magicandlight

Turned out that someone in the family had brought lilies into the house and put them up high, thinking that the cat wouldn't get to them. Alas, even a lick of pollen from lilies causes fatal kidney damage in cats.

Said cat was not epileptic. Her kidneys were fried, so she lost her life at one year of age.

he also said that it was incredibly unlikely that sexism will ever be resolved in the medical field. that the majority of medications i will ever take - even some of which are "for women" - will not be clinically tested on my body.

the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved. to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant. once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about "the effects of New Medication on the body." instead, the trial would fail - the results would be "the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient."

it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus. that's how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.

at the time, i remember him talking about the ethical implications of testing on a developing fetus; how such testing could theoretically bankrupt a company if a lawsuit was filed. he talked about informed consent and about how long it took for any legislation to be passed about this - that in 1993; the year i was born, it finally became illegal to outright exclude women and minorities from clinical trials.

i remember him shrugging. "that's not to say it doesn't happen," he said. my ears were ringing.

i was thinking about how every time i have been rushed to the ER, the first thing they have asked me is if i am pregnant. when i broke my wrist at 16 years old - despite never having had sex - they made me wait three hours for the test to come back negative before they gave me pain meds. the possibility of a child haunts my health.

how many people have died on the table because they were waiting for the pregnancy test before treatment. how many people have died on the table because they were pregnant, and the only thing we care about is the fetus.

it is hard to explain to other people, but it feels like some kind of strange ghost. our entire lives, we are supposed to "save" our bodies for our future partners. but really we are just saving the body for the future child, aren't we? that hovering future-almost that cartwheels around in a miasma. you can't get your tubes tied, what if you change your mind? think of the child you must have, eventually.

put dates on everything

don’t believe digital stuff is preserved forever - if it’s really important (documents, photos, etc) print it out

name your files accurately I know it sucks but please

don’t destroy the original just bc you scanned it

rubber cement is the devil’s adhesive use photo corners and quit gluing shit

you will NOT remember write it down

if you staple things to the inside of a folder I will find you

Like when some celebrity does deranged conservative shit or whatever, I don't see a lot of calls to "cancel" them. Just a more quiet understanding of "Okay, fuck you then" and moving on to ignoring them, removing them from the conversation entirely. Like how people are trying to get others to understand that no amount of calling out JKR's transphobia is going to move her, and no amount of publicly shaming people for reading Harry Potter is moving them, so the only way to really move on is to stop talking about her and her properties. Same with Dave Chappelle, etc.

We saw this play out most recently with Sydney Sweeney and her "good jeans/genes." Cons wanted to make this into a public canceling because that's what they've learned to respond to. But the overwhelming liberal response to that was "Whatever" and then a possible quiet boycotting of American Eagle that led to a 8% sales decrease after the ad.

Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human

Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

Dazai Osamu, “Waiting”

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Saigo Takamori” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

ii. we hadn't ever seen eye-to-eye about this issue. i am flatly and annoyingly anti-bot. my entire thing is creativity and the empathy of the human spirit. communication should be about connection, not distortion through the lens of AI. otherwise: what is the fucking point.

iii. i am steadfastly loyal in all my personal relationships - to a genuine fault. that fault will become clear to both of us shortly. sometimes when you love someone, you give them the benefit of the doubt; even when you doubt that you benefit.

iv. however. i used to academically cheat a lot. i had all the sad-kid excuses you could possibly want - unsafe home, untreated severe ADHD, bullied at school. i skipped most of my classes, to the point that the truancy officer knew me personally. sometimes i stand on top of my own high-horse policy of why would you use AI? and then i see the hoofbeats i left behind me. didn't i copy homework? didn't i just sparknotes the reading? didn't i write multiple essays just using wiki as my main resource?

v. she started using AI for her job. admittedly it is a tedious, annoying job. the first steps, slippery-slope style, were uses of AI that seemed minimal - checking two documents for minor changes. reading over drafts for conciseness. the kind of thing that pushes but does not bend what "using AI" constitutes as.

vi. for the record; i stopped cheating in college. i instead became the kind of person that other people copied off of. once i'd moved out of the unsafe housing (and was free of bullies), i dedicated myself to my work with a passion my teachers called "honestly a bit much." but isn't it tempting, as an adult? why the hell should i write another cover letter for another position that's being read by AI?

vii. AI became the centerpiece of how she finished all of her writing, the way i had warned her about. the argument was pretty explosive. at that point i'd learned to be scared of her anyway - of ever having a different opinion. i tried to talk about how my own work has probably been skimmed. how it is destroying artists. i asked - how can you do this to the environment? after all - for years, she'd been vegan.

viii. there's no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway. and the world is falling apart. and everyone else does it. i keep hearing - it's here to stay, get used to it. and hell, maybe i'm that guy. sometimes i think of the panic people had when we invented GPS or tablets. how all the adults said it's going to make people stupid. maybe i am paranoid about the decline of civilization because every technological advance always does that to a generation.

ix. her job switched AI programs and she admitted to me that she couldn't really do it anymore. the new AI wasn't trained, wasn't as comprehensive. and she couldn't return to something she'd been doing for five uninterrupted years; that it was like relearning a language that used to be her mother tongue.

x. i don't know exactly when she started using Chat as her therapist. when exactly she started feeding Chat information about me. when she started answering my text messages with the famous unspaced-dash. i have my suspicions. i would have never known for certain, except that one night she opened her laptop to play a movie - and there it was. her chat prompt about me, and our relationship, and how we needed to break up. she said you weren't supposed to see that. i sat there and thought i am going to get dumped by a robot.