Little Owl's Nest

A protein bar isn't the best possible source of protein in your diet, but it's better than not getting that protein. Fresh fruits would be better than orange juice, but if your choices are between having the orange juice and not getting the vitamins at all, you drink the fucking orange juice.

I am not hungry. Food is not an appealing thing. I do not wish to eat. If I had the option to just never have to eat again, I would do that. Eating is an unpleasant but necessary chore.

Food actively sounds bad to me. If I put something in my stomach, I have doubts about whether it will stay there. Even if it does stay there, I will be nauseated and/or in pain for at least an hour after eating. But I have no reason to believe that this situation will go away, and/or I have reason to believe that this situation is caused by how long it's been since I ate, so I really do need to figure out some way to get food in me.

(1) is my baseline level of existence, and the solution to this is to just treat it like any other unpleasant but necessary chore. I don't like doing laundry or cleaning out the sink, either, but the alternative is worse, so I just buckle down and do it, while making it as un-miserable as possible. Put on music or a podcast; distract yourself by watching TV or scrolling Tumblr at the same time; call up a friend and both to the unpleasant chore at the same time.

The good news is, for as long as you are in this state, you don't have to worry about willpower to eat healthy. Every food sounds just as bad as any other, so make yourself some beans and rice and just eat that for every meal. Use a food tracking app to figure out a set of foods that gets you enough protein, carbs, fat, iron, sodium, etc, and just eat that every damned day. Who cares? You're gonna hate it in the moment anyway, so you might as well do the thing that'll make your body feel better later.

(2) is a different situation and has to be handled differently. In those cases, I look to the few foods that actually do sound good, no matter how much I am not hungry. In my case that's generally sugary treats; my friend Sarah it's salty treats. But whatever it is for you -- cake, Doritos, big hunks of meat, pizza, whatever -- that's your go-to in this case. Usually this will be a food that fills some other kind of psychological need -- I'm not hungry, and food actively sounds bad, but sugar means "My mother is pleased enough to give me sugary treats, which means I am safe right now", so my neurological systems are willing to let it in even though it does require letting food in as well.

Usually this goes something like trying to lure a toddler into the car. The conversation goes something like

Me: Time to eat

Also me: don't wanna.

Me: But we gotta

Also me: Won't.

Me: Isn't there anything you'd like to eat?

Also me: No.

Me: Not anything??

Also me: Nothing.

Me: Not even ..... ~~ice cream~~...?

Saltines/tortilla chips often work when everything feels nauseating. Salty grains that I can eat without noticing, and then 15 minutes later my body is no longer starving and can think again.

Fruit often works when food seems so boring that I'd rather starve, and fruit JUICE is even better. Sweet, interesting, and my brain doesn't classify them as 'desert' and feel guilty.

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Small, bite-sized foods are almost always best when I'm uninterested. Things I can stick on my desk and absentmindedly eat. Nuts, veggies, chips, blueberries - lots of things are bite-sized! I just need to keep enough in my house that I can find something that will work with my mood.

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So much of the language ADHD people find makes us sound like we're not trying. 'Not hungry'. 'Bored'. 'Uninterested'. 'But I just don't do it'. It's hard to figure out what's going on under the surface, but if you want help, it's important to try. And then actually try to verbalize what you've figured out.

Yeah, 95% of the time I'm not hungry. The reason that this is a problem is: I will get so dizzy I fall down because I didn't eat anything other than an orange all day. My migraine will get so bad I can't talk because I only consumed tea and oranges all day. I will know I need to eat, but the idea bothers me so much I go to bed instead, and I can't explain WHY I do that, but I'm pretty sure it's not a good sign.

(Fun fact: once me and Official Old Man fucked while BOTH recovered from surgery... L shaped...

One of us had a reparative/restorative surgery... The other had had an ORGAN REMOVED!

What it is...... is ✨BAWDY✨

Horny books want to turn you on, so sex is treated as a Serious, breathlessly big-deal thing. Bawdy books do not care about turning you on, because the point of bawdiness is to entertain and delight you with some rowdy, boisterous antics.

A bawdy approach is deeply unserious about sex: it's just a funny thing people do which gets them into funny situations. Bawdiness also doesn't really presume that the audience will be participating in any sexiness that is happening. There's a clear division between what the characters are feeling and what the audience is expected to feel -- we're just standing on the outside munching popcorn while a group of weirdos flail through some hijinks for our amusement. This is, naturally, a very welcoming and comfortable space for many ace and aro people, who KNOW that sex is one of the silliest activities a person can partake in.

As for it being the first piece of media you've seen that treats sex this way -- Oooh, I bet it isn't, though! Because I absolutely did NOT invent this vibe! Shakespearean comedies often rely heavily on bawdy humor (for example: the title "Much Ado About Nothing" is itself a bawdy double entendre: "nothing = no thing", where "thing" is a euphemism for dick. So the title means "Loads of Drama About Pussy"). Many of the jokes in Terry Pratchett could be classed under the umbrella of bawdy comedy, as could a good chunk of old-school slapstick. All the funny scenes in Moulin Rouge are built on foundations of bawdy comedy, inspired by or taken directly from scenes in opera, where bawdy humor has always been one of the core loadbearing pillars -- same with the Commedia dell'Arte. Ever been to a drag show? At least a few bawdy jokes in there, I guarantee it. Oh, and I Love Lucy! Check it out:

Familiar vibe? :D yes, it's our good old friend ✨BAWDY COMEDY✨ It's got some winks at sex (Lucy saying "let's stand two feet apart, we don't want to get the school rated", the tango's reputation as a sexy dance, the physical intimacy which results in the punchline, the positioning of the eggs that she and Ethel are hiding on their persons) but it's not remotely trying to be sexy. It's too busy giggling with you at this absolute gremlin of a woman.

I will allow that bawdy comedy seems to have decreased in popularity in recent decades -- possibly an unfortunate unintended casualty in the sexual liberation movement? Greater freedom of sexual expression -> greater freedom to depict sex sexily, instead of having to stay firmly in the territory of saucily winking and chuckling about it under a layer of plausible deniability??? Or possibly Reagan's fumbling of the AIDS epidemic -> Sex can't be funny anymore, sex is scary and deadly????? Or the rise of Evangelical Christianity condemning anything even faintly related to sex???? Maybe a bit of all of that? I'm just spitballing here, I don't have anything but guesses. I'm sure somebody has done a PhD about it somewhere in the world. I hope they are on tumblr and see this post so they can explain where and when and why bawdiness fell out of fashion to the point that people have forgotten the word entirely and (this isn't just you, op!) only have the vocabulary to frame it as, "well it's horny but not sexy?? it's like weird gremlin horny??? What IS this?"

Genuinely, I think we as a society need to rediscover bawdiness and embrace that vibe again. I think we need to lean into it. I think it would fix us. 90% of the fandom antis/purity culture people on this accursed webbed site are like that because they've never been taught that it's okay to relax and laugh about sex.

stranger things pokemon AU

I mentioned posting these designs here at some point but I wanted to wait until ZA was out so here they are! These are from last year, there's a Patreon collection for all of my pokemon AU posts.

I've talked more about this on patreon but in summary:

I mean, imagine you're like, an office manager for a small firm. You're not getting a hell of a lot of respect and reward for your job, because nobody is in this system, and also because "the woman who answers the phone," is virtually invisible in this society. Your roommate firmly believes the kitchen sink is Dish Storage and yet also gets salty if you go ahead and stack her dirties in the dishwasher and clean them with your own, like make up your mind. You don't really have advancement prospects. You went and got a classics degree because people pumped you up all through your childhood with Follow Your Dreams, but what the fuck are you going to actually do with it? Museum? Archivist? Gonna need different degrees for that, and you've got student loan debt, and besides, you'd probably have to move to a higher cost of living area and try to make it on an entry level salary—do you really want to do that?

But there's fiction, and there's influencers (also fiction), and there's recipe bloggers, and there's almost a general miasma of reactionary sentiment that says: Opt Out.

Frankly, sounds lovely, you think. Opt Out How?

Well, all you need is to find a loving and powerful man. (This does not immediately trigger alarm bells, every Disney movie has told you that true love is The Solution, so it's got a certain resonance.) And then you split the work, you let him take care of the headache stuff (it's okay, he's into it) and you concentrate on Creating A Perfect Environment. Fuck dirty dish roommate anyway, this place will be Yours, and it can be Perfect, and beautiful, the pace of your life will change from frantic to leisurely, and you can spend the time to do the little artistic things that you've always wanted to try. I mean, all those influencers and recipe bloggers are somehow finding the time to shave fresh nutmeg onto their artisanal hot chocolate with a glowing smile, so doesn't it follow that you could take the time to actually look into textiles a bit? Maybe even, if you're lucky, get a loom? As it is, you've pretty much abandoned the idea of doing any serious fibercrafts as a hobby, but if you could opt out of work, you can do it, can't you? And I mean, yes, you'd end up having kids, but you were always open to kids someday, and the propaganda says that these kids would be well behaved and not sticky and grow up having fun with a big yard and a dog (and maybe you wanted a dog when you were little and dreamed of that sort of life for yourself, it sure would be lovely to give such an idyllic childhood to another human being). Doesn't it sound nice?

Of course the propaganda is built around several significant lies, starting with the idea that doing housework is somehow a less work-like sort of work than what you're doing now (but that's a lie you've pretty much grown up with, if housework was real work men would do it and people would get paid for it). Also the idea that your Good Man will always be good to you so long as you hold up your end of the relationship (but that's also a lie you've grown up with, True Love is always idealized and nobody talks about why marriages end—except by sometimes speculating that "she let herself go" and he cheated as a consequence of that failure).

Lesser Flamingo (Phoeniconaias minor), family Phoenicopteridae, order Phoenicopteriformes, eastern coast of India

Time shifting

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The resulting audio file can be played over the radio (sounding a bit like the old dial up noise, as it's just two quickly oscillating notes) and recorded to a cassette tape, which you can then give to your computer to "decode" back into 0's and 1's, which gives you the program file. You can then run it as if you'd installed it from a disk.

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian,1886-1980)

Flower Garden