I draw, Yay!

MAY YOU NEVER LOSE YOUR HYPERFIXATION

hot as fuck trans men exist

in this world we’re in

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

RADIATION POISONING

WE DO NEED TO GET INTO THAT

well, oke, so, back when i was in secondary school, like 13-14 years old, we were learning about radiation, and nuclear power, and the like.

for this particular lesson, my teacher had procured a geiger counter to demonstrate everyday radiation and then compare it to recordings of dangerous levels. and so she was scanning shit with it; the furniture, the walls, a bunch of bananas, herself, all of which gave off slightly different but minimal readings. all expected, all normal. and then, she moved on to us.

she walked through the aisles, wafting the geiger counter back and forth as she went, continuing to reel off shit about radiation as the thing beeped its littl beeps, all expected, all normal. until it swung past me and went completely haywire !!

the littl beeps were gone, replaced with loud, angry clicks. so loud that i, everyone sitting near me, and my teacher herself all jolted in shock. she turned it off; everything was quiet, and everyone was staring.

and just like that, the lesson was suddenly paused..

she pointed it at people around me to the sound of beeps, back to me and back to angry clicks. she told me to get up and pointed it at my desk, my bag, my pencil case, and my workbooks; all beeps, back to me; angry clicks. she asked what i'd had for lunch, i said a sandwich, she asked if i'd been inside a nuclear reactor whilst eating it bc with the readings i was giving off not only should i be dead, so should everyone else in the school. i shrugged.

this, apparently, was not a good enough answer. next, she got me to take off my blazer, my tie, my belt, my shoes and socks, and turn out all my pockets. but no matter what, her geiger counter just did not like me. i think if she could've, she'd have gotten me to strip completely naked, as it was, and after about half an hour of this, she finally let me sit back down. though she kept staring at me throughout what was left of the lesson, and jumped to scan me once more as we were all leaving, getting nothing but more angry clicks before shooing me off to my next class.

but i was not yet free bc later (i can't remember if it was later the same day or like, a few days after.. (this all happened over a decade ago lol)), i was back in the science building again, and she saw me and collared me, dragging me over to this other teacher like it was this one !! this one's the radioactive freak !!! (not what she actually said, but that's what it felt like at 14 years of age) and then the fucking geiger counter was back, throwing another littl hissy fit in my direction, and more teachers rolled up to ooh and aah and wtf at my expense, discussing if they should do something about this phenomenon (my existence) and whether it was ethical to experiment on a student.....

but eventually, the head of the science department said it definitely wasn't, and i was very clearly not as dead as the stupid clicking thing was saying i should be, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and i was finally actually set free. but after, that particular science teacher would always squint at me whenever she saw me....

i've been nowhere near a geiger counter since, so it may well have just been a really unrepresented, unresearched side effect of puberty, or maybe that particular geiger counter didn't like my vibe idk, but yeah, as a result, i tell people i'm radioactive bc i think it's funny :3

We’re the new face of failure, prettier and younger but not any better off.

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.

When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.

Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)

Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.

College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.

Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:

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:

Just. A fun thought idea.

Stuff like this always makes me remember how sensationalized the ​“hide your kids, hide your wife” video was, also known as the “bedroom intruder meme” 🗿.