not leaving, just becoming less real

mama??

MAMA!!!1

hi

The retail workers are working 12 hours shifts. We are threatened with losing our jobs if we don’t show up unless we’re dying in the hospital. I had an assistant manager show up with fucking strep because he would’ve been fired otherwise. Yes, he did infect 7 and hospitalize 2 coworkers; who knows how many members of the public he infected.

The stores have, maybe, 5 of that special cheap thing you’re after. Corporate does this on purpose, and stores are not allowed to order enough. The prices aren’t even that much lower. They lie about how expensive something is to fool you into thinking you’re getting a discount. You aren’t.

Most of the workers you will come across will be new hires for the sole purpose of being bodies for about three months before they’re fired. They actually don’t know anything because they’ve been working there for maybe two weeks, and have had no real training. I was once hired at Staples a week before Black Friday and expected to know how to deal with phones, coupons, the online ordering site, and AS400 after five 6-hour shifts. This is the kind of person you will likely be dealing with at Black Friday.

The city of San Francisco currently has the worst air quality of anywhere in the world because of the wildfires. (This level of air quality, incidentally, is bad for people and kills them.) These once-in-a-lifetime wildfires will become more common in our lifetimes.

TEN YEARS AGO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN TOP OF NEWS CYCLE DISASTER COVERAGE

a) This is happening in a region where the majority of the population does not have air conditioning in their homes, because the climate in the coastal parts of the Bay Area (including the East Bay, where we live) is typically very mild, and rarely gets warm enough to require cooling. Right now, it’s also not warm enough to require A/C for cooling, but A/C can also be used to filter indoor air. So most Bay Area residents do not have any technological means to filter the air inside their homes. When hbbo and I left earlier this week, the air inside was vastly better than the air outside, but the smoke was still so bad indoors that we were wearing N95 masks inside our apartment. Telling people to stay inside is a pretty inadequate way of protecting them when the air inside is so bad you taste ash every time you pull your mask down to take a sip of water.

b) The Bay Area is also currently struggling with one of the worst crises of homelessness in the country. The best public health recommendation available right now is: stay inside your home. I’ve been trying to find 2018 statistics without a lot of luck, but in 2017, the homeless population of San Francisco (city) alone was about eight thousand people. San Francisco is a tiny, tiny part of the area that’s affected by the smoke; the typical definition of “The Bay Area” covers either seven or nine counties, depending on who you ask, and homelessness across those counties hovers between about 0.2% and 1%. In other words: for an enormous chunk of the area currently blanketed by life-threatening smoke, between two and ten out of every thousand people does not have a home inside which they can shelter.

c) N95 masks, the only protective mechanism most Bay Area residents have access to, frequently don’t fit children correctly, because their faces are too small to allow for a good seal, and a lot of public health outlets are just flat-out recommending against having children wear them. Just—think about that, for a second. The entire Bay Area and Central Valley are in the middle of a public health crisis that has, now, for large swathes of that area, lasted for over a week. There are very few places in that entire area, indoors or out, where you can go to get a full breath of clean air. So, throughout that area, most kids are just—breathing in smoke. All day. Every day. Indoors and out.

d) I grew up in Los Angeles and I’ve lived in California for most of my life (I’m 37), and yes, wildfires have always been a part of the California experience. But not in November. It used to be that California had a well-defined “fire season” that lasted from about May to about October, with the worst of the fire risk in the most heavily populated parts of the state coming between mid-August and mid-October, which is, for wide swathes of California, the hottest part of the year (I know this sounds bananas to non-Californians, but this is just what our climate’s like: our perceptual summer is dramatically late-shifted into the autumn, and our technical “summers” can actually be quite cool, especially if you’re near the coast, as is true in SF and LA).

e) You can use Breezometer to compare the air quality in the Bay Area to the air quality in your location. The air quality at our apartment is currently 18/100 on their scale (higher is better); it’s dipped as low as 12 at various points this week. As I’m writing this on Saturday morning, the air quality is noticeably improving for most of the state, but:

HOLD THE PHONE, ORDERING IMMEDIATELY. 

me:

you have long cat (serval)

ear cat (sand cat)

small evil cat (black footed cat)

spherical cat (pallas cat)

cat who probably watches makeup tutorials on youtube (caracal)

very round cat (leopardus guigna)

water cat (fishing cat)

cat with socks (leopardus colocolo)

grayscale cat (geoffroy’s cat)

and let’s not forget revolver cat (ocelot)

Are You 100% Sure This Isn’t A Lemur (flat-headed cat)

That’s A Fucking Stoat (Jaguarundi)

Foot Fetish (canadian lynx)

(OK I’M SORRY FOR THAT ONE BUT JESUS JUST LOOK AT IT.)

and I move that my favorite, spherical cat, should be renamed Redonkasaurus Rex immediately (pallas cat)

I don’t know why I’ve been obsessively thinking about the concept of “gaydar” 

but I have. 

Actually no it’s because a straight family member used the term like 

“oh I have really great gaydar” 

and it made me feel really gross 

and it took me like a full hour to realize why. 

When heterosexual people say that, 

it feels like they’re bragging about their ability to clock us, you know? 

like a straight person is telling me that they can spot us queers at 50 paces 

and i’m immediately going to be uncomfortable with that, 

whereas when other queer folks talk about being able to spot each other 

it’s a tool for survival. 

Like here’s the thing right? 

being able to tell is important sometimes.  

Here’s an example: 

A couple summers ago I was in a very very small town in Nova Scotia, Canada 

(like 6 buildings small) 

and I met a woman in the library who was probably a little older than my actual mother. 

She was there most days using the wifi 

because she lived across the street in an apartment without internet. 

We sat at the same table a few times and spoke briefly about life in passing 

and after a few of these not-talking-about-gay-stuff convos I was pretty sure she was a part of the lgbtq community 

and I slipped in a casual pronoun re: an ex 

and she just looked at me, 

stopped completely 

and said “oh thank fuck, I thought so.” 

and instantly started talking about her girlfriend, 

it was like this huge wave of relief washed over both of us 

because we were in a small rural town and both hovering in this really queer space and unable to talk about it. 

Anyway she was really rad and took me to the closest big town to buy me a tim hortons coffee 

because she found it reprehensible that I had been in canada for more than 3 weeks already and hadn’t ever had it. 

Almost instantly it was like 

“oh okay we have this thing in common that other people may not be cool with 

but we can actually exist and not hide shit without the fear of violence or anger”

but when it’s a straight person

they’re pretty much just letting you know that they can spot the fact that you seem “abnormal” to them 

like great