An exercise in mad science

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

Baseball but goofy. You may have seen some viral clips of the Savannah Bananas. The Banana Ball Championship League is now up to six teams.

They all wear goofy outfits and some of them are intentionally slutty. Like booty shorts and crop tops.

By the end of the game half of an entire team was just dancing shirtless and they were probably drunk.

And yeah some women are on the teams too!!

If you think "children should not be allowed in this space," you HAVE TO reckon with the fact that you are now excluding parents (and very often women specifically) who don't have access to childcare. You are isolating people who are poor, or rural, or single parents, or any number of other factors that might prevent someone from having on-demand childcare. You are cutting them off from being able to exist in public. You are denying parents and children the ability to fully participate in society.

My mom spent several years only leaving the house to buy groceries or take me to school, and even then, people would still come up to her to complain TO HER FACE about how she shouldn't bring a crying toddler to Walmart. Entitled strangers would literally try and demand that my mom leave and come back without the kids.

"Why can't your husband watch them?" Because he was at work, usually working extreme amounts of overtime so we didn't get evicted, because landlords don't like it when you stop paying rent.

"Why can't you send them to daycare?" Because that costs money.

"Why can't your teenager stay home with them and babysit?" Because I also deserved to be able to leave the house for something other than school, and taking me to the grocery store was how my mom taught me to manage a household budget, shop sales, and meal plan.

"Don't bring your kid in public if you can't CONTROL them and make them stop crying!" Kids cry when they're upset, and being dragged around a store is upsetting! Don't be an asshole! Children are human beings who are still learning how the world works, and they don't have a lot of agency. You'd cry, too.

"Spank them until they learn to stop crying!" That's just straight-up child abuse, Jesus Christ.

I have blocked multiple people who went on tirades about how I'm a "horrible breeder" who is "contributing to overpopulation" and how I and my "spawn" deserve to be trapped at home. (I am infertile and my foster kid is an adult now, so I don't know what breeding and spawn they think they're talking about.)

One person asked if I was posting ragebait for fun because "this isn't a real issue." Several have asked if this "really happens" and told me that my "experience isn't universal." (There are multiple parents in the comments who have agreed with me and talked about how hard it is to navigate the world with their kids.)

Children are an oppressed class who are treated like absolute vermin. Parents are given absolutely no support in caring for them. Good parents are set at a disadvantage even when they have all the best intentions, struggling parents aren't given resources to improve their situation or get community assistance, and blatantly abusive parents don't get caught because hitting and screaming and controlling are considered perfectly normal ways to treat a child. Communities would rather shut kids away where they can be ignored and forgotten and mistreated, all for the sin of "being annoying in public."

Youth liberation is vital, regardless of whether you, personally, like kids. You cannot ban children from public. You cannot shut children away in isolation and expect them to grow into happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults who can function in our society. You do not get to demand children be removed from every corner of public life all for your personal comfort.

It's an amazing document when you read it. It lays out a set of principles for the protection and safe growth of children, framed in terms of rights that the child themself has to grow up in a safe and healthy environment and be provided with the resources and opportunities to grow and flourish. The thing I love about it the most is that it starts from the assumption and presumption that the child is in fact a person with their own independent rights, and not the property of their parents or their state.

Now here's where the American Exceptionalism comes in: The US never ratified it. It is, in fact, the only country recognized by the UN that never ratified it. The reasons why are...educational:

It prohibits child marriage, explicitly and specifically. Many US states don't have a minimum age of marriage with parental approval, ratifying this would force the US to federally mandate a minimum marriageable age of 18.

It prohibits life imprisonment or the death penalty for anyone under the age of 18. The supreme court has specifically ruled that this is legal, four times.

It limits certain parental rights over their children, specifically related to medical care and rights to a good education (i.e., it would require higher standards vis-a-vis homeschooling).

As you may have guessed, the strongest opposition comes from the American religious right.

The whole idea that children (and their parents) don't have the right to exist in public spaces is just one symptom of a broader problem of the US treating children like things instead of people, and specifically the religious right's attitude toward children. It has pervaded American culture to the point where it's mainstream.

Hittin’ the keyboard like

Friends comin’ online like

DID YOu SEE tHE THINGg MY GOD

Babies gain language much earlier than they start talking. They can understand you before they know how to make the right word sounds with their mouths. Speaking, like writing, is a feat of incredible physical coordination that we generally undervalue because it's been muscle memory for years or decades, but it involves a lot of very precise coordinated physical movements that take a lot longer to learn than the words themselves do for someone who's new at this whole having a body thing. Complex language is also not all that critical for baby sign language. To a baby, communicating hunger via crying or via reaching towards your food isn't markedly different to communicating it with a hand gesture, and they don't need particularly sophisticated language skills to do any of those things, so you can start teaching them hand signs pretty much as soon as they have a concept of deliberately communicating with others.

You get told a lot as a man “real men do or don’t do xyz”. I’ve even experienced this as a trans man.

but the “real man” is an impossible standard to achieve. He doesn’t exist. He’s a mythical being to strive towards. You will never be him and trying to be him will trap you in a cage.