Welcome to the Grab Bag

Hello and welcome to my blog! Feel free to check out my about, shoot me an ask, whatever. (Sam she/they)

[crittaslink]

I gotta hand it to sandler that this scene is exactly what listening to that song feels like.

[yokowan]

okay I'll bite

[yokowan]

hawm

[mapleejay]

does anyone else think about how brave all their friends are and get really emotional about it

[mapleejay]

I'm glad everyone is alive rn

[robreyart]

Dust of Life Oil, 24 x 18 inches

Understanding who we are in the universe involves understanding where we come from. How did life begin? As we investigate, we find that the building blocks from which life likely formed, organic (carbon containing) molecules and amino acids, are everywhere in space. In swirling clouds of gas and dust that we analyze spectroscopically, and on the comets and asteroids that our spacecraft have visited. From simple hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang, the stars have fused the elements and bonded them into the complex molecules necessary for biology over billions of years. The cosmos seems to be primed for life.

This painting and its preliminary study are part of the third annual Character in Context show. The largest exhibition of original illustration in the Western U.S. opening this Friday, June 5th at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad, Colorado.

[marta-bee]

The Abortion Absolutist

Warren Hern has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients as ever.

This was an interesting read. Surprisingly nonpreachy given the subject; and well worth the time.

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

This is oaywalled but it made me weep with relief to see an honest recounting for once, so I’ve saved some good bits:

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

[mysharona1987]

[stoptheantisemitism]

Reminder that the NYT is trash and complicit in the genocide of Palestinians

[beardedmrbean]

[doggosource]

[lordoftables]

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[kriosv]

[heyhoneyfox]

"I'm lying to you but this sentence is technically the truth without context" is such a good trope. Like yes the way that I am spinning these words forms a lies but if you squint I'm actually not lying.

[orcarriagesthatwork]

I think about this cake every day

[tizzymcwizzy]

sorry for exposing your tags but this is hilarious

[microsuedemouse]

OP, I hope you don’t mind me making an addition:

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

I love a botched cake.

[helenarth]

one time me and some pals spotted one of those big cookie cakes in a store. it was done up with red icing and little X's for kisses and in the middle it said

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

for ages after when we'd wind each other up we'd declare "NO ONE LIKE YOU ☹️👎"

[itseasytoremember]

I just feel like it's important to post the Sacred Texts

[64mpg]

what do you mean my childhood affected me

[64mpg]

i have terrible news

[unconventiononthelawofthesea]

have I mentioned on here before that as a child I thought that "dyke" meant "badass" because I was trying to use context clues based on who I heard my parents friends call dykes

[unconventiononthelawofthesea]

the way I learned that it was actually a word people use for lesbians, and many people find it offensive, was when my teacher was wearing a leather jacket that I thought looked really cool, and you'll never guess what I said.

[animentality]

[mmilhouse]

goodbye $200 helloooo 3 groceries

[sabertoothwalrus]

aint it crazy how everyone is famous nowadays and yet I dont know who anyone is. there are countless people that will have more followers on instagram than the population of Sacramento and no one I know irl has ever heard of them