By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.
You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.
You have to.
Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.
It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.
You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.
I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.
Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.
That's one of the things I love about my bus trips. Stressful and occasionally bordering on traumatizing though they are, I was on a bus home from two months in Pennsylvania and met a girl my age with a service dog who was going to a different part of Oklahoma and she immediately trusted me and we spent 95% of that trip together and then with another girl who was in the early months of pregnancy. We talked and sat and moved together until we had to split. I watched her dog for her while she went to the bathroom and he trusted me too.
I was crying on the bus another time because my headphones broke and I had no cash and an older woman started talking to me because of my punisher hat. She gave me a handful of crumpled ones to buy food before she left on her next bus because I had sat crying in Arkansas thinking I'd be stuck there for a full day.
My first bus trip, a handful of us became layover family after being stuck at the same layover cities for hours. In Philadelphia a black girl got on the bus and called someone saying 'Hey, are you X's mom? I just called to let you know I gave your son some sweats because the security guard was harassing him and I didn't want him to get in trouble' before she went to sleep. There was a guy in the seat behind me who was talking to his girlfriend about how much he loved her and wanted to start a family and how he and his sister were starting a restaurant that would donate food to the homeless and how his sister was the soul of it.
And beyond all of these people being from nowhere and going nowhere else, people get it into their heads that the place they live in doesn't have that camaraderie. My mom helped an old man who fell on the curb. I stayed by a car crash that happened in front of me to try and help. A cashier at Waffle House said to not worry about it when we were a few dollars short (that same WH had a waitress named Miss Purple who sang to everyone). A woman gave me a ride home after a day of volunteering in the hot sun and bought me a soda and gave a homeless man a care package and a prayer.
There is not one place on this planet that doesn't have love in it and that love is shown in the hands that help and the laughs you share.
I met another customer at the craft store trying to repair/remake his mom's favorite ornament and we figured it out together.
Our waitress the other day got married by accident and had the same name as me.
A stranger approached me at a gas station and said "Jesus wanted me to tell you that it will be okay. You're going to have a problem with your heart, but it will be fine." She was, uhh, she was right. It was a totally benign arrhythmia. She was also the first person I gave my new, trans, non-legal name to.
I wear queer and neurodivergent pride pins on my hat and SO MANY people have given me a "me too", whether whispered or out loud. (That is why I wear them.)
I once sat on a plane next to an elderly woman whose husband had died in a plane crash and wow her attitude was amazing and it was weirdly reassuring to have her there as I was trying not to have a panic attack because we were flying over Nevada and there was a huge thunderstorm under us with red lightning.
I had a really cool conversation with a random patron at an Egyptian burial exhibit about the artists who made the exquisite little miniature grave goods.
The white as milk Midwestern dude at the gas station spoke fluent Tagalog and was a fuckin low key philosophical genius.
I just love people. Their stories, these moments, all the stuff that makes up the web of our social relationships to each other.
Yeah the world is scary, I get spooked in public sometimes. But man, most of it really is just us sharing a wild fucking ride with absolute strangers who for the most part are pretty chill. Pets, kids, music, travel, there's just about always a way into someone's good conversational graces. I never get tired of it.
“Becoming a writer in a language that is not yours by birth, though, goes against nature; there is nothing organic in this process, only artifice. There are no linguistic “instincts” to guide you on the path and the language’s guardian angels rarely whisper into your ear; you are truly on your own. Says Cioran: “When I wrote in Romanian, words were not independent of me. As soon as I began to write in French I consciously chose each word. I had them before me, outside of me, each in its place. And I chose them: now I’ll take you, then you.” Many who shift to writing in a second language develop an unusually acute linguistic awareness. In an interview he gave in 1979, some seven years after he moved to the United States from his native Russia, Joseph Brodsky speaks of his ongoing “love affair with the English language.” Language is such an overwhelming presence for these people that it comes to structure their new biographies. “English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life,” says Brodsky. The need to find le mot juste starts out as a concern, turns into an obsession, and ends up as a way of life. These writers excel at the art of making virtue of necessity: out of a need to understand how the new language works, they turn into linguistic maniacs; out of a concern for correctness, they become compulsive grammarians.”
— Born Again in a Second Language h/t @playsuits (via cesaire)
God, I can't tell you how much the "there's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "Your head gets screwey when you're apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit? The tiger? I've gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.
I've been doing yard work and my dad's been inside watching the news and he just texted me and I came here immediately knowing that this freaking crab would be here I'm so psyched I'm dancing with my pole saw not psyched that someone has died just psyched that the memes have finally come to fruition
amid the celebrations about the queen probably dying soon, we need to remember how this will negatively affect the country. there will be millions spent on a funeral and charles’s coronation while we are in the middle of a severe economic crisis and working class families are having to choose between heating and food. it will take attention away from all the important politics and parliament may be suspended. all news and television will be about her death and her reign — it’s been said that comedy programmes will be cancelled for potentially up to a fortnight out of ‘respect’.
yes, celebrate this news. but her death does not erase the fact that the monarchy exists, and it will be a spit in the face for working people when the money we all so desperately need is spent on her and the rest of her family
it is also worth noting that this will be used to cover up the inaction on the cost of living crisis. expect a bunch of "uk coming together to mourn the queen" bullshit soon when families are choosing between heating their homes and feeding their kids
not to mention how the funeral costs will show just where the country's priorities are but any political figures pointing that out will be demonised for being anti-monarchy
here’s a thing that happened to the queen of england:
basically, she was walking through the corridors of her balmoral palace, talking about something meaningless. i think it had to do with a movie. then this bus screeches up, and a bunch of people with “Down with Cis” shirts climbed out and starte
I saw a Tweet today from a doctor who caught COVID even though she was vaccinated after spending two days seeing COVID patients. But here’s the kicker - she saw the patients briefly, she wore a mask and she saw them outside.
That’s how contagious these new variants are. Be careful folks and don’t forget to mask up. Personally I’m back double masking with an N95.
[ID: Two Tweets from Dr. Claudia William MD, MScHAL @DrCSWilliam “I woke up and feel like shit after seeing > 60 ppl with COVID symptoms in the last 48 hrs. Headache, Runny nose, my body hurts, coughing, feeling hot & no it’s not allergies. It’s called a breakthrough infection, glad I’m vaccinated but this is not good at all. 🥺😢😬 I spent very little time with patients face to face, if I did, it was outside. Fully masked up. Why am I saying this? Because this means the variants are HIGHLY contagious, which matches the data we have seen about the delta variant. We need to be taking EXTRA precautions not less.”]
Vaccines continue to be effective, particularly at preventing severe disease, according to the document. But they may not be as good at prev
July 30th 2021
Highlight 1
The document, obtained Friday by NBC News and first published by The Washington Post, explains the scientific background behind the agency’s change in mask guidance earlier this week.
It concludes that the delta variant is “highly contagious, likely to be more severe” and that “breakthrough infections may be as transmissible as unvaccinated cases.”
Researchers have been focusing on viral load — a term for just how much of the virus is present in infected peoples’ bodies — which can affect transmissibility and severity. Infections with the delta variant lead to higher levels of virus in the body, even in breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated individuals, the document said. Virus levels can be as high in breakthrough cases as in unvaccinated people, even if vaccinated people don’t get nearly as sick.
Highlight 2
The document notes that the risk of infection is threefold lower in vaccinated people, and the risk of severe disease or death is at least tenfold lower in vaccinated people.
One piece of evidence cited in the document came from an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where 74 percent of cases were in fully vaccinated individuals. In a report on the outbreak published Friday by the CDC, researchers said that the delta variant was implicated in 89 percent of cases, and in the breakthrough cases, 79 percent of people developed symptoms.
Of note, PCR tests, which are used to determine if someone is infected, showed similar levels of the virus in vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people. PCR results, the CDC wrote, “might reflect the level of infectious virus.” In other words, it could suggest that vaccinated people are as contagious as unvaccinated people.
Highlight 3
The internal CDC document also provided more concrete numbers on breakthrough infections, estimating that at current levels, there are 35,000 symptomatic breakthrough infections per week among the 162 million fully vaccinated adults in the U.S. The agency stopped providing public information on most breakthrough infections in April, when the tally hit 10,000. From that point on, the CDC website only posted data on breakthrough infections that led to hospitalization or death.
It also details just how much more contagious the delta variant is than earlier versions of the coronavirus. A chart included in the document states that it is more transmissible than the flu, the common cold and even smallpox and is on par with chickenpox, considered among the most contagious common viruses.
If that’s not enough to convince you to go back to taking the same precautions as you were taking pre-vaccines, there’s also some evidence that breakthrough infections may be capable of leading to Long COVID (PASC) even in the vaccinated:
israel has been bombing residential towers, refugee camps, media offices and now there are reports that it plans to bomb two UN run schools in palestine. reminder that many ppl who have been rendered homeless by these bombings have found shelter in these schools. palestine's hospitals are overflowing, their top doctors are being killed in these bombings, and the pandemic is still raging while israel is blocking humanitarian aid as well. these are war crimes. this is a genocide.
PLEASE do not stop talking about Palestine and spreading information, especially from Palestinians, whether it's here or on other social medias you use more often. Palestinians themselves have said over and over again that spreading this on social media helps, I've seen some people say that it feels different this time now that the world is starting to hear their voices. and please donate if you are able to
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