my body is a slaughterhouse for all the people who have tried to love me. / including myself.

I deeply dislike climate doomerism, but also every instance of someone claiming we need "hope" or trying to spread "hope" about the future of the climate just makes me sick. I genuinely cannot envision a future, a NEAR future, where my country is genuinely livable. I can't envision retiring and moving back to my home region of the Nordeste, a region historically plagued by droughts, famine and desertification even before climate change kicked into full gear, unless I want to burn to death in a dry unnatural desert. I can't even be optimistic about a future where my country is free from USAmerican imperialism and oppression and our people are free without being undercut by the knowledge that our biggest population centers (and our capital) will be plunged into eternal boiling droughts sooner rather than later. I can't imagine having kids without knowing that they will spend their formative years cursing every heat wave, each one hotter than the last, or knowing that THEY won't be able to have kids unless they either leave or accept that their own kids will be born in hell. This is my MOST OPTIMISTIC SCENARIO!!! I can't even begin to imagine how the future will be if the Amazon rainforest collapses!!

God I don't know why but if someone close to me 'excessively' asks me that like especially how are you and your day and call me, it comes off too annoying and clingy and hammering for me.

I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.  And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.” So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)

There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:

Sometimes when people on the Internet are like "ADULTS CAN NEVER INTERACT WITH MINORS IT'S CREEPY" I remember how, at 12, back in 1997, I was on the Witchvox forums with people ranging from me to people in at least their 50s, and no one there was ever a creep to me, no one ever made me feel uncomfortable or asked for my personal info, and when I finally broke down after a particularly brutal day of bullying at school and posted about it they were the first adults I'd ever met in my entire life who told me the bullies were the problem and it was okay to be angry about it.

On the other side of this, as I am now officially Old, whenever I find myself in the company of young people I am always grateful for their perspective. I am constantly exposed to new things that passed me by while I was busy getting old. Not just media or news, but new ideas and points of view I could never find without them. I love my young friends. I want to help them because often I've found myself in situations they've been in that I can help with. But also they can help me see the world through their eyes. They keep me grounded. They make me think about the future, and what I can do as an old person to leave them a world that's just a little bit better for them than it might have been for me. Or better than it is now.