The Nerd Life is the Life for Me @the-nerd-lifeee - Tumblr Blog

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bees-with-swords

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

hearnoweevil

Last year I finally had an excuse to illustrate this simple little Tumblr story I've had bookmarked forever for class.

I hope you like it :]

knightofleo

nonaferatu

This would have had me crucified on tumblr 10 years ago but maybe we are ready for this conversation now:

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

This is a PSA to about 3/4s of the Portland Youth populace

nonaferatu

everyone who reblogs this and is like "I ordered my own tea this week" or "I only barfed once when I had to give a presentation'- you are doing amazing sweetie. Have patience with yourself, you are relearning a skill so difficult that people get 4 year degrees to do it professionally.

moki-dokie

This is true of basically everything you struggle with in life, ngl. Exposure therapy is like, a very proven and real thing we HAVE to do to get used to shit we don't particularly like so that our response is more on the normalish side rather than, y'know, panic attacks and extreme shit. most of your fears can be conquered this way. most of the stupid social cues my fellow NDs struggle to pick up on can be learned this way. you will never desensitize yourself if you just avoid everything that makes you uncomfortable. you will never grow and learn by avoiding. i'm sorry to say that yes, you have to get out there and deliberately make yourself uncomfortable sometimes. that is life, babes. but see, the cool thing about CHOOSING to do it is that you can pick for how long and how often. microdose on discomfort if you must. confront your social anxiety for a full five minutes and reward yourself for it. do it again for six minutes. for seven minutes. suddenly ten minutes isn't so hard. next thing you know you can tolerate fifteen minutes. thirty minutes. a whole hour! and it may seem like just being able to tolerate the anxiety for an hour isn't really a big deal or isn't much progress until the day you're suddenly forced into a social situation. then you realize, hey, this kinda sucks but i'm not curled in the fetal position hyperventilating or locked in the bathroom barfing and shaking uncontrollably. i can tolerate this.

and maybe tolerating is all you can muster, and that's fine. that's all you need to be able to function without a breakdown! but sometimes, after your brain has finally realized you don't need to activate survival mode anymore in these situations, you might actually find that you enjoy a bit of socializing. i know, bonkers right? it's almost like we're social animals or something. anyway.

take it from me. i used to be firmly on the "absolutely fucking not" side of social situations. i regularly took F's in school for refusing oral presentations. i avoided parties like the plague. even amongst my own friends, i had a hard time handling more than like five of them together at a time. i was the kid who had a very hard time doing sleepovers at friends houses because the rest of their family was simply too much socializing for me. i passed on leadership opportunities in several jobs because the thought of leading made me physically ill. i was about as reclusive as it came. i simply did not have a social life to any degree. and then i got into a relationship with someone who was... i wouldn't exactly call him an extrovert, but close to one. plus he was almost ten years older than me and that age group (hello, xennials) just have an entirely different way of socializing that i can't really articulate. he had a LOT of friends. his friends were definitely extroverted. and they liked to hang out all the time. on top of that, he had a MASSIVE family, where as mine consisted of just me, my brother, and our mom. i wasn't necessarily forced into socializing with any of them, but i realized i would be missing out on an important part of him if i avoided it like i always had. and so i made an effort. little by little i worked my way up to tolerating these large groups. and he would always leave when i reached my limit, even if he hadn't reached his yet. and then it started being less tolerating and more neutral. and before i knew it, i was having a good time. i was enjoying the times we had group hangouts with the friends. i started looking forward to the next one. i was excited to be invited over for a movie night or to watch basketball. his family was still a bit much during the holidays, but i could sit and chat and not want to crawl out of my skin. and soon it turned into us hosting the hangouts and the gamenights, inviting more and more people that i often wasn't even that familiar with! i went to concerts finally! festivals! cons! i learned to finally accept leadership positions. i learned how to take charge on meetings and presentations, how to speak on behalf of a team, how to reach out and conduct business with complete strangers. and most importantly, through all of this, while i was learning how to face my anxiety of being social, i was also learning how to advocate for myself. i know that's a big thing socially anxious people struggle with. it's so much easier to avoid than to confront. it's easier to allow people to step all over you than dare speak up and bring attention to yourself. it's easier to just go along with something you hate than x, y, or z. but that's only doing harm to yourself, and reinforcing the avoidance cycle.

learning to be social taught me the power of saying no without fear attached to it. it gave me a bunch of friends - some of whom turned into family. it gave me an extended family and all the craziness that comes with it. it opened up job opportunities. it improved my confidence. and all of that came by taking small steps. be being willing to make myself uncomfortable. by being patient with myself.

it isn't a cure by any means. i still have panic attacks brought on by social situations. i still talk myself out of going to things i really want to go to just because People Will Be There. i still avoid. i've probably done a lot of backsliding since my move to cali where I'm entirely alone and without my now-ex-but-still-best-friend as an anchor for social events. but it doesn't control my entire life anymore like it used to. even if i'm struggling a little more right now, i'm still getting out ten times more than i ever would have in the past. the amount of socializing i do now, while somewhat minimal by most standards, would have made 12 year old me utterly terrified and would have sent 18 year old me straight into a panic attack.

so yes. if something like ordering your own drink is that step forward for you, then congratulate yourself. and keep at it. you are doing amazing every single time you choose to step out of your comfort zone. small progress is still progress and it will add up, i promise you. future you is so, so proud of you. future you is cheering you on. future you is so grateful for all your effort. keep challenging yourself and keep growing!

animentality

macleod

this is how you do it

josephbrassey

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

gudamor

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

sosaneitsinsane

fall in love again and again...

please do not repost without crediting me. find me on instagram, twitter, and tiktok. you can also support me by subscribing to my patreon newsletter.

the-ladyrae

That was delicious. I genuinely don't think I've seen anyone line up those scene parallels so well before. This was a perfect snapshot of every branch, rock, and mattress they hit on their way down

the-wanton-house-wife

harbinger-of-silly

All gays will go to hellsite

king-of-oreo

What if in hellsite but not gay

NO!

String identified: A ga g t t at t t t ga T tag g a Ag agag Acctac ! T tag g a Ag agag Acctac

Closest match: Psylliodes chrysocephala genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle

(image source)

graveexcitement

kebbopulos

finelytaylored

writer & creator of queer as folk and the original showrunner & head writer of the revival of doctor who, reviews heated rivalry. (x)

chronicillnessfromateensmind

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

thememedaddy

babyfoxcollectionthings

enigmatic-mystery-777

This is magical

titleknown

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

hopesterling

This….

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.

withasmoothroundstone

This explains a lot. And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.

And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that. Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given. It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.

lizardtitties

I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:

https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2016/01/06/healthcare-in-iceland-vs-the-us-weve-got-it-so-good/

thebibliosphere

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

Eat the rich. Resist.

dyannehs

When I was travelling in Germany once, I seriously hurt my ankle. In a few hours, it had swollen to twice its size, and I went to a little ER in a tiny town. I spoke no German and only one nurse spoke English. They ran an X-ray and an MRI to determine what had happened (turned out I had bruised my peroneus brevis muscle and pulled the tendon), gave me a ton of very regulated meds for the pain and swelling, including some supports so I could walk…and my poor little 22-year-old ass was sat there, knowing all of this would cost thousands, if not tens of thousands, back in the US. I was shaking.

I’m in the exam room, post diagnosis and with pill bottles in hand, and in walks the one nurse I’ve been able to speak to the entire time. She pats my hand and tells me (and this is verbatim—I will never forget this conversation as long as I live), “I’m so sorry. We had to run those tests, and they are expensive. You don’t have insurance so you will have to cover the full cost.”

I start crying.

She continues, softly, as if telling me someone has died, “It’s going to be three hundred.”

I start sobbing, certain I’ve misheard, certain that I would be absolutely fucked, broke and going into debt in a foreign country. “Thousand?” I clarify.

Her entire demeanor changed, and she looked at me as if I had sprouted four extra heads. “No,” she says, “euros.”

That moment radicalised me.

queern-bn

My family got charged several thousand dollars for a late-night trip to the ER when I was a kid after an oops at home resulted in a large cut that needed almost 40 sutures. We lived in the US at the time.

Now we live in Canada. Last year my leg got rolled over by one of the front tires on a pickup truck. I spent 3 weeks in hospital, had 3 surgeries, one of which included skin grafting to cover the half of my leg that was degloved in my accident. I had IV antibiotics 4 times a day, I had physiotherapy daily, I was on a lot of meds for pain and having complex wound dressings changed every day. After all that, I had a home care nurse visit me every 1-2 days for 6 weeks to help with my wound care. The greatest expense to us as a family for the amazing care I received was my parents and husband using the parkade next to the hospital, which was like $13 a day. If we’d lived in the US, that injury absolutely could have bankrupted us.

cranquis

This information needs to be part of the US med school curriculum.

beaniebaneenie

I remember the moment that radicalized me.

I went to the UK for graduate school, and being there for that long meant I had to buy insurance for the duration. 18 months was something like £800 (this was in the early 2010’s). I, being American, figured “oh ok, that’s the premium and if I need serious medical care, I’ll get charged deductibles and all other kinds of fees at the time of care), because that’s how it works here.

Some time in the early part of that winter, I got incredibly sick. I’m immunocompromised, so sometimes that happens. But being a broke ass grad student in a foreign country, and dealing with unrelated financial abuse from family members, I figured I couldn’t afford going to the hospital. I figured I’d go to their version of Walgreen’s (Superdrug, and yes that is really that store’s name, load up on cough drops, some OTC meds, and try to ride it out as best I could.

One of my friends in my program came over to check on me and offer help. When she got to my room and saw how sick I was, she asked why I hadn’t gone to hospital. I was near tears and said I couldn’t afford it.

This is when I suspect my friend knew she was dealing with an American who was ignorant of how socialized healthcare actually worked, and realized that I couldn’t really be reasoned with. So she said, “I’ll pay for it- let’s go.”

Off we went to hospital, my friend did the talking bc my voice was so shot. The receptionist said, “as you don’t have an appointment, you may need to wait quite a bit.” I heard that and figured 5+ hours was at least what I was in for.

23 minutes later, my name was called.

My friend went back with me, bc I was pretty out of it. The nurse leading us back apologized for the “huge wait” because having a sick patient wait “nearly half an hour just for medical care” was unacceptable. I was stunned.

The nurse and doc asked some questions, looked at the medical records I had on my phone (bc I was a foreigner with very little medical history in the country), did a few rapid tests. The whole time, I’m seeing an old-timey calculator ringing up charges and freaking out… even though my friend said she’d pay, I was so conditioned to believe this would cost a fortune.

About 30 mins later, the rapid tests confirm I have both bronchitis and pneumonia. Doc writes me a prescription for some serious heavy-duty meds. My American ass is thinking, “ok, so now I go home, wait for 4 days for the pharmacy to fill it, then go get it.” The doc tells me that there’s a pharmacy counter on the way out, and I can stop there to collect the meds before heading home.

I’m skeptical but thank him. My friend gets me to the pharmacy counter. I give my name and hand over the paper, fully expecting to be told that it’ll take days to fill. The pharmacist turns around, pulls a bag off the shelf, hands it to me. Because my meds were already filled and waiting.

Me: you had them already?

Pharmacist: of course- there’d be no point in sending you home without medication, that’s why you came here. To get medical help.

Me: that’s so fast? (I am very confused)

Pharmacist: well, we expect people to have these illnesses at a higher rate this time of year, so we do our best to stock up on our end.

Me: that’s so nice? Also, what do I owe you?

Pharm: sorry, love?

Me: what do I owe you? For the medication? And the visit. All of it, how much do I need to pay?

Chat, her whole fact changed. She realized I didn’t just sound funny because I was in respiratory distress. I had an American accent. She reached over and patted my hand.

“Love, that’s what the health insurance is meant to be for. You’ve already paid for this. We’re not taking extra money off you, we don’t do that here.”

The entire visit was less than 2 hours, absolutely free, and everyone worked to be as efficient as possible in the goal of providing comprehensive healthcare for me, the patient.

Once I got home with the meds, I did actually recover pretty well (and relatively quickly, as far as I’m concerned). I talked to the friend after, and she admitted that she knew it was going to be free, but that I wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that in the brain fog of serious illness, so she said what she had to in order to get my stubborn (and terrified of bankruptcy) ass to the doctor.

That’s what healthcare should be. A goal of providing comprehensive and compassionate care to your patients, being well-staffed enough that no one waits for hours, anticipating medication needs, ensuring that patients leave with the medical care they sought- and that they’re not afraid to seek it, because they know medical care won’t make them homeless.