Let every eye negotiate for itself

I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.

Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.

My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.

Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"

No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.

Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.

There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?

That's not our responsibility, they said.

But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.

My niece gives me Covid.

This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.

The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.

Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.

Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.

In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)

If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.

Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"

And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!

In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?

I have a friend I know from when we were both 6. She is the only person living nearby and so she saw me go from walking through limping to wheelchair on a daily basis. I keep her updated on my health even tho we rarely hang out anymore. She was gonna come over yesterday and I had to cancel. She asked if I can’t hang out later that day. When I said i won’t feel better later, that if I feel that bad in the morning later will only get worse she got annoyed and “joked” that I’m just finding excuses. And I was surprised, she knows all about me being disabled after all? So, a bit taken aback, I told her it’s a normal thing for me.

“But you got the diagnosis now, aren’t you better?? I thought you’ll get better now”

ches

1. Port Elizabeth (South Africa)

2. Unknown

3. Nairobi (Kenya)

4. Pretoria (South Africa)

5. Aburi Botanical Gardens (Ghana)

6. Cape Town (South Africa)

7. Pretoria (South Africa)

8. Harare (Zimbabwe)

9. Windhoek (Namibia)

10. Windhoek (Namibia)

To @kushandwizdom this is a rather unfair portrayal of Africa as a whole since half of these are literally just South Africa.  So Instead to add to this post and better dispel the myth of Africa as the vast wasteland of poverty most people think, I found a much more mixed collection of pics from various countries.

Luanda, Angola

Agadir, Morocco

Lagos, Nigeria

Cairo, Egypt

Port Louis, Mauritius

Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

Algiers, Algeria

Tripoli, Libya

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Tunis, Tunisia

A redneck neighbor once asked my mom (in the 80s) if they had cars in Peru. Sigh.

Hartford, Connecticut

New Orleans, Louisiana

Camden, New Jersey

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

McDowell County, West Virginia

Flint, Michigan

Washington, D.C.

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

I haven't written in years. Decades, probably. I know I don't do it for the "right" reasons, and anyway, nobody ever seemed to be able to find the time to read anything I sent them.

But when I do write, I sound like this. I always have. Because I wrote to impress my father, an unempathic and unhappy man who admires literature but believes he knows more about it than he does, and so my writing was tailored to his taste. It was the only thing I ever got praised for, even though it always came paired with unsolicited critique.

I recognize now that I only ever wrote so that I would be told I was good at something.

Sometimes when things are bad, I liked to imagine I could write again. After all, we live in a time where people are reading often and all kinds of books - maybe this time, I could find readers.

My career was the only other thing in my life I was ever told I was very good at; It collapsed in 2021, and I haven't heard anyone say that to me since. Sometimes I liked imagining that writing could be a way I would get to hear it again.

Again, I know that's not the right reason to make art. I should be content to make it for nobody except myself, and that should be enough - i should be satisfied that the story is now extant in the world, that I have read it should be enough for me. Alas I am a flawed person; I need to feel like I am doing a good job at something.

So, in a way, I am grateful to OP for this post. I can't imagine how destroyed I would be if I had taken a chance and posted a story, only to have eight thousand people all agree that its some kind of eye-melting slop. I would rather write and share nothing, than have thousands of people all casually laughing about how bad my writing is. OP has spared me from that.

if you look through the replies and tags, you'll find you're far from the only person who felt personally targeted— but you'll also find plenty of people saying they genuinely liked the original excerpt and wanted to read more. that's a good thing!! clearly, there's an audience for that style, and i don't have any interest in arguing otherwise!

what bothers me isn't the vocabulary, or even the (imo overly) lyrical prose itself. when i say “tumblr prose” i mean a particular trend where nearly every sentence feels optimized to sound profound rather than communicate something. beautiful prose isn't the problem! ambiguity isn't the problem either. my issue is when atmosphere begins cannibalizing the storytelling instead of supporting it.

with the original sample, even as the author, i came away knowing very little beyond the mood. i don't really know who these people are, why god is apparently gone, why the antarctic organisms are relevant, or what materially changed over the course of the conversation. there are lots of striking individual lines, but they don't really build into a coherent or particularly interesting whole. it feels like each sentence is trying to be The Line people screenshot and say "this goes hard," rather than working altogether to tell a story. that's ultimately what i was parodying, not people who enjoy this style, and certainly not people who just wanna write! just a trend in online prose that i personally find frustrating as an avid reader

And for a while, reading his posts started to make me really paranoid about my own writing, and to think anything I wrote could be dissected to that level. I almost never saw him compliment a cover, either - those he tended to only post when he disliked them, and it was a lot of covers where I actually liked the style.

Anyway, then one day he posted two covers he'd made for his own WIP, and I'll be honest lads, I thought they were dog shit. Bland, tonally mismatched to the genre, just bad. Absolute casserole. And instantly I was like, oh yeah. You're eloquent and passionate and good at critique, and you're also one person with human opinions that are going to diverge from mine. And that's okay.

And instantly, I no longer felt any insecurity about my own work from him lol.

Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.

Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.

Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.

Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.

Hiss is a low, threatening whisper. Raw, guttural, vicious. It is NOT a literal hiss like an animal, it is a tone of voice that serves the same function. Someone will hiss that they’re going to cut your throat- a message from one person to the other.

Snarl is the same kind of thing. Not literal, it’s a tone of voice that serves the same function. It’s raw and gutteral like a hiss, but more savage than vicious. It’s loud, it’s showy, it’s intimidating. It’s very alpha male, big man, look at how fucking dangerous I am. I’ll take ALL of you on. Even if they’re snarling at one person in particular, nobody better back them up or they’re gonna get fucked up too.

Shriek. Come on, seriously? We’ve all heard people shriek either in fear or outrage. High pitched, loud, out of control, feminine. Men can shriek, but it’s funny and emasculating. Think angry italian women throwing pots and pans or ladies on tables who just saw a mouse.

This is like the top of the hierarchy of needs for me now. This is better than self actualization. There's snails.

reference:

the proportions on the header band have improved, but I think I maybe should have doubled the weft threads for the warp.

I started weaving the spear, penelope, and the right border via double-weave with the intent to leave the remaining warp threads unwoven (as they would be on penelope's loom on the pot), but predictably this is giving me tension problems. I either need to increase the loom weights or just weave the black layer and leave the orange warp threads unwoven, and then switch colors once I get to the heddle bars in the drawing, with the black warp threads floating on top. (I guess weft-faced tapestry would be a third option, if I add a ton more tension.)