cryst16

Possums seeing ticks:

I started following that road looking for her, occasionally calling her with my special I Come Bearing Muesli whistle (and it was a lie), and as soon as I got mobile reception I received a text from a neighbour telling me “Ton affreuse est là” (“your horrible one is here”). I turned around to go pick her up, and discovered that he had locked her in the Horny Bull Pen, aka his most securised enclosure. When Pampe escapes to his farm just to be a pest she usually hangs out with his cows until I arrive and he doesn’t mind, so it was a little joke, and it was so funny finding Pampe languishing in a high-security prison. She looked very put out and I told her she absolutely deserved her sentence. Then I opened the gate and I didn’t even need my rope, she was happy to be pardoned and to see Pandolf, and followed us readily, on the road and then through the woods to my farm, it felt so companionable, the three of us walking home together.

Me, sobbing:

They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.

Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.

The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.

These tweets are from Dara Kass. She's an MD. Please take her advice on how to deal with this current situation. Read. Take notes. Memorize it. And protect yourselves.

The issue here is that birth is a physically taxing and potentially very dangerous endeavor, and our society does not treat that with the respect it deserves which leads to mothers/other birthing people getting injured or very ill or dying from completely preventable situations.

The other issue here is that medical personnel and society at large doesn’t view the mother as a fully realized human being who needs to be cared for outside of the context of her keeping her fetus alive, and when you ask questions like ‘well why don’t you just adopt?’ in the context of ‘giving birth is dangerous,’ you are completely ignoring the fact that those adopted babies don’t just pop out of thin air. They have a birth mother who faces the same risks any other person in the delivery room does. Why should we be okay with them taking the risks we wouldn’t take ourselves?

https://twitter.com/curiouszelda

Interviewer: What do you think about starting an initiative on campus here at UK, to be more inclusive to women who have penises? So we can put urinals in the womens restroom for them.

Student: Sounds fantastic.

Interviewer: Oh, does it?

Student: Yeah.

Interviewer: What about- Let’s take it one step closer, y'know more- for inclusivity here on campus, but free tampons and pads in the mens restroom for men who have periods?

Student: Sounds great.

Interviewer: Ok- You dont see anything wrong with those statements?

Student: No.

Interviewer: What men do you know with periods?

Student: I generally use- ones like in Willy T* have pads, I use them pretty often.

bennett: so do you think we should put tampons and pads in the men’s restroom? dude: sure, I mean, I don’t really care. if a dude needs a tampon, he can have one. bennett: but would he need one? like, what would he use it for? dude, thoroughly unimpressed: I don’t know, that’s his problem.

“You and this perfect person, who you’ve never met before, to come out of nowhere, fit into your life perfectly, complete you, and make you whole for the first time in your life, like your mother did for me.”

And even though what he said sounds sweet and whatever, the way it manifested to my seven-year-old self is, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole.”

And that’s not just something that my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society for the last 40 years has made every single child feel. Every Disney prince has a princess, every princess has a prince, and every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But guess what, by the end of the series? They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, the fucking idiot!

It’s all to do with love. Everyone needs someone. And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when you become an adult for the first time in your late teens and early 20’s, we’re so terrified.

We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw, and force them into our jigsaws anyway. I’m going to force this fucking person into our lives because it’s much better to have something than nothing.

Then five years later, you’re stood looking at this jigsaw you don’t recognize, being like, “Ah! There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this!” And in that moment, you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. Do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Do I waste the rest of my life?