WOW!

So I’m aware I haven’t really posted anything in a while but I hope this reaches someone. My brother’s name is Efren. Growing up he used to tease and make fun of me, but among all the teasing he also helped raise me along with our mom. When he was little he wanted to be an architect. But his is the story that a lot of Mexican American working class families face: either take the opportunities available to you to attain your dreams, or curtail those in order to take care of your family. He chose his family. After graduating high school he turned down full ride scholarships in order to stay and work to help pay the bills. It was just him, my mom, and me. After a couple of years we got stable enough economically that he was able to go to college, but after graduation we fell on hard times again and instead of finding work in his field or applying to architecture school like he always dreamed, he decided to stick around and help us again. It’s because of his choice to help our family that I was able to go to college too, something that for a time I didn’t think was possible. It’s because of him that I was able to apply to and get accepted into a PhD program in the hopes of becoming a professor. It’s because of him that my mom has a house to call her own. My mom and I owe him everything. Yesterday, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). He’s uninsured. I’m a student, our mom works in childcare. There’s a high success rate for remission if he gets treatment, but we can’t afford it. He’s all me and my mom have, and we can’t lose him. He chose family growing up, and it’s my turn to choose him. Please, any donation helps. I just want him to come home.

I know times are tough with covid and everything so if anyone could please just spare a dollar or a reblog thatd be great. I can’t lose him.

paypal.com/Yulenni

cash.me/$pastandfuturequeen

venmo: @Yulenni

First off, thank y’all so so much for the generosity, advice, and kind words y’all have shared. I honestly thought this might get a couple hundred notes I didn’t know it would get over 12k!!!! I’m so incredibly thankful to everyone who’s reblogged and donated and messaged me. Y’all truly don’t know how much it means to me and my family.

Now I wanna post a couple updates here. A lot of y’all pointed out that hospitals should have financial aid or pointed out some charities that could help, and for that I’m very thankful. Yesterday we applied to the hospital financial aid but they told us that he likely only qualifies for a 50% discount on their sliding scale because of income. We’re incredibly thankful for that help of course, but 50% of $30k/month is still $15k/month for treatment. I also spent yesterday applying to different cancer charities and Catholic charities and Latino charities and government assistance but ofc cancer related assistance is in really high demand and a lot of charities are strained thin because of covid and people losing their jobs.

I’m incredibly grateful for y’all’s extreme generosity, so far through the gofundme, Venmo, cashapp, and PayPal we’ve received $8,327.64 and I’m absolutely blown away. I’m in tears writing this I didn’t know people could be so generous. I know times are tough with covid and a lot of families are going through the unimaginable. I don’t know how much more this post can circulate on tumblr, so now I’m just asking if y’all could do this:

Please spread this post and the gofundme link on your other social media.

I’ve made this post on Twitter that y’all can retweet (link) but I don’t have Instagram or Facebook or Reddit because I’m admittedly kind of a hermit. So I’m incredibly thankful for everything y’all have done, I’m just hoping that maybe some of y’all will spare a retweet or a repost and help get the word out to as many people as possible. Thank y’all. God bless.

Apologies for the late update. But first and foremost I just wanna say:

Thank you so much.

We’re blown away by everyone’s generosity, I never thought that this would gain as much traction as it did, and Efren also wants to say thank you so much. Words really don’t do justice to the overwhelming amount of support and love that we’ve received though this and though everyone reaching out and offering your kind words and suggestions. When I showed this gofundme to Efren he was speechless, both my mom and I cried because now he gets to stick around just a little bit longer, and that would’ve never happened were it not for everyone’s support. So a million times, thank you.

Now for the (actual) update: Since we heard about the diagnosis, we’ve been applying to a couple of different charities and to St. Francis’, SCCA’s, and UW Medical Center’s financial aid departments respectively. I want to give a quick shout out to people who offered advice and helped us navigate this whole financial situation. Thanks to everyone’s help, Efren’s been able to see a whole army of doctors and hospital staff (Efren says there’s too many to count) and he’s gotten his first round of chemo with more to come in the following weeks. Because of you guys, he’s been able to laugh and talk shit about me for the first time since we got the diagnosis, something I never would’ve thought I’d miss. The bill has gone way WAY down, so now we’re looking at a total of $25k instead of $200k, mostly for meds and the initial emergency room visit.

We never expected this much help and generosity. We’ve set up a payment plan for the remaining amount so it’s not gonna be due all at once – this is a long road to remission as I’m sure some of you may know, so hopefully a combination of payment plans and a diet of ramen packets (I’m kidding mostly) will help us weather this storm. Again, my whole family and I just want to thank each and every single person who’s donated, shared, and sent kind words or prayers our way. God bless you all.

(Including the funds from PayPal, cashapp, and Venmo):

Fuck. Capitalism.

Here’s an article from Reuters. From the article:

World Trade Organization members on Thursday delayed a decision on a proposal to waive intellectual property rules for COVID-19 drugs and vaccines amid ongoing opposition from wealthy countries, a Geneva trade official said.

“Big Pharma” has rejected an idea proposed by India and South Africa that would grant compulsory licensing of the vaccines and drugs by overriding patent rules of WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement, allowing generic or other manufactures to make the new products.

The proposal has won support from some countries at the WTO but is opposed by Western countries, including Britain, Switzerland and the United States, which have strong domestic pharmaceutical industries.

Non-governmental organisations have been pressuring rich governments to ease rules temporarily as they did during the AIDS epidemic, arguing that they create barriers to access to affordable medicines and vaccines for vulnerable people around the world. This week, the WTO received a petition signed by more than 900,000 people asking it to “ensure access to life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and equipment for everyone in the world.”

‘Thursday’ in the above article refers to 10th December 2020. From Bloomberg on 17th December:

Back at the WTO, delegates have agreed to keep discussions open and were due to submit a report to the WTO’s General Council meeting on Dec. 16, highlighting the “current lack of consensus” on the issue, according to a statement from the organization.

The WTO has still not decided on this. They will continue the discussion in early 2021 (WTO tweet and website). The global petition referred to in the article is still taking signatures.

You could use some facts before az*ris bombard you with picures of 2018 Libya claiming it as their current “damages and disasters”.

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Hitler often used it to cite how history would forget about his “final solution”, as they didn’t remember the Armenian genocide, did they? 

My family is in America for the sole reason that the first Armenian genocide drove them out. My grandmother knows nothing of what happened to her cousins and aunts and uncles, and still, to this day, the Armenian genocide is not recognized by Turkey. 

It’s happening again. The Azerbaijan and Armenian conflict over Artsakh, an area that Azerbaijan claims is theirs, but is inhabited heavily by Armenians, has been restarted, and the people living there are in serious danger, as Turkey is now lending their military aid to Azerbaijan as well, while the rest of the world is turned the other way. 

I know we’re all so fatigued from the shitshow that has been 2020, and how difficult it can be to comprehend yet another tragedy, but if you have a moment, please just educate yourself on what’s happening in Armenia and Artsakh, educate a friend, and take a look at the some of the resources I’ll link below, I would be so grateful. Don’t let history annihilate my people again. 

explaining why the conflict has re-started

a help Armenia carrd

donate- the Armenia Fund

Hero, dodging: but your entire room? I’m not painting my entire room orange

These are all from the same project/concept that I don’t think I’m gonna do anything more with, but I like a lot of the sketches so I decided to clean some of them up a little and just post them + one actual finished drawing. They’re not in chronological order, so you can fill in the blanks with whatever you think is going on here!

[image ID: two tweets from user Wagatwe Wanjuki. The first is in response to a tweet that reads: “Pretty much every elite athlete on earth was born with a body that does shit differently than “normal people.” Caster Semenya is being penalized for how her body works just because of trans panic. Nobody ever asked Michael Phelps to get a lung removed to make it fairer!”

Wagatwe replies: “Not just because of trans panic. This is also about Black womanhood and Africanness and how we are never “woman” enough.”

Her second tweet reads: “Transphobia, racism, & colonialism are all at play. It’s not lost on me that it’s a court in a white country deciding what a Black woman must do to her body. state-sanctioned medical “interventions” against BW based on perceived deviance from “true” white womanhood aren’t new.”

And as disclaimer: everything in the tweets is correct EXCEPT for calling it transphobia and trans panic.

this dude actually found a large fossil deposit that was created not just close to, but actually DURING THE K-PG EXTINCTION EVENT.

IT’S LITERALLY A WINDOW BACK IN TIME TO THE CHICXULUB IMPACT, AND TURNS OUT IT WAS WORSE THAN ANYTHING WE COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED

- chicxulub is the given name for the meteor that struck/initiated the event

- the paleontologist within is described as making groundbreaking discoveries of multiple species every day, but many of his peers discount him because they’re grouchy old dudes he accidentally had a fragment of a turtle bone involved in a larger reconstruction of a fossil this one time and they won’t let him live it down.

- the extinction event was so fast and so destructive, this guy describes this particular dig-site as being so densely layered with dead and dying creatures, there is a lot of organic tissues that have been preserved, and he is able to even discern that many of the marine and freshwater fish may have still been alive as they were buried due to molten glass being found in their gills, implying they were still attempting to breathe.

- they looked into exactly when and how this could have happened, having freshwater and marine animals stacked on top of mammals and larger dinosaurs (including an amazing deinonychus forearm discovery he was able to match to feather fossils he was finding atop the pile), and rather it being the initial tsunami, they are fairly sure that it was caused by a seiche of catastrophic proportions, which would have been set off within the first hour of the event. denser and larger creatures sunk to the bottom, leaving lighter debris like leaves, small fish, feathers, and molten glass on the surface.