be curious, not judgmental

Never give up hope, no matter how dark things seem.

Similarly, insults that deliberately target other marginalised characteristics and communities such as race, sexuality, gender etc are also slurs. This is not a new, woke definition. This is literally just what the word means.

There goes Mr. Heartless There goes Mr. Cruel He never gives He only takes He lets his hunger rule If being mean's a way of life You practice and rehearse Then all that work is paying off 'Cause Scrooge is getting worse Every day, in every way Scrooge is getting worse!

I imagine that this was just lost to time and all of the news generated by Trump, but in the first Trump administration, Jimmy Kimmel shared that his newborn had undergone heart surgery and appealed to people to support necessary health care spending, which the Trump administration was pushing to cut (the types of cuts that have now occurred):

I mention this not just because I want to remind people that this happened, but also because, I'll never forget this, shortly after this aired, I was on a trip and my mom and I ate lunch at a beautiful waterfront restaurant in Maine.

While we were eating our lobster rolls and enjoying the nice atmosphere, a group of the worst-people alive sat next to us. It was about eight well-off white people, with an even mix of men and women (I assumed it was four couples from their behavior with each other).

These people — seemingly well-off, healthy people with the ability to enjoy a weekday lunch together — proceeded to bring up this anecdote of Jimmy Kimmel going on air and crying about his newborn child and then vented their feelings about how absurd he was, how embarrassing it was for him to cry on air, how he was probably lying about his child's health and that no one cared about his baby. They were among the nastiest words I've ever heard from a group of people in public, and it was about a sick baby and his loving father. I keep them in the back of my mind when I need a reminder of how far people can fall from simply human empathy or even just basic decency.

We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the biodiversity in the neighborhood since. We have birds that we haven’t seen since we moved into the city from living rurally and those birds are starting to nest in the trees and gardens in spring. The swallows and bats are back at night. The single woodpecker we would only occasionally see visits daily and even has a friend that has joined it. We have more squirrels and rabbits and shockingly fewer moles and voles. We heard an owl outside last fall.

this is my artistic representation of what they looked like on the beach from where i was standing in the distance