Chokecherry Pie

One of the people spoke up and said something along the lines of that if she got a tattoo when they were younger and regretted it later, they didn't think that meant they shouldn't have been allowed to get the tattoo.

Because her younger self deserved the right to get that tattoo and enjoy it, even if they didn't like it 100 evolutions of character later. Their younger self still deserved the right to make that choice, just like her [insert age] self deserves the right to get tattoos their 90 year old self would despise. It would be a disrespect to claim otherwise.

Your younger self deserved the right to your body just as much as you do now, even if you don't like or agree with what they did with it.

from dear layal by hala alyan, published in the twenty-ninth year

Gonna post this one rather than block it immediately just to show that I get shit like this in my asks all the time from spineless cowards who need to be on anon because they like to pretend their multiple people.

Slime mold is a common name which is an attempt to describe organisms that defy simple categorization. For a while, it was thought they were fungi, so they were once classed as such (hence, myceto-, meaning fungus). But they are not fungi at all, and they live much of their lives like an animal.

Yes, that’s right: like an animal. Myxomycetes have two main life stages but four in total. First, they exist as amoebae and dwell in high numbers in soil. Then they become a free-moving, hunting, foraging, predating, exploring organism in the plasmodial stage. We know more about this stage because scientists and artists have been able to observe the behavior in laboratory settings, showing that plasmodium can solve various complex problems, such as finding an optimal way home through mazes, or, famously, mapping the car and rail networks of Tokyo more efficiently than humans are able to. We have already learned a lot from slime molds: for example, astronomers have only been able to map the mysterious dark matter that holds the cosmos together with algorithms inspired by plasmodium.

In this creeping stage, slime mold plasmodium is often bright yellow, though it can be orange, red, or hyaline. It can spread for a few inches, or several square meters. Plasmodium feeds on bacteria, fungal hyphae, fruiting bodies, spores, algae, and lichens. Then a radical change occurs and it morphs into fruiting bodies, many of which are brightly colored and distinctive. The fruiting bodies tend to be between one and four millimeters high, visible to the naked eye but much more visible with a hand lens or loupe, I read. Then the slime mold sporulates. Spores carry forth on wind; air currents; in the bodies of others; and in water. The cycle continues.

for Ada Limon

And yet, I know so much about them. Start with the database. Millions of patients, and each had an entry in the database, at my fingertips. An idle search, whether to check accuracy or (as some of us did, illegally) just browsing out of random boredom, and I had someone's whole world in front of my, stripped of meaning, emotion, or life. Name, address, phone, social security number, medical history, all rendered into just a series of fields in a database entry, cold and clinical.

And then, of course, the actual test results.

I was doing Covid tests, mostly for nursing homes and rehabs and similar facilities. I would know thinvs about my patients, never having seen them, that no stranger should know. Often I knew more about their situation than they or even their doctor ever would. You see, while all positives had to be called out to a person by phone (usually a charge nurse, never the actual patient), we customarily did not report on the precise values of the PCR markers. We did not report viral load information unless asked.

When I would see, for example, a person who was 80-100 years old, who had a high viral load and lived in a nursing home I knew for a fact was not adequately taking care of people with covid or doing enough to slow transmission? That person was dead. They might not know it yet. Their doctors might not either. Nor family, or friends. But I, a complete stranger, did. They had almost no chance of living. I had just delivered a notice of death in advance. For them, even for their nurses, what I had said was one of the most impkrtant things they would ever heard, and among the last. For me, it was Tuesday and I had another fifteen to thirty names waiting to be called, with the next run of results coming in soon and two errors to track down and biohazard crates to seal and take upstairs to wait to be taken by the shipling company, and just wanted to move along.