C’est La Vie

I always assume the train will be so boring and I bring seven things to do but then I'm entranced by the wonderful window the entire time

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

I have a friend who was strongly against inclusive bathrooms because he felt that “bathroom stalls are already really exposed due to how they’re constructed, so no wonder women don’t want men in the same bathrooms as them” and when I pointed out that we could just… build better bathrooms… with less exposed stalls, he got really quiet and then said “honestly that sounds so much better, but there must be some problem with building them like that, because otherwise wouldn’t we already be doing it?” BESTIE we are. WE ARE. Old-style bathrooms are cheaply made, poorly designed, and all around bad. Haven’t you noticed that men’s restrooms rooms get weirdly sticky? Haven’t you noticed that women’s restrooms end up with giant lines? This is because these rooms are architecturally awful. And we can do better now, because we know more! And we are!!! People are actively designing better bathrooms that address known problems, and guess what: those bathrooms are “inclusive” in the same way that curb-cuts are inclusive. It doesn’t matter if the ramp was built for a wheelchair or a stroller; it doesn’t matter if the bathrooms were designed specifically for gender inclusivity or just because fall-apart-if-you-sneeze-on-them metal stall dividers with giant ass peek gaps suck. We can in fact improve our built environment to better meet our needs. Stop cutting off your nose to spite your face; stop settling for less just because someone else might also enjoy it.

Seattle's SEA-TAC airport has an all gender restroom that's a row of about a dozen fully enclosed separated little rooms that lock, with a shared bank of sinks and it's great. Love it. Lot of very strange encounters at the sinks, feels odd the first few times! But people laugh it off almost instantly. Because it's not actually a big deal to share a sink.

it sucks that the overwhelming majority of medical messaging around salt/sodium is "evil poisonous substance that you're definitely already eating way too much of," because like. you do still need it. (trust me, as a POTS-haver, I've had to completely rewire my own brain about salt.) and you need more salt when the entire northern hemisphere is hot enough to fry an egg on. ever tried sucking down the recommended 64oz of hydration per day entirely as water, only to find you're peeing constantly without any of the purported benefits of being "hydrated"? assuming you don't have another medical condition that causes frequent urination, your body probably needed more salt/electrolytes to be able to hold onto that water and make use of it. if there was ever a time to keep a sports drink/pedialyte/etc within constant reach, it's when the heat index is 110°F/43°C.