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My second grade teacher liked to ask us, “How do you feel today, on a scale of one to ten?” Ten always meant I’m super, thank you and one was always not today, Mrs. MacAuley, not today. But I never liked numbers, they would always twist and rebel against my mind so I chose to speak in colors instead. January third - I am the color of mint chocolate chip ice cream but I’ve eaten all the chocolate chips. I am calm. February seventh - I am a bruise of blues and violets today. I think it would be best if I sat by the window. These are unhappy colors. April eleventh - I am turquoise, I am magenta, I am every color in the rainbow. April thirtieth - I am gray, I am silent. May first - I am orange, the color of melting creamsicles on a beach in July. June twelfth - I am as yellow as the school bus that will bring me home to summer. I am free. Twelve years later, I still use colors. The winter makes me feel cobalt blue, the ocean turns me a seafoam green. Violets and purples leave me uneasy and scarlet is a fever of fury. Some nights I drown in shades of navy, denim, and cornflower but other nights I meditate in forests of harlequin and shamrock. But you, you leave me a blinding white followed by a soft yellow: the color of sunlight after a period of darkness.

Kelsey Danielle, “A Diary of Colors” (via pigmenting)

artmonia

QTM [Queering the Museum] has its roots in projects like Mining the Museum, Fred Wilson's groundbreaking 1992 intervention which unearthed horrifying artifacts lurking in the Maryland Historical Society's collection—Klan hoods, slave shackles—and displayed them alongside typical history-museum stuff like silver tea services to highlight the effects of racism on the way museums collect and show objects. The exhibition fueled a shift from the parochial, white-male curatorial style that dominated the 20th century and continues to affect our nation's cultural repositories. QTM pushes museums to look critically at their practices and mine their collections.

"Queering the MOHAI," Erin King

#racism #race #museums #museum #queer

an archaeology of care

#disability #healthcare #bones #PCAs

Unlike their children, parents of kids with disabilities are adults, and with that comes privileges and responsibilities their children do not yet have. Parents are far more powerful, both at home and in the public forum, than their minor children (what are the odds that a thirteen-year-old’s complaints about his mother’s unpredictable temper would have gone viral, even though it’s far more terrifying to live with a parent with emotional control issues than with a child?). Thirteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to be good at thinking about their future, but their parents are. Parents are responsible for their children’s lives, not the other way around.

I am Liza L.'s kid

#disability #mental illness #parenting #sandy hook #violence #newton

violence & mental illness

a few facts.

mental illness is not an independent predictive factor for violence. areas with high rates of mental illness are not correlated with high rates of violence. people with mental illnesses are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of violence. there is no magical, violence-related dividing line between "severe" mental illnesses and more mundane ones. of mass school shooters with mental illnesses, most have had depression. of people with mental illnesses who are violent, mental illness is not the causal factor--it is secondary to other factors, such as substance abuse or life situation.

this does not meant that people with mental illnesses never commit violence. it does mean that gun laws targeting only those with mental illnesses are not likely to be effective in controlling gun violence.

regardless, the u.s. needs to provide much better access to humane, accessible mental health treatment. part of the process is destigmatizing mental illness, so more people feel comfortable asking for appropriate help and fighting for the right to obtain it.

a few sources.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525086/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/crazy-life/201207/violence-untreated-mental-illness-there-is-connection

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19188537

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/

#violence #mental illness

keys

got 'em today! moving in monday.

Wellstone!

today's the 10th anniversary of his death.

you may have heard about the connecticut case where a disabled woman was raped but her rapist's conviction was recently overturned. she has severe physical disabilities and cannot communicate verbally, but 3 of the 4 judges still decided that the burden was on her to NOT consent. in other words, women are assumed to be consenting to sex unless proven otherwise, which is a terrible assumption under any circumstances, but especially so when the person who is assaulted does not communicate in the same way as the rapist (in this case, verbal vs nonverbal communication).

but a lot of the reporting about this case is ableist and makes another bad assumption: that women with (certain kinds of) disabilities are incapable of consent under any circumstances.

this is tricky terrain, because women with disabilities are sexually assaulted at much higher rates than nondisabled women, but sexual women with disabilities also have to fight against their pervasive desexualization and infantilization. this article at Girl with the Cane does a nice job addressing these issues.

#disability #women #sexual assault #sexuality

my doctor faxed off the form for me today.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Ira Glass

i've tried to put it off for so long, but the time has come: i require very strong orthopedic shoes, the kind that are made in styles that...well, they're not my style. but shoes are really part of my identity. so more than using a wheelchair and scooter, more than applying for a handicap parking permit, this shoe thing is hitting me hard.

so i've decided: i'm going FULL GRANDPA. i did it in high school (albeit accessorizing my polyster pants and cardigans with chucks rather than orthopedic shoes), i can do it now. i'm still youthful enough looking that i will not be confused for an actual grandfather.

#shoes #fashion #disability

The lockout of union refs has turned the nation’s Sunday NFL ritual into a profane farce. You could look at it as a living argument for the importance of trained union labor, or like a dangerous practical joke: a group of Sacha Baron Cohens in black and white stripes poking at fans and players to see just how much they’ll take before they snap. Yesterday we were served the spectacle of 49er coach Jim Harbaugh berating some meek scab into giving him both an extra challenge flag and an additional timeout. Then there was the sight of the referee who threw his hat on the field of play, causing receiver Kevin Ogletree to step on it and slip awkwardly in the end zone. Fortunately, his knee ligaments remained attached. But this was all high comedy compared to seeing helmet-to-helmet hits go unregulated, Bill Belichick physically accosting an official and 70,000 fans in Baltimore chanting “bullsh*t” in unison for a solid minute. The owners might want to note that it’s only funny until the peasants grab pitchforks.

this is dave zirin on the scab refs' mockery of the NFL BEFORE the big debacle last night.

#football

this image, from one of the most scandalous, outrageous blown calls in NFL history, is going down in infamy. my poor beloved packers.

"You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?’ And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."

Junot Diaz

Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our faces.

Charles Lamb, "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People." via bookslut

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