Random

Do you all see my vision??

yes <3 my queen shaak ti despite her five (5) different death scenes

well now i just havee to draw more rocky in my style

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

—Did you know that Juneteenth is also celebrated in a part of Mexico? Nacimiento Mexico was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the US. As many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. —To date, many Black Mexicans from the Texas area retrace a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery. —Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions in the village of Nacimiento. —Slave hunters would patrol the southern border for escapees, led by the Texas Rangers but the Mexican army would be there waiting for them (the slave hunters) to turn them away.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

say something nice about prev!!! find something cool about them!! give their blog a skim!!

oh wow! hey if you take pills check this out. new medicine taking meta just dropped.

according to these models, out of the 4 tested postures, the best position to digest pills is laying on your right side. standing upright has a similar time to laying in your back at twice as much as laying on the right side, and laying on the left side is the slowest by far.

laying on right side: pill dissolves in around 10 minutes.

standing: pill dissolves in 23 minutes. laying on the back has a similar time.

laying on left side: pill dissolves in up to 100 minutes.

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0096877

definitely worth a lot more research.

- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.

- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.

- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.

Ever since then, my kitties make a POINT of sleeping in the border of my bed, to create a "bump" so If I EVER rolled over? I wouldn't fall. They even taught the ones that came after to do the same.

What I (foolishly) didn't expect is that she would keep teaching herself tasks to caretake me. She aggressively guards me when I catch an infection. If it's been too long since I've eaten, she will pester me until she watches me put food in my mouth. I had to train her out of trying to drag me to safety after fainting. Just wild things for a cat to choose to do.

So imagine my confusion this year when during the height of one of my scariest health episodes, this same cat is constantly acting up. It felt like she timed it to me finally being well enough to get out of bed. No matter what I was doing, this little grey cat would be right there: pacing, pestering, and absolutely demanding that I lie down to cuddle her. Cuddling isn't even her thing.

Amid trying to settle her, my symptoms would inevitably catch back up to me. So I'd just drag myself back to bed – and suddenly, she was an absolute angel again. And this cycle just kept repeating, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The only time my cat didn't start doing this was when my wifey was around.

Fast forward a couple months. I find out my migraine disorder has progressed (a thing untreated migraine can apparently do) to a rare form that sometimes mimic stroke (a collection of symptoms that can apparently happen outside of stroke). It's a huge relief, but one with big health considerations. Key among them, it means my migraines needed to urgently be detected, prevented, and treated due to the possibility of hemiplegia. So, I start the arduous process of logging my migraines, and aggressively treating any first signs of them.

My cat has continued bugging me during all of this. And while I'm venting about that and going over my migraine logging with my wifey, they suddenly stop me, point at a day I'd marked, and say, "Hey. Wasn't that one of the days she was really acting up?"

It was like a light bulb moment. We went over all our shared messages, cross referenced them with my logs, and yeah. Yeah, my cat had been bullying me for getting out of bed every fucking day I had a migraine. The only days she hadn't were when I'd spent the entire day with my wifey... the person that takes care of me and gets me to bed when my health gets bad.

TL,DR: my cat figured out what was making me sick before the doctors did, made it her job to alert me and enstate bedrest, and only takes a vacation when she knows somebody else can do the work.

So they train them from an early age that they should always be distracting themselves with something as to not be in the way or annoying the adults.

That's really it. You'd probably have gotten similar results 30 years ago if you studied kids who are left to read books by themselves alone in their room for multiple hours a day vs kids whose parents read with them, or at least in the same room and talk to them about what they're reading. Because the former are most definitely also being neglected in other ways.

The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was- 1. Compliment before Critique 2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’

Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.

Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive. Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.