Amen.
(via preraphaeliteoftheforest)
I present to you: my life right now.
My logic is that, when camping out at the uni library for 9 hours, even if I procrastinate for half that time (which I have) I’ll still be getting something done. I mean, that sure beats doing an hour or so of study, lying down in bed to watch an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and then promptly falling asleep. (Then waking up, proclaiming the day wasted and repeating it all over again.)
Good plan, no?
This is why you don’t use the word “retard”
“In the past year or so, Schuyler has made a discovery. It’s one I’ve always known she would make, and always anticipated with a heavy heart. Inevitable, perhaps, for any person with an essentially good heart and a love for the world that it has neither earned nor returned.
Schuyler is learning how to be sad.
She learned in middle school that being surrounded by people doesn’t mean you can’t be lonely. She learned that people will look at a kid like her and make assumptions that are extremely unkind, assumptions that she can’t easily dispel. She learned that her brain can betray her, can leave her confused and dispirited, and that as she grows older, that betrayal only grows worse. The last few times that she’s suffered partial complex seizures have left her crying. She had one last night in the middle of dinner with friends that left her sobbing, for no reason she could identify. “I can’t stop crying,” she kept saying to me, and the confusion in her voice was, for me, perhaps the most heartbreaking of the many bad things about her fucking monster.
Schuyler is coming to realizations about this grand, rough world that she probably already knew, but in the last year or so, she’s taken those lessons to heart.
Today I accompanied Schuyler to her middle school band’s annual trip to a local water park. I was attending as a parent chaperone, doing things like checking names as the kids got on the bus and handing out wristbands and such, but when the rest of the chaperones’ jobs were done and the kids were in the park, my real duty began. The band director, a good and decent person who really does real damage to the crappy reputation of conductors everywhere (I kid, I kid…), recognizes our daughter’s challenges, and she works harder than we have any right to expect in order to make Schuyler’s band experience a good one. She put me on the chaperone list, I believe, so that I could keep an eye on Schuyler.
Schuyler had a good start to the day as she and a friend gravitated to each other immediately. But I knew we might be in trouble when I saw the girl later with someone else. When Schuyler found me, she was frowning.
“She found another friend,” she said. I tried to explain that just because her friend was playing with someone else didn’t mean anything bad, and that sometimes people just change up their buddies from time to time, but she wasn’t convinced. I honestly had no idea what had happened, but I know Schuyler. She’s an amazing person, but she can smother her friends. It’s always been a problem and it will continue to be one, until she finds her person, the one who only wants more of her, not less. And that girl or boy will be her soulmate and her forever person, and that will be that.
We sat down for lunch, and were having a pretty good time. Schuyler was fighting a losing battle with a hot dog that she had inadvertently smothered in a toxic strata of mustard, but she was soldiering on. And that’s when we heard it, from the table next to ours. A girl, laughing and yelling at her friend.
“You are a retard!”
Schuyler stopped. Her face froze, and she turned to look at the kids. They were oblivious; I don’t even think they were from her school. They carried on, not knowing what they had just done, which I suppose is true of the majority of people who casually throw that word around. But I knew. I could see it on Schuyler’s face. She turned back to her lunch, her face now a careful mask.
“Are you okay?” I asked. There was no need to acknowledge what had been said.
“I’m not a retard,” she said quietly. “That’s a mean word.”
I tried to explain that the girl wasn’t talking about her at all, but Schuyler was absolutely convinced that she was. Beyond that, I explained, not for the first or I suspect the last time, that people who use that word don’t have the first clue about who Schuyler is or what she’s capable of. That word has nothing to do with her, I said, and people who use it only make themselves smaller, not her. Schuyler sat quietly, not even looking at me when I snapped a photo of her, trying to cheer her up. She listened, but she didn’t hear. She’d already heard what she needed to, and not from me, but from one of her peers.
Finally she gave me a lingering hug and said something that I can tell you for a fact that she has never said to me in her young life, yet something that I’ve said a hundred times to just about any person who has ever loved me, ever. I suppose it was just a matter of time.
“I want to go walk around by myself,” she said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. And she did, for almost an hour. She was never alone, because I followed her from a distance, watching. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, but it didn’t feel wrong. I know it wasn’t the wrong thing to do. Sometimes the hardest part of being a father is when there’s absolutely nothing I can do to make it better. Just follow, and let her sadness resonate with my own.
She walked with her hood pulled up, her hands in her pockets, her face cast down, moving sadly through the park and the world like a ghost.”- Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords, a blog that chronicles Rob Rummel-Hudson’s experiences raising a daughter with Polymicrogyria.
A must-read for everyone.
(via athenasaurus)
This is why we're friends
- J: We're going to Clayton I think, so grabbing a lift with R or S. We're at HAL anyway so I'll text you before we leave?
- M: Cool beans.
- J: Icy legumes.
Anonymous asked: Aw, sweet. Now maybe you'll know how it feels when you get all those little adding-up comments and stop doing it to others.
Firstly, that’s not what I was addressing in my post. It wasn’t so much the comments themselves than the fact that, after talking to them about it, people would merely use the excuse, “it was only a joke!” I’m not upset by the fact that they said things that hurt me; I’m hurt by the fact that they don’t understand that I’m upset. Are we clear on that?
Secondly, this little ask isn’t constructive in the slightest. For one thing, I honestly do not believe that I have ever said something to someone this year and brushed it off with the “joke” line. Do unto others, etc. But if we’re going to go with what you’ve outlined, which are “adding-up comments”, then I have not done so consciously either. If I have, please let me know with specifics and I will apologise to whoever I may have offended, because that was not my intention at all. And the fact that they’ve “add[ed] up”, well, that’s even more distressing. I won’t publish the ask detailing these circumstances, so please, do tell me.
And thirdly… why would all of the above invalidate what I’ve said? “Now maybe you’ll know how it feels”. This isn’t very mature of you at all. You’re not acknowledging the fact that I’ve had my feelings hurt, so with that tone of response, why would you expect me to do the same? The thing is, nobody has told me if I’ve done such a thing, which is where you need to step in and let me know so I can “stop doing it to others”. But I have told others when they’ve done it to me. And the difference between them and me? I won’t shrug it off with “it was only a joke, relax”.
The People’s Record Memorial Day Dedication (video source)
Thank you to the Iraq War veterans who speak-out and organize against these imperialist wars.
From the Iraq Veterans Against the War website:
Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) was founded by Iraq war veterans in July 2004 at the annual convention of Veterans for Peace (VFP) in Boston to give a voice to the large number of active duty service people and veterans who are against this war, but are under various pressures to remain silent.
From its inception, IVAW has called for:
- Immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq;
- Reparations for the human and structural damages Iraq has suffered, and stopping the corporate pillaging of Iraq so that their people can control their own lives and future; and
- Full benefits, adequate healthcare (including mental health), and other supports for returning servicemen and women.
Click here for a complete list of The People’s Record’s Memorial Day dedications.
On memorial days worldwide, we remember the horrors of war. We do not glorify them. We most certainly do not justify their continuing presence in the modern day.
And while we’re on this subject
I’m not sure when this happened, but it terrifies me that it did: being expected to tolerate insults, rudeness and all manners of casual jokes lest you be branded sensitive, immature or—gasp!—having a poor sense of humour.
Passive-aggressive mode: activated
If you think this is about you, it is. I’m not going to be direct with certain people because it simply isn’t worth the scene, but I needed to vent.
Never has a truer word been said.
(Source: game-of-thugs, via derpkneenar)
Just Say No To Free Birth Control (by blndsundoll4mj)
The Anti-Feminist moron is baaaaccckkkk!!!
“That’s just so ridiculous. I’m not going to pay for your birth control… I’m not saying she’s a slut. I’m saying she’s lazy because she wants me to pay for her birth control.”
I’m not going to pay for the murder of thousands of civilians while my country’s armed forces occupy and impose upon a foreign government, either. It’s like, God, pay for your own guns! I don’t use guns, so I don’t pay for them, I shouldn’t pay for someone else’s!
But seriously.
It is often overlooked that contraceptive drugs do more than simply prevent pregnancy. For example, the pill reduces menstrual cramps, protects against endometrial and ovarian cancers, regulates menstrual cycles, controls acne and manages PMS—that is, logic dictates that birth control is not always synonymous with promiscuity. The idea that a woman should simply “close her legs” and “not have sex in the first place” rather than “drain tax-payer dollars” by accessing free birth control is not only highly misogynistic, but ignorant of the health benefits entailed.
Moreover, though she says “I don’t want to force my ideals on anyone”, saying that she’d rather “they not be having sex in the first place” is both hypocritical and unrealistic. People are going to have sex for pleasure and there is no way this is ever going to change, pure and simple. Now let’s pull our heads out of our rainbow asses and address the issue rather than wishing it will go away. Contraception does this in a way religious vitriol does not, by reducing the prevalence of unwanted pregnancies and thus lessening the economic and population burdens that they cause.
With 50.8% of the US population comprised of females, the epidemiological impact of contraception is by no means insignificant—boasting high efficacy rates, it reserves the same right to government funding as other public health measures.
If your taxes go toward subsidising other peoples’ medications, which you don’t take, or other people’s hospital beds, which you don’t sleep in, then why are you happy to pay for them but not this?
I think I command the wrong sort of respect from the first-years
- A: I asked him if he saw anyone he knew, and he said, "oh, I saw M, she was really excited to see me!"
- M: Yeah... I was a little drunk.
- A: You always have the wildest stories. It's always, "This time I was drunk, or when I was drunk here, or I'm drunk right now--"
- M: What! I don't really have that image do I?
- A: [makes hand gesture] Just a little.
(Source: ama-ter-asu, via fuckyeah-nerdery)
"Aside from some academics and members of the business community, the term neoliberalism is largely unknown and unused by the public at large, especially in the United States. There, to the contrary, neoliberal initiatives are characterized as free market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of the incompetent, bureaucratic, and parasitic government, which can never do good (even when well intentioned, which it rarely is). A generation of corporate-financed public relations efforts has given these terms and ideas a near-sacred aura. As a result, these phrases and the claims they imply rarely require empirical defense, and are invoked to rationalize anything from lowering taxes on the wealthy and scrapping environmental regulations to dismantling public education and social welfare programs. Indeed, any activity that might interfere with corporate domination of society is automatically suspect because it would impede the workings of the free market, which is advanced as the only rational, fair, and democratic allocator of goods and services. At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few."
— Noam Chomsky and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism
(Source: fyeahnoamchomsky, via arielnietzsche)
