if you're bored and want to do something simple but fulfilling I recommend wikisource's proofread of the month. you can help public domain works be transcribed to be more accessible for everyone! even just validating a few pages helps a lot and there's a bunch of simple guides on the site.
My mom likes to tell me about how when I was a little kid riding public transport with her I'd always smile and giggle and chat with weird old ladies who smelled like cat pee and homeless folks and strangers dressed in bizarre outfits but any time a tidy and respectable businessman in a suit and tie waved at me I'd immediately clam up, and she takes a great deal of pride in my supposed inherentability to clock personalities but the truth is I do vaguely remember those bus rides, and it was never about the clothes or the hair or the smell, but more because everyone "strange" asked interesting questions and listened to what I had to say and seemed to think about what I said while the neat and tidy and rigid folks only ever acted like they were going through the motions, which was boring as hell and also pretty annoying
Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.
I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.
Often the idea of divine feminine in spiritual contexts is based entirely on reducing AFAB people to their reproductive organs.
The mother, maiden crone archetype or the “life cycle” of a female revolves around reproduction and whether or not it is being done. Ones “divine feminine” and spiritual wellness is judged on reproductive factors being “in sync with your cycle” and the like.
I think it is time we move on from this. We are not defined by our ability to reproduce, witchcraft and paganism claims to be a freedom for women free from the misogyny that plagues all other faiths. Yet just like these other religions spirituality, paganism and witchcraft reduces AFAB people to breeders.
People with children are first and foremost people. Their spiritual purpose is not just child bearing and should not be forced into a lifestyle where they are treated as nothing but a mother.
A person who chooses to not have children is not “out of touch with the divine feminine” one does not need to have children to “spiritually level up”.
People who do not have sex or are perhaps on the asexual spectrum are still divine. Getting your tubes typed or going on birth control doesn’t make you of less value. Those who can have children are not any more divinely feminine then those who cannot
AFAB people who have periods and female anatomy but do not associate them with femininity should be respected. Reproductive organs do not define a person.
Trans women who cannot have periods are not any less divinely feminine. A trans woman who never got to be a maiden in the outdated, traditional sense should not be considered any less.
If the language you’re using to describe AFAB people is the same way that a dog breeder describes a breeding dog, you’re doing something wrong.
when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)
anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.
i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”
and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.
“What?” i say.
“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)
tv show like grey's anatomy except they're veterinarians. all the soap opera drama but there's creatures all over the place. "is that a gerbil on your scrubs or are you just excited to see me" but it's actually the gerbil, he's a patient and we can't be having sex right now.
the characters still wax poetic via voiceover about how the surgery of the day is just like their own tumultuous personal lives but the surgery in question is like. neutering a bunch of kittens.
which is of course exactly like Dr. Riverbeans trying to decide if he wants to be a father. it's such a huge decision, and he just doesn't know what to do! if only someone had made the decision for him by gently anesthetizing him as a child and fucking. cutting his balls off.
Rest = Lying Down, Eyes Closed
Because other parts of the program from England made sense, I decided to try resting every afternoon. After some experimentation, I determined that the most restorative rest resulted from lying down in a quiet place with my eyes closed.
I was surprised at the results from taking a 15-minute rest in mid-afternoon. Even that short break seemed to help, reducing my symptoms, increasing my stamina and making my life more stable. After a while I added a similar rest in late morning.
Over time, I came to believe that my scheduled rest was the most important strategy I used in my recovery. Resting everyday according to a fixed schedule, not just when I felt sick or tired, was part of a shift from living in response to symptoms to living a planned life. The experience showed me that rest could be used for more than recovering from doing too much; it could be employed as a preventive measure as well. In the terms suggested by someone in our self-help program, I learned the difference between recuperative rest and pre-emptive rest.
Surprisingly, taking pre-emptive rests greatly reduced the time I spent in recuperative rest, because I was experiencing much less Post-Exertional Malaise. The result was that my total rest time was reduced.
sometimes like an idiot i assume everyone has read bruce campbell on resting/pacing to handle post-exertional malaise affiliated with chronic fatigue. that is obviously not true! anyway here's the hot guide, i linked straight to the "schedule in mandatory complete 15 min rest as part of your day and hopefully you will get to do less surprise many hours of rest to recover" section but the whole thing is laid out pretty clearly
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