james

Kristen Pizzo makes a strong argument for why you should respect people’s pronouns over at Medium:

If you are going to grumble about how hard it is to adjust, think about it as analogous to any of these situations:

When your friend gets married and goes by a new last name

When the year ends and you have to write a new year on everything you sign

When your Pokemon evolves and has a new name

If these are too abstract for you, remember that the bottom line is that none of this is about you.

When you make a big deal about how difficult it is to adjust to using new pronouns or names, you are telling the nonbinary person in question that their existence is an inconvenience.

Stop thinking about how “awkward” the singular pronoun ‘they’ feels on your tongue and think about them for two seconds.

Yepp, those are the main points! Just be a polite, kind and decent human being.

the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too. 

he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it. 

he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.

previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.

is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.

it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.

YOU CANT JUST CASUALLY LEAVE THIS IN THE REPLIES AS IF THIS ISNT A CRUCIAL ELEMENT OF THIS HARROWING STORY

42 + 29 = 71

for neurotypical people, they use the method we were all taught in grade school where you add 9 + 2 to get 11 and then move the extra one over to make 4 + 2 + 1 which equals 7 to give you 71

but the way I do it (as many other people with ADHD as I’ve come to find out) is this:

okay so you have 42 + 29. if you take 1 away from 42 and give it to 29 to make it an even 30, you now have 41 + 30 which is an easy 71

or, another problem: 53 + 88

round that 88 up to 90 and take the two from 53 so you have 51 + 90. but wait I can make this easier. take 10 more from 51 to make 90, 100 and now you have 41 + 100 which equals 141

fucking HATED that. as someone who could get from point A to point D in my head in a split second, I felt like showing my work was often a waste of time when sometimes it felt like I just automatically knew the answer

or, if I did put down my work, I went through a process that wasn’t taught and would get points reduced anyway because it wasn’t the way we were taught just because my brain worked differently than the rest of the class. my answer was always right. they just didn’t like how I got it

because I do things to that extent too

so if you give me something like 37 + 45 I’ll go “well 30 + 40 is 70 and 7 + 5 is 12 so 70 + 12 is 82″

Oh absolutely. So a fuck you letter should always be in response to an inciting action from another party. We don’t write “fuck you” letters unprompted, we write them to illicit a specific “oh shit, I’ve fucked up” reaction from the recipient. Furthermore, the inciting action on the part of the other party ideally has to be wrong. Now, when I say wrong, I really mean two things: 1) that it would incense a reasonable person, and 2) that it’s the type of action that people can get in trouble for.

So, I’m going to make a example up to demonstrate. This example has literally nothing to do with the type of letters I write, but I think it illustrates my process. Say you live in a neighborhood that has a Homeowner’s Association, but your house was built prior to the HOA forming and no owner of the house, including you, has ever agreed to join. You hung up a Pride flag on your porch last June, which is unremarkable, as many houses have flags displayed on their front porch; some are purely decorative, others convey meanings, like your neighbor’s Blue Lives Matter flag, or your other neighbor’s Build the Wall flag. The day after hanging the flag, you go on vacation for a week. When you return, you find that your Pride flag is missing, and you also find a letter in the mail from the HOA stating that you have 24 hours to remove the flag or it will be removed and you will be billed for the cost of its removal. You have, furthermore, recieved a bill for 200 dollars for the expenses incurred by the HOA in removing your flag.

Okay, so we obviously have our wrong act. So now we’re onto Stage Two, and this is the most important stage, Fact Gathering and Research. The obvious move is to find proof that the HOA had no right to enter your land or remove your property, and naturally we’ll do that as the very first thing, but really, is that going to make them sweat? We want them to sweat. So, let’s find news articles about other times this HOA or other HOAs in this neighborhood have entered someone’s property and removed or materially altered the property. Let’s find out what happened to them - were they sued? How much did they get hit for? Was there a ton of negative publicity? How did that impact housing prices?

Even though you’re not a member of the HOW, can you get a copy of the bylaws and see what they say about decorations outside homes that are part of the HOA? Is there a rule against displaying all flags? How about the neighbors? Have any of them recieved demands to take their flags down?

How about researching the demographics of the neighborhood? Do any gay couples live there? Have any gay couples applied and been denied housing there? Does the jurisdiction you live in have a law against discriminating against housing applicants due to sexual orientation? Has anyone ever complained that the HOA has acted in a discriminatory fashion against them because they’re gay? What penalties are available in your jurisdiction if that were the case? Are any of those complaints still pending, and could the complainants use the HOA’s act of removing your flag as proof of discriminatory intent?

What about the bill for $200? How was it calculated? Was it based on the time it took to remove the flag? Did it actually take that amount of time? Do you or your neighbors have a video doorbell that might have captured the removal of the flag? Who actually removed the flag? Did they say anything while removing it that might bolster your argument that the HOA acted with the intent to discriminate against gay people?

How about your own property? Did anything get damaged in the course of the flag’s removal? How much was the flag worth? How much was the property damage worth? Have you spent money related to this incident?

Once you’re done with your fact gathering and research, you’re onto stage 3, which is organizing the letter. So, you line up everything you’ve figured out, and arrange it from “least scary to the HOA” to “pants shittingly terrifying for the HOA.” Let’s say here, least scary is probaby “the cost to replace your flag” and most scary is “the prospect of a ton of lawsuits from other people who have been discriminated against and the prospect of publicity that will cause every HOA associated home’s property value to tank,” with a bunch of other stuff in the middle. Start with establishing that you’re not subject to HOA rules, and then walk them, sentence by sentence, step by step, through just how badly they’ve fucked up, and the bad outcomes they can expect in response to their fuck up.

Finish by telling them who else you’re copying on the letter, if it makes strategic sense to do so and will result in a better outcome for everyone that’s been wronged. In this case, you might think about a variety of gay friendly organizations, local news media, and governmental representatives. Wrap it up by asking them to provide you with a list of the actions that they intend to take to repair the damage that they’ve done to you and to the community within, say, fourteen days, so that you can give that to your attorney in order to help you consider how best to respond to their actions.

End with the most brutally infuriating sentence known to man: “Thank you for your kind attention to this issue.”

You’ll sleep like a baby once that letter’s in the mail.

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Wiping down my dash at the end of an evening, I see your read-more, over-hear your rant in the tags, so I pour you a drink.

She says tumblr I’m feeling like shit today can you send me some posts for a smile can we talk about slash, can you fill up my dash so I won’t have to think for a while

Laa dahdah didee dah La dahdah didee dah dadum

And sometimes we blog with a beer

And when I proudly boast that I’m older than most,