Hello This Is Dog

I have no idea what I'm doing

[docholligay]

Doc, what are the top five items food banks LOVE to receive? I'm doing a collection soon and want to ask for specifics.

MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY

That aside.

 I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome. 

1) Canned chicken and beef 

looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins. 

2) Fancy nut butters

Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)

3) Canned or packaged tuna

You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend. 

4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like) 

Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry. 

5) Shelf-stable juice

This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives. 

[kesonafyren]

But seriously, give money

And it’s way better food, too, anything you get prepackaged has A TON of sugar and/or salt in it…collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done

[pennie-dreadful]

Yoooooo heads up for those of you with kids, I know this time of year schools start holding canned food drives so keep this in mind if you’re able to give.

[burmabeast]

Also spices and cooking oils! Those are things that people very rarely think about but are absolutely critical. They are also significantly more expensive.

[everydaylouie]

[everythingstartsfromsomething]

This is weirdly cute and enchanting

[spectremirror]

this is gonna be in my halloween playlist

[fuckyeahtimolyphant]

Timothy Olyphant on the End of "Justified"

[fuckyeahtimothyolyphant]

“What was I thinking?” If Timothy Olyphant is nervous about life after Justified, he certainly doesn’t let it show. FX recently announced that the show (airing Tuesdays) would end next year after its sixth season, but to hear him talk about it makes it seem like business as usual. Olyphant shares the quiet cool of his character, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, though he’s willing to get a little sentimental when discussing the future and his relationship with Elmore Leonard. We caught up with him as he got ready to film this year’s third-to-last episode and he shared his thoughts on Raylan’s code, Leonard’s funeral, his prospects at getting a big-time film role, and how much he loves being a pain in the ass on the Justified set.

[ruinedchildhood]

Reblog for Good luck🙏🏼

[inamortalivesinfictions]

Sexual orientation: Thomas Shelby smoking a cigarette.

[museum-of-artifacts]

Reconstruction of bust of Roman emperor Caracalla.

[shitface54]

Looks Middle Eastern/ African maybe even Greek. Interesting post.

[terrasigillata]

His father, the emperor Septimius Severus, was North African (the first African emperor of Rome!), and his mother, Julia Domna, was Syrian, from a wealthy priestly family

[lord-kitschener]

#rome was a multiethnic empire

[eastern-bloc-party-archive]

Yep! Septimius Severus was born in what is now Libya. (X)

[elodieunderglass]

That Roman Empire was a real big place!

[velocicrafter]

thx for the history lesson but anyway 10/10 would smash

[sixpenceee]

I hope love finds you in 2018

[nvmdanyway]

I hope health finds u in 2018

[rosedespleurs-deactivated202009]

I hope wealth finds you in 2018

[dark-eyed-harmothoe]

I hope happiness finds you in 2018

[traumamamas]

I hope success finds you in 2018

[sleepingpeelz]

I hope self-love finds you in 2018

[greenneerg123-deactivated201804]

I hope supportive people find you in 2018

[doesnt-evenmatter-deactivated20]

I hope all the dogs find you in 2018

[fandomsrourlives]

I hope good grades find you in 2018

[everi-moved]

I hope validation finds you in 2018

[trailinginfinity]

I hope self-acceptance finds you in 2018

[bunntsu]

I hope healthy friendships/relationships find you in 2018

[remi-reciprocal-blog]

I hope better mental health finds you in 2018

[live4love137-deactivated2019082]

I hope confidence finds you in 2018

[brownii-milkshake]

I hope good vibes find you in 2018

[gothvibes-deactivated20180324]

bi culture is making subtle comments about multiple genders to hint at your sexuality so maybe they’ll just Get It and you won’t have to tell them

[marxvx-deactivated20170329]

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

[madgastronomer]

Younger than 40.

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.

[feminesque]

2011

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.

AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden

The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.

The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.

Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience

The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project

Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub

Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

We Were Here (2011)

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.

[nomorekyriarchy]

They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.

That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.

Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/

As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959

[flashdoggy]

I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y'all. Please, take care of one another.

[injygo]

http://www.aidsquilt.org/view-the-quilt/search-the-quilt

Updated link to the quilt

[millenianthemums]

this is so hard to read or even think about but… it’s so important. it’s so important to understand just the …overwhelming SCALE of this. how many people died while the government did NOTHING.

[notlostonanadventure]

Reblogging for pride

Never forget your fallen. Your people were nearly annihilated in an epidemic. Never forget how lucky we are, never forget how they tried to let us die.

[play6irl]

[thug-gifs]

Reblog in 40 seconds and you will be put on the path to achieve your dreams and find your fortune

[atsirhc-deactivated20230825]

WELP.

[xanadontit]

Can’t hurt.

[jigglyteenfeedee]

Bet

[arizonasugarbaby]

I’ve been rolling in the dough lately so it seems like these things are working 🙏🏻

[baddestheaux]

No they literally work

[lilyliqueur]

I reblogged this the other day and literally got a settlement check from an old job. like LMAO ?????????????????????????? 

[fixedhawa]

i’ve got nothing to lose lol

[justsomeantifas]

lol

[republicansareahategroup]

Reblog in 30 seconds for good luck

[michigatita]

This poem broke my heart

[thedeviljudges]

Ardeth Bay + Hair Appreciation

[fuckyeahwomenprotesting]

ok but this guy was the first time I felt real attraction for a boy he is disgustingly beautiful 

[plantain-emoji]

May your next period be light and end quickly

[plantain-emoji]

This is literally now my favorite post ever, because its become thousands of reblogs consisting of passing on good fortune. Meanwhile many of y’all added your own comments saying your thanks, and continuing the chain by adding your own little bit of wishful thinking. You are all wonderful.

[neeka-neko-deactivated20160625]

may you not leak even once

[phineas4cobain]

NOT EVEN when you sneeze or cough!

[insouciantbibliophile-deactivat]

may you always have what you need when you need it. 

[obsessivereaderandwriter]

May you have no cramps.

[misunderstoodraindrop]

May you have no headaches

[captainxandis]

may you start in your own home/somewhere you are comfortable, in your least favourite underwear and with plenty of pads/tampons on hand

[trans-mlm-boy]

may dysphoria not get to you !

[princey-must-slay-deactivated20]

^^^may you still feel valid!

[motorcyclegrrl]

and no weeping and crying over commercials.

[persephoneandthepomegranates]

May your cramps not cause you to throw up!

May your cramps not keep you from going about your day!

[soggywarmpockets]

May that chocolate you crave, you know, that one specific kind, be within your reach.

[victim-that-speaks]

May it happen on a day where you have nothing to do.

[pro-survivors]

May your gastrointestinal system stay relaxed.

[musicforyourplants]

[boy-matt-deactivated20181204]

*slams reblog*

[ariesaav]

Klezmer dolphins.

[willcub-deactivated20180521]

I don’t know that I’ve reblogged anything faster in my entire tumblr life.  

[deadwithoutdata]

The one dancing and flailing at the end

[mrjandpuddin]

Vincent and the Doctor—S05E10

Hold my hand, Doctor. Try to see what I see. We are so lucky we are still alive to see this beautiful world. Look at the sky. It’s not dark and black and without character. The black is in fact deep blue. And over there, lighter blue. And blowing through the blueness and the blackness, the wind swirling through the air and then, shining, burning, bursting through, the stars. Can you see how they roar their light? Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.

[inthemoodforportnawak]

Buddah Cats - KyleKahotek (Imgur)

[ariristocat]

I am so happy

[dashaibo]

There’s something pure in this photoset.