Anyone else like lamps?

Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.

Yes. NTs were shown videos of autistics doing NOTHING. Just existing. No faux pas made. They were judged as weird or off putting.

"Why are women so --- oh but not you, you're different."

"Why are gays so--' but you're not like them, you're more like us."

Krusty The Bird Killer rants for five minutes about black women being 'sluts that all have eight kids with different fathers because they'll lay with anything that moves,' and then talk sweet to our secretary, a black woman in her 40s who doesnt seem to count as a black woman when he's ranting.

I've been trying to put words to this behavior for awhile now. And I think it just comes down to 'us vs them.'

I showed up to work in a cowboy hat and work boots, wasnt afraid of the men's room, and lifted a 50 pound trash bag full of dog shit on my first day. I'm not like other women to them. I dont count. I'm one of us.

I talk about my girlfriend in a quiet way: I dont declare queer supremacy and I dont make my whole life about being queer and oppressed. I'm not like other lesbians. I dont count. I'm one of us.

They dont know me. They dont know my girly interests and they dont know about my political art pieces and they dont know about the fake eyelashes that I wore during pride. They certainly dont know I'm trans.

I passed their test. I'm 'one of the dudes.'

I'm really not, though.

If they saw me outside of work, I would be a Them. But they got to know me first. I'm in their list of "thems that are us." And every them that they meet can be an us. But they dont go out of their way to meet many thems.

I'm a Gay. I'm not the Gays. I'm (to them) a woman. I'm not Women. The secretary is black. But shes not The Blacks (pardon the phrasing, it hurt me to even type it that way.)

Every person is the stereotype of their group until someone gets to know them. But that doesn't disprove the stereotype- it just means that the person doesnt count as part of that group anymore. They're with us now.

Respectability politics really dont get us anywhere. If you're out to disprove the stereotype out of a sense that you'll change their minds, I'm telling you that energy is better spent living authentically if you are safe to do so.

He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.

So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.

He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.

So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.

so great! your quality of life has fucking dematerialized! within the span of this week, your apartment is a pigsty. you keep having racing thoughts that slam you awake at 2 in the morning, and then the next day you collapse in a brain fog by 3PM. but you need to go to your fucking job anyway so that you can have the insurance to pay for the meds that you're not even getting but you need the meds so you can do your fucking job! you need to make money to pay for the apartment you can barely afford as it is! so good luck. your negative coping mechanisms have started to creep back in. you find yourself loud, annoying, vapid. you fucking hate it.

and here's the thing - these meds are life changing, but not necessarily life saving. it's like going through life without your glasses on - you're struggling, but it probably won't kill you. it's just fucking annoying because the solution exists, and you can't obtain it. and the whole time you are begging the pharmacist to please just fucking fill the prescription all you can think is - holy shit. i'm so fucking lucky that i don't need these to actually survive.

like, are you miserable, sinking quickly into suicidal? sure. but you keep picturing the people who aren't okay-without-it, and it makes you so fucking sad and angry and disgusted with the whole thing that fire-and-static start running up and down your limbs because of course you want to help, of course you'd cut your hair off and hold out your own body, but what are you going to do about it? because fuck! remember the first time they accidentally filed your insurance wrong and said that your meds would be three hundred fucking dollars per-fucking-month? you stood there, shaking, your hand on your credit card, thinking - i have no idea how to make that work. and how you felt like the world was laughing, big and loud and long.

because it didn't matter! they can just say whatever fucking number they want! they could say any number, and you'd pay it, because you have to pay it. they figured out long ago what the landlords are just-now starting to recognize: profiteering in the age of capitalism isn't ever punished. if it's food or housing or medicine, you're going to pay for it, aren't you, darling.

god bless america! does it hurt? does it hurt, are you going to cry about it, in one massive, horrible sob?

and of course this is an incredibly busy week at your job. of course your life is currently falling apart. the life you're fighting so hard to cling to is in a world where it's an obscene luxury to own a fucking dog. you still have outstanding medical debt because you dared to experience hardship. don't mention the student debt. don't mention the price of groceries. don't mention how we have been through at least two life-changing recessions and nobody in the middle class has actually recovered from that yet.

be good, be an adult, handle your shit. call them again. feel like you want to scream, don't scream. feel your brain getting further and further from you. god, how the fuck did you ever live like this?

you tell your mom on the phone today while you drive to the fucking pharmacy again for the third time in the last 24 hours: if they don't have it i'm just hopping the counter and grabbing the first arm i see with my teeth. i'm going full alka seltzer with this one. they're going to need a rabies shot. and you realize you're not even mad you're just fucking desperate; the kind of beg that sounds like a whimper.

home of the free and the brave! it's not that you feel trapped, it's that they've taken you hostage.

There are four medications that are both hard to find in forms I'm not allergic to and pretty essential to my quality of life.

Metformin.... Every pill version I could take was recalled years ago and never came back to market. I went from very well controlled prediabetic to needing insulin to failing insulin to extremely insulin resistant and needing liraglutide. We eventually found a compounded topical version because liraglutide alone wasn't enough.

Liraglutide was an insurance battle. There, but so expensive i couldn't afford it out of pocket. Six months without it damaged me permanently.

There is one form of duloxetine that I've found that does not contain inactive ingredients I'm allergic to. One tiny pharmacy was willing to order it for me.

But the worst is fondaparinux.

See, I need anticoagulants to live. I have three different clotting issues. And I don't process warfarin correctly. The amount of lovenox I would have to take is so high that i was having to do two syringes per dose twice a day and the volume burned like fire. I'm allergic to something in the oral anticoagulants and so fondaparinux is the only med that works consistently for me without horrible side effects and no one carries it normally and every once in a while the pharmacy that orders it can't order it and then I have to find a new one to order it but most pharmacies flat out can't even get it from their wholesaler. I've had four pulmonary embolisms. Going without anticoagulants is terrifying.

Multiple drugs I've taken for ra have been approved for use in covid and that's its own brand of terrifying because it means supply issues happen. Hell, oxycodone supply issues mean filling that is chancy and fraught.

But the ADHD thing is happening specifically by design because of government action, which makes it even more frustrating. (Oxycodone has the same issue. These are not difficult drugs to make and supply except for artificially imposed volume limits that primarily hurt legitimate users.)

Most medication is regulated by the FDA- the guys in charge of making sure food and drugs are consumed safely.

But Adderall, and anything else considered a scheduled drug (testosterone, for example; which I am also on), is controlled by the people whose job it is to make sure people don't get drugs.

The DEA strictly regulates how much of a medication can be manufactured, and when ADHD diagnoses increased during the pandemic (because telehealth made healthcare as a whole more accessible), manufacturers were not allowed to keep up with demand.

They still aren't. The DEA has blamed just about everything they can for the shortage, from one manufacturer's issues with production now years ago, to the accused "overdiagnosis" of ADHD.

The DEA has also, more recently, set restrictions on how much pharmacies are allowed to dispense. These numbers are not adjusted for local population counts, and they are also not being communicated to the pharmacists, so often pharmacies are running into those limits suddenly and without warning.

Just to say that it's the "war on drugs"; not pharmacies, and not even really manufacturers, causing these problems.

Also, just because I've been dealing with this too: the best way of navigating this issue I've been able to find has been to, in this order:

Call pharmacies until you find one with your meds in stock. Make sure they have the right dose and enough to fill the whole scrip. (Call big pharmacies first; Costco has been a safe bet for me so far. Then the rural ones, if you can get to them.)

Call your doctor to refill your meds, and tell them they need to send it to that pharmacy, ASAP, or you will not be able to get your meds. Communicate how much you have left/how long you've been off your meds. (But y'know, be cool about it)

If your doctor's office isn't responding to your calls, show up in person, if you can. This goes for your pharmacy as well. My experience has been that they rarely respond to anything in text, they usually respond to calls, and they can't ignore you if you're physically there.

Get a timeframe from them on when you can expect that the pharmacy will have heard from them.

Call your pharmacy after that amount of time and ask if they have the scrip, and when you can pick it up if so.

If they don't have it yet, call your doctor again.

Repeat steps 5 & 6 as needed.

I doubt most of this is super new to most people, but figuring this out has been a nightmare, and this is how I've been able to get my partner's and my own scrips filled relatively quickly these last few months. Hopefully it saves someone some trouble.

Adult literacy is low.

Child literacy is low.

Information literacy has shifted dramatically in the last decade, but reputable information sources like research journals and factual news reporting have been unable to keep pace.

We are genuinely in a crisis of media literacy, with ever fewer genuinely factual resources available in the style and language used by contemporary audiences.

It may sound condescending, but we genuinely need to remind people, or worse, explain to them for the first time that art is not evidence of real world behaviour.

So, thank you, for this reminder. Genuinely.

You're correct:

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

We've been in a productivity boom for the past 60 years, but the one area where production cannot become more efficient is the arts. It takes the same amount of time to write a novel or compose a symphony now as it did a hundred years ago. That's just the creative process.

AI represents a shortcut to making art that has had executives salivating since LLMs and AI art generators hit the internet. It means more content faster with the benefit of not having to provide salaries, sick days, parental leave, time off, or healthcare. It means not having to deal with unions and labour laws. It means cutting humans out of the most fundamentally human activity we do – making art.

All those headlines and clickbait articles about AI annihilating the human race are a hyperbolic distraction from the actual problem we may soon be facing where people won't have the possibility of supporting themselves making art (not that it's particularly easy to do as it stands).

when i’m at work, people get mad at me for not hearing them the first few times. like, openly agitated. they’ll assume that i’m stupid, or rude, or careless. sometimes they will indirectly chastise me for ‘not paying attention.’ at which point i say “i’m sorry, i’m hard of hearing. you were on my right side and i’m severely deaf in that ear,” and they go “oh my god i’m so sorry i didn’t know.”

yeah. you didn’t, did you? the only available information you had about me was… that i didn’t hear you say something. the thing you hated enough to comment on was that i couldn’t hear you. you don’t get to backpedal once you find out that i have can’t-hear-well disease. i shouldn’t need to present a diagnosis to expect decency from you

I don't get it. what.

Like. You asked for an explanation.

A reason to keep yelling at you

You to shut up and stop pointing out the issues with their statement

An opportunity to use one of the ready-made arguments they can pull out a moment's notice to shut down or refute your explanation with (regardless of whether it actually does)

A simple response that allows them to move the goalposts