The Garden

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

Random bloke: Maybe if you walked more you wouldn’t be so fat

My sister stops dead, stares him in the eye and goes: Is everything alright at home?

I’ve never seen a man’s face turn to horror so fast

"No," I said. "That doesn't work for me. If you're unwilling to honor the deal we made, I'm not buying a car from you."

Well, they talk for a living. So they talked. Here I am, a young woman on my own, and these two men at the dealership are giving me all the reasons they couldn't possibly honor the deal we made yesterday.

So I sat. I didn't say a word. I just stared at them.

They kept talking, trying to get a reaction out of me. After about 10 seconds, they abandoned all pretense of logical arguments and started hammering pathos. They weren't even buying my old car from me for the dealership; it was a personal favor for which they were using their own hard-earned money to help this poor guy at church who just got out of rehab and his house burned down and his children exploded and his dog left him for another man, etc etc

I didn't say a word. I just stared at them.

They began falling apart. They continued trying to hustle me, but their confidence left them. I think they might have been sweating.

Friends, I was staring silently at someone while inwardly flailing desperately to come up with a response to something they’d said that wasn’t overly rude but also was holding my ground. In my mind, I was being hellishly awkward. I couldn’t summon any charm, I couldn’t figure out a sentence to string together. Silence spooled out horrifyingly between us as I got farther and farther away from being articulate and became more and more flustered by this failure to respond. From the outside, I guess, I just looked like a stone cold bitch waiting for them to get their shit together, lol.

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.

But anime and video game boob jiggling is like. The most uncanny valley shit I've ever seen nine times out of ten. You would think people this horny about tits would have actually looked at some but I guess not.

Like, a *lot*. 

So wrong.

So often. 

See, all genies will, to some extent, screw with wishes. It’s their nature. With some of them, if you wish for ‘a horse’, they give you a heavily insured and very identifiable race-horse and watch the catastrophe unfold. Others will just  mess with the wish a little bit, say, by giving you a foal instead of a currently rideable horse or something. But everyone knows they need to be careful with their wording, these days, so it’s not usually too bad. (Unless you violate the three rules. Wish to raise the dead, to kill someone, or to make someone fall in love with you, and they will get *very* unpleasant.) 

But Jimmy… he meant well. He really did. 

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.

When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.

Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)

Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.

College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.

Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:

When on the flight Amy was fed bread that contained multiple things she was allergic to. The packaging was completely unlabled and she was never offered an allergy warning before or during the 13 hour flight. She had an allergic reaction and had a very hard time breathing and had to take the ONE epipen she had access to for this whole trip that day. She would not be able to get a new one. The flight attendants did not give a singular fuck about what happened to her and the position she was put in because of their carelessness.

Fast forward to the end of the trip. Luckily Amy had no further incidents during the trip. We get on the plane for the flight home and Amy asks about the food for the flight and if she can have the ingredients list. She also makes it clear to the flight attendants that this is really important because she has already had an incident and no longer has her epipen.

Do you want to know what the flight attendants did?

They kicked her off the plane. They kicked a seventeen year old off a plane and left her behind in an unfamiliar city because they would rather not deal with her disability. She delayed the flight for several minutes begging and crying for them to not leave her there. She told them she had no way of accessing a new epipen here, but they said she couldn’t fly without it. Me and my friend who were sitting next to her held her and argued with the flight attendant to keep her on the plane. She sobbed as she said she could just not eat anything, or that she could eat what she brought aboard. They still kicked her off. Bless the chaperone that chose to stay behind with her so she wouldn’t be alone.

You want to know the most fucked up part after that? The flight attendant who kicked her off was amused about the whole thing like it was some funny joke. Another one complained that “In all his years of working this job he had never been so disrespected.”

Amy and the chaperone ended up sleeping at that airport over night before they could get on another flight. I don’t remember if she was able to get another epipen for the flight home but I think she was.

it used to be a cool achievement but now it’s like