A Weird Desert Lover with Decent Luck

I'm Morgan! Age 28, queer, they/them pronouns. I reblog memes, cute animals, and other fun interests, along with social justice, queer subjects, and fandom stuff. I dabble in way too many art mediums. I'm the mun behind the Ace Attorney RP blog bodejustice.

[cheerycheesecake]

list of interesting customers i've encountered as a goodwill cashier

toadstool wizard with toadstool robe, toadstool fingernails, toadstool purse, and toadstool wizard hat (top favorite of all time)

low-level mmorpg man with an armored trench coat who paid for his mountain dew and candy with gold coins

my coworker bob who looks incredibly shady when he shops during his off-time

woman whom i helped find a dress for a date while she told me about her c-section and other life events

man with a very sweet and well-behaved pitbull who sits in his owner's shopping cart and gives kisses (i don't know how his owner gets a full-sized pitbull into the shopping cart)

couple who shop with their maine coon cat whom they call their son (the man pets his cat too hard and argues with the cat when it complains)

mother with a young son who tells jokes to the cashiers every time they shop

couple with matching black outfits, red hairstreaks, spiked collars, and visible hickies who definitely switch their dom-sub routine on a regular basis

my 24-year-old goth manager's 40-year-old punk boytoy who keeps coming in to buy vintage tv sets

family of 5 with parents who look like they belong in a hallmark holiday movie

guy who interrupted my work like "hey what would you say would be a good art gift for a mom who's moving into a new place? you're on the clock and i don't want to look through all these canvases-" while his mom was right there telling him this is unnecessary, she can pick something herself, and she doesn't really need anything anyway

baby who screamed "HI!" at a guy so loudly he dropped a glass measuring cup on the floor

young teen who, when they saw my pride pin, asked if i was nonbinary and opened up to conversing with me

woman who piles her cart almost head-high with clearance-sale clothes to sell at a profit later (HATED)

germanic elderly lady who speaks very little english but i enjoy helping her through basic pantomime and select words anyway

family with a man carrying a bearded dragon lizard in each hand and wearing a backpack containing a tegu lizard (he set the tegu down on the counter for me to meet)

man perusing our DVDs who told me about how he used to have a huge media collection probably worth millions that was destroyed in a house fire, but he's learned to be chill about it; "we come into this world naked with nothing and we go out of this world naked with nothing"

unseen monster who keeps leaving half-eaten pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream sitting around the store, enraging me further every time i find the evidence

woman who definitely lied about being a senior to get a discount on senior discount day, immediately followed by a woman who said "i could lie about my age but that wouldn't be nice"

two different senior women who were shopping on their birthdays and wished each other happy birthday when they overheard each other

noticeably gender-non-conforming customer who was buying clothes for a murder mystery-themed queer party hosted by the local kink community

mother who shops for her several children once a year, specifically at goodwill during our memorial day sale, whose 165-item and $400-dollar purchase almost crashed my register's computer several times and made the computer stall for 6 minutes while it struggled to apply the sale to everything (the receipt was about 9 feet long)

elderly man who asked me for a pen and paper, then spent the next several minutes writing down a song in a language script i didn't recognize at my register--my best guess is irish gaelic since it looked a little similar and he had an irish type of face

very positive man who told me "i hope you live a radiant life to 101 years old"

(more tba)

[cryptidcritter]

Figure I sure finally get posting this over with, since I was supposed to like two weeks ago (oops)

Here’s the horrid little beast I made a while back, figured tumblr would like him

he was made with the image of one of those sock-cats in mind

[dairy-godmother]

Sardonyx from Steven Universe and Mr. Ant Tenna have a vibe so immaculate that no other tv host type characters have. Idk what it is but i don’t think anyone else can go in their secret clubhouse.

[deepfrieddeltarunememes]

so once all this is over*, is Kris going to have some real difficulty playing video games ever again?

they're already monotone when answering that gaming is their life, their head droops if they tell Susie games are fun

they show concern and worry for the playing cards if you try to drop them because they understand they're literally people

and even things like The Weather Channel and spam emails are also people. so wouldn't it be really difficult for them to control or kill someone in a video game, thinking about if they're a real person or not? chat, are they cooked?

[neenarchive]

companies make billions from you thinking you're ugly btw. only ugly thing is their bottom line. log out of tiktok right now.

[neenarchive]

learning to ask 'is this an ad' will save your life

[columboscreens]

[litafordvsferrari]

that makes me curious

do you think you could beat up your blorbo in a fistfight if you had to

yes

no

nuance i guess?

Remaining time: 2 days 14 hours

[prokopetz]

The whole "Elvis sighting" thing is hilarious because, like, the first documented career Elvis impersonators began working over twenty years before the guy even died. I wonder why a public figure who has a whole industry of people who look and sound like him would generate an unusual number of posthumous sightings? It Is A Mystery.

[bluestockingbaby]

[owlwriter]

I miss seeing the Elvis impersonator at our local Tex-Mex place after it changed ownership. Norteño Elvis was awesome

[daily-specilfeacher]

Day 90: height difference

[dailymanners]

I do try to avoid grumbling about rude/inconsiderate people as much as I can on this blog because I want to keep the tone of the blog positive and helpful rather than "grumpy person nagging you to behave better while always griping and being grumpy about people being rude". It's also why I try to balance my posts between "do this kind thing that's nice and considerate" and "avoid this inconsiderate behavior" instead of just having it all the latter so I'm not the nagging and complaining blog.

Nevertheless, I am human, and I make this post for the hopes of discussion and feedback as much as it is me griping about this.

I thought COVID would make people more conscious about covering their mouth when they cough or sneeze in public + respecting other people's person space bubbles more. Somehow, the opposite seems to have happened? I don't know if it's just where I live, but I feel like people have somehow gotten *worse* about open mouth coughing and sneezing in public and invading other people's personal space. How?? Why??

I also feel like I don't see parents / guardians / caretakers teaching their kids to cover their mouth when they cough or sneeze anymore. I understand you can't expect a baby or a young toddler to cover their mouth. But a kid as old as 6, 7, 8+ should be able to. Now it's a daily thing whether I'm in public or visiting friends/family with kids that I see their little ones who are in primary school open mouth coughing and sneezing right at other people while their parent / guardian just stares at them with a blank expression and doesn't react.

Of course, this is 100% the adult's fault for not enforcing this behavior, I'm not trying to hate on kids for not getting proper guidance from the adults in their life. And of course kids mirror the behavior they see in adults, and if the adults around them are open mouth coughing and sneezing of course they'll mimic that. I just think it's disappointing that this has somehow gotten worse instead of better after enduring an airborne pandemic spread by coughing.

Anyway, I don't know if it's just me or just the area that I live in, but does anyone else feel like people have somehow gotten worse about covering their mouth when they cough or sneeze + teaching kids to do the same?

[dailymanners]

@that-bloody-linguist

That is really concise and to the point, and that attitude sounds very hauntingly familiar to what I see here.

I am very grateful that I never saw teens purposefully coughing in the face of old people, but I did see a similar attitude of "How DARE you tell me what to do even if it's for the benefit of everyone around me!"

When I worked retail over the mask mandate days about half my customers would flip me off, cuss me out, scream at me, or even try to reach over the counter and harm me when I asked them to put on a mask. Pretty often I see Icelandic teens and young adults do things like, intentionally throw their trash on the ground when they're only a meter or two away from the nearest trash can and smugly strut away from their empty soda can now just sitting on the ground. It's this idea of "How DARE someone tell me where I can and can't dispose of my trash, how DARE someone tell me where and how I can cough." It's this obsession with being ungovernable and nobody getting a say in their actions or behaviors, even when their actions or behaviors are directly harming someone else.

I've had Icelanders tell me it's unavoidable to see this kind of behavior here because they believe this obsession with being ungovernable (even to the point of harming others) is grafted right onto their DNA, because the Norse people who left Norway to settle Iceland were people who wanted to live independently without being ruled or governed by the king of Norway.

For what it's worth, I don't believe in that. I don't think "self centered jerk" can be found in anyone's DNA. I think it has more to do with the fact that Iceland has been a rural agrarian society, where people lived in small isolated family farms, for most of Iceland's history. So, for most of the country's history people rarely, if ever, were interacting with anyone outside of their small close knit communities. Urban areas where people actually have to see and interact with strangers on a regular basis is a fairly new phenomenon to Iceland, so this idea of "maybe you should be considerate of other people, yes even if you don't know them" is a fairly new concept to Iceland. Some are more resistant to this than others.

An obsession with independence is also a major part of the Icelandic identity. The first and only Icelandic novel to receive a Nobel prize is "Sjálfstætt fólk" (Independent People) by Halldór Laxness. The central theme of the novel is criticizing the Icelandic cultural obsession with independence, and the main protagonist of the novel is portrayed as a very cruel, selfish man for his obsessive pursuit of total independence. But it's also very interesting to note that the Icelandic word for independent, sjálfstætt, would more literally translate to "self standing" in English, and I think it really is more accurate to many Icelander's concept of independence to have "self" right in the word.

For important nuance, of course a major reason independence is so important to the Icelandic cultural identity is the centuries long struggle for independence from Danish rule. It is right, healthy, and just to want to be free from tyranny, from unjust rules, from being controlled and manipulated by others.

However, in many western cultures, you can find this hyper-obsession with independence and being ungovernable to the point of being actively destructive and harmful to the people around you, when the obsession of being ungovernable is self obsession, me me me self self self.

However, We Live In A Society.

For anyone interested in the theme of obsession with independence and being ungovernable -> obsession with self -> cruelty and malice I do recommend reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness. That book won a Nobel prize for a reason.

[crematedequally]

the first time I caught covid in 2020 was because a woman coughed on my face on purpose after I told her she'd have to leave our grocery store unless she wore a mask. she left the store, but I have long covid and am now permanently using a rollator because covid fucked up my nerves and muscles. when I complained to my boss, they told me that's just how people are and I shouldn't risk losing more customers by pressing the issue, and that it was my responsibility to not get sick.

I definitely believe that the obsession with independence directly tries into the combative western idea of 'fucking make me' that leads to this kind of behavior. a lot of people in my area bragged about not wearing masks because 'it's a free country'- when I mentioned that it's a free country for disabled people and children and the elderly too, people didn't understand what I was saying. their argument started and ended with 'i don't think anyone should be allowed to ask me to do something i don't feel like doing'.

[mellosdrawings]

Yurifies your trolley problem <3

[anthropologist-on-the-loose]

It is not nearly common enough knowledge that most Native tribes in the U.S. don't actually own all of the land within their reservation. There are millions of acres of reservation land that tribes don't legally own and they have no control over how that land is used. Like, there are a lot of different concepts tied in with the land back movement, but a major one is literally just getting reservation land back into tribal ownership.

[vigilskept]

really i think the most insidious part of white supremacy is the way it will convince white people everything is actually About Them. being called out isn’t about you. poc expressing frustration at your behaviour isn’t about you. it’s about how you are affecting others. step one is literally just de-centre yourself from the conversation. anyone who’s not white has already had to learn this lesson the hard way and it gets tiring waiting for the rest of you to catch up

[werewolf-transgenderism]

irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers

[tagfer]

welcome to the club asshole

[tarenko]

[thebattleblog]

[battle-for-dyke-island]

it’s like a spot the difference game with you people

[maybeophe]

[re-reclass]

[maemaybe]

I don't know who my intended audience is here, so whoever needs to hear this, I am begging you to learn to participate in conversations that are about things you aren't interested in.

Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.

Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.

It can not always be about your preferred topic.

You are being rude. Yes, even if you are neurodivergent. You can be both autistic and rude.

[lawbutch]

you don't have to be scared of your suicidal friends. you don't have to be scared of your psychotic or delusional friends. you don't have to call the police every time someone says they feel like they want to die. you can say things like, "that sounds really hard" and "I'm going to bring you some food and you can tell me more about it"

[lawbutch]

Important addition thank you! You can absolutely have boundaries about substance use but your friends who use substances know themselves and their needs better than you, and they do not need policing or threats of incarceration. If you want to help your friends who deal with addiction, be patient and demonstrate that you're a safe person to talk to.