Loq's Home for Imaginary Queers

"Maybe not every household needs its own industrial-grade leaf blower."

"Maybe we should accept denser housing and shared infrastructure."

"Maybe private lawns should become community gardens."

all the way to

"You don't get control over your schedule."

"You don't get privacy."

"You don't get to choose your own aesthetics."

"You don't get to decide who has access to your emotional life."

"You don't get to opt out of communal activities."

"You don't get to have tastes that aren't socially approved."

Those are not remotely the same category of thing.

Some people treat all preferences as interchangeable units. They imagine a giant pile labeled "individual desires" and then talk about reducing it by 15%.

But preferences aren't equal.

Wanting three power drills when one shared drill would do is different from wanting control over your schedule.

Wanting a third car is different from wanting a bedroom door that locks.

Wanting a private yacht is different from wanting the ability to listen to music nobody else likes.

Wanting a 10,000-square-foot mansion is different from wanting to spend an evening alone.

The fact that these get lumped together is what makes the discussion so frustrating.

Because someone says, "Well, people will have to make sacrifices."

And I ask, "Okay, what sacrifices?"

And they think I'm being difficult.

No, that's the entire question.

Disabled adults should be able to go on nights out with friends until 5am then sleep in until the afternoon if we want to.

ER doctor: you mean if I just send you for a leg ultrasound right now and it's clear you'll leave?

Me, picking up my book: yeah, I'm just gonna read until we get it done

Fastest ER visit ever (it was not in fact a clot but I sure would have felt dumb if it had been)

Or, "hey so this test result came back weird and so I think we have to rule out a benign pituitary tumor."

The more specific I get with what I need the faster they order tests. For the RA diagnosis it was, "hey this is probably some weird post viral arthralgia but could we do an arthritis panel since I've got 27 affected joints?"

If the doctor says something dismissive or they don't know, I ask for them to refer me to someone with more expertise in this area.

I had to go through three different practices to find a spinal surgeon who did not tell me that operating on me would be too dangerous because I'm fat. But the third one was like, "Oh, I'm not worried about you coding, there's just a risk that it won't work. But it has a hundred percent failure rate if we don't try."

I did not code. The surgery worked. Was it perfect? No. Did it drastically improve my quality of life? It gave me my fucking life back. I can sit. I can be out in the world and not in blinding pain.

It is so important to not take dismissals and such as the final answer. I got so much bullshit for so many years. It nearly killed me twice, people blowing off clots as muscle pain or "depression".

Track your symptoms. Make a list. Talk about how it affects your quality of life. Ask for physical therapy, ask for second opinions. If you have an idea of what might be wrong, ask them to help you rule it out. Also ask for patient assistance, nonprofit hospitals have it. You might have to go through their labs and their doctors but it can cover an awful lot.

Take a friend with you, or a family member. My pcp asks if I want a chaperone (I don't) but literally having an extra person with you can help.

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

This is a incredibly rare find. A ball of yarn made from stinging nettle fibers in the Late Neolithic (5900 years old) in what’s now Marin-Epagnier in Switzerland. The thread has been preserved by being carbonized. Look at how much thread that is! And how fine and even it is spun! The skill going into this is absolutely incredible. Imagine the incredible textile work that must’ve been made with that. For a reference here’s a ball of nettle yarn I managed to make with a drop spindle. That took me 300 hours of work.