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Clown Persian Cat Room Guardian

"am i normal" is not as helpful question to ask as "are intrusive thoughts causing me frequent distress?" and "would my life be better if i could find a way to feel less distress/learn to tolerate the distress?"

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

They want to build this in the zoo parking lot and act like its no big deal

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Р isnt P

Fortunately for him, it is a very important communication signal, especially given what he's going through right now. It says, "This is, in some way, unsatisfactory." Unfortunately, it's not very specific and he doesn't understand much about how to deploy it.

You have to understand, the stomach ache that he has right now is the worst stomach ache in the universe, because as far as he's concerned, the universe is maybe a month old and there's been a limited number of stomach aches in it. Or, the loneliness and anguish he felt when he couldn't see you was the most terrifying isolation in the universe, akin to being adrift in the Boötes Void, for the very same reason. He does not have guidelines to cope with these things. He has barely accumulated enough of a dataset to start evaluating things like, "Most times, when people I know go away, they will reappear eventually," or, "that particular stomach ache will go away if I eat something." He doesn't even know which particular problems can be cured and which can't. He just knows that "technique: scream like fucking banshee" does have some sort of a success rate.