Noa

ויהי בימי אחשוורוש…

פורים שמח וצום קל לכולם !

Taking a break from my usual minhag of drawing a comic page for Purim just because I was so inspired by Alphonse Mucha lol!

Queen Esther was a young Jewish woman hiding her identity inside an empire that wanted her people gone. And when the moment came where she could either protect herself or risk everything for her people, she chose her people. She fasted for three days, walked into the king's throne room uninvited (which could have gotten her killed), and changed the entire course of Jewish history.

Purim is really a story about how the people who seem all-powerful aren't always as secure as they look, and how one person's courage at the right moment can unravel an entire evil plot. Esther was probably was terrified, but she moved anyway because she understood that she was exactly where she needed to be for exactly this reason.

I love Mordechai's words to her, "Who knows whether you came to your position for just such a time as this?" Every generation has its "such a time as this" moment and somehow we're still here, every single time.

חג פורים שמח 👑

Unfortunately, English native speakers have a hard time making the "ão" sound correctly since the sound doesn't exist in English, so instead of saying "pão de açúcar" (literally, bread of sugar), she said "pau de açúcar." Now, "pau" technically just means "wood," but it's also, unfortunately for her, slang for "penis."

So to the driver what he heard was "Look at the sugar dick! it's so big!" and he almost crashed the car from laughing so hard.

For context: My linguistics professor and I got into a discussion after a test she did with us, and I was of the opinion that the reason for the results was different from the one she offered, so she encouraged me to test my theory.

What I need

All you need to do is draw a coffee cup (with a handle, not the disposable stuff) and then answer three questions.

I don't need to see the coffee cup. You can draw it wherever you like; on a piece of paper, digitally, in the sand, on a foggy window. Anything works. It does not have to be good. A doodle is fine.

You have to draw the coffee cup before you see the questions. This is very important. If you decide to help me with this, please doodle the coffee cup before you keep reading.

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

'dissociating' rather than just 'zoning out'

'overstimulated' rather than 'overwhelmed'

'maladaptive daydreaming' rather than just 'daydreaming'

'hyperfixation' rather than 'interest'