Your cats are not "manipulating" you they are communicating with you. They do not understand why you're limiting their food supply or keeping them indoors or preventing them from ruining your furniture or whatever.
When they meyowl pathetically for more food, it's not because they're trying to "trick" you into feeding them again. They just want to be fed, and they're smart enough to notice the correlation between certain sounds they make and the responses they get from you.
They've figured out that if they want to communicate to you that they want more food, if they make those pathetic sounds, you're more likely to behave as if you've understood what they're trying to communicate.
When your cat waits for you to look away then yoinks food off of your plate, it's not because they love crime. It's because they're social colony creatures who instinctively share food with each other and they don't understand why you're not sharing the best foods with them.
Your cats are very intelligent, social creatures who see you as their Very Strange sibling.
They've learned how to make intricate sounds just to communicate with their humans. When the sounds they make elicit the responses they want, they learn that those sounds are the most effective way to communicate their desires.
Not because they're scheming about how to control you, but because they don't know how to communicate with you any other way.
how do you explain to people that spending all your pre-adolescence and adolescent years in such deep depression you didn't expect to make it past 19 and somehow making it to 30 changes your worldview. like i don't need any aspirations, i'm just vibing with my iced coffee that brings me actual joy and contentment. might chuckle at a funny post later. life's simple. it's good
like there's only so many times you can say "hey don't say that, that's rude/bigoted/a dogwhistle" before everyone just stops talking to you. nothing changes except you're alone now. ask how i know.
“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”
Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.
you have to be in a certain specific mood to listen to classic rock because sometimes a guy is playing his guitar and you're just like shut the fuck up man
The mood on the estate is very low. We're waiting to find out, in the next two-to-three weeks whether the landlord applied to the court for possession orders on the properties that he served a Section 21 notice to. Almost everyone waiting for a rent tribunal determination did it in one big block so are all waiting for the next steps. The council is reviewing evidence about the mismanagement of the estate to see if they have grounds to prosecute or deny licenses. Now is the big wait-and-see.
The deadline for filing to the courts was July 31st, so if he hasn't, he isn't getting any of the ones that are currently occupied, but if he has we are going to have to fight tooth and claw to stop them in the courts and stop them on the streets if necessary. Over a third of the notices we are aware of are invalid, but we haven't had the correct legal counsel to check the rest.
The rent tribunals have rejected some people's cases saying that the section 13 rent increase notice was invalid in the first place. In at least one of these cases, the landlord has explicitly said they intend to serve a new Section 13, and in another one they've started harassing the resident saying that they owe arrears, despite the rent tribunal process freezing the applicant's rent until a determination is made. I'm really worried about the people on benefits who can't afford a rent increase of really any size whatsoever. They are the people most prone to falling through the cracks here because they are the most vulnerable, the least protected by law and have the fewest resources with which to fight.
Some more neighbours are moving. No grand declarations of the situation being hopeless, just someone whose husband is a real estate agent so was never really in the collective fight to begin with, someone who started buying a house before it all began, a student flatshare going their separate ways - life stuff. It's still heartbreaking to see them go and watch our community take yet more wounds. Absences. Construction sites where we had neighbours, friends, family members.
In the low mood there has been a drop off in attendance to socials and organising meetings. I was expecting it, but it still feels like shit.
I know the next move, and I've been carefully recuperating my energy to be ready to start it this week. We're going for another media push, this time about the inadequacy of the council's response. The council, especially being a new Green council, is susceptible to shame in a way that the landlord is not. We're going to start now planning a protest of the council for next month, and with a little luck we'll have a simultaneous protest of the landlord's offices in North London by our comrades in the Renters Union. It's going to be a lot of work, and we have to get it going from zero momentum, which is always the hardest part. Uncertainty drains energy. The big wait-and-see is a hungry horrible thing to have hanging over you.
This morning, as I've been doing most mornings, I went outside to read, watch the commuters passing by - I'm starting to recognise them - and have my bubble machine on to brighten the days of passersby. The book I'm reading at the moment is an anthology, which is perfect for a morning doorstep read because you can take it a little at a time.
This morning i was reading a short story about one of my favourite robots in the universe, Zhurong the chinese martian rover. In the story, Zhurong was left all alone on Mars and had to figure out what to do with themself, and they found a mushroom. As you can imagine, the idea of a mushroom on Mars to me is very very beautiful. I looked up from my book and saw one of my neighbours walking his dogs. This neighbour describes himself as "a gobshite", loves arguing, hates authority, and can be a pain in everyone's ass if you don't make an effort to point him at the right ass, which we've been working to do for the last few months. We chatted and caught up. He and his dogs had all been under the weather. I mentioned the meeting we're going to have with a housing association CEO where my neighbour is going to tear this corporate dickhead a new hole and we both had a chuckle. A few months ago, I didn't know this neighbour's name. A few weeks ago I thought we would never be friends. Now things are different.
I returned to my story, and read about Zhurong sacrificing themself to save the mushroom, and the distant future when martian life forms dicover the remains of what happened. We can never be certain, but i think things are going to be okay.
All those "spend just 35 minutes doing a bunch of really hard exercises and you'll feel great forever!" videos are really discouraging. I usually end up doing like, 2 minutes of some of his while waiting for my shower to heat up, and ykw?
That's 2 minutes more than I would have done otherwise.
oh hey I have a thing like that last one that I like to do sometimes, but I do it lying down in bed. it's a very satisfying pop/shift in my hips/lower back, but doesn't always work. maybe I will try his version and see if it is more effective for me
it's like, definitely still mansplaining if the man is dominating the conversation unintentionally and he would totally stop if you asked him to, actually. like, the term exists to describe a phenomenon that arises from the implicit bias that women are expected to simply be less knowledgeable about things. it doesn't matter if he's doing it on purpose or not. he does it cause he expects women to not know things or to not have any input. maybe don't fucking expect women to stand up for themselves every single time they have to have a conversation with a man because that shit happens like daily for a lot of women
