The Artistry of the bipolar brain

The art of living with bipolar disorder.

[collector73-deactivated20230303]

[inkribbon796]

I … I need a moment.

[red-faced-wolf-deactivated20251]

I love this actually

[theartistryofthebipolarbrain]

This is amazing!

[miseriathome]

You know, if you go to Pride and you’re put off by the things that the very most degenerate and freakish of the queers are doing, that’s a good opportunity for growth; that means that the spirit of Pride as a public demonstration for rights is still alive and functioning within your event, and that means you have the opportunity to learn compassion for others in your community who live very different realities than you do.

When we say that Pride began as a riot, that’s not just a quippy catchphrase. Pride parades are the result of nighttime street fights and riots against systems of policing becoming accessible to a broader movement of queer people and leftists in the form of daytime public demonstrations. The very nature of queer people existing out in the open during the daytime amongst “polite society” was in and of itself a demonstration. It was a demonstration against state power, against police violence, against dominant gender roles, against urban economic segregation, and against the indignities of being relegated to the margins of society. When the rest of society found it too easy to disengage from what the margins were doing, the margins moved in on the rest of society and made it their problem. Pride is about queering the streets and making queer existence inextricable from daily life.

“Men in dresses” challenged public sensibilities by having the audacity to exist without apology. With pride. Do you not understand that “but these non-explicit clothings and actions are obviously inextricable from sex acts and thus have no place existing in public!” was exactly as sensical of a justification for the extermination of queer people then as it is now? Do you not realize that the histories of queer people intertwines inextricably with the history of sex workers, kinksters, drug users, people of color, and other degenerates of the night who occupied city streets instead of houses? That the bisexuality of Brenda Howard, mother of Pride, cannot be ripped from her polyamory, her kinkiness, or her Judaism? The reasons why HIV, immigration, racism, police violence, and disability rights are all queer issues is because they are issues that affect queer people.

Shame is the opposite of pride, which is why the history of Pride matters so much. We rebel against the corporatization of Pride because it does not speak authentically to our history and our needs. When Trojan sponsors a parade, they quash local safer sex initiatives run by community-based organizations meeting community needs by regulating that only Trojan-brand condoms may be distributed at the event. When alcohol distributors sponsor Pride, it’s without regard for the alcoholism rates in queer communities, nor the history that the community has for being persecuted for buying alcohol as “known homosexuals.” Corporate Pride employs cops to “clean up the city” by detaining homeless trans sex workers in preparation for Pride events, so that the “good, normal, lawful” attendees don’t have to witness degeneracy while they have their rainbow party. The pinkwashing of Pride is the sanitization of queer identity and the erasure of queer history to appeal to as wide of a consumer base as possible. That’s also all we are to corporations–consumers.

If Pride was ever meant to be a safe space, it was for the most vulnerable and despised of us, not for tourists to a gentrified marketing scheme. Pride began with queers reclaiming the streets, a place of violence against them, and daring the world to challenge their right to take up public space–daring the world to look them in the eye and bear witness to their unashamed existence. Pride began with the knowledge and the understanding that existence is not criminal, and yet the idea that it should be persists to this day. An event which is so sanitized that corporations are willing to sponsor it and the state is willing to sanction it is not an event which speaks with any authenticity to the experiences of vulnerable queer people. If you cannot stomach the “freaky, weird” queers existing in the same public sphere as you, then you would not have rallied against bar raids, bathhouse raids, and other instances of state-sanctioned violence against queer people. If you condone the continued physical marginalization of degeneracy out of the public eye and into private spaces, you are not fighting the same battle that Pride was born out of and exists for. Pride does not gatekeep questioning people or non-queer allies because the bar for entry is not Sameness, but rather a willingness to celebrate all manifestations of queerness in defiance of the systems which repress them.

There can be no revolution without coalitions of mutual support. There can be no “reform” which unteaches the biases that inform violence against the oppressed. Kinksters, sex workers, fetishists, cross-dressers, genderfags, polyamorists, monarchs of drag, and all those other “freaks” have existed since the beginning of Pride and have always been a part of the battle against “polite society” and “normative sensibilities.” They–we–are not only a part of this community, but are also its founders. Remember that Pride began as a rebellion against the institutions that would shame us. Remember that Pride began as a riot which will not end until free, open, authentic, visible pride can be attainable for all and not just the most respectable. Pride has never been about presenting ourselves at our most dignified for the approval of social institutions, but about showcasing the indignity of systemic violence and suppression at the hands of those institutions.

[musashi]

thoughts on the friendzone

when i was 5 years old my best friend was a boy named kyle who didn’t know how to knock on doors so he made dinosaur noises outside my window to wake me up in the summer until i demonstrated how to ball his fists and slam them against my doors.  we collected caterpillars in my trailer park and built them houses while we traded pokemon cards.  he wasn’t the only one.  there was ben, and mitch, and noah—but kyle’s the only one who hurt me, because when he tried to kiss me and i asked him why, he told me “because you’re a girl and i’m a boy, shouldn’t we like each other?”

i missed him so much and i wondered why he couldn’t just be my friend like he always was

in the first grade there was rich and joseph and i got sent to detention with them almost every day with a smile on my face.  we built block towers and sang to my teacher’s lion king soundtracks when she’d turn the lights off during lunch time.  one day they got in a fist fight over me at recess, and i wondered why they felt they needed to share my friendship, like it was something they owned.

in the second grade zach and i played yu gi oh under our desks during free time and i got moved for talking to him constantly.  everyone in the class would tease him and i for talking, asking when we were going to date already, asking him if he’d kissed me, and he stopped being my friend.

when i was 11 i met a chubby boy with the name of a colour who wore puffy vests and unwashed t-shirts, with greasy hair and bright blue eyes and a smile that hid hurt behind it.  people didn’t like him because he was silly, but i liked him, because i was also silly.  he became my friend the day he bought me 5 giant roses and asked me to be his girlfriend, and i politely declined but promised him i’d be his best friend because i’d always wanted a best guy friend that stuck around. we burnt our feet on the concrete during the summer and walked home with the sunset silhouetting us.  he talked often about how he loved me, but never blamed me for being me, even though he refused to move on. that boy dyed his hair jet black and sat on the end of my bed playing songs to me on guitar, and all that pent up rage from before didn’t show until the first time he slapped me across the face and called me a dumb cunt.

in the 7th grade there was a boy named ryan who sat next to me on the bus and talked to me about manga.  he’d ask me personal invasive questions but i didn’t mind because it was attention and i liked attention.  i was dating another guitarist with curly brown hair, one who was much more kind-tempered than the other, and ryan mentioned how much of an asshole he was every day.  i wondered, why, why does he think the love of my life is an asshole?  but whenever i asked him, he just told me, “girls only date assholes.  there’s no room for nice guys like me.”

i wondered, if he was so nice, why did he say such mean things?

he never stopped with me, taking me to movies, hanging out with me, you know.  being friendly.  i thought we were friends.  but then, how many times had i thought that before?

how many times had i bonded with a boy, thought they got me, only for them to ask me if i wanted to make out?

how come when i told ryan i was coming out as a lesbian, he stopped being my friend, and said “damnit, the one girl i really want to pound into a mattress, and she’s only interested in chicks!”

there was a boy my junior year who stayed up all night with me until the sun rose, talking about life, past loves, hopes, dreams.  beneath a million twinkling stars spanning forever, he brushed long brown hair out of his eyes and listened to me talk about the history that made me. then he asked me if i’d ever consider dating a guy, and complained about how he’d never get laid.

when i told him no a couple hundred times, he found new girls to listen to.

i would sit on the couch and play zelda with dakota, and he’d talk about all my favourite games with me.  he was the closest thing to support i had, and the letters and poems he wrote me were always so kind and friendly.  but he’d put his arms around me on the couch, and no matter how many times i told him i was uncomfortable, he’d still come over every day and do it.

“don’t you know how it feels to love someone and not have them love you back?  don’t you know what it feels like to be friendzoned?”

when i meet guys who talk about the friendzone, who talk about the girls who don’t give “nice guys” like them i chance, i always want to just say

when i was 10 years old i met a girl whose brown hair fell across her shoulders and whos eyes sparkled when the sunlight hit them, whose voice was like velvet and whose scent was like mountain smoke, who made me dizzier than a fly climbing a sugar hill.  and i’m 18 years old, and i still love her, and she knows, and she doesn’t love me.

but my first thoughts upon hearing her rejection were not “what a bitch,” were not “she just wants a douchebag and not a nice girl like me!” were not “im going to keep pushing her until she dates me,”

they were

“she is the best friend i have ever had, and i am the best she’s ever had, and i would hate to take that away from her.”

so before you play the victim, mr. Nice Guy, before you angrily throw your fedora on the ground and blame the girl you claim to adore so much:

put yourself in the shoes of a girl who thought she made a wonderful friend, only to find out that he just wanted her for sex.  that he just wanted her for a relationship.  a girl who was just an object to win, a prize.  a girl who’s trust you’ve just shattered.

maybe she friendzoned you.  but you girlfriendzoned her, first.

[nyahchatnoir]

I am clapping for this, you just can’t see it.

[howellaboutphil-blog]

okay honestly wow I’m oh my god just

[civil-defense-system]

Really unfair and uncool that I cant teleport to my friends on the other side of the country when I wanna visit them

[timemachineyeah]

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

[sailor-arashi]

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

It meant “Evil person that hates God” which is why it took me thirty fucking years to realize I was one.  Excellent post, OP.  I grew up in the middle of freaking nowhere and knew absolutely nothing that wasn’t taught by my parents, my church, or the public school system which had to answer to them both.  Educating myself was literally impossible because there was no resources available for me to do so because the Internet did not exist in any sort of useful form until I was in my 20s.

[actualaster]

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

Thank you for touching on this, too–we have definitely hit the opposite end of the spectrum where information overload is a massive problem.

And we’ve also got to face that active misinformation is not a problem of the past, it’s a problem alive and well in the present.

“Just google it” was viable some years back.  It isn’t really so much anymore.  Hate groups do a lot of work to make sure they’ll be among the first information you find if you just google it, and somebody just trying to educate themselves may not be able to readily filter out the garbage and parse what’s reliable from what’s propaganda.

And, something people don’t seem to like to accept, part of educating oneself is asking questions of others who have more knowledge.  But asking questions out of ignorance is often lumped in with asking out of malice–very understandable, I don’t blame people for this because often malice and ignorance can look very similar or even identical.

But when people do attempt to educate themselves, and the wrong resources are the ones making themselves the most widely available…

Well, that problem with filtering out the garbage and figuring out the reliable sources rears its head once again.  That’s not an inherent ability–that’s a learned skill and not everybody learns it young, not everybody finds it easy to learn or to use.

And if a person genuinely doesn’t even know where to begin with searching for information, and is shut out every time they try to ask…  Well.  They won’t be able to educate themselves very well, if at all, because of that issue with information overload and bad info and difficulty sorting the trash from the truth.

[beggars-opera]

Yes, yes! This has always been a pet peeve of mine - I don’t know if the “not my job to educate you” mentality has died down or if I’ve just culled my feed enough, but as someone who once felt woefully underprepared to navigate difficult topics like race and lgbtq issues, despite growing up in one of the most liberal and well-educated parts of the country, I always felt my heart sink when someone with good intentions was just flung back out into the ocean of the internet to find their own way. 

By the time I heard these things, I had been through college and had training in how to do research, but others do not. If your mentality is going to be “it’s up to you to find the most up-to-date, correct information without help because you should just intrinsically know this” then you have to be prepared for people finding and internalizing the wrong information and, here’s the kicker, that will be on you.

No one should be forced to be a dispenser of information, but if you set yourself up as an advocate, you have to realize that comes with the territory. And we can use the community to help us through that! Even just having a form letter-type response with a suggestion of how to get started, or the name of a friend who’s more willing to teach that folks can be redirected to. If we work together we can utilize our strengths and educate without feeling burned out.

[nick---mulligan]

I do want to add a point here:

knowing how to use electronics is a learned skill. One that poor or rural people cannot easily learn, because they literally don’t have the internet access or the time to do so.

“But internet is essential at this point!” Not only do internet companies have 0 obligation to service everywhere, and certainly not at affordable rates, but… if you have to pick between the electricity bill and the internet bill, which one is literally anyone going to choose?

“Go to the library!” If your local library has internet access, there’s no guarantee everyone has the transportation or time! In rural counties, your local library could be 1 hour round trip! Many people do not know how libraries work. I had to explain to a kid recently that he didn’t need money to get a library card.

When you force everyone to educate themselves, that inevitably means that poor people do not get educated. They don’t have the time. They don’t have the access. And in places where poor kids and POC kids are over-disciplined and ignored in schools, many people cannot even read.

Here’s something a professor commented on one of my posts:

On top of all that, knowing how to use a search engine, filtering good results from bad ones, knowing when something is an advertisement vs a valid link? ALL LEARNED SKILLS.

“Just Google it” is a statement of unintentional classism.

[theartistryofthebipolarbrain]

I know that I have difficulties parsing truth from propaganda on the internet. Part of the reason for people to create echo chambers is because it causes less confusion and fear when you can't tell what's true.

[thespoonisvictory]

people misunderstand what ‘gifted kid’ actually means but it’s ok it’s fine it’s cool it’s good

[thespoonisvictory]

it’s not about actually being gifted, it’s about an initial higher scoring on standardized testing that means little to nothing or being good at learning in the way elementary and middle school wants you to, so you get marked as ‘advanced’. in reality, maybe you had faster development in certain areas, but the issue with being a gifted kid isn’t that “everyone told me I was so cool and special for reading and then I actually wasn’t :(” it’s “I wasn’t properly taught to handle things not coming easily to me, but the adults around me were counting on me not being a ‘difficult’ child in school.”

people who use it as some weird bragging method or interpret it that way are ignoring the way a lot of school systems force certain roles on students to simplify the learning process. If your kid doesn’t need to take notes to understand a science concept bc they get it naturally, well that’s good, but now you’re not teaching them how to take notes and they’re not learning that important soft skill. but because ‘gifted’ kids are easy and don’t show that they’re falling behind in learning in other categories that are harder to quantify, they eventually fall behind after that catches up to them. It’s about the failures of a one size fits all school system trying to compensate in the worst way possible.

[jabberwockypie]

And also the thing where ‘gifted’ kids are super likely to also be neuroatypical, which they don’t get screened for because they appear to be doing well in school. Or “You can’t be ADHD/autistic/etc, because you’re doing so well in school!”. Or being shamed for developing mental health issues/generally not being able to keep up with school work later, because you USED TO BE able to do it just fine.

Or the assumption that just because you can read well or you like math class, you’re somehow more EMOTIONALLY mature than your little kid brain is actually capable of being.

Or gifted kids whose parents and teachers put immense pressure on them to Do Great Things and Save The World and you’re like. “I’m 10 and I have no idea how to do that, but everyone is saying that’s my job?”.

[swordplease]

This is the best “gifted kid” post out there. I never took notes until college because I didn’t have to, snd when it got challenging I had to literally teach myself note taking at age 18. It also fucks with your perception of asking for help - you’re advanced, you’re competent, you should be able to understand every topic easily. Asking for help/going to office hours/asking for a tutor feels like failing when you were praised in your early years for not needing to do that.

[theartistryofthebipolarbrain]

The truth here is painful.

[captaincrusher]

Man 1500 years ago: Let me sleep with this woman or I will die.

The rabbis:

(Link to tweet here)

[percsbeth]

i was watching Cinema Therapy’s reaction to Inside Out and i found this bit really interesting

[severeobjectfun]

Woman doesn’t understand why the actor got mad when she touched him without consent. People in comments defend her and say the guy overreacted. Just because you’re a woman it does not give you the right to touch people. Don’t be like this woman or the people defending her.

[la-femmex-deactivated20220305]

this is insane.

“he overreacted” what???? i’m speechless.

imagine what would have happened if it was the girl to get her breast groped like that.

but no, since it’s a man he obviously “overreacted”.

[blondejokes-deactivated20220825]

You hear him say “there’s kids here” 

He’s not a male stripper, he’s there to entertain children not be groped. 

[definitely-not-hominishostilis]

I mean big L for giving money to Disney, but then doing this too? Throw the whole woman out she’s trash

[the-davest-of-uncles]

If it’s not okay to do it to one, it’s not okay to do it to all.

[bizarrolord-deactivated20241123]

He was well within his rights to make her leave. Sexual harassment is sexual harassment, and, as he stated, she was doing it in front of kids.

[brunhiddensmusings]

i restate a rule- if swapping the gender suddenly makes it skeevy, it was already skeevy the first way around

[headspace-hotel]

idea: scene with two characters eagerly stripping each other clearly about to bone, but they keep getting interrupted by finding carefully concealed weapons in each other’s clothing, so they keep just unholstering, revealing and unstrapping increasingly ludicrous amounts of hidden guns and knives as the clothes come off, and it’s lowkey killing the mood a little

[findingfeather]

Alternatively: it's not killing the mood at all but it's totally making both of them giggle like they're twelve and possibly get lowkey competitive in a subconscious way about who has the most to drop.

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

The more that I think of it the more I'm seeing the incredible intimacy of letting someone know where you keep your backup knife.

Like my god, the trust involved in letting someone undress you and learn your secrets instead of popping into the bathroom to change where they can't see and hiding all your weapons under the sink

[headspace-hotel]

...Oh

[brainsforbabyjesus]

second alternative: you go to hide all your weapons under the sink but there’s already a bunch of weapons hidden underneath the sink.

awkward

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

It’s not that there’s already a bunch of weapons hidden underneath the sink that makes it awkward so much as that there’s so many weapons hidden underneath the sink that they fall out of the cabinet with the unmistakable sound of a knife-alanche, and then the other person comes in like “I can explain!” and you’re just dead-ass standing there with your own armload of weapons like “I can also explain.”

[fenrislorsrai]

Married version is shoving your hand in your partner’s clothes when you’re out of weapons because you KNOW where their spare is.  Or wearing a weapon in a spot you can’t draw from yourself because its now spare storage for your spouse’s weapons.

[thepersonalhermit]

Of COURSE it’s spare storage for my weapons - my pants don’t have usable pockets!

[curious-bun]

Learning to sew because your wife is hopeless with a needle and none of her pants have pockets.  Now she has pockets everywhere, and so do you.

[theartistryofthebipolarbrain]

This is the best version of this I've seen so far!

[bookhobbit]

this is sort of vague because I'm not sure if I can make it make sense but I wish more 101 nonbinary activist materials focused less on just "gender isn't binary" and more on "the fact that gender is a social construct means it is constructed differently in different cultures and is in a constant state of change like everything else about a culture"

like...it's not just about updating the gender system to recognize non-binary genders but also about recognizing that the social construction of gender is extremely responsive to time/place and this is true even for "man" and "woman" which means that there's no reason to invalidate anyone's expression or feelings about their gender, no matter what gender it is or how familiar it is to you

[bookhobbit]

a further thought: this is also why I don't think gender abolition is a useful goal, because, as Rikki Anne Wilchins put it, gender is primarily a system for creating meanings, and if you actually tried to totally erase the concept of any gender at all from the world, that would involve erasing a huge amount of cultural meaning, probably without actually fixing inequality tbh

on the other hand, if you acknowledge that there are as many gender systems as there are cultures, and that there are probably as many variations on even the normative genders as there are people in that culture who belong to them, then gender essentialism loses the vast majority of its power because if the meaning of gender changes across cultures (even across relatively small cultural shifts), then that means they're not inherent moral truths of the universe, they're ways of performing particular cultural meanings

and this makes non-binary genders, and nonnormative gender expressions, no less concrete than binary genders with normative expressions, not by saying "actually a non-binary gender is a concrete object with xyz characteristics" but by saying "all genders are arbitrary", which creates room for essentially infinite space and self-determination

I have no idea if any of this makes sense, I just visualize, like, a garden

[mimzy-writing-online]

Right before my chronic fatigue crash nap of the day, I thought of the perfect metaphor to describe what chronic fatigue is like:

The medical definition of chronic fatigue is "a fatigue that can not be solved by rest."

Here it is, presuming that:

-energy is a form of currency

-and that our bodies hold that energy like a bank account

-and every task requires a certain amount of energy (ex: getting dressed, showering, making dinner, dishes, laundry, taking out the trash, seeing friends, going to work or school)

-and that sleep is the labor by which we obtain income (energy), the payment system works as thus:

Able-bodied people are paying for their daily tasks with a debit card. There is no interest, and depending on how much sleep they get per day, that income will restore itself.

Disabled people, especially people with chronic fatigue or chronic pain, are paying for everything with a credit card, and that credit card has a high-interest rate. No matter how much energy they accumulate in sleep, some of that money is always getting paid to reduce some of their debt.

If they wish to attempt paying off that debt quickly, that means spending a lot less money on daily necessities: that means letting dishes stack up, not doing the laundry, skipping showers, staying home from school or work.

Which is the equivalent of someone in debt not taking their car to a mechanic, not being able to visit a doctor, not replacing shoes and jackets as they wear out, having to put off paying their electricity bill. Those financial needs will not disappear in a few weeks, but rather will begin to accumulate so that as soon as you have a little extra money, that's where it's going.

Chores, school work, and personal care are not going anywhere either.

And if those needs get taken care of, that's less money to pay off the debt, and interest grows until your card is maxed out. The physical health version of maxing out your credit card is having a medical relapse.

And if you started off reading this wondering why on earth disabled people were paying with credit instead of debit, why they had accumulated so much debt so quickly, the answer is this: a medical emergency, possibly one that required being hospitalized.

The bills of that medical emergency are steep, and that is no fault of the disabled person.

(This metaphor brought to you by my brain as I crashed on Wednesday, typed up before class on Thursday, and forgot about until Sunday)

[byjove]

I’ve seen this new trend of girls posting videos like “I hate my boyfriend for bringing all of his stupid boy things into our apartment when we moved in together 🙄” and then pictures of his hot wheels collection or a Halloween skeleton or an extremely cool pirate flag. Give him to me you do not deserve him.

[throwbackjoe]

Buckle up, folks. I’ve got a lot to say on this…

I’m not one of those guys who subscribes to the “Man Cave” idea. That theory that once you’re in a relationship, you’re required to forfeit 99% of your own home and be grateful to have one room in which you can be yourself and have your own possessions on display. I think if you’re in a relationship, you have a right to make your home reflect your personality and interests as much your partner does. I’ve run into a couple of instances where a woman thinking a man has no right to his own possessions has not gone over so well and it was hysterical.

I once knew a guy who worked in the telemarketing department of a company I worked at. One Friday night after work, he told me about how he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend.

This guy was like me, very clean and orderly and liked things a certain way but he wasn’t volatile about it or anything. He and his girlfriend decide to have a weekend sleepover at his house, a trial run in his mind for moving in together. She showed up and the red flags sprang up immediately. “Where’s your bag?” he asks. “For a weekend? I don’t need one.” she says. His mind reels. “So you’re not gonna change clothes…or shower…or brush your teeth…?” “No. Why would I do that in just a couple of days?” He tries to be okay about it but then she starts “cooking” and the kitchen looks like a war zone. Then there’s the fact that her B.O. seems to get stronger by the hour.

The last straw comes towards the end of the weekend when she walks around his place, eyes his Elvis Presley memorabilia collection and says “If I lived here, all this Elvis shit would get set out for trash, I’m not wasting space on all that.” When it finally comes time for her to go back home, she says “This was fun! Can’t wait to do it again.” “Yeah, about that…” and he dumped her in his own driveway.

He said if he had to choose between hygiene and an Elvis collection he’s built for years and her, he’s gonna be happier being single, cleaner and having his collectibles around than he would be with her.

Another instance happened when I had a garage sale and one of the things I was selling was a talking football player action figure from the 90s that someone had bought me under the presumption that because I was boy, I was into sports (I was not). The action figure was brand new in the box because that was how little I cared about playing with it despite my mother’s best attempts. A woman shows up, sees the action figure and loses her shit.

“Oh God, I am so sick of seeing these! My husband has the whole set and all I want to do is throw them in the trash!” A guy at the sale overhears this and says “Well, I’m sure your husband has a list of things that he’d like to get rid of that you’re partial to but he doesn’t say anything because that’s the give and take of being in a relationship” She blows him off and says “I should be the one to decide what goes in the house and what he can buy, THAT is how marriage works for ME.” The guy changes his argument. “Maybe on your husband’s list of shit that needs to go, you should be at the top of the list…” Everyone else at the garage sale (including me) was now watching silently and wondering when the throw down would happen…

“What did you say?”, she asks him a bit taken back. “I said if I was him, I wouldn’t take that shit that somehow being married to you means forfeiture of my belongings and personality and substituting it all for your bullshit. I’d sooner throw you out than my action figures.” After picking her jaw up off my driveway, the woman hurumphs and storms back to her car. I high-five the guy for making an excellent point after she leaves.

I have a lot of collectibles myself and am currently in the creative habit of going through my childhood Power Rangers and Pokémon toys and putting the ones I absolutely want to keep in shadow boxes and hanging them on the wall as conversation pieces and selling the rest.

I have Funko Pops. I have lunchboxes. I have special edition magazines and comic books in floater frames on the wall. I have more books than I have time to count or read. I have tub after tub of Halloween and Christmas decorations because that’s my favorite time of year. I would never throw all of this stuff away because I’ve purged plenty already and kept what I wanted to keep. It’s all a reflection of my personality and my story. If someone came into my life and said our life together would mean giving all of this up and doing what he wanted, I would consider that a toxic situation and I would end it before I got in too deep.

Men, gay or straight, can find themselves in toxic, abusive relationships, this is not a phenomenon only experienced by women. It just seems that way because men, especially straight men, rarely speak up about it and mistakenly settle on what they assume is some unchangable default result of being in a relationship. It’s not.

I would never move in with someone and tell them to throw everything out that has been a part of them or spoken to who they are in order to make room for me. I am all about organizing and making a space feel cozy, functional and fun and would go out of my way to make sure we both had space for our things and our personalities and stories. One does not have to overshadow or overpower the other in order to make a relationship between two people work.

So, the next time someone says “It’s me or the Star Wars action figures on that one shelf that aren’t bothering anyone but I hate that that shelf isn’t all about me anyway” say “May The Force not hit you in the ass on the way out” as you show them the door.

[rudjedet]

My dad broke up with the girlfriend he had when he was 20ish because she said "the motorcycle goes or I go". And not because she genuinely didn't like motorcycles, no! Because a friend of hers told her bf to get rid of the bike or lose her, and that guy choose the girl. Dad's ex saw it as a power play she could pull on my dad as well. He turned her out on the spot.

[digdeepergravedigger09]

I used to think guys just didn’t have any interests?? Or hobbies?? Because of all those images of homes where the wife designs everything and there’s basically no touch of the husband there anywhere, and how it was implied that that’s “normal”.

[cookingwithroxy]

I just reblogged this but then I thought and I just have to make this addition?

Yeah, that last comment, that's how fucked up our society has gotten, because men have to conceal or hide or at best get ONE room to put their stuff in, and even then it's treated as terrible and regressive and should not be allowed. The 'Man Cave' aka the one space in a person's house where they're allowed to express themselves and their hobbies and it's treated as a terrible thing because he's 'excluding' his wife from it, while the things that are in there are NOT ALLOWED ANYWHERE ELSE.

We have allowed people to brainwash us into two dumb ideas, one that men are expected to give up everything that they love for their significant others, and the second that it's a burden on women that they have to determine how everything is in the household. Because that is also how it is in so many cases.

[skepticsub]

Felt this meme would be important here.

[ranpoismyblorbo]

The meme is perfect here and this thread as a whole makes me realise how screwed up society is and also how happy I am to not be living in such a household

[theartistryofthebipolarbrain]

This says so much about the harm our society does to men.

It feels like this is a facet of the idea that men must be stoic assholes that only show softer emotions to their wives (because society is homophobic, too, historically). If men can only show anger to other people, showing softer emotions regarding THINGS (like nostalgia, respect, adoration...), would be a serious weakness.

[dog-of-ulthar]

Wait but tell me more, what kind of math does our godforsaken measuring system make sense for? I'm horribly curious!

oh dear oh boy okay, I've tried to explain this to people and had them just get more annoyed, so I'll give it a shot, but no promises that it will make any sense. Disclaimer also that I don't really know what I'm talking about, I've just done a lot of baking, and ages ago I read something by Plato explaining why the musical scale is how it is, and I'm extrapolating from the two

(wow this turned out way longer than I meant it to because IT'S MIDNIGHT)

the metric system is a base 10 system, like most modern human math, so it is easy to use in the way people tend to do math these days - ie, by sitting down with either a piece of paper or a calculator and doing sums. It's a good system for a lot of things, especially scientific applications where you need to be VERY precise and don't want to waste time converting units, and need to do shit like calculus. It's a highly rational way of doing it...if you are literate.

if you aren't literate, or are less literate, it's not a sensible way to construct a measuring system at all. If you measure something and come up with 367.45 cm, that's nothing. You're going to forget it, and you can't easily divide it by anything, there's no way to go from here

But consider the English Foot. We've all been working with a base 12 system without realizing it, and without really utilizing it for what it's best for, which is easy mental division. This is where people get mad at me, they say math all gets terrible and ugly when you do it in feet, you end up trying to figure out how many sixteenths of an inch 0.135 is, or you end up with repeating decimals, and it all sucks super bad. To this I say yes, it does, because you're thinking like a modern algebra student, and not like a medieval bricklayer.

The base 12 system of the traditional English foot is fantastic for mental math, because 12 is a highly divisible number. It's easily divisible into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths by most people in their heads. The inch is then typically divided into 1/16ths, which *super* suck to deal with on a calculator, but are really quite friendly if you just keep them as fractions like God and the Magna Carta intended. This is the kind of math most artisans need to do. You want supports placed evenly along a wall, to divide a piece of fabric in half, or to double a recipe. Nobody 1.7x's a recipe. Metric would be great for that, but why would you do that? It wouldn't be worth the math involved.

And listen, I also use a lot of metric baking recipes. Everything is in grams, you can measure everything the same way, and it's super accurate. They're great if you have a digital scale, but before the age of digital scales? Unfathomable. You (a medieval peasant) have a cup you've decided is The Cup, and sometimes you put in a half or a third or a quarter of that cup. THAT makes sense. Also, it's a lot easier to double something that calls for 1 cup of flour than it is when it calls for 136 grams of flour, and this is for me, a person who learned math in the typical modern way and always has a calculator in their pocket. I would have the sourdough recipe I make every week memorized if it wasn't in fucking grams. I DO have my pie crust recipe memorized. For every cup of flour you put in a third of a cup shortening, one tablespoon of butter, and start with 3 tablespoons of water (and a dash of salt). A double crust pie takes about 3 cups of flour, so that's one cup shortening. Easy! A third of a cup of shortening in grams is 68.3333333. That's nothing! That's garbage!

"Wouldn't it be more accurate to measure 68.3333333 grams, though?" Sure, but the amount of wet indigence you need to put in any baked thing changes with the fucking weather! That's why this recipe says "start with 3 tbs water." There's no need to be more accurate, and in fact it would make things more difficult.

Okay that turned into a tangent about how to make pie crust, a thing I think everyone should learn because pie crust is delicious, but i hope you get the idea. TLDR sometimes you just want to divide things in thirds and have it not suck ass. The eldritch sigil of measurement conversions is a little less threatening if you realize every step up or down is a factor of thirds or fourths

fuck oh no another half remembered piece of pop science coming at you - the largest number a typical human can hold in their head *without language* is 3. You don't need numbers to count to three, you don't need to count to be aware of three, you can just see three things and say "that's three." Don't believe me? That's the whole basis of Roman numerals. The numbers 1-3 are representational, after that they get more symbolic, and you never end up with more than three of the same symbol in a row. After III comes IV, not IIII, and it's just that III is much easier on the brain. For the same reason, a lot of English conversions are in factors of 4. There are 4 cups in a quart, and 4 quarts in a gallon, so you're only dealing with measurements that are easy to hold in your head without counting. You never have to count out 4 cups if you convert. You either need 3 cups or 1 quart. Does that make sense? Anyone who has done Big Cooking should know that if you have to count cups beyond 3 or 4 it becomes very easy to lose track.

Now i'm not saying it's all logical. It would be great if every step was a factor of 4, but they had to get fancy and throw pints in there. Pints aren't too bad, that's a factor of two, but I'll be the first to admit that it makes no sense for one tablespoon to equal three teaspoons instead of four. But because this is a system that evolved over time instead of being constructed intentionally, you have to cut it some slack. I'm sorry to anyone who decided to read this, I should be in bed, but I actually care a lot about this and I swear it's not just stockholm syndrome from Being American

[pure]

I wish i could find this one article written in I believe the 90’s that went under the radar on abortion. The author said that the “life” arguments are basically useless on either side and what actually matters is that humans shouldn’t have a right to use other human bodies as a resource without consent no matter how alive or sentient they are, even if they’re on the brink of death you have the right to deny them access to you. It probably was too radical for pro-choice activists back in those days but like…that’s the most robust arguement lol so we need 2 being that back and dead the pontifications and splitting hairs about “life” in my honest onion

[pure]

I found it. Actually, it was written in the 70’s. She was way ahead of the curve.

The article is ‘A Defense of Abortion’ by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Essential reading!

http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm

[soprie]

If you cannot demand that a person donate their organs to keep you alive, you have no right to legislate that an embryo gets to use a woman’s body to keep itself alive without the woman’s consent.

[null507]

@fandomsandfeminism has used this argument a lot and one of the things she said that really stuck with me is that saying a fetus can use the body of a pregnant person without their consent gives the fetus more rights than any born person has and gives the pregnant person less rights than a corpse.

[bashana-haba-ah-deactivated2017]

hey if u can’t drive/are a slow learner due to a disability or mental illness, just picture historical figures like pirates or the founding fathers trying to operate a car.

it’s only “easy” bc we’ve normalized it.

[bashana-haba-ah-deactivated2017]

it would be great for neurotypicals to reblog this

[shipburner]

this is a serious point and makes me feel a lot better about my refusal to get a driver’s license and yes neurotypicals please reblog this but i’m also thinking about that one gif of george washington barrelling towards you in a truck

[theartistryofthebipolarbrain]

Driving is HARD and COMPLICATED. If it wasn't, people wouldn't have to take classes to do it or get into accidents. If driving was easy, driving distracted wouldn't be the problem it is now.

[astrodidact]