Bridgett Elizabeth

Acrobat dancer, circus performer Vera Christy Original Contact Photo, 1920s. | src David Pollack Vintage Posters

The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.”

So I wasn’t really taught to brush my teeth every day as a kid. So I didn’t. I got to be an adult and realized “hmm teeth are expensive I need to start brushing them” and brushing my teeth twice a day has been on my actual to do list every single day of my college career. It’s a habit I needed to build.

Have I successfully done it? Absolutely not. I’m pretty good about doing it at least once a day, but some days it just doesn’t happen. It’s not that I forget usually, I just had some aversion I couldn’t figure out, until last week.

I’m at the grocery store, in the toothpaste aisle with my roommate, and I complain about how much I hate mint. I FUCKING HATE THE TASTE OF MINT. The taste and the smell, any kind of minty thing in any form, I HATE IT. But literally every “adult” toothpaste in the aisle was some type of minty disgusting nonsense. And my roommate was like “you know you could like get kids’ toothpaste? You like bubblegum right?”

And y’all, it was like the clouds parted. I got some strawberry bubblegum kids’ toothpaste. I brushed my teeth with it and it was a whole new experience. I have successfully brushed twice a day every day since, because the mental block I had towards it is gone! 

I thought my lack of brushing was just a moral failing on my part; I was too lazy, too undisciplined, to build a good habit. But really? I just hate the taste of mint so much I didn’t want to brush my teeth.

This made me realize that when presented with a change you want to make, a habit you want to build, if you’re encountering resistance in yourself, you should lean into that resistance and really investigate what’s causing it, then work on accommodating that. 

Say you hate washing dishes so they pile up and then you’re overwhelmed by how many you have to do. Why do you hate it? Deep down, what about it do you dislike? Is touching wet food super gross for you? Try thick rubber gloves while you’re washing. Does the sound of dishing clanking together grate your nerves? Do them with headphones in and turned up loud. Do you hate the smell? Light some candles, spray some air freshener. 

Do these things instead of gritting your teeth and forcing yourself, then ultimately failing and getting discouraged by your “lack of self-discipline”

Something that isn’t a career choice. Something you don’t have to be good at. As long as it brings you joy.

Determined, he found that the “hauntings” stopped when the industrial air conditioning unit, that had just recently been installed, was turned off. We’ve found that measurable micro vibrations in a structure cause immense fear, and a feeling of a presence and corner eye hallucinations – just like when you watch a scary movie alone at night and you see things move in the corner of your eye or are afraid to go in the cellar because you’re convinced someone’s in there.

Why?

Because many members of our species built homes in and around cliffs and caves for tens of thousands of years. And it’s likely that these certain shaky vibrations give us intense fear and a need to move far away because that would have saved our lives if the cave were collapsing or unstable.

You know what also causes infrasound? A LOT of machines, especially large industrial ones. There’s a reason haunted house stories started popping up in post industrialization. That scientist was Vic Tandy and he wrote about it in a the paper Ghosts in the Machines

Look. Of course you should be working to reduce waste in your own life. But let’s not fucking pretend that consumers are the ones who made this mess. You know what another recent study found? Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. If the rest of us stopped ALL WASTE and fucking ascended to a higher plane of existence that no longer requires consumption of any kind, the world would still be absolutely fucked if those 100 companies keep on as they do.

I hate this personal responsibility model when it comes to conservation. By ignoring the actual source of the problem and focusing on individuals instead, guess who gets targeted? The absolute most vulnerable individuals on the planet. When people advocate personal responsibility, somehow they’re never talking about billionaires and their private jets. They’re creating straw bans that will make life more dangerous for people with disabilities. They’re shaming women for using disposable menstrual products. They’re criticizing the poor and destitute for using “wasteful” products because they’re all they can afford. They’re making vaguely eugenic statements about getting people in “third world countries” to stop ~breeding~ so much. It’s monstrous.

To defeat your enemy, you first have to know who they are.

As a wonky nerd, I looked up the actual report everyone keeps vaguely referencing. Here’s some actual info on the worst polluting companies in the world according to the Carbon Disclosure Project.

In case you can’t read that tiny writing, here’s a list of what is on this graph, which is labeled: Oil and gas company product portfolio mix and GHG emissions intensity. The point of this graph is to show and shame, since even among fossil fuels, some are worse than others. From left to right: 

Suncor (Canada), Husky (Canada), Petrobras (Brazil), Lukoil (Russia), Rosneft (Russia), Canadian Natural (Canada), Marathon Oil (USA), Occidental (USA), Hess (USA), Chevron (USA), Murphy Oil (USA), BP (UK), ConocoPhillips (USA), ExxonMobil (USA), Devon Energy (USA), Apache (USA), Total (France), Eni (Italy), Statoil (now named Equinor.. Norway), OMV (Austria), Shell (USA), Anadarko (USA), BHP Billiton (Australia), Repsol (Spain), Encana (Canada), Gazprom (Russia).

As you can see here, on the far left is Suncor, and they’re all about mining those Canadian tar sands, the #1 most polluting way to create energy on an industrial scale.

Here’s another too-small picture I screen-shotted from the report. Here’s some key words: “The distribution of emissions is concentrated: 25 corporate and state producing entities account for 51% of global industrial GHG emissions. All 100 producers account for 71% of global industrial GHG emissions.”

Here’s that list of the 25 worst emitters, roughly ordered as worst polluters to least:

1. China (a collection of state-owned Coal companies)

2. Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia)

3. Gazprom (Russia)

4. National Iranian Oil (Iran)

5. ExxonMobil (USA)

 6. Coal India (India)

7. Russia (a collection of state-owned Coal companies)

8. Pemex (Mexico) 

9. Shell (USA)

10. CNPC - China National Petroleum Corporation

11. BP (UK)

12. Chevron (USA)

13. PDVSA - Venezuela state owned 

14. ADNOC - Abu Dhabi National Oil Company state owned 

15. Poland Coal (Poland)

16. Peabody (USA - coal) 

17. Sonatrach - Algerian state owned 

18. Kuwait Petroleum Corp state owned 

19. Total (France) 

20. BHP Billiton (Australia) 

21. ConocoPhilips (USA) 

22. Petrobras (Brazil) 

23. Lukoil (Russia) 

24. Rio Tinto (UK/Australia) 

25. Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (Nigeria)

As you can see, this is a truly global problem. Most of us aren’t going to be able to make an impact on governments far away from us, but we can sure as hell put pressure on our own governments. And yes, we can also do individual acts of protest - be it buying a solar charger for your phone or pinning blankets to your curtains to make them more insulative or riding your bike more instead of using a car - because the non-state owned companies rely on consumers in order to survive. 

If you want to read the report for yourself, which has lots more charts and graphs, you can find it here (PDF). It is meant to sway investors, so if you know anyone investing money in company stocks, this would be a great thing to show them.

Find out who your local energy company is

Find out how they generate electricity

if y'all see that your local libraries and museums are doing pride displays and events, PLEASE INTERACT WITH THE MATERIALS AND/OR ATTEND THEM! even if its just a pretty arrangement of lgbt books, borrow the materials amd make comments about how much you like them.

libraries in particular take a lot of heat for showcasing lgbt stuff, but having supporting statistics in hand to defend ourselves helps to keep the directors from backing down when confronted by conservative blowhards. but we only get those statistics if you’re actually there supporting us. my system dropped our Storytime with a Drag Queen events because of this.

The tiny stack is people complaining. 

The giant stack is people supporting us and telling us their stories and affirming how important it is to have queer representation in libaries.

Now, it wasn’t my library. Wasn’t even my system. And we were always planning on doing a Pride display. But in the face of such asshattery, we turned it up to eleven. Every section has a rainbow display, even though we have zero space in our branch. And nobody has complained once. (I’d know if they had, because the manager is out of town so I’m the boss and I get all the complaints.)

Yesterday a kid, much too young to read, pulled I Love My Two Dads off the display for her mom to read to her. And the mother didn’t balk. Didn’t even hesitate. They sat down and read the book right there.

LGBTQIA+ people rarely see public support.