Hello, I'm Pebble!

Anyway, she follows it up with, “My husband and I just recently won our custody battle with our foster daughter and she means the world to us. She’s a beautiful African American girl and her hair looks a lot like yours. But I’m afraid because I don’t know what to do with her hair. It’s a lot different from mines and our other children and we are at a total loss. I’ve tried looking up the YouTube videos and my husband went to the braiding shops so they can teach him how to properly braid her hair, but he’s still pretty new and it will be a while before he gets used to it. Do you have any tips you can give me? If you don’t have the time, it’s okay, really! I just needed a little advice because I want her to look beautiful.”

Y’all. swear I almost started crying on aisle 6. So for the last 30 minutes, I spent my time talking to her and what products to use and how to properly detangle and comb her hair with the proper tools and what not to do with natural hair. And I showed her a bunch of easier to follow natural hair tutorials on YouTube and saved them for her. (I also had to create a YouTube account for her so she could save it for later.) but omfg, she was so sweet, and I could tell that she listened to every single thing I had to say and she took little notes on her little notepad.

And what really filled my heart was the fact that her husband actually taking classes from African braiding shops. And she showed me a picture of him wearing a little sweater vest and loafers in a little shop surrounded by beautiful black women showing him how to braid black hair and even the lady he’s braiding on is guiding his hands. And omfg. Bless these old white people and their black daughter who I know have new loving parents because they are willing to step out of their comfort zone just to make her feel and look beautiful.

Thanks for reading,

This is the 10th Anniversary Edition of "It's Not A Race." Originally released in August, this version is months late because the prospect of adding pages to what is easily my most read works was particularly daunting.

"what is this BABY doing in space!???"

Thanks for reading,

This is the 10th Anniversary Edition of "It's Not A Race." Originally released in August, this version is months late because the prospect of adding pages to what is easily my most read works was particularly daunting.

It's like how a bunch of celebs were big on body positivity and fat liberation...until Ozempic dropped and it turns out no, none of them ever believed any of that! They just pretended to bcs up until now healthy, long term weight loss was impossible so they had no choice but to cope by learning to love themselves no matter how they looked...but now that it's here we can go back to the truth! Being fat is ugly and gross and unhealthy and you should starve yourself and take experimental meds right now so you can be skinny which is what ALL humans are clearly supposed to be!! Yeah that body positivity stuff was fun, but come on. We know you actually just wanna be skinny and think being fat is a fate worse than death.

That's what it feels like to me. Every single time. Honestly in a lot of other areas too, one of the big issues with the left is that they really do seem to think that Republicans are right about how things work and should work but we just pretend otherwise because it's the right thing to do and it reduces suffering. Which seems fine, but you cannot be an effective leftist like this. You do actually have to deconstruct your beliefs and biases and world systems, you can't go around like "well yeah we aren't gonna kill disabled people that's eugenics and it's wrong" when you clearly don't actually think it's wrong. You think eugenics would work but implementing it would be uncivilized, and it shows. You have to actually understand that racism and ableism and all other forms of bigotry are not just cruel, but entirely incorrect.

It's not experimental for diabetes care, it is experimental when it comes to weight loss, and basically everything you've heard about it has been on the word of the company, from people paid by the company to say what the company wants them to say, and cannot be trusted! Being skinny isn't worth paralyzing your digestive tract, as someone who genuinely is dealing with a mild form of that, trust me, YOU DO NOT WANT THIS. IT IS NOT WORTH IT. I cannot decribe the sheer, suffocating agony of knowing that I am starving to death despite shoveling food into my mouth 24/7. And also, it doesn't even keep you skinny!!! IT DOESN'T EVEN KEEP YOU SKINNY!!!!!!!!

Interestingly nutrition science, like eugenics, is another field where people think their feelings on it reflect the facts when that could not be further from the truth. Literally the general feeling consensus around nutrition is the POLAR OPPOSITE of the truth 9 times out of 10.

You do not need to eat less, you need to eat more.

Fat and sugar and salt and carbs are good for you, outside of medical diets for stuff like diabetes, POTs, and hypertension you do not need to cut any of these, if anything you probably need more given how normalized restriction is in our society especially of these CRUCIAL nutrients.

Part of the reason that cannibalism doesn't actually save people in situations that come to it is because your body literally cannot absorb a LOT of nutrients if you don't eat them with fat, and starvation victims are notoriously low in fat. If you don't eat any fat with your food you're getting basically nothing outta it at all. Wasting your time chewing, my dude.

Restricting will never fix your cravings, the only way to get rid of them is to let yourself eat whatever you want as much as you want, and anything else is making it worse. If you cannot have a single bag of candy in your house without eating all of it in a few hours is a sign you have an eating disorder and restriction is not the solution. Eating disorders are a lot like OCD, more rules are not gonna fix anything, you actually do have to let go.

Eating way too much protein is just gonna give you colon cancer, you need fiber too.

Keto isn't sustainable long term and is an emergency treatment for severe epilepsy in children, it will not help you lose weight in a healthy way because that's not what it's for and you need medical supervision to even do it right. At home it's just cutting carbs which is starving yourself.

Carbs are also not bad for you, and you do actually need to eat them.

Bar allergies and other legitimate health issues, everything you enjoy has a place in your diet.

Food that tastes good is better for you than food that tastes bad, eating healthy bland salad of kale and nothing is less healthy than eating a salad filled with nuts and apples and cheese and boiled eggs covered in balsamic vinegar and bacon bits.

1500 calories a day is a starvation diet well below what even just your brain needs to turn on, and eating that little will kill you faster than eating McDonalds three meals a day every day.

Weight cycling is awful for you, and people who have an "overweight" BMI tend to actually be healthier than people with a healthy or underweight rating.

Also the BMI scale is notoriously bullshit, nothing that's standards can be changed by an insurance company being annoying for money has any buisnesses being taken seriously.

Juice cleanses aren't a thing, you're just starving yourself. Your kidneys and liver are all the cleansers you need.

Intermittent fasting is an eating disorder that will kill you.

Weight loss surgeries are mutilation, do not work, kill people, and should be illegal.

There is no real, healthy, easy way to lose weight long term, almost every person who intentionally loses weight through dieting will regain more than they lost and be less healthy for it, and you're better off just letting yourself eat what you want, eat lots of different things, and get some exercise in than artificially inflate your cortisol levels by living like a famine victim as if that won't kill you so much fucking faster than anything else, dude, if there is ONE thing we know it's that stress is AWFUL for you. And we're all already so fucking stressed out, don't make it worse!!!

Also, this one might hurt a little but was actually the thing that chased the last of the disordered eating internalized fatphobia outta me; as someone who has experienced pretty profound weight loss twice now due to health issues uh...so where your body holds fat is just where your body holds fat. You can't actually change that. Losing weight will not get rid of your arm, chin, thigh, ass, or tummy fat if those are the places your body holds fat. My body is 100% visually smaller and it just looks the same but smaller, like someone scaled me down, no fat redistribution at all occurred, ever, aside from just...off my body entirely following my natural proportions and fat stores. So legit. Trying to lose weight to make your body look physically different in this way is a waste of time. Don't do this to yourself. Just learn to love your body, I beg you, it's so much easier. I'm 132lbs and still have a double chin, and I no longer feel even remotely bad about it at all.

The other thing that scared the last of that out of me was realizing my Nonna, bless her, is in her 80s and my early 30s and I have never shared a meal with her. She will spend all day cooking and never touch a bit of it for herself and instead just eat a hummus and sprout sandwich and then cry in the kitchen at night eating a whole party bag of M&Ms and she has lived like that for EIGHTY FUCKING YEARS. I do not recall a time I ever ATE THE SAME FOOD as my maternal grandmother during a meal. That's so sad. She's an amazing cook, too, really. She can make anything and make it delicious and I just. It ruins me to think of the joy she's denied herself. I feel legit grief for her.

And I won't end up like that. I fucking refuse.

All that to say, just because you feel like being fat is bad for people, doesn't mean that feeling is backed up by literally any science at all, and the fact that you are so comfortable with the idea that your feelings reflect the facts on this you're trusting what fucking Novo Nordisk and Eli Lily tell you shows that you have some huge fucking blindspots in the way you navigate the world that you need to get to patching.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

apparently the murder happened in 2023 after doing some research but the murderer has been found not guilty.

The store owner got his gun out, and he and his son started chasing the 14-year-old boy, because they FALSELY believed he stole FOUR BOTTLES OF WATER.

The boy who was being CHASED WITH A GUN FOR NO REASON did carry a gun, and it would have been very much justified to actually take it out (because he feared for his life since he was being CHASED WITH A GUN FOR NO REASON), but witnesses never saw it in his hands, and at no point did he actually point it at his two pursuers. He had his back towards them the entire time because he was FLEEING.

The kid stumbled and fell, dropping his gun in the process. The gun was only ever seen on the ground next to his body, it probably fell from his waistband or pocket or whatever, not his hands. And since it was dropped, he did not have it on him AT ALL when he was murdered. He was SHOT IN THE BACK WHILE LYING UNARMED ON THE GROUND.

The sheriff's report written in 2023 said that this was "not a bias-motivated incident" even though there is literally zero ambiguity that this man was just itching to shoot a Black kid. There is no other explanation for why you would take your gun out and chase him more than 100 yards over a vague, weak, unfounded suspicion that he might have stolen four (4) bottles of water. In and of itself, the train of thought "this Black kid was holding four bottles of water at some point, and now he's leaving the store, clearly there's no chance that he simply put them back, he must have stolen them" is already racist as hell. But the cops say "well there's absolutely no indication that shooting an unarmed 14-year-old Black boy because you falsely suspected him of stealing a few dollars worth of water was motivated by bias" because of fucking course they do.

So Muslims and Christians have a right to certain sites in Israel because they have deep religious significance, but Jews don’t? They have no right to their own damn indigenous land? To the birthplace of their entire culture, religion, language, and identity? The amount of mental gymnastics and Jew hatred required to make these statements is mind numbing.

And for anyone that’s curious, Muslims and Christians already can and have been to Jerusalem for decades. The whole “Jerusalem is for everyone” is so fucking stupid because literally anyone can visit already. And this argument is even more rich when considering the Temple Mount, the literal holiest site in Judaism, has highly restricted access to non-Muslims. Jews cannot visit their own holiest site without massive restrictions and they are not allowed to pray there. Only as recent as this year have SOME Jews been allowed to pray there (discreetly and out of sight). They’re facing these restrictions in their own indigenous land, no less! You would think since Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” country they’d get rid of these restrictions in their own fucking capital city.