“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
astro-
From ἄστρον (ástron, “celestial body”)
-pithecus
From πίθηκος (píthēkos, “ape”)
Hi, I'm one of the 7.8 billion humans being. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. Let's be friends.
[ he / him ]
I like personality tests, but as an ENTP 7w8 Di Leo, I don't put a lot of stock in them.
👽 bio
I'm an elder Millennial that moved to Portland, Oregon in Summer 2025. I have a day job where I send a lot of very important e-mails. The rest of the time, I make music, draw, write, argue on the internet, and occasionally go outside. I've been married to my best friend for roughly half my life and we have three beautiful cats together.
👁️🗨️ this blog
A largely unstructured stream-of-consciousness about whatever's rattling my skull at the moment, a travel log of my trips around the sun. Some original content, a lot of reposts of things I found funny or interesting, forays into self-indulgent armchair philosophy, and a hyperbolic rant about politics or the human condition now and then. You probably shouldn't take me too seriously, I don't.
☣️ content warnings and tags
I'm practically middle-aged, so I doubt I'm even interesting to anyone under 18. Consequently, I use rude language sometimes and talk about "grown-up things" from the titillating to the mundane. I personally draw a line at images or videos with real-world violence or gore, though, and I typically avoid posting anything truly sexually explicit.
🏷️#reblog is the tag for content from other Tumblrs, and 🏷️#not mine is the tag for content I repost from outside Tumblr. I try to credit original authors and artists when possible, but if your work is misattributed or you'd prefer it not to appear here, send me a message.
🏷️#original work (just my original posts)
🏷️#doodlings
my drawings
🔗obligatory self-promotion
Listen to music I recorded on SoundCloud
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Explore my uniquely terrible taste in music with my playlists on Spotify
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📆 Last Updated October 27, 2025, a rainy autumn afternoon
i think people really under sell the physical side effects of mental health disorders sometimes. like sure the depression and anxiety may be 'just in your head' but when what's in your head happens to disrupts your sleep schedule and prevent you from going outside regularly and eating consistent meals and exercising and generally taking care of your body. well it sure takes its toll huh.
This isn't an accident, viewing mental illness as "all in your head" is a uniquely Western viewpoint, and it's not even all that old. Earlier eras of Western medicine had horrors like transorbital lobotomies and electric shock therapy, but these treatments were born out of the awareness that "mind" is not a separate thing from "body," and that mental health issues can have physiological causes and physical symptoms.
In Western culture, we don't "take" easily to biopsychosocial frameworks that say mental health is the intersection of mind, body, AND environment. Steeped in centuries of "man vs. self" narratives and puritan asceticism, we look at mental illness as some intangible personal failing that we should be able to overcome through strength of character and superior moral fiber. The concept that thoughts and behaviors can be caused by our body or our surroundings instead of just our mind strikes directly at the heart of Western ethics and morality - what if we accepted that addiction is caused by environmental factors instead of "personal demons?" What if we could attribute violent criminal behavior to an overactive limbic system and childhood food insecurity, instead of some people just being "evil?" What if there really is no such thing as "free will?" It'd mean not just overhauling our understanding of psychology, but also our morals, religious beliefs, cultural narratives, justice system, labor relations, political stances; the list goes on. In short, admitting that the science is right and mental health isn't "just" in your head would require rethinking our societal structures en masse.
can you say something true and reasonable for me to misinterpret and be weird about? i want to take it wildly out of context and make a poor comparison.
It's totally tonedeaf and irresponsible to describe salad as yummy during a cyclospora outbreak. Normalizing eating plant matter could literally kill people, ESPECIALLY children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised. Your leafy green apologism is violence towards some of society's most vulnerable groups, and you should be ashamed. People like you always act like you're safe as long as you wash your vegetables, but cyclospora can't be removed with water alone and you're spreading dangerous misinformation sponsored by Big Veg.
abelds have this funky ability where they hear disabled people say they "can't" do something and instead of hearing "can't" as in, cannot, they hear "i can if i push myself and i just don't wanna". which is really interesting!
This is because people that have never faced their own limitations fear the word "cannot."
Human beings naturally overestimate their own capabilities. Many people genuinely believe they can accomplish anything they put their mind to. In the same way we all know we will die someday but manage to blissfully ignore it most of the time, modern conveniences mean many people live a comfortable industrialized life almost completely blind to their own limitations. They've never been exposed to the kind of conditions that show them their body and mind do have limits, or if they have, they talk about it in hushed tones with dramatic terms like "terrifying ordeal" or "worst experience of my life" or "most painful thing I ever went through," when actually they're just saying "there was a time I couldn't."
So they use "can't" on a daily basis to mean "I could but I don't want to," and try to protect their psyche from the horror that real "can't" even exists.
Conversely, the psychological battle that people with disabilities have to fight is embracing that "can't" is real. Living in a world not built for them means they have to face "can't" every day, and learn to sit peacefully with it, and come to appreciate that they're still valuable and worthy of love. In the process, they develop a conscious self-awareness of their own limitations that most fragile everyday egos wouldn't be able to accept.
So when a disabled person says "I can't," people often NEED it to mean "I don't want to" or else it's shoving them into an existential crisis. They attack the disabled person's ego (lazy/liar/etc) because their own is wounded by the reminder that "can't" exists and can happen to anyone. It directly challenges the sense of security they get from a "mind over matter" worldview, the belief that they can always succeed as long as they try hard enough - you're reminding them of their own mortality, that there are some limits that can't be negotiated with. And because "can't" for them is an emotionally distressing state, they often can't understand how a disabled person can face it so calmly and bravely, which makes them suspicious.
It's not an excuse, emotional maturity means they should be able to confront their own wounded ego without taking it out on the people around them. But understanding a negative reaction to "can't" as the temper tantrum of a frightened person might help to not take it personally.
remember that guy that had a single auditory hallucination that told him he had a brain tumor and the exact location and then he went to the doctor and it was fucking right
Okay let's be perfectly fair here: Rugby has rules (or at least a culture of) preventing the sort of high-impact collidions popular in Gridiron*. If you watch a Rugby match, tackles generally involve running up next to a ball carrier and pulling them to the ground. In Gridiron it often involves sprinting at high speed into the carrier in order to knock them to the ground. This is the reason why Gridiron players suffer so many concussions leading to CTE, and Rugby players usually don't.
That being said, Rugby does have the scrum, which is known for its propensity for causing neck injuries.
*I.e. American Football; used here in the spirit of the original post
Risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in rugby union is associated with length of playing career - PMC
According to this study they studied CTE in rugby players because there’s less data than for other contact sports. There was CTE in 68% of the brains they looked at, although they admit the sample size wasn’t huge. There’s just not as much data on rugby players unfortunately.
Some other articles I looked at also said that rugby has much higher concussion rates than other contact sports which is a whole other problem.
Boxing got significantly more dangerous once we added gloves. In bare-knuckle boxing, there is a natural limit to how hard you can hit someone in the head, because at some point you'll break your hand. By wearing boxing gloves, you remove that limitation, and so the introduction of boxing gloves is linked to an increase in concussions among boxers; "safety" gear makes the sport more brutal.
The same is true of pads and helmets in Gridiron football, they're essentially blunt weapons, they allow players to cause more damage to each other - move faster, hit harder.
I don't necessarily think that's positive, I actually think it's kind of ghoulish that Americans normalize high school and college kids playing a sport where lifelong debilitating injuries are a feature and not a bug. But if anything, rugby is the casual, unarmed, friendly version of gridiron.
Every once in a while, I wish the friendship meter from the Sims was real so that way when people tell me "I used Chat-GPT" they can visually see just how much respect I just lost for them in that moment.
