Untitled

Please read this, I'm not trying to shame or insult anyone. I've worked in food service and I have loved ones with life threatening allergies, and what I've learned is that most people just aren't taught much about them and don't come across in-depth information casually. So, it's one of those things that you don't know unless someone bothers to really explain, but it's actually really important to learn about because often someone's life may depend on you knowing this.

Some allergens are airborne. Meaning that the proteins which cause the allergic reactions can be in the particulates that come off of the food (the same thing that allows you to smell it, allows the allergen to be inhaled). Nuts and seafood are some of the most severe ones, but not the only examples.

This means it is not at all like a diabetic expecting others not to eat sugar, or a vegan demanding you don't eat meat. A person asking you not to eat an allergen near them is doing so because proximity to the allergen can kill them. An allergy is not a preference, it is not another way of saying you don't like something, it is the term for a type of potentially life threatening illness.

Important to note: Different allergens have different effects, and even the same allergen can range in severity. Dust and pollen making someone tear up and sneeze is a type of allergic reaction, and someone being exposed to shrimp and having their throat close up, going into shock, and dying is another form of allergic reaction. Some people with a mild nut allergy might only have issues if they consume some, and even then it might not be life threatening, while someone with a severe nut allergy could get a lethal reaction just from airborne particles or residue. You can't assume that you know someone else's limits just because you're familiar with your own allergies and reactions.

Allergies are not curable and they are not stress induced. Calming down about it will not lessen a reaction. Allergy medications may reduce the reaction, and some can fight anaphylaxis enough to save your life if you're lucky and take it in time but there is nothing someone with a life threatening allergy can take to prevent reaction entirely, and reacure medications aren't always enough to prevent death. Allergies are a lifelong, incurable illness like diabetes, but they cannot be managed through diet and preventative medication. They're at the mercy of environmental exposures.

Nobody is telling you what to eat in your own space, or what you can order at a restaurant. This is an issue of shared spaces where someone can't just leave if someone opens a bag of peanuts. Especially on an airplane, which is small and sealed off and thousands of feet in the air with no way of just stopping and letting you off in an emergency, if someone is exposed to an allergen in those circumstances they very realistically could die. (this also applies to any kind of public transit and waiting areas. you're asked not to smoke at bus stops because other people who need the transit and have asthma or certain allergies could go into severe respiratory distress).

Sometimes not travelling by plane isn't an option. People with allergies do take responsibility for their own health, to the fullest extent possible without living in a hazmat suit, but sometimes that responsibility can't extend beyond begging the people around them not to expose them to poison. Notifying the passengers and crew was the most responsibility she could possibly take, because her life threatening illness is vulnerable to environmental factors that she has no control over. But sometimes you still need to get on a plane, and beg and pray that nobody chooses to kill you.

I need every single person to understand how horrible tumblr’s tagging system is

I go into the tag for epilepsy and its all flashing lights. We can’t use our own tag because people without epilepsy fill it up with improper warnings.

Use ‘flashing’ in place of ‘epilepsy’ in your tags. You aren’t warning people of epileptics, you’re warning us of flashing lights. Please please tag properly. Epileptics say this endlessly and constantly and it’s ignored. You are risking lives by doing this.

Here’s proof of what I mean:

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:

The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.

Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.

Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.

They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.

Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.

Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.

And stomps the ashes.

KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.

KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.

Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.

Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.