Just A Little Tickle Bug

however. if I hadn’t gotten the hysterectomy back then and was trying to get one now, it would be harder. after becoming recognized as trans in medial systems, legally I would need two separate psychiatric professionals to write letters affirming I’d been under their observation, that I was mentally stable enough to know I wanted the surgery, and that they also believed it was necessary. and I would need to find a surgeon willing to operate on trans people.

like this is the difference. the literal procedures involved in medical transition are not exclusive to trans people. the difference is that these procedures are gatekept from us.

that’s why all the laws banning trans healthcare (in the US, I haven’t read legislation elsewhere) are framing it as only banned when someone has a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis. the point isn’t to stop performing the actual procedures, the point is to deny trans people healthcare because we are trans.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

Camilla found a banana

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

I require your opinion on bosmer antlers

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

Then you feel a shift.

One of their hands gently entangled with your hair, holding your head in place without pulling or hurting you. Your heart rate picks up as your eyes dart up to him, and you see his free hand holding up two objects.

You realize it is a fluffy soft looking feather, and a more firm looking feather. A cold shiver runs through your body and you squirm slightly as you put his hand outside your view.

You squeeze your eyes shut and then you can feel it.

A soft feather fluttering over your ear, gentle and soft dancing across every inch of your skin, back and forth like a slow dance twirling across and behind your ear, maybe even your neck. Covering a broad area, tickling all over your ear at once. The touch is so maddening light it makes you want to jump out of your skin.

Just when you thought you couldn't take it anymore it stops and you catch your breath, just to be jolted back into reality by a sensation.

A firmer feather, a more focused attack. Slowly tracing the outer shell of your ear, all the way from the earlobe to the tip. Then flicking and twirling across your earlobe before being pulled behind your ear, back and forth until you can barely take it anymore. After that the feather dips into the ear, finding every small ticklish spot that is hidden in the curves of your ear. Lastly maybe tracing the feather across your neck for a little bit.

When the feather finally retreats you have a second to catch your breath. Your ear feels hot and sensitive, tingling all over, just the breathing your ler does is enough to tickle the skin.

You relax, closing your eyes as you take some deep breaths.

Then you feel it again, the unmistakable softness that covers your whole ear and it dawns on you what just happened was merely round one.