Saturday Six (Stuff)

Snow, snow and more snowwwwww, and it's still snowing. It's supposed to snow all day. So another 8-10 inches on top of the 17+ inches we had already. Blargh.・゜・(ノД`)

My therapist is setting all kinds of challenges for me. How do you turn a pessimist in to an optimist? IEDK.Σ(-᷅_-᷄๑)

I finally finished my big project for work. It feels anticlimactic, actually. Maybe I'll feel better once it's been delivered to the customer.(⑅ ‘﹃’ )

Reggie (Regulus Arcturus Black Kitteh) isn't really happy about being stuck inside because of the snow. But he's found out that he doesn't love snow either. (^・ω・^ )

Socks (the fat old man cat) has a cold, and needs to go to the vet. He will not be happy about this.(*｀へ´*)

I'm trying to keep up with the Erised fest this year, but my Kindle died, and reading on my phone is a bit of a pain. I'm doing the best I can. I'm also reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and that just makes me sad. ヾ(*´ー`)ノ

We need to talk about how so many queer spaces are inaccessible and even actively hostile to physically disabled people.

in which gangle causes psychic damage to the entire cast

I'm begging people to not be afraid of OTC pain meds.

OTC pain meds are not a devil’s bargain or a moral failing. They are a tool to reduce unneeded suffering. They do not destroy your organs if taken correctly, and there is no reward for the people who take the fewest pills in life.

Take what helps, and take it safely! If you have prescription meds or other health issues, always check for possible interactions/adverse effects. 

Edit: the upper limit for paracetamol/acetaminophen is actually more like 4g for most people! :)

finally at that age where i'm thinking i should get a tattoo. not bc i feel strongly about it, just seems like a waste not to. i've got so much skin i'm not using

Is Solkat the last two braincells in your brain or something/pos

yeas

stupid crush

Average Drama Enjoyer observes some peak drama.

Feisty Lady Anger and other things about me you hate

My mother prizes her anger, for all that she doesn't express it openly. I tell stories about her spiteful, steel-spined responses to people who told her, "You can't do that," and I point to them as Why I Am How I Am. Her father told her he wouldn't pay for her college because "women only go to earn the MRS degree," and she could "get married and have babies" without college. In response, Mom got her bachelor's in Mathematics in 1970 on her own dime, back in the days when in-state students didn't pay tuition at state schools (just another thing Reagan ruined). She worked and paid for her books and housing, got her degree, paid for her own wedding because he wouldn't do that either. Taught school, got her Master's, had three kids, started her Ph.D. with 3 under 6 and became a professor when the youngest was 5.

Tell me I can't, my mom told the world, and I'll show you that I can. I won't just do it, I'll become a department head and a Distinguished Professor and retire after 30 years of teaching other math teachers with a list of achievements as long as my arm.

There is an anger that runs deep in the women in my family. Tell me I can't, and I'll show you I can. Show me injustice and I'll tear at it with my teeth and hands, staring you down while I do. Backwards and in heels.

I can't tell you the moment I crossed out of Feisty Lady Anger in the eyes of the people close to me, but I can tell you the moment I noticed. Maybe it was when my voice started dropping or the growing muscles on my shoulders pulled my stance more square and upright. Maybe it was when I moved from they/them to he/they, and somehow I stepped from Diet Woman to Too Close To Man in their eyes.

It's a funny thing when all of a sudden your anger becomes real enough to be startling to people. Your anger is no longer feisty, charming, and attractive. This thing that people liked about you, that people who say they love you said they loved about you, suddenly becomes frightening, upsetting, and terrible. The way you didn't let people mow over you and fought back used to be a thing that people admired. It was actively attractive. It was one of your best qualities.

Now? It's ugly. It's disgusting. It's scary. The thing you were is gone, and now your anger is real to them.

It's in that moment that the blade cuts back towards you. You realize the reason your squared shoulders and set jaw drew people in couldn't be squared with the stubble on that jaw or the newfound strength in your arms. Feisty Lady Anger isn't real, not in the way a man's anger is real. Feisty Lady Anger is admirable, sure, but it is admirable because of its essential ineffectual nature. At most, Feisty Lady Anger fixes minor problems for the kids at school, gets the principal to back down from scolding your child when she politely asks the kid calling her a faggot on the bus if he knows what that really means, pushes a woman to achieve for her family, in appropriately neutered ways.

When you stop pretending to be a woman and become who you really are, when your anger becomes real, you realize both that the thing about you that people loved is gone and that this thing was attractive in the first place because of its ineffectiveness. Your anger wasn't scary because it wasn't real enough to be threatening.

Now you have Man Anger, and, you're told, you should apologize for that. It doesn't matter if it's the same anger you've always had, or that you're angry about the same things. It comes now in baritone, with belly hair and bellowing, and now it's both real and disgusting.

The worst part is watching it come from people you thought should know better, the people who should understand. You spent nearly 40 years being told to sit down and shut up because the men in your professional career were speaking, assured that if you just waited your turn, you'd be given a place to speak eventually, and now here you are being told within a community that claims to love and understand you, by people that claim to be in community with you and love who you are, that you actually don't have any real problems to speak about, also your Man Anger and Man Privilege (when do I get that, please?) are Scary and mean you should sit down and wait, and you'll be given a place to speak eventually.

It is the Transmasculine Catch-22: if you become Man Enough to no longer fit into Almost Lady, your anger becomes Real, which makes you realize that your anger wasn't Real before, but because it's Real now, you're not allowed to have it. And by the way, you're not allowed to be neither Man or Lady - now you're Man Enough, and that makes it all the more clear how you were simply Kirkland Signature Lady right up until the point you weren't.

There will be a few people who Fucking Get It, who don't see you as either a Failed Lady or a Broken Man, and you'll love those people all the more for their rarity. It won't take the sting out of realizing that the things people you love loved about you before now disgust and repel them, but it'll make it enough to keep going.

You couldn't stop, anyway. You've never felt more yourself, and the people who don't love you, the actual you, the real you... the loss of that hurts, but not nearly as much as the idea of pretending to be something else did.

protecting each other

Hmm thinking about old friends. I still do my lipstick the way you taught me, look for your face in every crowd, start to tell a story and feel your name die in my mouth. No amount of anger erases the way we hid in the trees as kids, how you’d run to the door hands full with my favourite sweets. Your smile is my picture of happiness, name the first I learned to write.

A lil date 🍅🍥

gee i wonder if the issue could be at all related to the fact that the current treatment plan for his chronic pain consists solely of FUCKING IBUPROFEN

There's a weirdly poignant sort of... metaphysical tragedy in the fact that pain, which evolved as a helpful signal to alert us when bad things might be happening to us, grew into becoming... well, basically the Bad Thing. To the point where by universal consensus the very worst thing you can do to a being like us is torture them (i.e. trigger the warning signal as strongly as possible while perhaps deliberately avoiding causing "actual" harm). And there are tons of illnesses and injuries and disabilities that massively impact people's quality of life, ranging from annoying to depressing to driving people to suicide, basically purely because they're very physically painful, while the underlying bodily dysfunction that the pain is supposedly "warning" of is either relatively minor or literally non-existent.

The capacity to feel pain is a good and important thing, some people lack it and that's generally awful for them, only in a universe unrecognizably different from ours could we ever do without it. But isn't it awful to think how if only there was somebody up there to adjust the settings for us, they'd probably only have to tweak them the tiniest bit to keep 99.99% of the benefits while saving us from all the most extreme miseries forever?

The mechanism didn't have to be perfect for natural selection's purposes, it had to be good enough that the average individual in the average situation would be motivated to stay more or less out of trouble. Measured by the metrics nature was working towards, she could afford to be a little slapdash with the exact implementation, and she was. In doing so she opened the door to infinities of evil and suffering that wouldn't otherwise be conceivable. All this only had one chance to happen, and it happened that way. There's nobody to be mad at--I'm mad about it, though.

"I don't want things to change."

MIKE WHEELER & WILL BYERS IN S03E08 - The Battle of Starcourt

Danver’s specific brand of racism is so intrenched in love it’s fascinating. Her daughter is precious to her and her daughter is Indigenous and in this town, an Indigenous woman is not viewed as a precious thing. They are abused and raped and murdered and therefore, being white is the ‘better’ choice. She is actively whitewashing her daughter, not only because she’s afraid of what she doesn’t understand and because of typical coloniser mentality, but because she doesn’t want to lose her. Danvers can’t distance Indigenous identity from white violence and it’s killing what she loves.

The fact that neurotypical and able-bodied people can’t comprehend that disabled people usually don’t like consistently being told “BEING DISABLED IS BAD!!! THE WAY YOU ARE IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG!!! YOU NEED TO BE CURED!!!” even in a ‘nice’ or ‘woke’ way shows how little they actually value our agency or even our worth as humans.

No, Stacy, I don’t want people fiddling with eugenics because they’re uncomfortable with me existing, I want you to. You know. Treat me like a person. Have help be there when I need it without treating me like I’m an invalid. Why is that apparently so much more difficult for you than telling me my existence is wrong and spending millions fiddling in a lab for unwanted “cures?” Whatever happened to listening to others and accepting them for who they are? Or do you only see disabled people as the poor, helpless invalids you can “help” cross the street without asking so you can get another Scouts badge?