#roseapprentice

I think it's because their moral hierarchy is different. In certain parts of right wing ideology, killing a person who wants to hurt your children is basically a good thing to do, except that morality requires a trial first unless you kill them in the act. The child-hurter has committed a crime that makes them into a disposable person, so as long as you kill them in one of the two acceptable ways, the killing isn't even considered a little bit wrong.

Ah, yeah, and I think “killing other humans is always base wrong but could be excusable on safety grounds, though I worry that some of these gun people are mis-imagining how safety grounds actually tend to work in a pretty weird way.”

they do it because power strips sometimes get warm. cats love to sleep on warm things, or even things they think might get warm.

@misocorny replied to your post: Why do cats like to sleep directly next to power...

Cos warm

@lachryphage replied to your post: Why do cats like to sleep directly next to power...

it warm

Yeah, that makes sense. I've been fat my whole life, still am, and the thing that I suspect you may not be seeing is how intense the constant cultural pressure is to lose weight for every imaginable reason. Even if someone is outspokenly proud of being fat it's often the case that they have spent their whole life trying desperately to lose weight and still do occasionally try desperately to lose weight.

Oh, yeah. That’s how many of the fat people I know in real life actually act--they express concern about their weight, or shame, or make weird “jokes” that I guess are supposed to make light of it but just seem weird to me. 

And sometimes they ARE in pain! Shitty boss had such bad knee problems that she took too much sick leave and I’m sure it factored in her firing. But “the doctor won’t operate until I lose weight, but doesn’t understand that I can’t.” Which--don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that isn’t a catch-22 and I’m definitely not saying it’s not shitty, but... after months, I wasn’t sure I wholeheartedly meant all of the “your doctor is such a fatphobe” Approved Noises I was making. What if there was more to her not trying than JUST pushing back on the ‘phobes? What if... what if reality is often disappointing, and lots of us are stuck in it, and that sucks but sometimes you have to look for a solution other than letting ti get worse (which may or may not involve less weight, I’m not saying it has to)?

Which I think is why “don’t say you’re concerned” pings me so differently than what I’m pretty sure it actually means. Because it reads like “pretend you haven’t noticed a bunch of times I actually AM in pain.”

And... that’s hard, because it’s difficult to figure out when my empathy is firing because someone wants to be comforted, or when it’s firing because it is and I need to butt out. So I feel like I’m watching this... show, where people are sexy and happy and only good things are said, but I can see behind one of the curtains and I’m being told what I see there isn’t real and I get all confused (and... triggered is the wrong word, but my childhood abuse involved a lot of “no, this isn’t bad, it’s GOOD; if you think it’s bad there’s something wrong with you,” so when I feel like I’m being told “stop noticing reality” I get... I start snapping at people. I’m not saying reality is good or okay or what reality’s doing to you is deserved! I’m saying “I see a thing. It is blue.”)

And I think that’s one reason why it... it doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of ND people have trouble social justicing properly. Because there are scripts not just for what to SAY but for WHICH THINGS TO NOTICE, and if you notice the wrong ones it means things about you.

roseapprentice replied to your post “@roseapprentice This makes sense. I may disagree with a little of what...” I'm getting the sense that on your end, "don't tell me you're worried about me" sound similar to "don't be worried about me" whereas I have trouble seeing those two statements has similar.

Yeah. Because I’m used to “your anxiety is An Problemme, Be Pleasant, Shut Up.” Which... if it’s “talk about this less” that’s... well it still stinketh like a poopeth but it’s not an unfair ask. Sometimes I actually am bringing people down and I should in fact shut up and do something solitary like play on Arena until my Socialization bar is no longer red and blinky. 

But very often it just does come out like “Stop worrying.” And like... dude, okay, but if I take a higher dose of Prozac I will be sleeping instead of worrying, and there’s this little thing called paying rent, which if you sleep too much you start maybe not being able to do?

“Don’t worry” is useless advice unless it comes with instructions. “Be worried over there because I can’t right now” is okay, but I have to know that’s what you said.

“Don’t fake being worried when you’re not actually worried but rather just mean” is what I think is being meant, but what’s being said sounds like “end process Concern.exe immediately, regardless of data loss, or at least make sure you look like you did” and... sometimes I... can’t?

roseapprentice replied to your post “@roseapprentice This makes sense. I may disagree with a little of what...” Also thank you for responding gracefully to my voice and disagreement. I now wish I had led with that.

My favorite types of asks to get are things that have nothing to do with my interests, i.e. celebrity things that I've never heard of.

Example: For one day last year, I was in the supermarket and saw a commercial for a chicken sandwich. I was a vegetarian before, but had never heard of the word "hamburger," and my knowledge of cooking included Poultry Recipes 1 and 2, but that was it. So I bought the sandwich, which I knew was definitely a ham sandwich. (It was called a "Hamburgers" sandwich, and I wanted to eat a Hamburgers sandwich. Eating a Hamburgers sandwich might well be preferable to the alternative.)

I then read a few things on the back of the menu, and decided I wanted to make this into a Facebook post. Then I stopped to realize that I had no idea what a hamburger was and couldn't even imagine trying to make one for dinner. My mind went to strange places – did anyone ever just eat a sandwich? – and somehow that seemingly simple sentence became the most complex thing I could think of. I couldn't explain it.

I’m struggling a lot more than I used to.  My parents and I are now staying at my parents’ house because my parents and I are worried they won’t be able to get us to a hotel.

I think the change from morning to evening/night is definitely more jarring for me than it was for most people I talked to on tumblr.  Even though the CDC just re-affirmed that we should still be very worried about it.

I think this is actually a pretty common genre, though I rarely see it done well. It seems to mostly end up categorized as crime-thriller and romance. Nora Roberts writes romantic procedurals under the pen name "JD Robb", though it's nearly all the 'in death' series, which I'm not fond of. I recently read a book by Karen Rose that I liked pretty well and sort of fits.

Yep, Karen Rose is another author in this space I’ve read and enjoyed. You’re right in that it’s a sort of crossover genre and I think that’s partly because crime/thrillers are targeted at both a male and female audience, as opposed to romantic suspense which is targeted pretty exclusively at a female audience.

I suppose that depends on the person and what they’re doing at the time.  For instance, there are several times when I was worried about existential doom and reacted badly – it’s mostly people who seemed to be going way off in an unproductive trajectory, who became less and less reliable to me and were looking increasingly closer to doom.

Rules: Tag nine people you want to get to know better. You can tag less, if you like. Or no one, if you feel like it. Who needs rules anyway?

How old are you?

26 (27 by April’s end)

Current job/ Dream job?

I work in a long-term storage facility (warehouse) for a university library. This means I sort/label/data-input incoming new books (mostly Fine Arts for the past year or so, but they seem to be shifting us into Geography, Computing and Engineering, which is much less fun to flip through, tbh), pull/return any books/collection-boxes/pallets requested by University employees/students from the depths of cold-storage (it is 63 degrees Fahrenheit in our units, to keep humidity low despite central Texan climate, to preserve older books), and otherwise mostly spend the day between delicate work with tomes of various ages (some very dusty and old, some new, some in between like the Netscape Navigator guide last week) and just plain moving heavy objects (boxes/trays/carts/wheeled-shelves full of books which for their weight you might as well conceptualise as paper bricks with useful shit writ in them somewhere) by hand or by forklift. I both handle books all day, and get enough physical exercise that I am as fit and muscular now as I was when I was 19. Also they hired my sister, too, so she could escape the living hell of her previous job working in retail for a Pier 1 knock-off store. (Not actually Pier 1, but most of their stuff wouldn’t be out of place there.)

I enjoy the physical labor because it lets my mind wander freely throughout the day, allowing me to absorb a lot of data via podcasts or just zone out while singing loudly in the echo-y cold chamber. I love the comforting organisation of places which collect books, and I find some of the weirdest stuff when the Fine Arts library is the main one sending us new stuff. (Someday I will do a few posts of Weird Shit I Found At Work.) My sister even loves it when the medical science books with photos and illustrations come in, because she’s a morbid creature, but also an aspiring neuroscientist or dermatologist; she leans more towards the former, but she loves the study of dermatology so much that I wonder how solid that dedication really is. Once she stops recommending pimple-popping videos to my best friend, I’ll stop considering dermatologist as one of her potential career-paths.

Anyway, the main point is: I fucking love this job. My boss is gay and recommends to me punk bands I did not previously know, even, I just. I love it here. Also he gives us all cosplay advice. It is GREAT. But it’s only a part-time gig, so I barely make enough to scrape by, and dude, poverty is a bitch. I would love to make more than $15,000 per year again, tbh, because being raised in a capitalist society makes it really hard to overcome depression and self-worth issues while you’re under the poverty line but don’t qualify for any real assistance, especially in the dystopian wasteland of Texas, and that has really impacted my life since I lost my previous job over a year ago, had to sell my house and start all over.

Ideally, I’d have a gig similar to this full-time, and thus have enough financial security and free time (having a lack of the former mitigates the usefulness of the latter due to the stresses of poverty, I already knew, but got to know very personally since 2015) to be able to write my own original fiction and grow medicinal herbs (marijuana if I am honest, because I have a reversed curvature of the spine in my neck that causes me chronic pain, and all other pain-relief forms aside from that either incapacitate my forebrain, are heinously addictive, or both, so heyyy THC is my friend) and fruit/vegetables (farmer’s markets are good places) on the side. That’d be living the dream, for me: book-handling for my day job, writing after that, and a big damn garden that my botanist father will be proud of me for achieving.

What are you talented at?

Prevarication, bullshitting (subtly different), storytelling (even more subtly different, with fiction), cold-reading, verbosity, improvisation, photography, talking to strangers and striking up congenial rapport based on nothing in common, as well as being a font of obscure information about science and history and human psychology. Also tripping over nonexistent barriers.

What is a big goal you are working towards (or have already achieved)?

I wrote two novels by the time I was 16, but neither of them had a plot. I didn’t learn how to write an actual plot until I was 18, but haven’t managed to write any original fiction (as opposed to fan fiction) since then. I’d like to amend that, at some point, as soon as I figure out wtf to write a novel about.

What are your aesthetics?

Take slate blue, and blue it up a few shades, but keep it nice and dark and unshiny. Now turn that into an antique chaise lounge. The wood bits should be a very dark-stained oak, or ebony. Around it, there are mismatched styles of bookshelf, but they cover more than one wall (two of the shorter, wider ones stack atop one another and are full of fiction alone, but they stand no taller than the 7ft-shelf beside them which is all comic books except the top shelf which is collections and leather-bound classics like the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and all of Poe’s works, and on the other wall a smaller, redder shelf only 5ft tall full of mostly reference and photography books).

Nearby is a large window. Outside is a rainstorm. In the distance, where the rain has already passed them by, a pack of coyotes is howling. Slightly closer, a flock of corvids (ravens? crows?) complain to one another about the storm. Together, it’s all music.

On the other side of the window is a sage-green and stately wingback armchair with a sleeping brown/grey tabby cat on the seat.

I am on that chaise lounge. There is a nearby ratty and battered coatrack from the 20s by the door, from which a dark green trench coas and a light-weight leather motorcycle jacket both hang, along with a black newsboy cap. At the base of it, two pairs of boots and a pair of slim-fitting athletic shoes I originally got for fencing purposes rest at its base.

The tea is probably Gunpowder, Lapsang Souchong, or an experimental Taiwanese/Nepalese tea of some sort. Next to it is a stack of Thin Mint cookies from the Girl Scouts and the book I am currently reading. (Right now: Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, because it arrived today and I am HYPE.) On some days, the aroma of vapours from my rice-cooker, or the aromas of pasta and/or slow-cooked meats seep up from downstairs.

The cats are all safe inside. The rain grows louder.

Do you collect anything?

Books, mostly, but also… I am a magpie. I also used to have a kleptomaniac streak, before I broke the habit after graduating high school. I collect interesting shiny objects, pocket knives, craft supplies (this is the only way I can explain the shoebox of broken glass and mirror shards in my closet, the geological specimens, the dumpster art canvases I plan to paint over at some point, the magazines I might use for reference or collage purposes, and the chunks of Obsidian which I have accumulated over the years to most people; fun fact: one of those pieces of obsidian is the size of a brick), cheap shitty swords (started as a joke and to be fair I have only 6, not counting the scimitar which is actually half-decent quality but the tip sticks out of its sheath and I once tripped and fell into my closet and that tip stabbed me in the arm so I have literally fallen on my own scimitar and lived sorta, and it is a large scar), and trench coats.

What is a topic you are always up for talking about?

Intersectional feminism. QUILTBAG issues because I am queer as a 3-dollar bill. Politics. Black lives mattering. Scientific progress. Storytelling. Public education. Civilization. Antifascism. Mythology. Human history. Comic books. Music history. The list goes on. My interests are eccentric, broad, and varied.

What’s a pet peeve of yours?

When American conservative politicians promote people to leadership of government offices, while those promotees are publicly acknowledged for their lust for the chance to destroy the government services those offices are supposed to respect, run and improve.

Good advice to give?

A lot of people consult me for it, so I guess I’m doing something right. It’s best applied on a case-by-case basis, though.

Recommend three songs

Kirkonväki - Paavoharju

Galloping Steeds - Tengger Cavalry

Stars and Stripes of Corruption - Dead Kennedys

If I tag you, it is because I like you. No actual reciprocation needed, but do know I like you.