K-maceroni

Orphaned baby bats are often swaddled tightly like teeny burritos to mimic being cuddled by mom and help ease separation anxiety.

They also seem to find pacifiers soothing.

But as an individual, there are things I can do.

I can be kinder to those around me, infusing goodness back into the country one person at a time.

I can vote to support local government initiatives to make small but important changes where possible in my own community.

I can volunteer and donate to charities, to promote acts of goodness and human decency.

I can help educate people so that ignorance and fear does not take future elections.

I can give my strength to those around me when they need it.

I can work with fellow citizens to protest laws and actions that do not and should not define our country.

I can encourage tolerance and acceptance in those around me.

I can write my government representatives to tell them what I want from them as my stewards in government.

But most importantly, I can get up tomorrow and know that Trump and his flunkies cannot take Hope for the future from me.

FUCKING.

THING.

Stop abusing your boyfriends and yes what you are doing is abuse.

Stop:

Yelling at him in front of his friends 

Hitting or slapping him when he does or says something you don’t like

Telling him he doesn’t have a choice when it comes to decisions that involve both of you 

Telling him he can’t hang out with friends because you don’t like him

Telling him to not talk to other girls even if they are his friend

Forcing him to spend every moment with you 

Belittling him and pointing out all his flaws

Calling him stupid or making fun of him for making a mistake

Threatening to break up with him if he doesn’t do what you want

Being emotionally manipulative and crying until he does what you want

Accusing him of cheating every time he’s not with you

Blow up is phone if he doesn’t text you every five minutes 

Telling him you are the must thing that has ever happened to him and no one else will love

Physically attacking him when ever you are mad

Forcing him to have sex despite that fact that he said he didn’t want to

Invading his privacy by going through his phone

Getting mad at him for changing his password and demanding he tell you what it is

If a guy did any of these things to a girl it would be considered abuse but since its the other way around its considered normal. Throughout High school I saw many girl treating their boyfriends like shit. Sometime even physically abusing them in the hallways and no one trying to stop it because its a girl attacking a boy. 

Boys: If your girlfriend does anything on this list leave her. It is abuse and you deserve better.

You don’t deserve to be screamed at, ignored, or assaulted.

We usually see “elephants”—or “wolves” or “killer whales” or “chimps” or “ravens” and so on—as interchangeable representatives of their kind. But the instant we focus on individuals, we see an elephant named Echo with exceptional leadership qualities; we see wolf 755 struggling to survive the death of his mate and exile from his family; we see a lost and lonely killer whale named Luna who is humorous and stunningly gentle. We see individuality. It’s a fact of life. And it runs deep. Very deep.

Individuality is the frontier of understanding non-human animals. But for decades, the idea was forbidden territory. Scientists who stepped out of bounds faced withering scorn from colleagues. Jane Goodall experienced just that. After her first studies of chimpanzees, she enrolled as a doctoral student at Cambridge. There, as she later recalled in National Geographic, “It was a bit shocking to be told I’d done everything wrong. Everything. I shouldn’t have given them names. I couldn’t talk about their personalities, their minds or their feelings.” The orthodoxy was: those qualities are unique to humans.

But these decades later we are realizing that Goodall was right; humans are not unique in having personalities, minds and feelings. And if she’d given the chimpanzees numbers instead of names?—their individual personalities would still have shined.

“If ever there was a perfect wolf,” says Yellowstone biologist Rick McIntyre, “It was Twenty-one. He was like a fictional character. But real.” McIntyre has watched free-living wolves for more hours than anyone, ever.

Even from a distance Twenty-one’s big-shouldered profile was recognizable. Utterly fearless in defense of his family, Twenty-one had the size, strength, and agility to win against overwhelming odds. “On two occasions, I saw Twenty-one take on six attacking wolves—and rout them all,” Rick says. “Watching him felt like seeing something that looked supernatural. Like watching a Bruce Lee movie. I’d be thinking, ‘A wolf can’t do what I am watching this wolf do.’” Watching Twenty-one, Rick elaborates, “was like watching Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan—a one-of-a-kind talent outside of ‘normal.’”

Twenty-one was a superwolf. Uniquely, he never lost a fight and he never killed any defeated opponent. And yet Twenty-one was “remarkably gentle” with the members of his pack. Immediately after making a kill he would often walk away and nap, allowing family members who’d had nothing to do with the hunt eat their fill.

One of Twenty-one’s favorite things was to wrestle little pups. “And what he really loved to do,” Rick adds, “was pretend to lose. He just got a huge kick out of it.” Here was this great big male wolf. And he’d let some little wolf jump on him and bite his fur. “He’d just fall on his back with his paws in the air,” Rick half-mimes. “And the triumphant-looking little one would be standing over him with his tail wagging.

“The ability to pretend,” Rick adds, “shows that you understand how your actions are perceived by others. I’m sure the pups knew what was going on, but it was a way for them to learn how it feels to conquer something much bigger than you. And that kind of confidence is what wolves need every day of their hunting lives.”

In Twenty-one’s life, there was a particular male, a sort of roving Casanova, a continual annoyance. He was strikingly good-looking, had a big personality, and was always doing something interesting. “The best single word is ‘charisma,’” says Rick. “Female wolves were happy to mate with him. People absolutely loved him. Women would take one look at him—they didn’t want you to say anything bad about him. His irresponsibility and infidelity; it didn’t matter.”

One day, Twenty-one discovered this Casanova among his daughters. Twenty-one ran in, caught him, biting and pinning him to the ground. Other pack members piled in, beating Casanova up. “Casanova was also big,” Rick says, “but he was a bad fighter.” Now he was totally overwhelmed; the pack was finally killing him.

“Suddenly Twenty-one steps back. Everything stops. The pack members are looking at Twenty-one as if saying, ‘Why has Dad stopped?’” The Casanova wolf jumped up and—as always—ran away.

After Twenty-one’s death, Casanova briefly became the Druid pack’s alpha male. But, Rick recalled: “He doesn’t know what to do, just not a leader personality.” And although it’s very rare, his year-younger brother deposed him. “His brother had a much more natural alpha personality.” Casanova didn’t mind; it meant he was free to wander and meet other females. Eventually Casanova and several young Druid males met some females and they all formed the Blacktail pack. “With them,” Rick remembers, “he finally became the model of a responsible alpha male and a great father.”

The personality of a wolf ‘matriarch’ also helps shape the whole pack. Wolf Seven was the dominant female in her pack. But you could watch Seven for days and say, ‘I think she’s in charge,’ because she led subtly, by example. Wolf Forty, totally different; she led with an iron fist. Exceptionally aggressive, Forty had done something unheard of: actually deposed her own mother.

For three years, Forty ruled the Druid pack tyrannically. A pack member who stared a moment too long would find herself slammed to the ground, Forty’s bared canines poised above her neck. Yellowstone research director Doug Smith recalls, “Throughout her life she was fiercely committed to always having the upper hand, far more so than any other wolf we’ve observed.” Forty heaped her worst abuse on her same-age sister. Because this sister lived under Forty’s brutal oppression, she earned the name Cinderella.

One year Cinderella split from the main pack and dug a den to give birth. Shortly after she finished the den, her sister arrived and delivered one of her infamous beatings. Cinderella just took it, as always. No one ever saw any pups at that den.

The next year, Cinderella, Forty, and a low-ranking sister all gave birth in dens dug several miles apart. New wolf mothers nurse and guard constantly; they rely on pack members for food. That year, few pack members visited the bad-tempered alpha. Cinderella, though, found herself well assisted at her den by several sisters.

Six weeks after giving birth, Cinderella and several attending pack members headed out, away from her den—and stumbled into the queen herself. Forty immediately attacked Cinderella with was, even for her, exceptional ferocity. She then turned her fury onto another of her sisters who’d been accompanying Cinderella, giving her a beating too. Then as dusk settled in, Forty headed toward Cinderella’s den. Only the wolves saw what happened next, but Doug Smith and Rick McIntyre pieced together what went down.

Unlike the previous year, this time Cinderella wasn’t about to remain passive or let her sister reach her den and her six-week-old pups. Near the den a fight erupted. There were at least four wolves, and Forty had earned no allies among them.

At dawn, Forty was down by the road covered in blood, and her wounds included a neck bite so bad that her spine was visible. Her long-suffering sisters had, in effect, cut her throat. She died. It was the only time researchers have ever known a pack to kill its own alpha. Forty was an extraordinarily abusive individual. The sisters’ decision, outside the box of wolf norms, was: mutiny. Remarkable.

But Cinderella was just getting started. She adopted her dead sister’s entire brood. And she also welcomed her low-ranking sister and her pups. And so that was the summer that the Druid Peak pack raised an unheard-of twenty-one wolf pups together in a single den.

Out from under Forty’s brutal reign, Cinderella developed into the pack’s finest hunter. She later went on to become the benevolent matriarch of the Geode Creek pack. Goes to show: a wolf, as many a human, may have talents and abilities that wither or flower depending on which way their luck breaks.

“Cinderella was the finest kind of alpha female,” Rick McIntyre says. “Cooperative, returning favors by sharing with the other adult females, inviting her sister to bring her pups together with her own while also raising her vanquished sister’s pups—. She set a policy of acceptance and cohesion.” She was, Rick says, “perfect for helping everyone get along really well.”

Children cannot give consent. Children cannot legally sign contracts. Children cannot get married.

Animals cannot give consent. Animals cannot legally sign contracts. Animals cannot get married.

None of these people have ever expressed a worry that dogs will start wanting to marry men, or that houseplants will start wanting to marry cars.

This way of thinking only makes sense if your view of straight marriage depends on “man actively choosing, woman passively chosen” and gay marriage only fits into your worldview as the distortion “man actively choosing wrong thing,” as though it’s a Sesame Street comedy sketch with Mr. Noodle trying to marry a pocket watch by mistake, presumably with his pants on his head.

-  I’ve specified good fanfiction in literally the first tweet. While this is, obviously, a value judgement wherein YMMV, My Immortal is famous for being arguably the most terrible fanfic ever written, and is therefore demonstrably not what I’m talking about. Similarly, I’ve seen other responses to this post bring up 50 Shades, which, despite its popularity in mainstream circles, is pretty much universally regarded as being not just terrible fanfic, but an excruciatingly bad and dangerously inaccurate portrayal of BDSM that romanticises abuse. So no: these are not the droids you’re looking for.

- Here’s the thing, though: you already knew that. The decision to respond to this post with a flippant reference to a fic that’s notorious precisely because of its poor quality is exactly why I used up precious Twitter characters to specify good fanfic, even though I shouldn’t have had to. Every mode of artistic expression is composed of good, bad and mediocre works, but when it comes to genres that are traditionally viewed as less worthy or literary - like fanfiction, or romance - we have a reflexive tendency to conflate the bad with the whole, such that the good is implied to be either exceptional or nonexistant. I specified that I’m talking about good fanfiction, not because I think such fics are an exalted minority, but to pre-emptively combat the assertion that they are, and then you’ve gone and made it anyway. So, thanks for that.

- But while we’re on the subject of quality, let’s make a very important distinction. Though fanfic is a largely unmediated medium, it’s not bad; it’s amateur, in the very literal, dictionary-definition sense of engaging or engaged in without payment; non-professional. While there’s a stereotype that lots of ficwriters are teenage girls - which, why is that always wielded as an insult? oh right, misogyny, carry on - a lot of us are, in fact, grown-ass adults of varying genders, some of whom also happen to write professionally in other contexts; like me, for instance. I’ve read fanfics that are unquestionably as good as, if not better than, many professionally published works I’ve read, some I’ve simply enjoyed or felt meh about, and others where I’ve mounted up on my Nopetopus and ridden off into the sunset after the first paragraph. It’s a grab bag, is what I’m saying, but if you think that’s an inherently different spectrum of enjoyment over quality than applies to any other medium, then I’d politely invite you to reconsider the matter. 

- In conclusion: fanfic might not be your bag, but it has its own culture of editing, collaboration, publication, criticism and dissemination, its own conventions and subversions of same, its own extensive history and trope awareness, and, yes, its near-unique status as a medium invested in female sexual desire. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other things straight dudes can do to learn the mystical ways of What Women Want like, oh, say, talking to them, always bearing in mind that women are not a goddamn hivemind, but given that there are a frightening number of guys out there whose first or primary exposure to any type of porn is whatever degrading mainstream het they can scrouge up for free without virusing the hell out of their PCs, then yeah: I’m gonna go out on a fucking limb and suggest they maybe balance it out with some fanfic.

(Part 2) Sometimes I wish I could just quit at life. Just… y'know… *quit*. But I have to get my life right for everyone else’s sake? That’s Effective Altruism, right? I have utilitarian values and I have abundant talents and I have disproportionate (potential) access to resources… and that combination of traits means I can (potentially) make a big difference in the world. And *that* means I can’t quit. Have to get it right. Means if I screw my life up I’m letting countless others down.

Hey. So, a bunch of thoughts. 

First thing, I think there’s a tendency, among smart people who care a lot, to think that there’s a singular, invisible, Right Path through life, the one that helps people and fulfills our potential and fixes the world. And the challenge before us is of seeking out the Right Path amidst the mists of uncertainty and then doggedly walking it, damn the odds.

I think this is mostly the thought process of people who have been praised their whole life for their potential, and who start thinking of ‘realize that potential’ as a single discrete thing, and who then notice that none of the choices in front of them are labelled ‘realize my potential’. And also people who have been told their whole life that the key to success is hard work and if they just work hard the world is open to them, so they start thinking that ‘realize my potential’ is lurking out there in the mists and the harder the walk the closer they’re getting, right?

So the sort-of-mixed news is that a path being hard doesn’t mean it’s the right one. And the bad news is none of the paths have ‘fulfilled your potential’ at the end of them. But the good news is that the path to a happy and significant life that meaningfully touches and changes hundreds of other lives isn’t actually that narrow, either. 

You can’t ‘end up on some dead-end path’ by failing to get your act together soon enough. If you get your act together in five years, then you start doing awesome shit in five years. Doors don’t close, not really, certainly not in the absolute sense that it feels like when you’re measuring yourself against some vague idea of your potential. 

And, yeah, you are going to improve so many other lives and make a dent in the world’s problems, but you don’t have to get your life exactly right to do that. You can have that anyway. You can spend your twenties unemployed and living at home and still have that. You can fail out of college and still do that. Life is so long, and the world has so much to fix in it, that (sadly) we won’t have it all squared away by the time you find something that you enjoy that pays the bills. 

And because we - by which I mean that very broadly, everyone on team humanity, all the people who definitely recognize themselves in this ask and therefore recognize you as an ally and an inspiration and a reason to stay in the fight (and you don’t need to have done anything to be on that team, you just need to ask yourself ‘are those the people I want to call mine’ and you’re in) - won’t have fixed stuff in five years, or ten, you need to pick one of the paths you can walk for a pretty long time. A path you have friends on. A path that sometimes spontaneously makes you smile. The hardest one in front of you probably isn’t it. Picking a path you can walk for your whole life isn’t throwing away your potential, any more than marathon runners are stupid for not starting out at a dead sprint. 

Though, also, if someone does pick a path they can’t handle, and then crashes and burns or finds it impossible or wants to die or whatever, they can always change, you know? You usually don’t even have to do much backtracking. That’s what I mean about the road to a meaningful life not even being particularly narrow. You’re not throwing your life away, or ruining it, or boxing yourself into a dead end (unless you’re having a lot of children, or committing a lot of felonies). You’re taking some exploratory stabs at the road here, and you know what you want, and that’s way ahead of a lot of people and more than enough for now. 

- Louis Nicolas le Tonnerlier de Breteuil, on his daughter, the raddest person in history, Émilie du Châtelet. Emilie was a scientist in the 18th century who proved Newton’s ideas on velocity wrong. She also played a role in helping Einstein figure out E = mc2 with E=mv2 (via intuitiveunderstanding)

Also, “frightens away the suitors” = BS. Emilie du Chatelet was a hustler. Fucking Voltaire was her personal man-candy. Her husband was apparently totally cool with it. The historical record did not preserve evidence for or against a threesome.

#girls don’t you go feeling like you don’t got any role models ‘cause you got role models like damn#it just takes a little more work to find out about them is all