select few of my former teammates were spreading nasty rumors about why I left the team, trying to get on another one was nearly impossible. So, I simply grinded away and ignored what people were saying. Fast forward to April of this year, I was in crazy good shape and playing some of the best hockey of my life

So in April, I attended a AAA tryout for a team about 2 hours north of me. I personally played well, but relative to everyone else, I was definitely a step below, so not getting the call back didn’t exactly sting.

Fast forward to this month, I attended my local travel team’s tryouts for 16U A & AA. I unfortunately had Pneumonia the week leading up to tryouts, but I was still in good enough shape to skate (It also didn’t help that you had to attend two separate skates in order to be eligible for the team.)

The skates didn’t go too bad. They were both scrimmages, I got assists in both, and was decent in the faceoff dot. The issue is that there were also 60+ kids at the tryout, so it was hard to make a huge impression on the ice, although I tried to make the best impression off of it.

After the skates, despite the team’s poster promising that results would be published within 24 hours, they didn’t end up emailing me until today, despite the tryouts occurring over the weekend. And when I was finally emailed, I got a cookie-cutter response that told me that everyone who had made a team had been reached out to. I was not reached out to.

Before you ask about how much Pneumonia affected my performance, it seems that I wasn’t the only player seemingly snubbed at tryouts. Frankly, it seems like half the kids who made the team didn’t even tryout.

I talked to the goalie on my house league team (13M), who actually put up a shutout during the 14U tryout scrimmage, and he still got cut. Unfortunately he’s going to be playing 16U for my former team, which while I am glad he’s playing up, I really hope that he doesn’t get screwed over as much as I did by them.

Maybe I’m coming off as a bit spoiled, but it feels frustrating that I worked towards this goal all year and my hard work now means nothing since the organization doesn’t have an 18U team.

Not really sure what to do next, Juniors seems a bit out of reach now that I can’t even make a single A travel team. To make things worse, I can’t seem to find a job anywhere either since nobody will call me back, so I’m worried I’m just destined to be an unemployed chud this summer.

Advice?

I, (16M), fell in love with Justice’s music this year, and strongly urged my mom to let me go to Factorytown for their DJ set last March. My plan involved getting my hands on a fake ID and sneaking in (Factorytown is an 18+venue, stupid I know..) but my mom thought I was being ridiculous, and frankly I feel a bit ridiculous writing this post, but damn it does seem like I missed a crazy experience.

I don’t drink or do drugs, don’t plan on doing it, so it’s not like I’d be getting a fake for getting beer or anything. I simply love Justice’s music and wanted to hear it live. I really do hope they go on tour again sometime in the next decade, or atleast play a set in Florida, because their mashups are intoxicating, and I can’t imagine how awesome it would be to be in the crowd for Stress.

While we will never see it due to Freddie’s untimely death from AIDS in 1991, it’s always exciting to think how Freddie and Justice’s artistic visions and sounds could have meshed together. I like to think a collab would involve the operatic style vocals of Bohemian Rhapsody and of course Justice’s “unique specialness” as Lady Gaga put it.

But again, simply “What If?”