Illusionary Reality @awesomelyalli - Tumblr Blog

Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?

Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.

All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)

But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.

But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.

I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?

It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.

Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.

Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)

agj1993

My step aunt is a lesbian and I think she came out before I joined the family but I didn't know until I was in my late teens and I was so shocked because no one ever mentioned but it made so much sense

animentality

woolandflax

vashti-lives

I went to the county fair and there was a doll sized quilt show happening in the fiber arts hall?!

elodieunderglass

I’m deciding it now. All shows, conventions and fairs should have a second smaller version of themselves within them. Yes academic conferences, yes comic conventions, yes state fairs, yes horse shows, yes whatever old guys are doing with old cars.

They all have to have a second smaller version of themselves like a model village

kitschyfemme

guys oh my god they invented a thing called friends. and they love you and want to talk to you and be around you. has anyone heard of this

#sounds fake

somenerdthing

divorcedwife

look at the republican calendar and see which animal/plant/item is associated with your birthday ok. if you're born january 14 you get the day of the cat

divorcedwife

solidarity for everyone who was born on the day of the cistern or the watering can or something like that

quicksilvermad

SOUND ON.

hotcinnamonsunset

The Tiger (from the poem by Nael, age 6)🐅

jumbleofnotes

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like

naonic-blog-deactivated20230221

Once again John Oliver proves that you can do anything with money and lawyers

partisan-by-default

Oliver then proceeded to detail how with $50 and knowledge of the law he was able to successfully apply online to create a debt buying company named “Central Asset Recovery Professionals,” or as Oliver put it, “CARP” named after “a bottom-feeding fish.”

After setting up a rudimentary website for CARP, the satirical, but still real company was offered a $15 million package of medical debt for $60,000.

Oliver explained that the debt was out of statute, which means it is the kind of debt that a collector can only continue to collect, but not sue the debtor for.

Then, instead of chasing down the 9,000 debtors in the debt package as a normal collection agency would, Oliver decided to stage the largest one-time giveaway in television history and work with the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt to forgive the $15 million with no consequences for the debtors.

helloquirks

Okay but now I know what I want to do of I get rich?

beabaseball

You dont have to be rich to do a bit of this actually

RIP Medical Debt is a charity (and therefore takes donations). They buy the rights to medical debt and then forgive them. So far they’ve forgiven over 1B in medical debt.

So a little ray of hope for someone out there today.

shayvaalski

Donating $10 buys $1,000 of medical debt. This is real, it works, and we’ve done it ourselves. You can too.

ladyshinga

Doctors should snark at each other more, be a bit mean. Not for no reason, mind you. But if five doctors blow me off about symptoms and doctor number six FINALLY runs actual tests and gets a diagnosis, I think it should be Doctor Six's right to call up the other five and tell them they're lazy pieces of shit. That should be socially encouraged. Those first five doctors clearly can't listen to patients, but maybe another doctor might finally get to them.

fuzzballsheltiepants

ok looks like we're gonna be doing the same thing, different verse, now that it's Kamala Harris on the Dem ticket instead of Joe Biden.

friendly reminder that one of these 2 people is getting elected. there's not a magical 3rd party person who's mystical and perfectly progressive who is gonna come out of the woodwork and save us. not voting or voting 3rd party isn't a "protest," it's capitulation. so let's do a comparison:

On Gaza:

I forgot to add to this that Trump also stated he will deport any non-citizen who protests the war in Gaza.

On LGBTQ+ rights:

On criminal justice:

On reproductive rights:

On the border:

In case you don't believe me re: the last Trump point.

On voting rights:

On climate change:

On the working class:

spiribia

we do need to revisit the wording of "you can't have your cake and eat it too" because i don't think it clearly enough conveys that it's more that you can't simultaneously retain a cake and also get to consume it (which would render you cakeless). for years i was like But why not....it's my cake....?

ferrettoy

this fucking problem is how they caught the unabomber

m0thmancore

hey you should uh. elaborate. for my own personal satisfaction

ferrettoy

the unabomber was pedantic about idiomatic phrases like "have your cake and eat it too" and rephrased it to "eat your cake and have it too" (which to be very fair makes sense). fast forward to when he starts writing manifestos. he uses the phrase word for word in his pedantic style and his brother (who has been keeping his eyes on the unabomber shit for obvious reasons) notices the phrase and is like "oh fuck that's my fucking brother no one else fucking says that" and calls in an FBI tip