Never Settle

this is the perfect grade of good luck

My four-year-old sister, however, is under the impression that it’s just “3D freckles”, and that they look very, very pretty. She wants all of my freckles to “pop out”, especially the ones across my nose; they’re her favourite.

And it puts me in this weird position where I can’t say, “No, this is acne, and it’s bad,” because I don’t want to teach her that it’s a bad to have unclear skin, you know?

Because the more I think about interactions I have with children, the more I realise that children will consistently compliment “flaws” until they’ve been taught not to.

Like, a kid at the library, whose sister has vitiligo, saw my scars once and suggested that his sister and I should be cats for Halloween, since I have “tabby skin” and she has “calico skin”. “I can be a black cat,” he immediately added. “It’s not AS cool, but they’re the spookiest.”

When I started losing weight, my little brother immediately demanded that I gain it back, because I wasn’t as comfortable to cuddle with anymore.

And my other little sister always wants to wear her paint-stained clothes to school so that “everyone can tell [she’s] an artist”.

Like I thought I was just acquaintances with this person because they never told me details about themselves and we just talked movies and writing . But then they made time to have coffee with me and they showed up out of breath because they ran. Like. RAN to be on time for coffee with me?

And I was like “i don’t mind waiting” cause I never want to run

But they said they wanted every minute they could get because I’m so busy usually

Which is when it clicked that I didn’t get how much they considered me a friend because I just straight away didn’t see MY signs of affection in them and went “cool! Casual buds it is.” But now that I’m seeing their signs of affection, I feel a little silly for dismissing them like that even though I felt like we could be best bros.

I can already see it now. Forget the hurricanes for a moment:

-Hay isn’t growing at the right time. Last year, no one got good hay where I live, because the weather (which has been in the same pattern during hay season for as long as I’ve been alive) was whacked out.

-None of my animals grew coats correctly, because the weather is just all wrong, and they don’t know what season they’re in.

-We’re getting new temperature records globally; basically, all weather is starting to change already

-Where I live, there are always two weeks where we see echidnas everywhere, and then we don’t see them the rest of the year. that is, until last year, when we barely saw them, spaced throughout several months. 

-Let me reiterate, the animals cannot tell what season it is because climate change is altering weather patterns that have been here for as long as anyone can remember

-We also have more acidic rain due to all the gasses, which is why we’ve got so many statues and whatnot corroding even though they haven’t changed for thousands of years

-We had a tornado start to form in Melbourne. That’s unheard of.

We have the technology to slow down climate change. If we want to survive for more than 50 years, we need to act now. NOW. We need to put in place all the technologies we have, and pour money into more scientific research.

i just recently sat in a climate change presentation and the physicist who gave the presentation talked about how if in the next 30 years we (not just Americans, but humans all over the world) do not cut down on carbon emissions (and this honestly boils down to policy changes that MUST be made amongst industrialists in “developed countries” but that’s a whole other conversation) climate change will ultimately become irreversible. 

and I said, “explain”

and she said, “you know you’re allowed to eat whatever food you want in the morning. you are not bound by law to the traditional american breakfast.”