Random sh*t

I recently had my first full dental cleaning in a decade. I had so much shit caked on my teeth that it took *hours.* And you know what the dentist told me? That he was impressed with how well I did for the super invasive cleaning, and that the dental team was really excited that they were helping me get a fresh start to good oral hygiene.

The hygienist even recommended me a good electric toothbrush that would specifically help me keep the spaces between my teeth clean, because I expressed that I have a hard time flossing due to disability and abnormal tooth spacing. She told me that she was excited to help me have and KEEP my fresh start, and told me several times how good it is that I came in to get some help.

Building the airport in this location will destroy an ancient landscape, one shaped by the Incan people with terraces and routes.

Critics also suggest that planes flying low over the nearby village of Ollantaytambo and its archaeological park filled with ruins and a massive Inca fortress with large stone terraces, would cause incalculable damage to fragile Inca ruins there and destroy the peace and beauty of the area.

The new airport will make access to the site much easier, and thus encourage greater numbers than ever before to visit.

But Machu Picchu is already overwhelmed by almost double the limit of tourists as recommended by UNESCO. [see also India’s Taj Mahal - an incredible site simply reeling under a relentless, ineffectively managed tourist, both domestic and international, onslaught]

hey! peruvian here

to be completely honest, there is probably nothing anyone can do about this at this point because it has been in the works since the 90’s. as you can most likely tell, our government is a fucking joke. still, this needs international attention. a lot of it. this is my country’s history, culture and one of the most beautiful things we have to offer at risk.

Sometimes Noodle prefers to have his existential crisis in the fridge 

Image of the “The Simpsons” meme where the bus driver taps the sign. The bus driver is taping the bottom left of the sign in the both images. The first one reads “Asexuality and aromanticism are inherently queer experiences. Even if an ace person is heteromantic or an aro person is heterosexual, they are still queer by the virtue of their aspec experience.”

The next image says, “Our heteronormative society is both allonormative and amatonormative and, therein, expects all people to experience sexual and romantic attraction exclusively to someone of the ‘opposite’ gender by default. Asexuality and aromanticism undoubtedly queer those rigid standards.”

The problem comes in when you start connecting things that you don’t need to connect, like “mild displeasure” with “OH GOD EVERYONE HATES ME” or “I feel a little crummy” with “I AM THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD”.

So when we’re talking about Life Skills/ADLs, you gotta use that power to make your life easier, not harder. You gotta connect things when it makes your life better and NOT do it when it makes your life harder. 

Here’s an example of the habits: 

I had a stretch of time where I was too sick to do much of anything. I could barely get out of bed to get to the bathroom. I was walking with a stick and generally just… le dead. And one of the problems I had was that I could almost never remember to take my morning meds. 

I decided that the first time I got up to use the bathroom every day, I’d take my meds. That way I was taking them no matter how crap I felt- I had to get up to pee, like it or not- and it was getting done pretty early in the morning. 

Getting up to pee meant taking my meds; they were the same thing. I didn’t have to remember to take my meds separately, or set an alarm to remind myself, or anything like that. I just did it as part of something I had to do anyway.

As time went on and I started getting better, I realized I could do the same thing with other parts of my routine. If you connect something you need to do with something you have to do, the thing you need to do gets done.

So like… say I’m already in the habit of getting up to take a shower. I’ve lived in crappy apartments my entire life, so the water takes a minute to warm up. Since my countertop dishwasher is right outside my bathroom door, I’ll take a second to empty and load the dishwasher while the water’s still heating up. It just becomes part of the routine of taking a shower. 

You don’t have to think about Doing The Extra Thing. Connecting it to something you’re already doing means that, after a certain point, it just… happens, automatically.

 The problem comes in when you start trying to do this with tasks- things that you only have to get done once, that already have a fair few steps to them. Especially if that task is has a lot of steps, has a time limit, or is otherwise Hard for you. 

Figuring out tasks with dependencies (I have to do this before I can do this!) is already hard for us ADHDers. Sometimes what happens is that you bundle two tasks together- you decide you can’t do something until you’ve done the other thing, even though these tasks are in no way connected. 

Here’s an example: 

I have three packages I need to mail. One of them is a gift for a friend in Australia, which costs a lot of money; one of them is a package for my Etsy store which is Not Finished Yet, and one is a very late Christmas package. 

I might decide, “hey, I need to mail all three of these packages together! I can’t mail any of these packages until I bundle all of them!” But it’s probably smarter to mail them separately! I don’t want to make my friend with the late Christmas package wait any more, so I can mail that first, and then mail the Australia package when I have the money and the Etsy package when it’s finished. 

But if I insist that I have to bundle these tasks… I won’t get any of them done. I’ll be too stressed out about the Etsy package not being done to mail the other two packages, and then I will run out of money for the Australia package, and the Christmas package will not get sent til Labour Day.

At the end, after years of trying and failing to reconnect, they happen to encounter each other again, by pure chance, in some ordinary public venue – and after a moment of shocked recognition, they’re both like “you!”, and proceed to pull out a pair of previously unhinted-at handguns and have a sickass gun-fu battle that goes on for like ten minutes and ends with them falling off a building while locked in life-or-death struggle.

i said what i said. i wasn’t confused about saying it.

if i found out a woman had aborted a fetus because she found out that fetus had a disability that i have—disabilities that i have firsthand knowledge of being painful, difficult to live with, and often resource-intensive—i would not be angry with her. i would not feel like she doesn’t think people like me should not be alive (unless she actually said so).

fetuses are not little potential “you”s. projecting your own anxieties onto a woman’s abortion (”i wouldn’t have wanted to be aborted” is common reasoning in plenty of pro-life circles; it’s not better here) is invasive and nonsensical.

bodily autonomy isn’t conditional. you don’t know a woman’s exact reason for abortion and you don’t need to. women’s rights to abortion need to be protected, even if you feel icky about some potential reasoning behind an abortion, which you aren’t even fully privy to in the first place.

disabled people should always be in the care of people who have the resources and desire to take care of them. insisting that disabled children be born simply to ease your own moral qualms with abortion is frankly unethical in my opinion, resources are often very slim for disabled people. not to mention our quality of life is often just lower in general. you can argue all you want in the notes about “mild” disabilities but you aren’t the arbiter of what constitutes a mild enough disability to make an abortion terrible and immoral and shame-worthy. 

women aren’t vessels. regardless of how morally pure you feel your crusade is, they simply aren’t.

speaking as a disabled person, energy is literally always better spent on changing society—by increasing resources for caretakers and disabled people alike, speaking frankly about quality of life, correcting notions about what disabled people’s lives are like, punishing mistreatment of actual disabled people [not potential ones], and putting research into easing the pain/suffering of people as much as possible—than it is on getting mad about women getting abortions. and it isn’t just better spent that way, it’s just immoral to do the latter.

I AM DECEASED 😭😭