a_lotofthings

happy disability pride month to people with brain damage (regardless if abi or tbi) who have to hear neurodivergent abled people use "but the brain is an organ!!" as an excuse to invade physically disabled specific spaces. happy disability pride month to intellectually, cognitively and similarly disabled people who's voices are ignored and disregarded because of being perceived as "stupid" or "less smart", or "less worthy" of being heard and listened to. happy disability pride month to people who are visibly autistic, cannot mask, or aren't low support needs and are perceived as "stereotypes". happy disability pride month to people who are amputees, paralyzed, deaf, or blind and are dismissed and overlooked for it because of it being a "well known" or "common disability", causing people to forget that "well known" doesn't automatically mean "understood" and "respected". happy disability pride month to those who are disabled by/due to rare, unknown, or uncommon illnesses or disorders, ones that don't have wikipedia pages, ones that aren't ever mentioned when speaking in the topic of disability, ones that people have to google, and therefore aren't heard or valued. happy disability pride month to people with disabilities that are seen as "old people/elderly" disabilities and are mocked for it. happy disability pride month to disabled people with disabilities that are or make them look "gross", "strange", "scary", or "creepy" to abled people and are avoided or made the butt of jokes as a result of. happy disability pride month to anyone i didn't mention here.

Happy Cerebral Palsy Awareness Day !!!

It’s hard to figure out that you might be interested in plumbing as a career when you’ve spent twelve years learning how to pass multiple choice tests and having ceramics and band as the only available electives.

This is one place where I actually WILL do the generational thing and say that Millennials and Gen Z got completely fucked in a way that older generations didn’t.

Just imagine a world full of beautiful stained glass windows which also generate electricity…

Reposting from my twitter here, but: you wouldn't prevent an adult from speaking to their friend or eating when they were hungry. In your personal life that's abusive behavior, in the work sphere a suppression of workers' rights. Other places these rights are violated include: prison.

In Education and Peace, Maria Montessori describes the culture of war and identifies it as originating, on a personal level, in the struggle between the adult and the child that begins as soon as the child is born. This is the very first conflict. The adult subjects the child to their own wants and needs and completely disregards the needs, development and personhood of the child. This struggle continues throughout childhood, between both parents and children and other adults and children:

“Both the adult and the child are unaware of their own characteristic natures. They fight one another in a secret struggle that has gone on for countless generations and is becoming more violent today in our complicated and nerve-racking culture. The adult defeats the child; and once the child reaches adulthood the characteristic signs of the peace that is only an aftermath of war—destruction on one hand and painful adjustment on the other—remain with him for the rest of his life.”

This conflict positions children and adults relative to each other as two distinct classes, one with power and one without. Of course, there are other conflicts at play here—race is a huge one, gender another. And that’s not to say children can’t have power over parents, etc. But one of the most fundamental class conflicts is between adults and children.

And I should not be forced to endure bullying from adults simply because they are my teachers. If I am bullied by peers they should suffer consequences, and if they violently assault me, they should be expelled. If I have a difficulty learning or understanding I should be accommodated. I should not be forced to get up at 7 am and go to school and after school shit, then come home and do more school shit, taking away time I need to grow and learn and play.

And then she said something that just stabbed me in the heart. She said, and I do remember her exact words:

"He is allowed to defend his body."

It was a watershed moment for me both in thinking about how I approach animals, but also in how I suddenly understood my own trauma from childhood that occurred in school, home, and in medical contexts, and how I suddenly understood my adult reactions to my ongoing and neverending retraumatization at the hands of the medical and psychiatric professions.

I have the right to defend my body and my core psyche. And I had that right as a child as well. That wasn't well acknowledged then, and still is not, I live in a very toxic and controlling environment because I am disabled and mentally ill. Not being allowed to draw your own boundaries and decide your own fate fucks you up, man. It's literally killing me.

But outside of artificial school test-taking environments, human beings have always relied on the collective memory of their close peers to keep track of information. Anyone who’s ever worked clothing retail knows that no single employee has the location of every item in the store memorized, but as long as you have enough people working the floor, nobody will ever have to waste time searching for an item because at least one employee is bound to remember which rack it’s on.

TL&DR - brains were never designed to function in isolation. 

Testing the intelligence of an individual in an isolation is never going to give you an accurate idea of a person’s true intellectual potential.

TL&DR TL&DR

The important thing is not knowing the answer, it’s knowing how to find the answer.

It our era of text and alphabets, that’s often knowing how to look something up. But for most of human existence, there were no alphabets. So knowing how to find the answer meant finding the person who knew the answer.

A group of 6 college kids were ahead of us in line and started chatting with me. Full on just having a fun conversation with someone literally going through the beginning of a very awkward middle school period. I was so shocked they wanted to talk to me. I think my mom mentioned it was my birthday. They were very nice about it. When we got on the ride they told us to go ahead of them so we could sit at the front of the car since it held 8 people.

Now the ride (called Journey to Atlantis - I believe it is sadly no longer there) started with a slow ride of beautiful visuals of dolphins and oceans and computerized images of this imaginary Atlantis before going up the hill to the beginning of the coaster, where it paused for about 30 seconds, and then the ride started. The college kids must have known there would be a pause. Maybe they’d ridden it before I’m not sure.

But as we sat there on that peak, 6 people I’ve never known, and will never know again, sang a very very lonely 11 year old happy birthday. Loudly. And with gusto. They were happy and laughing and joyful. And it made me feel less alone in the world.

I am 29 years old this year, and I still remember them. I still remember that kindness. It is so important. It doesn’t go into a vacuum. It exists beside me in my daily life. And I love the idea that I have been that person to someone else too.

The main bundle has 69 (heh) games for $60. The sister bundle has 66 games for $10.

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.