We're all mad here

TIDYING means clearing space, making your environment orderly and inviting. it usually entails removing clutter from surfaces, clearing the floor so you can move around easily, and creating psychological ease by putting everything visibly in its place. It's very visual, and can also involve things like straightening picture frames, squaring pillows, folding blankets on the couch, etc. It reduces chaos and noise and makes a space comfortable.

ORGANISING means sifting through belongings, ensuring that what doesn't need to be kept is thrown out and what does need to be kept is kept well. This often means categorising by room and function – teaspoons go in the teaspoon drawer, and the teaspoon drawer stays in the kitchen. It can also mean indexing things so you can find them easily (markers sorted by colour, paperwork divided into topical folders, books alphabetised) and preserving things (moving photos out of direct sunlight, keeping open flour in a sealed container, sleeving trading cards).

CLEANING means removing built up dirt, dust and grime, reducing the level of environmental contaminants and making your space sanitary. Bacteria are a fact of life, they love to hang out in dust and cling to pet hair and multiply on any given surface. Cleaning is how you keep that stuff in check, preventing it from building up to the point it affects your health. This means wiping frequently touched surfaces with disinfectant, sanitising utensils (doing the dishes), washing bedding and clothes (and yourself), and sweeping/vacuuming and taking out the trash to physically remove dirt from your home.

Tidying is not the same thing as organising – shove the mail, bills, dirty teaspoons and your gardening gloves in a drawer, and you've tidied the table. Sort the paperwork into piles by deadline, put the teaspoons in a cup, and roll the gloves together so they don't get separated, and the table is untidy but organised.

Similarly, a tidy or organised space can still be filthy. Just because all the yellowed newspapers and trash bags are sorted by date in the basement, out of sight, doesn't mean they're clean. A chaotic, cluttered space can still be very sanitary if it's being kept clear of refuse, and wiped and dusted often.

Happy new year! Here's the end of the 1953 EC Comics adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," first published in Weird Fantasy #17.

As far as I can tell the reasons that this happens are:

The interpretation of disability accommodation as wokeness - a lot of the same people who are shitty about food limitations are also shitty about sign language interpreters and ramp requirements (also building regulations relating to the latter) because they view any accommodation as capitulation to a group they think should "suck it up and deal with it" (quietly exist without named or obvious accommodations). The conversations around peanut-free or milk-free classrooms to accommodate children with allergies are similarly unhinged and possibly more horrifying.

Conflating specialty diets as a result of proximity in the popular consciousness - you're a lot more likely to see something described as "vegan + gluten free" or to see vegan/vegetarian/g-free options grouped on menus than you are to see keto/vegan/gfree options so the "lefty" animal-free diets get grouped with gluten-free (it's also interesting that there are right-wing diets, and I wonder how many of these people remember when you used to be able to find "atkins-friendly" symbols on casual dining restaurant menus)

Gluten free diets became a fad fifteen years ago; tons of people read "Wheat Belly" and stopped eating wheat as a weight loss hack and when they went back to eating wheat because it's actually pretty difficult to get around a major staple grain they didn't experience any negative consequences; people saw this and basically think that it's a trend, that people are faking medically necessary diets as part of a fad. When questioned about this they always go "but, I mean, it's okay if you REALLY need to skip the wheat because you have a condition but most people are doing it because it's popular" when g-free diets haven't been a major trend for quite a while now. TO BE QUITE FAIR, I think that things like "Gluten Aware" cookies and beer and such, which contain a little gluten but not NO gluten contribute to this perception (these have annoyed me forever for two reasons: 1. They make people without celiac think that a little gluten is fine for people with celiac, which it is not; 2. fucking commit, companies. *I* want the cookies and beer and it's deeply annoying that these business will go to the lengths to create products with minimal gluten but won't actually make g-free foods - this is often because of the risk of cross contamination, they won't claim to make g-free things because they won't work with a dedicated g-free facility)

Anyway, in conclusion: it sucks, I'm sorry.

US specific:

Is your ham made with vinegar? Does your ham have the generic word "spices" on the ingredient list? Does your ham include "smoke flavoring"? Does your ham include caramel coloring?

Because malt vinegar has gluten in it. "Spices" may include wheat products in a mix. Smoke flavoring may be made with barley flour. Caramel coloring may be made with wheat or barley syrup.

If the label says "gluten free" that means that the "spices," caramel coloring, vinegar, and smoke flavor are certified to contain 20ppm or less of gluten.

If the ham is cured in any way, it may include gluten. If the ham was marinated, it probably includes gluten. If the ham was prepared in a facility that processes wheat in any way, it might be cross contaminated with gluten.

There's a company out there called "Gluten Free Water" that makes water in plastic bottles, poking fun at the idea that too many things have a gluten free label. I fucking hate that company. Because that company is functionally saying "lol, people are so sensitive and over the top about this, let's be a little silly and laugh about how crazy people can be with their 'gluten free' nonsense."

Did you know that there are sustainable food containers and straws that contain wheat? And that you don't have to label them? There are definitely people with celiac who have been sickened by biodegradable plastic straws in their "obviously water is gluten free there's no risk here" water.

"It's over-labeled so it looks trendy" just means you don't know how foods are made or what foods contain gluten. Gluten is ridiculously common in foods in general, and also in packaged meats.

Your ham has to say gluten free because it distinguishes it from the hams that do contain gluten, which is a fucking lot of them. And you're annoyed that your ham has to say gluten free and I'm annoyed that I'm standing in the grocery store calling a ham company to figure out where they source their caramel coloring so I can figure out if the damned ham is safe to eat.

"lol, oats don't have wheat in them, are people so stupid that they have to be told what is and isn't wheat? why does this oatmeal have a gluten free label?" Cross contamination; gluten free oats are not grown near wheat and are not processed in facilities that process wheat.

"lol, rice doesn't have wheat in it, why is this rice labeled gluten free, all rice is gluten free" Cross contamination; the rice isn't processed on equipment that processes wheat.

"lol why does this turkey breast say gluten free, it's just fucking turkey" read the ingredients on your "just" turkey, lots of packaged meat is packed in broth, some of which contains modified food starch, which may contain wheat.

"lol why are these strawberries labeled gluten free? they're fucking strawberries" WAX, BUDDY. SOME FRUITS ARE COATED IN PRESERVATIVE WAX FILMS BY THE MANUFACTURER AND SOME OF THOSE FUCKING FILMS CONTAIN GLUTEN.

I think that part of the reason that people are so irritated by g-free labels is because it exposes them to just how vast and alienating their food systems are.

"Ham should just be meat from a pig, maybe with sugar and salt; what on earth is happening that there might be wheat in that process? Nothing in that process should involve wheat." And then you might have to think about it for a second, might have to wonder what "sugar" and "salt" mean when someone is producing a million hams to be delivered thousands of miles away. It's not just sugar and salt; it's preservatives and nitrates and batch cooking and getting corn syrup instead of sugar and getting smoke flavoring instead of smoking the ham and turning your "whole food" into all the ingredients that make up the ingredients that make up the ingredients.

A "gluten free" label says "you can eat this" to somebody with celiac disease, who has already pounded their skull against the shittiness of the medical system and the food system.

But to someone who doesn't have to worry that their food is going to disable them, a "gluten free" sticker on ham takes a known quantity and turns their sandwich into a hyperobject that contains animal agriculture and industrial additive production and shipping pollution and the ongoing assault on regulation.

If it doesn't have the label, you can just eat your lunch. If it does have the label, you are haunted by the specter of RFK junior imploding the FDA.

Gluten free chips ahoy and oreos? Oat flour. Canyon Bakehouse, the only gluten free bread brand that actually resembles bread? Oat flour. And then if I do find truly wheat free food it's also vegan or low carb/salt/fat/calories/ect. and it's genuinely not even worth eating. I'm already on the verge of starvation constantly because even gluten free food isn't safe for me to eat half the time, them removing all the nutrients just means that people like me get to eat health food garbage, if we can eat at all. Even gluten free food isn't always safe, and so if you thought people with celiac were limited in their options people with wheat allergies are just straight up fucked.

1 - the geese in the background show that the fake coyote doesn't deter geese

His joy and whimsy at seeing this

His acknowledgement of it not being as interesting as the chase

god this tickles me

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Uhm.. Actually, you can be. There's a lot of people who are honest when answering that question. They just do it in ways that don't come across so upsetting or depressing.

Many people sugarcoat their answers to be more palatable for a greeting, or for a start of a conversation. It can also just be a polite way of giving others an out for a potential depressing conversation they may not want to be a part of.

These responses usually come in forms like, - "How are you?/How's it going?" - "Could be better." "It's definitely going." "I'm still alive." "I'm getting there." "New day, new problems." "Well, I'm still here." "Same old." "It's not all sunshine." "It's moving along". "It is what it is." "Not great but I'll survive." "Hoping tomorrow comes quickly." And many more responses like this. These are all ways of basically saying "Things are kinda/very shit at the moment for me". But they just don't go into detail about it. They are being honest, without the extra information.

If the other person doesn't want to go further into this then they may just responed with something like "I feel you", or "That's relatable", or "Yeh, that's life". Which are basically ways of saying "I acknowledge things aren't easy right now", without having to go into a conversation about it. Not everyone has the emotional energy to deal with conversations like that in that moment and that's okay.