Delighful!

So I'm fully deaf. I can't hear anything at all, but I love feeling the vibration through my body. I really enjoy it. And that's how I learned to listen to music when I was younger. I would travel around through different states, because I was in a club soccer team, so I'm used to going on long car rides with my mother. And sometimes I'd ask my mom, "Can you turn it up so I can feel the bass?" And my mom was like "Yeah." But I always struggled to hear it. So my mom went ahead and bought a new sound system, and I loved it. You could feel the bass. It was so strong. the windows were shaking. It felt so good.

So one day, we stopped by the store. I didn't care about the store, so I stayed in the car, and my mother went into the store. And I sat there and I was bored. And I thought, "Oh yeah, we have the new sound system." I turned it on, and I turned it all the way up, and I loved it. I could feel the car shaking. I was having so much fun, I was dancing. One car drove by, and there was a stranger, a man, and he rolled down his window and he looked at me. And I was just imagining he must be like, "Wow, you have such a nice system, you must be playing a great song." And I was like, "Yeah!" and I started dancing to him. And another person pulled up, it was a woman. Same thing. I pointed at her and I kept dancing, and I was like, "I wonder what this song is?"

And when my mother came out of the store, she started laughing. She came and sat next to me and I was like, "What am I listening to?"

"You're listening to NPR Talk Radio."

Guys, I know people have touched on this before but it stings every time I'm reminded. I do a lot of thrifting, both out of environmental concerns and a love of vintage styles, and the stores here have been stale and empty for a few years.... Until now. There was an influx of antique clothing and furniture, decorative ceramics, dishes, you name it. I have seen more long discontinued Pyrex and Tupperware in the last few months than I ever have. As happy as I am to gain another reliable, well loved item that will last for years to come... It is a permanent reminder, a monument to a tragedy. I live in a really stubborn, conservative town. Nobody cared about Covid, they felt invincible, nothing closed, nobody wore masks. It tore through the older population. The funeral director built a pool, bought his daughter a new car, and went on vacation to the beach that year. When it got worse, stuff closed a little. People finally didn't go out after having two funerals a week in a small town. And when everything opened again in a few months? The secondhand stores were full.

extremely time consuming. Remember someone actually took time out of their life to create that, time they could’ve used to, idk, sleep, for example

entertainment you’re consuming for free. I can’t stress this enough: you’re enjoying someone else’s craft for free. You paid exactly zero money to look at/read/watch it.

S H A R E D  with you, not made for you. This is the most important point: someone created that, put it online and you found it. No one forced you to consume that fanwork, you C H O S E  to do it. 

The number of women I speak to calling me from the grocery store parking lot, begging me to help them find a way to escape their abusive husbands but they have no money to do so on their own.

The number of women I speak to who are forced by their husbands to open credit cards cause their husband only gives them $100 a month to buy food and diapers for their babies and the household, and they know if their husband finds out he’ll literally kill them.

The number of women I speak to who can never share their addresses and have their phone numbers removed from our system so we never call them back or send them mail cause their husbands are withholding their personal documents like birth certificates and drivers licenses that would let them escape with threats to burn them at a moments notice.

The number of women I have spoken to who try to work under the table at home while their husbands are at work, but then need to deposit their money in their friends’ checking accounts until they’ve saved up enough to move themselves and their kids out of state to file for divorce.

I want to shake women who act like staying home with kids is a choice that never has any negative repercussions.

I want to shake women who state they’d rather be poor than work, who don’t seem to understand bone-deep poverty will mean losing your kids anyway.

Financial independence regardless of gender didn't even legally become a thing until right before I was born, and during MK's dad's lifetime.

The only reason I was able to quickly and cleanly leave the ex who (among other things) punched walls and threatened suicide is because I had my own bank account and he couldn't take the money I used for the deposit on my new place.

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake: