Monkey Around Town

[monkeyaroundtown]

Due to tumblr not syncing well with Facebook, MonkeyAroundTown has moved to Instagram. You can find her at MunkeeAroundTown.

[number6bitch]

What Would A Mediocre White Man Do? (new mantra to live by!)

[sonatine]

this is SO REAL both the specific case and the broad case in the specific case: if you actually met 100% of the requirements they couldn’t afford you I tell this to every woman I talk to job hunting about APPLY ANYWAY THE MEDIOCRE WHITE MEN ARE DOING IT (via @galwednesday)

[eve-made-the-right-choice]

“if you actually met 100% of the requirements they couldn’t afford you”

I really needed to hear this. I had never thought of it this way. This literally never occurred to me, I’ve just spent my whole adult life thinking I was underqualified for everything. Thinking I’m not good enough for anything because the “minimum requirements” are so high.

I need specifics. I wanna know what I can get away with. I wanna know what they really mean by “minimum.” I wanna know how much I’m actually worth.

[hellanahmean]

As someone who worked in hr, this is true.

True to the point that if someone was extremely unqualified, but because of timing we were desperate, we’d bend rules to get them hired. And the only people taking advantage of this were guys.

[needshisbones]

[djsoliloquy]

if you actually met 100% of the requirements they couldn’t afford you

this made so much click in my head. because this was literally it–spend half the time being unqualified for everything and just not applying. and the rest of the time being qualified and not getting hired. because ahahaha fuck you, you’re too expensive now/we’re too worried you’ll jump ship and leave us because of how qualified you are! guess we’ll just hire this shitty dude to do it !? ?

[stagemanagerssaygo]

I debated posting this here but WWAMWMD? He’d post it. #girlgogetyours

[appolsaucy-deactivated20260202]

It’s way more than “if you actually met 100% of the requirements they couldn’t afford you” 

The reason they couldn’t afford you is that if you meet 100% of the requirements, you’re ready for the next position up.

Career strategy 101: The most valuable employees are always learning. Every company wants employees who won’t stagnate, i.e. sit in one role doing the same thing ever year and continue getting annual raises. A company wants to hire you for one thing at one salary, and then move you up through higher positions over the years, i.e. they keep getting new benefits for the additional money they’re spending on you.

A good company will offer you development opportunities, either within your role or in addition to it. So when the company interviews you, they want to see that you can learn what they need, and you want to see that they can teach you new skills. Companies know that the best applicants are interviewing them in return and that if they don’t offer development, they will lose those applicants to better jobs.

Companies structure positions this way intentionally and they assume you know it.

So not only should you apply to jobs you aren’t 100% qualified for, you can use 100% qualification as an indicator that you’re overqualified and should look for the next job up.

[bryntwedge]

This started funny but became really important to know. 

[frontholemonologues-deactivated]

Hey can we stop acting like parents are the sole deciders of the way their kids are raised? like yeah they are the most significant influence in most cases but there are literal thousands of people and institutions and attitudes that will shape a kid’s life in their formative years so let’s stop pretending that parents who raise their kids in a “gender neutral” environment are the answer to all problems of oppressive gender roles

[frontholemonologues-deactivated]

And I mean yes, please, by all means raise your child without gender roles but when your daughter starts picking barbies over tonka trucks maybe consider the fact that her preschool teachers are encouraging her to play with dolls and her friends have pink plastic kitchen playsets at home that look like so much fun and there are commercials and print ads with girls her age having the time of their lives with a purple glitter makeup set instead of just throwing your hands up and saying “Welp I guess femininity is innate”

[oldmaninatee]

YES. This reminds me of this anecdote by Deborah Rhode in Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender:

“One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.”

Parents should try their best to raise their children in a gender-neutral way! but it’s not going to make a dent to counter outside socialization unless the parents’ own behavior matches their words, and in most cases that’s not how it is. Children generalize their parents’ behaviors to represent what men and women are “like”. But a mother saying, “women don’t need to wear makeup” while herself wearing makeup isn’t going to convince her children that women don’t need to wear makeup, for example.

There was a study done where children were interviewed whose parents had evaluated themselves as encouraging their children to play with “opposite-gendered” toys, but despite their parents words, the children still played with “same-gendered” toys and believed their parents would have a problem with them playing with “opposite-gendered” toys (Freeman 2007). They know. Children are getting sooooo many more messages than their parents’ words.

Even if parents do everything right in this regard, if they both create a gender-neutral environment in the home and model gender-neutral behaviors themselves, it’s still only going to make up a small part of their children’s socialization. We are undermined constantly by children’s media, their peers, their teachers, other family members, literally the random people at the grocery store who comment on my son’s toenail polish! Gender is enforced everywhere. It’s inescapable in our society.

Even when it’s not enforced by being specifically instructed or punished, gender is commented on! It’s noted! And even that matters. There’s another very famous study where an arbitrary role system was created to see if we can artificially model gender: preschoolers were randomly assigned to a Blue group or a Red group for a three-week period. They wore t-shirts to match their group. In one classroom, that’s all they did, it wasn’t mentioned again once they put on their t shirt. But in the other classroom, the color groups were used constantly- children had to line up according to their color, they had their cubbies decorated in blue or red, they were referred to by those labels (“good morning, Blues and Reds!”). And this grouping for three weeks was enough to change children’s views in the room where the groups were emphasized- the children grouped themselves into playgroups according to color, they wanted to play with toys they were told other Reds or Blues liked !! (this is Bern 1983 btw) And is this not how gender is treated in our society? Children are color-coded, their toys are color-coded, the fact that they are a boy or a girl is commented on CONSTANTLY, EVERYWHERE. Children come to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally different about boys and girls because so much emphasis is put on distinguishing them. It’s all so arbitrary! We don’t need gender! Like it would be laughable that our society is so artificially constructed if it weren’t so goddamn harmful

Anyways yes it is much bigger than parenting

[odinsblog]

Deregulation strikes again.

“Free market” capitalism does NOT care about raging forest fires, it does not care about endangering firefighters, it does not care about people dying due to lack of healthcare insurance. Unregulated capatilism cares only about making profits, apparently at any and all costs.

[whysperingwoods]

I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else. 

Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different. 

I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year. 

So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them. 

I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated. 

It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching. 

And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition. 

Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier. 

Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time. 

[superherogrl]

‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one’

^^^^The real jack of all trades quote if anyone’s i interested.

[halftruthsandhyperbole]

Today I learned

[ouijubell]

Free Audiobooks and Ebooks on OVERDRIVE.

Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.

Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL

You are PAYING for all this with your tax money - USE THEM. Most likely systems will have all 3 or 2 out of 3, so if you aren’t sure call your local library’s reference/information desk and how you can get set-up or started.

[pikestaff-deactivated20200113]

Helpful links to all of the above:

Overdrive: https://www.overdrive.com/

Hoopla: https://www.hoopladigital.com/

Freegal: https://www.freegalmusic.com/home

–

More places to find FREE EBOOKS:

Standard eBooks (basically stuff off of Project Gutenberg, but prettified)

Baen Free Library

Book Bub - Free eBooks and Free Kindle books

Bubblin Books

-

Useful if you’re an ebook power user: Calibre

[gayerluke]

many libraries also give you access to KANOPY which has free movies (mostly documentaries but last i checked Moonlight was on there!)

[magicalfreezerbunny]

WHAT?!?!

I’m going to my library on monday. no joke…that’s awesome.

[mockiato-deactivated20200315]

Overdrive has an app called Libby and I love it!

[arabwife]

[mediokurrr-deactivated20200405]

Can i get a step by step on how to do this?

[catastrofries]

So far for me it’s been something like:

1. Become aware of how and when you tearing yourself down.

2. Now that you can catch yourself doing it. Offer counters to the negative self talk. A really useful thing I read was to talk to yourself almost the way you would child. Gentle and patient. Even when they fuck up.

3. Take time to celebrate your small accomplishments. You’ve been attacking yourself for every little mistake. Apply that same fervor to the positive things in your life. Did the dishes even though you didn’t want to? Fuck yeah! Got up and took shower? YES!!! You are taking positive steps to feeling better. Celebrate it.

4. Make lists of things you’re good at/ like about yourself. The first time I did this the only two things in my list we’re that I liked my hair and I had good friends. It was start.

5. Don’t beat yourself up if you screw up steps 1-4. It’s counter productive. When I catch myself calling my self stupid for some mistake or other my response now is,“We don’t talk to ourselves like that anymore. What’s something constructive that could actually help solve the problem.”

Most of the time that seems to work. Not always. But more and more Everytime.

I hope any of that made sense.

[absolutely-walnuts]

oh my goodness there are instructions!!

[rjzimmerman]

Why It’s Right to Be Mad About Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court

Excerpt:

But there is even more at stake than preventing another rightward lurch on the high court. As Kavanaugh prepares to make his way to the Capitol, and, most probably, to a lifetime appointment in the old courthouse behind it, we are witnessing the dénouement of an outrageous power grab by a radicalized political party, its wealthy backers, and a rogue President. It is essential to remember this wider context.

By now, the broad outlines of how the John M. Olin Foundation and other right-wing groups spent decades nurturing a conservative legal movement to wrest control of the nation’s courts is well known, or should be. (In his Timescolumn on Tuesday, David Brooks provided a brief guide for the uninitiated.) Ultimately, however, the conservative takeover hinged on ruthless power politics: the G.O.P. exploiting its unearned advantage in the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, and the Supreme Court itself.

At the risk of giving yourself a headache, consider some counterfactuals. Absent the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling, in 2000, under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, to halt the Florida recount and allow the election of a Republican President who lost the popular vote, John Roberts and Samuel Alito might not be sitting on the Court today. If, in 2016, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, had adhered to precedent and allowed filibusters on the nomination of Merrick Garland, Gorsuch might well not be a Justice, either. And but for the quirks of the Electoral College nullifying Hillary Clinton’s almost three-million-ballot margin of victory in the popular vote, Kavanaugh would still be a relative unknown.

If these points sound like the complaints of sore losers, they are. But Democrats, Independents, and anybody else who cares about the functioning of American democracy have good reason to be sore. There is no majority of voters out there clamoring for a ban on abortion, restrictions on collective bargaining, roadblocks to legal claims against big companies, or the purging from the electoral rolls of voters who skip a couple of elections. These are the concerns of smaller groups, with strong ties to the Republican Party, whose interests will be disproportionately represented.

To effect this transformation, the Republican Party has relied not just on the quirks of the Electoral College but also on another electoral body that was designed to limit majority rule: the U.S. Senate, where the 1.7 million residents of Idaho receive the same number of representatives as the 39.5 million residents of California. According to the Federal Election Commission, between 2012 and 2016, Democratic candidates for the Senate received some hundred and twenty-two million votes; Republican candidates received about a hundred and five million. Despite being trounced in the popular vote in 2016, the G.O.P. has controlled the upper chamber since 2014—which enabled McConnell to block Garland, Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee; get Gorsuch confirmed; and look forward confidently to the confirmation of Kavanaugh.

This isn’t how democracies are supposed to work.

[butterflyinthewell]

I just explained my issues with executive dysfunction to my dad and holy shit he gets it!

I described it like this: 

Imagine you’re back at AllPro(where he worked) with fifty phones and they’re all ringing. You want to answer them all because they’re all equal priority. That’s an environmental cue– phones are generally a ‘respond immediately’ cue.

Picking up a phone is a simple thing. You know it’s as easy as deciding which phone to answer and reaching out to pick it up, but your brain is saying “I must answer all of them!” The phones are ringing, and you can’t make your body reach out to pick one up because you don’t have fifty arms to reach out, you don’t have fifty ears to listen with, you don’t have a brain that can process and respond to fifty conversations and you don’t have fifty mouths that can all say different things all at the same time. 

Either you do it all simultaneously or nothing will happen. You can want to do it so bad it makes you cry, and you can’t make a decision because no choice seems like the right one. So the task stays unfinished and you get frustrated every time somebody reminds you to “just do it, it’s not that hard!” Because yes, it really IS that hard.

Now, if you had somebody who could point to which phone to answer, you can do it fine. That’s a prompt. Prompting removes the ‘middle man’ thought that says ‘do it all at once’ and gets you to focus on tasks one at a time instead of seeing them as some towering insurmountable mess.

Dad looked at me for a couple of seconds and said something to the effect of, “I didn’t know doing things were that hard for you.”

This is a major, major, major breakthrough between us because dad had it in his head that I left things messy because I didn’t care. While that’s crappy of him to assume, teaching him how that’s not the case and having him really understand it is a huge deal.

[theawesomeadventurer]

okay I’ve never been able to articulate this at all thank you so much for putting words to feelings

[jasmiinitee-deactivated20210610]

My Biggest and Most Annoying Fictional Horse Pet Peeve

Big Horses are a Very New Thing and they Likely Didn’t Exist in your Historical and/or Fantasy Settings.

You’ve all seen it in every historical piece of media ever produced. Contrary to popular belief, a big black horse with long legs and long flowing mane is not a widespread or even a particularly old type of horse.

THIS IS NOT A MEDIEVAL THING. THIS IS NOT EVEN A BAROQUE THING. THIS IS A NINETEENTH CENTURY CITY CARRIAGE HORSE.

All the love to fancy Friesian horses, but your Roman general or Medieval country heroine just really couldn’t, wouldn’t, and for the sake of my mental health shouldn’t have ridden one either.

Big warmblood horses are a Western European and British invention that started popping up somewhere around 1700s when agriculture and warfare changed, and when rich folks wanted Bigger Faster Stronger Thinner race horses. The modern warmblood and the big continental draught both had their first real rise to fame in the 1800s when people started driving Fancy Carriages everywhere, and having the Fanciest Carriage started to mean having the Tallest and Thinnest Horses in the town.

Before mechanised weaponry and heavy artillery all horses used to be small and hardy easy-feeders. Kinda like a donkey but easier to steer and with a back that’s not as nasty and straight to sit on.

SOME REAL MEDIEVAL, ROMAN, OTTOMAN, MONGOL, VIKING, GREEK and WHATEVER HISTORICALLY PLAUSIBLE HORSES FOR YOU:

“Primitive”, native breeds all over the globe tend to be only roughly 120-140 cm (12.0 - 13.3 hh) tall at the withers. They all also look a little something like this:

Mongolian native horse (Around 120-130 at the withers, and decendants of the first ever domesticated horses from central Asia. Still virtually unchanged from Chinggis Khan’s cavalry, ancestor to many Chinese, Japanese and Indian horses, and bred for speed racing and surviving outdoors without the help of humans.)

Carpathian native horse / Romanian and Polish Hucul Pony (Around 120-150 at the withers, first mentioned in writing during the 400s as wild mountain ponies, depicted before that in Trajanian Roman sculptures, used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in the 19th century)

Middle-Eastern native horse / Caspian Pony (Around 100-130 at the withers, ancestor of the Iranian Asil horse and its decendants, including the famous Arabian and Barb horses, likely been around since Darius I the Great, 5th century BC, and old Persian kings are often depicted riding these midgets)

Baltic Sea native horse / Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Gotland and Nordland horses (Around 120-150 at the withers, descendant of Mongolian horses, used by viking traders in 700-900 AD and taken to Iceland. Later used by the Swedish cavalry in the 30 years war and by the Finnish army in the Second World War, nowadays harness racing and draught horses)

Siberian native horse / Yakutian pony (Around 120-140 at the withers, related to Baltic and Mongolian horses and at least as old, as well-adapted to Siberian climate as woolly mammoths once were, the hairiest horse there is, used in draught work and herding)

Mediterranean native horse / Skyros pony, Sardinian Giara, Monterufolino (Around 100-140 at the Withers, used and bred by ancient Greeks for cavalry use, influenced by African and Eastern breeds, further had its own influence on Celtic breeds via Roman Empire, still used by park ranger officers in Italy)

British Isles’ native horse / various “Mountain & Moorland” pony breeds (Around 100-150 at the withers, brought over and mixed by Celts, Romans and Vikings, base for almost every modern sport pony and the deserving main pony of all your British Medieval settings. Some populations still live as feral herds in the British countryside, used as war mounts, draught horses, mine pit ponies, hunting help and race horses)

So hey, now you know!

[slavicafire]

I love this so much - and now I know why Tall Lanky Thin horses have a terryfying vibe to them, and the “primitive” native pony-like breeds awake in me only hope and trust.

[elodieunderglass]

such valid historical finger-eaters here

[monkeyaroundtown]

A bunch of prairie dogs and more lovely hiking views.

[monkeyaroundtown]

Monkey then had a picnic lunch and enjoyed the view.

[monkeyaroundtown]

Monkey went hiking around the Flatirons trail in Chautauqua park.

[monkeyaroundtown]

Boulder Dance Coalition International Festival. Boulder, Colorado.

[monkeyaroundtown]

Monkey also explored the shops around Pearl Street! She ate some delicious food, watched performances during the international music festival, and wandered through local art shops, a geology/archaeology shop (where she met a dinosaur!) and a honey shop!

[monkeyaroundtown]

Monkey hung out with the outdoor residents of Pearl Street Mall, sat at a fountain, and watched a street performer.

[monkeyaroundtown]

Monkey found an outdoor market and a river next to a sidewalk! With…a boat launch?