
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
tumblr dot com
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Monterey Bay Aquarium
YOU ARE THE REASON

@theartofmadeline
ojovivo
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

Janaina Medeiros
almost home
Mike Driver
Peter Solarz

if i look back, i am lost

Origami Around

ellievsbear
Game of Thrones Daily
we're not kids anymore.
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@3normcore5you
I CAN’T WITH THESE DAMN COWBOY HAT MEMES
LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOO son who’s making these???
Geniuses
The Providence Comics Consortium supports the Community Safety Act because we want all the kids and adults in our communities to be safe and treated with respect on the street.
Providence City Council votes on it tomorrow (Monday April 10th) show up to support: https://www.facebook.com/events/397737960612933/
More info on the Community Safety Act here:
https://providencecommunitysafetyact.wordpress.com/
- april 2017 - poetry month - Guillaume Apollinaire
Page from: Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre. Publié par Mercure de Paris, 1918. Read more at Public Domain Review, and explore their tremendous offerings.
How to organize your bookshelf according to “Call the Midwife”
Sister Monica Joan is a gift
Below is a list of some highly recommended books written by people of color (in no particular order). They span across a wide variety of genres and target audiences. Thank you to everyone who submitted their favorites and helped make this list possible! Known triggers are in parentheses next to the books they apply to, but if there is something that has been missed or there’s a book you’d like me to add, please don’t hesitate to let me know! Happy reading! The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (rape, murder, child abuse, domestic violence) The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri Migritude - Shailija Patel (gore, violence, rape mentions, abuse) The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho The God of Small Things - Arundathi Roy (child abuse, sex) Joys of Motherhood - Buchi Emecheta (starvation, poverty, gore, and suicide) Distant View of a Minaret - Alifa Rifaat (castration and death) White Teeth - Zadie Smith Emails from Scheherazade - Mohja Kahf (sexual violence) Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz (transphobic language/violence, homophobic violence) Boy Snow Bird - Helen Oyeyemi Sister of My Heart - Chitra Banerjee Divakurani Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi The Meursault Investigation - Kamel Daoud Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison The Summer Prince - Alaya Dawn Johnson The Noughts and Crosses series - Malorie Blackman A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (rape, murder, child abuse, domestic violence) And The Mountain Echoed - Khaled Hosseini (rape, child abuse) The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing - Mira Karoll Born Confused - Tanuja Desai Hidier The Queen of Water - Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango (child abuse, sexual harassment/child sexual abuse, racism, internalized racism, internalized shadism) Time to Dance - Padma Venkatraman Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri (implications of rape and sexual harassment) Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho Astonishing the Gods - Ben Okri Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami Fasting Feasting - Anita Desai The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi Drown - Junot Diaz Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak Honor: A Novel - Elif Shafak Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston Reservation Blues - Sherman Alexie The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie The Age of Shiva - Manil Suri The Kitchen God’s Wife - Amy Tan Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel - Sara Farizan By the Light of My Father’s Smile - Alice Walker A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif No God but God - Reza Aslan The Palace of Illusions - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki Babji - Abha Dawesar Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri (implications of rape and sexual harassment) Funny Boy - Shyam Selvadurai (violence, rape mention) The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros (sexual assault) Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Brick Lane - Monica Ali No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai A Bad Character - Deepti Kapoor (death, abusive relationships) Karma and Other Stories - Rishi Reddi The Burning Sky - Sherry Thomas Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi Climbing the Stairs - Padma Venkatraman The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison Coin Locker Babies - Ryu Murakami The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan Please Look After Mom - Shin Kyung Sook Bonsai Kitten - Lakshmi Narayan Written in the Stars - Aisha Saeed The Hero’s Walk - Anita Rau Badami Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz Beloved - Toni Morrison Woman at Point Zero - Nawal El Saadawi The Golden Age - Tahmima Anam Season of Migration to the North - Tayib Saleh Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami Snow - Orhan Pamuk Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche The President - Miguel Asturias (extreme violence, rape) The Hungry Ghosts - Shyam Selvadurai The Skin I’m In - Sharon G. Flake Black Boy - Richard Wright Cinnamon Gardens - Shyam Selvadurai 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami (domestic violence, horror, violence) She of the Mountains - Vivek Shraya (explicit sex) Island of a Thousand Mirrors - Nayomi Munaweera (rape, violence) Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka Broken Circle - Theodore Fontaine (child sexual abuse, alcoholism, anti-Native sentiment) The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke - Mohsin Hamid Burnt Shadows, Kratography, Salt and Saffron - Kamila Shamsie Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga Birds of Paradise Lost - Andrew Lam Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie Bitter Melon - Cara Chow (child abuse) Q&A - Vikas Swarup Five Point Someone - Chetan Bhagat Motorcycles and Sweetgrass - Drew Hayden Taylor Lakota Woman - Mary Crow-Dog Legend Trilogy - Marie Lu The Young Elites - Marie Lu The Wrath and the Dawn - Renee Ahdieh An Ember in the Ashes - Sabaa Tahir (rape, abuse) Where the Mountain Meets the Moon - Grace Lin Half of A Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Children of The Jacaranda Tree - Sahar Delijani The Twentieth Wife - Indu Sundaresan Destiny’s Captive - Beverly Jenkins Tiny Pretty Things - Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton (eating disorders, bullying, family issues) Lakota Woman - Mary Brave Bird (child abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse) Flight - Sherman Alexie (child abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse) Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangerembga (violence, eating disorders and mental illness) Redefining Realness - Janet Mock (child sexual assault, child abuse, transphobia) The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston Under the Udala Trees - Chinelo Okparanta (homophobia, violence against queer women) The Ghost Bride - Yangsze Choo The Shiva Trilogy - Amish Tripathi (rape) The Krishna Key - Ashwin Sanghi To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before - Jenny Han The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga Shatter Me Trilogy - Tahereh Mafi The promise - Nikita Singh When Only Love Remains - Durjoy Datta Nectar in a Sieve - Kamala Markandaya Chords of Strength - David Archuleta This Bridge Called My Back - Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami (rape/suicide mentions) I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou (rape) Draupadi: The Fire-Born Princess - Saraswati Nagpal The Hybrid Chronicles - Kat Zhang (child abuse, violence) Esperanza Rising - Pam Muñoz Ryan Becoming Naomi Leon - Pam Muñoz Ryan The Summer I Turned Pretty - Jenny Han Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See Out of My Mind - Sharon Draper Ghana Must Go - Taiye Selasi Difficult Daughters - Manju Kapoor Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez (violence, explicit sex, death) Birdie - Tracy Lindberg Burn For Burn - Jenny Han Mãn - Kim Thúy Huntress - Malinda Lo A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth From Heaven Lake - Vikram Seth Two Lives - Vikram Seth Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler (violence) The Mango Bride - Marivi Soliven (abuse) Between Two Worlds - Roxana Saberi When the Elephants Dance - Tess Holthe (rape) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami A Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (violence, explicit sex, death) La Vie et Demie - Sony Labou Tansi - French (gore, sexual violence) L'Enfant de Sable - Tahar Ben Jelloun - French (gender violence) Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives - Lola Shoneyin I Do Not Come to You by Chance - Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani 26a - Diana Evans Cloth Girl - Marilyn Heward Mills The Hidden Star - K. Sello Duiker kemi’s journal - Abidemi Sanusi Imagine This - Vickie M. Stringer God’s Bits of Wood - Sembene Ousmane Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel García Márquez (violence, explicit sex, death) The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X (trigger warnings for rape, racism, death) Roots - Alex Haley Sultana’s Dream - Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain The Crossover - Kwame Alexander I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia - Jenny Torres Sanchez When Reason Breaks - Cindy Rodriguez Los Perros - Lorea Canales - Spanish The Secret Side of Empty - Maria E. Andreu The Wake of the White Tiger - Diamond Shamsher Rana Blue Mimosa - Parijat - best read in its original language of Nepali The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (child sexual abuse, racism, violence, animal abuse, body image) Empress Orchid - Anchee Min Annihilation of Caste - B.R. Ambedkar Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz How to Be Drawn - Terrance Hayes When My Brother Was an Aztec - Natalie Diaz (explicit sex, drug references) Boy With Thorn - Rickey Laurentiis Between The World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates (police brutality) Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat I Too Had A Love Story - Ravinder Singh Can Love Happen Twice? - Ravinder Singh Boys Don’t Cry - Malorie Blackman If You Could Be Mine - Sara Farizan Ash - Malinda Lo Pig Heart Boy - Malorie Blackman (death) The Pearl that Broke Its Shell - Nadia Hashimi Brown Girl Dreaming - Jacqueline Woodsen Umrao Jaan Ada - Mirza Hadi Ruswa - Urdu Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum Citizen - Claudia Rankin This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth - Warsan Shire Whale Rider - Witi Ihimaera
Previously, I’d only seen the first two panels and assumed it was the complete comic.
This version is much better.
omg it’s so much better with the conclusion
The children were going to die.
The children were going to die.
Mohamed Bzeek knew that. But in his more than two decades as a foster father, he took them in anyway — the sickest of the sick in Los Angeles County’s sprawling foster care system.
He has buried about 10 children. Some died in his arms.
Now, Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a bedridden 6-year-old foster girl with a rare brain defect. She’s blind and deaf. She has daily seizures. Her arms and legs are paralyzed.
Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life.
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said. “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”
Of the 35,000 children monitored by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, there are about 600 children at any given time who fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs, said Rosella Yousef, an assistant regional administrator for the unit.
There is a dire need for foster parents to care for such children.
And there is only one person like Bzeek.
“If anyone ever calls us and says, ‘This kid needs to go home on hospice,’ there’s only one name we think of,” said Melissa Testerman, a DCFS intake coordinator who finds placements for sick children. “He’s the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it.”
Typically, she said, children with complex conditions are placed in medical facilities or with nurses who have opted to become foster parents.
But Bzeek is the only foster parent in the county known to take in terminally ill children, Yousef said. Though she knows the single father is stretched thin caring for the girl, who requires around-the-clock care, Yousef still approached him at a department Christmas party in December and asked if he could possibly take in another sick child.
This time, Bzeek politely declined.
Bzeek is a quiet, religious man who wants his foster daughter to know she’s not alone in this life. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
:::
The girl sits propped up with pillows in the corner of Bzeek’s living room couch. She has long, thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and perfectly arched eyebrows over unseeing gray eyes.
Because of confidentiality laws, the girl is not being identified. But a special court order allowed The Times to spend time at Bzeek’s home and to interview people involved in his foster daughter’s case.
The girl’s head is too small for her 34-pound body, which is too small for her age. She was born with an encephalocele, a rare malformation in which part of her brain protruded through an opening in her skull, according to Dr. Suzanne Roberts, the girl’s pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Neurosurgeons removed the protruding brain tissue shortly after her birth, but much of her brain remains undeveloped.
She has been in Bzeek’s care since she was a month old. Before her, he cared for three other children with the same condition.
“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” he said.
Bzeek, 62, is a portly man with a long, dark beard and a soft voice. The oldest of 10 children, he came to this country from Libya as a college student in 1978.
Years later, through a mutual friend, he met a woman named Dawn, who would become his wife. She had become a foster parent in the early 1980s, before she met Bzeek. Her grandparents had been foster parents, and she was inspired by them, Bzeek said. Before she met Bzeek, she opened her home as an emergency shelter for foster children who needed immediate placement or who were placed in protective custody.
Dawn Bzeek fell in love with every child she took in. She took them to professional holiday photo sessions, and she organized Christmas gift donation drives for foster children.
She was funny, Bzeek said during a recent drive home from the hospital. She was absolutely terrified of spiders and bugs, so much that even Halloween decorations creeped her out — but she was never scared by the children’s illnesses or the possibility that she would die, Bzeek said.
The Bzeeks opened their Azusa home to dozens of children. They taught classes on foster parenting — and how to handle a child’s illness and death — at community colleges. Dawn Bzeek was such a highly regarded foster mother that her name appeared on statewide task forces for improving foster care alongside doctors and policymakers.
Bzeek started caring for foster children with Dawn in 1989, he said. Often, the children were ill.
Mohamed Bzeek first experienced the death of a foster child in 1991. She was the child of a farm worker who was pregnant when she breathed in toxic pesticides sprayed by crop dusters. She was born with a spinal disorder, wore a full body cast and wasn’t yet a year old when she died on July 4, 1991, as the Bzeeks prepared dinner.
“This one hurt me so badly when she died,” Bzeek said, glancing at a photograph of a tiny girl in a frilly white dress, lying in a coffin surrounded by yellow flowers.
By the mid-1990s, the Bzeeks decided to specifically care for terminally ill children who had do-not-resuscitate orders because no one else would take them in.
There was the boy with short-gut syndrome who was admitted to the hospital 167 times in his eight-year life. He could never eat solid food, but the Bzeeks would sit him at the dinner table, with his own empty plate and spoon, so he could sit with them as a family.
There was the girl with the same brain condition as Bzeek’s current foster daughter, who lived for eight days after they brought her home. She was so tiny that when she died a doll maker made an outfit for her funeral. Bzeek carried her coffin in his hands like a shoe box.
“The key is, you have to love them like your own,” Bzeek said recently. “I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” Mohamed Bzeek says. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Bzeek’s only biological son, Adam, was born in 1997 — with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. He was a child so fragile that changing his diaper or his socks could break his bones.
Bzeek said he was never angry about his own son’s disabilities. He loved him all the same.
“That’s the way God created him,” Bzeek said.
Now 19, Adam weighs about 65 pounds and has big brown eyes and a shy grin. When at home, he gets around the house on a body skateboard that his father made for him out of a miniature ironing board, zooming across the wood floor, steering with his hands.
Adam studies computer science at Citrus College, driving his electric wheelchair to class. He’s the smallest student in class, Bzeek said, “but he’s a fighter.”
Adam’s parents never glossed over how sick his foster siblings were, and they told him the children were going to eventually die, Bzeek said. They accepted death as part of life — something that made the small joys of living all the more meaningful.
“I love my sister,” the shy teenager said of the foster girl. “Nobody should have to go through so much pain.”
About 2000, Dawn Bzeek, once such an active advocate for foster children, became ill. She suffered from powerful seizures that would leave her weak for days. She could hardly leave the house because she didn’t want to collapse in public.
The frustrations of her illness wore on her, Bzeek said. There was stress in the marriage, and she and Bzeek split in 2013. She died a little over a year later.
Bzeek chokes up when he talks about her. When it came to facing the difficulties of the children’s illnesses, the knowledge that they would die, she was always the stronger one, he said.
:::
On a chilly November morning, Bzeek pushed the girl’s wheelchair and the IV pole that carries her feeding formula into Children’s Hospital on Sunset Boulevard. She was wrapped in a soft pink blanket, her head resting on a pillow with the stitched words: “Dad is like duct tape holding our home together.”
The temperatures had been bouncing up and down that week, and the girl had a cold. Her brain cannot fully regulate her body temperature, so one leg was hot while the other was cold.
On the elevator, her face glowed bright red as she coughed, her throat filled with phlegm, screaming for air. People in the elevator looked away.
Bzeek rubbed her cheek playfully and held her hand, waving it playfully. “Heeeey, mama,” he cooed in her ear, calming her down.
For Bzeek, the hospital has become a second home. When he’s not here, he’s often on the phone with her many doctors, the insurers who fight over who’s paying for it all, the lawyers who represent her and her social workers. Any time they leave the house together, he carries a thick black binder filled with her medical records and pages of medications.
Still, Bzeek — who had to be licensed through the county to care for medically fragile children and receives about $1,700 a month for her care — is not able to make medical decisions for her.
Roberts entered the exam room, smiling at the girl’s frilly socks and brown dress with fall-colored leaves.
“There’s our princess,” the doctor said. “She’s in her pretty dress, as always.”
Roberts has known Bzeek for years and has seen many of his foster children. By the time this girl was age 2, Roberts said, doctors said there were no more interventions to improve her condition.
“Nobody ever wants to give up,” she said. “But we had run through the options.”
But the girl, who is hooked to feeding and medication tubes at least 22 hours a day, has lived as long as she has because of Bzeek, the doctor said.
“When she’s not sick and in a good mood, she’ll cry to be held,” Roberts said. “She’s not verbal, but she can make her needs known. … Her life is not complete suffering. She has moments where she’s enjoying herself and she’s pretty content, and it’s all because of Mohamed.”
Mohamed Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for the bedridden child. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Other than trips to the hospital and Friday prayers at the mosque — when the day nurse watches her — Bzeek rarely leaves the house.
To avoid choking, the girl sleeps sitting up. Bzeek sleeps on a second couch next to hers. He doesn’t sleep much.
:::
On a Saturday in early December, Bzeek, Adam and the girl’s nurse, Marilou Terry, had a celebratory lunch for the child’s sixth birthday. He invited her biological parents. They didn’t come.
Bzeek crouched in front of the girl — wearing a long, red-and-white dress and matching socks — and held her hands, clapping them together.
“Yay!” he said, cheerfully. “You are 6! 6! 6!”
Bzeek lit six birthday candles in a cheesecake and sat the girl on the kitchen table, holding the cake near her face so she could feel the warmth of the flames.
As they sang “Happy Birthday,” Bzeek leaned over her left shoulder, his beard gently brushing the side of her face. She smelled the smoke, and a small smile crossed her face.
Please consider donating to the GoFundMe set up in his name!!
my dead parents would be so proud
The Earth at night. Photographs taken by NASA.
(Source)
Well that was unexpected...
For a growing number of American kids, porn is their sex ed. Now Pornhub is hoping to offer their audience some more formal lessons in how to be a healthy and happy sexual being.
On Wednesday, the massive adult entertainment destination took the somewhat surprising step of launching the “Pornhub Sexual Health Center.” They’re hoping the free sub-site will become a go-to resource for some of their 70 million daily users on all manner of topics, including STIs, sexual safety and how to manage relationships.
They’ve chosen Dr. Laurie Betito, a renowned sex therapist, to direct the site and they’ll also be working with a number of doctors, therapists and other experts to offer advice and answer questions. Corey Price, Pornhub’s Vice President, told Mashable, “Our goal is to provide our visitors with a site that has credible and insightful information, rather than have them scouring the internet.”
While it’s a database they’ll build up over time, a first look reveals they’ve started with the fundamentals — with answers to things like “Babies. Where do they come from?” and “Are there really three holes?” These might seems almost laughably basic to adult consumers of hardcore porn, but there are a lot of young people for whom these are very real questions.
Price told Mashable they weren’t aiming the content specifically at beginners. He said they simply want to appeal to “those who are looking for trustworthy sex tips and health advice provided by experts.” But it seems like they realize this could prove to be an especially valuable resource for their younger audience, who most likely isn’t getting comprehensive (much less sex-positive) sex ed in schools.
There are, of course, plenty of online sexual health and education resources, but for many kids, landing on sites like Pornhub is already their way into learning about sex. Porn can obviously teach you plenty about the basics and mechanics of intercourse, but there’s a whole range of other things — biology, health, consent, relating to intimate partners, just to name a few — that you won’t pick up from watching videos like “Big tits round asses” or “Sloppy throat games.”
So if they can slide their curious audience over to the PSHC while they’re already on the site, it could function as pretty useful one-stop shop for filling in the blanks left by spotty sex ed classes and the birds and bees talks given by often bewildered parents.
Neat!
Holy shit their section on trans people was actually really good and not what I expected from something hosted by a porn site! If they had a containing various sexualities and whatnot as well, they’ll definitely have a good resource on their hands!
when a god damn porn site has better information about trans health than most school systems
I love computer graphics class.
♥I break a million hearts just for fun♥