be well, do good work, & keep in touch

Here’s some examples awkward accessibility being a thing:

Your at a hotel that has a lift to get you from one sub-floor to another, but the lift can only be unlocked and operated by one specific person that the hotel now has to go find. Sure, they’ve made the entrance to the sub-floor is accessible, but now it’s a thing.

The buses are wheelchair accessible but the driver has to stop the bus, take 30 seconds to lower the goddamn ramp, move passengers out of their seats, hook up the straps and then secure you in the bus. Sure, they’ve made the busses accessible but now it’s a thing.

The restaurant has an accessible entrance, but it’s past the trash room and through the kitchen. Sure, the restaurant is accessible, but now it’s an insulting thing.

Here’s some great examples of accessibility not being a thing:

The train to the airport pulls up flush with the platform. I board with everyone else and sit wherever the fuck I want. Riding the train is accessible and not a thing.

In Portland, I press a button the side of the streetcar and a ramp automatically extends at the same time the door opens. I board in the same amount of time as everyone else. This is not a thing.

(reposted by request. cheers.)

  14 Lines From Love Letters Or Suicide Notes.

1. Don’t freak out.

2. We both know this has been coming for a long time.

3. I have been staying awake at nights, wondering if I should tell you.

4. I bought the kind of crackers you like. They are in the hall cupboard.

5. Now that we have watched all the episodes of True Blood, I do not know what else to do next.

6. I have just been too afraid for too long.

7. This is the kind of thing where waiting for the time to be right would just mean waiting forever; it’s the kind of thing no one else can help you decide.

8. I came home on Thursday and found all of the chairs in the house stacked in a pile in the center of my kitchen; I don’t know how long they have been like that, but it must have been me that did it. It is the kind of thing a ghost might do, to prove to the living he is still there. I am haunting my own apartment.

9. My grandmother was still alive when I was five years old and she told me to check if the iron was hot enough yet, so I pressed my hand against it, and it was red and screaming for hours. Twenty five years later she would still sometimes apologize, in the middle of conversations, I feel so bad about making you touch the iron, she would say, as though it had just happened. I cannot imagine how we forgive ourselves for all of the things we didn’t say until it was too late. But how else do you tell if something is hot but to touch it?

10. I imagine my furniture in your apartment.  

11. I wonder how many likes it will get on facebook.

12. My dad always used to tell the same joke, but I can’t remember the punch line.

13. I was eight years old and it took three weeks (three eight year old weeks— imagine) to gather everything I needed to be Batman. Rope, boomerangs, a mardi gras mask with the beads cut off. I couldn’t find a cave near my house, so I buried them all in a bundle under the ivy. For years after,

I tried to find that spot again.

          The ivy grew too fast.

              I searched in so many spots

it seemed impossible I had missed any.

But I never found it.

How can something be there

       and then just not be there?

         How do we forgive ourselves

             for all the things we did not become?

instead of making high stress levels a competition, brag about feeling whole and at peace.

make is cool as hell to take 2pm naps and go on mindful walks by yourself.

talk about mental health and normalize visits to counselors or support systems

teach kids that being different is beautiful and that it’s healthy to love what makes us who we are.