resist, transmit

something incredibly jarring about an instagram account named "[person] natural lifestyle" making a 67.7M viewed video where she takes almonds (grown where? from what country?) that have been soaking in a bowl full of water and covered in plastic wrap (plastic made how long ago? how long will that last?) and proceeds to "naturally" make almond milk by blending them up (in a blender made by a company based in the UAE) (whose manufacturing processes i cannot even discern from a cursory online search) and using the pulp discard to make cookies with a banana (who harvested it?) and dipping the cookies in chocolate (dare i ask?)

reading a paper on quality of life among 45-to-70-year-olds with Down syndrome:

I lived in a room and board that failed the burrito test. (”If you’re not allowed to get up in the middle of the night to microwave a burrito, you live in an institution.”) No one stopped me from going to bed, but they did tell me I had to have my lights out by 10, and that I had to be out of the house by 10 the next morning. When I complained to my outpatient program that I needed more help than I was getting, they threatened me with board and care, where my cell phone would be taken away and I would lose contact with the outside world. My case manager sounded so damn smug, like he had caught me out, when he said, “if you’re really as helpless as you say, then you need to be in a board and care.” Like my only options were struggling to do things I couldn’t do, or surrendering my life to an institution.

Here’s the paper:

You all need to be reading Dave Hingsburger’s “Burritos and Cherry Pies.” Hingsburger z'l is the originator of the Burrito Test, referenced upthread. The test is a useful heuristic for determining whether or not one is living in an institution. An institution is a space, according to this framework, where one cannot get up in the middle of the night and microwave a burrito. (Or, as the case may be, have assistance in doing so). People living in hospitals, group homes, residential facilities, prisons, homeless shelters, nursing homes, and other carceral spaces cannot do this. Most children living in their parents’ homes are also, in this framework, institutionalized. Many disabled people nominally living “in the community,” too, are institutionalized, trapped under the thumb of their aides and ‘care'givers who are often unwilling to do the bare minimum to feed and bathe them. This is the norm, not the exception, for people regarded as unproductive and unprofitable.