Welcome.

Please, above all, take care of yourself.

[mitskiesque]

I cannot stress this enough the fact that Rebecca Black overcame the absolute inundation of internet harassment and bullying after she released a kind of bad song that she didn’t even want to make, because people love to hate teenage girls, and NOW just dropped a new single with a killer mv about being wlw is SUCH an iconic plot point of 2021

[vocallife]

sorry wait i know i'm reblogging this twice and with a comment but this information changed my entire worldview on particularly teenage girls in music when i first found it out which was at a thing called "music fridays" at my high school, where we'd spend 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every friday going over pop culture or even obscure music things Friday came out and after like a month of resisting, my teacher just walked up to the board and wrote "is Friday a bad song?" we concluded, after listening, dissecting, and discussing the song, that yes, it is. and then my teacher pulled up information about the company behind the whole thing. "any of you could have sung this song. Rebecca Black did not write this. It was a gift. and her gift, from well-meaning parents trying to give a girl a taste of her dream, went viral." lots of "oh fuck"s went around the classroom. not out loud, bc the teacher would have given us Looks at that, but like. he talked about how often young people are eviscerated for decisions that might not be their own. how often that happens particularly in the arts, and how that can destroy the essence of a person, because at that young, you ARE your art, even if you didn't WRITE your art. he talked about justin bieber, britney spears, hilary duff. it definitely went over that 5-10 minutes, but goddamn, it changed my mind about a LOT of things.

[stagalactic]

Here is her new song btw, it’s rly good 🥺

[brehaaorgana]

I'm so happy for her I love her.

[bad-days-are-ok]

[lousydrawingsforgoodpeople]

[juneofthemoon-deactivated202002]

Listening to Dear Sugars and all the feels. It’s so good. 

“At many points in our lives I think we need to really, in a conscious way, take stock of what are the stories that we’ve told ourselves about ourselves and about others and then rewrite that…”

“When you make decisions based on ideas you had rather than what’s before you, that’s where you go wrong.”

Dear Sugars: Do I Follow My Head or My Heart? Podcast

YES. Yes yes yes.

[memewhore]

[bananahomo]

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

[dont-forget-the-life-hacks]

Video Transcript:

Person 1: “What’s a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know?”  Person 2: “Most hospitals in America are non-profits. That means they must have a Charity Care Policy. This is going to sound weird, but what that means is if you make under a certain amount of money the hospital legally has to forgive your medical bills. Let me show you how this works. Type in the hospital name with financial assistance after it. It should be the top link, lets check. What you want to look for is financial assistance applications policy. Lets check the policy. From here, what you’re looking for is a scale, that is right here. 0%-300% of the federal poverty guidelines, they will forgive 100% of your medical bills. So you can see here, that 300% of the federal poverty guidelines is $37,470, so if you make under that amount [annually] the hospital will legally forgive your medical bills. And if you’re a larger household, you can check it out from here. If you want to test it out, I run a nonprofit that does this. So, dm me, and I will actually do it for you. Lets see if we can crash those medical bills.”

[dynamite5ftjewishbitch]

Having worked for multiple nonprofit hospitals, I can confirm. Also, if you have Medicaid, and if you had it within (I think) three months after when you incurred your bill? Legally, the hospital can no longer bill you.

[shanastoryteller]

in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread. 

(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)

we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love ,and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over. 

we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow. 

so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back. 

then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt. 

it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no. 

then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where”s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone 

and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline 

this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much

[cherryandsisters-deactivated202]

an explanation is not owed

[antique-scarecrow]

i want to show this to everyone i know

[tothemountainsimustgo]

WOW this was a reblog in .02 seconds for me.

[votedami]

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

[evilscum-deactivated20160223]

his name is Ibn Khaldun

[imaanhammaam-deactivated2016031]

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

[afghanmenace]

#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history

[guluna]

I reblog this post every time I see it

[kyraneko]

We fucking replaced a Muslim scientist with an apple?

[deliriumcrow]

In the middle ages, THE place to go for an education was the middle East, or, failing that, Spain. The Muslim world didn’t have the same limits placed on scientific inquiry that the Christian world did, and since they were willing to look at more than just Aristotole and actually compare texts to the observable world, they had some incredible scientific and mathematical advancements. And street lights and toilets. I mean theories and algebra are great and all, but street lights and toilets. In the 12th century. Also medical advancements, and fewer rules against women studying. Hell, women *should* be the ones studying the female body, would you rather a woman see your female relatives, or some old man? Would you rather have someone who lives in the same kind of body, or one who has no first hand idea what the parts can do?

[mdmshakespeare]

Europeans erased centuries of knowledge from the East because of fear. When we “rediscovered” it, we were still too egotistical to admit that non-whites could have been smarter, so we invented our own mythology.

Bring credit back where it’s due. Honor the true pioneers.

[rumaan]

Also the world’s oldest continuous existing university was established by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, in 859 AD (244/5 AH) in Fez, Morocco.

[star-anise]

I have sympathy for “not like the other girls because the other girls told me so constantly from K to 12 so yeah my relationship with femininity and girls or women who aren’t visibly ostracized like me is naturally a bit rocky” girls.

It took me until my late 20s to convince my hindbrain that the average group of women weren’t actually all waiting to peck me to pieces so I could actually dare to be friendly and the tiniest bit outgoing.

Sisterhood is great but I’d like to be able to acknowledge that the reason my hackles went up whenever I met a girl/woman who looked and talked like the people who abused me was way more about my traumatic experiences than my lack of feminism.

[findingfeather]

Fucking this.

[rubynye]

But isn’t it interesting that everyone who sees herself in this is like some other girls, those of us who were bullied and harmed by other girls?

WhatI mean by saying this is that I was one of the girls hurt and bullied and ostracised by other girls, especially girls who were suceeding at normative femininity, or at least looked like it. For instance I’ve been fat all my life, and too often the Only Black Kid in my class/grade/whatever. I definitely wasn’t nor did I ever look like a queen bee. But then I tried to reach out to other ostracised girls and often as not was rebuffed just on the basis of being a girl. Which makes a kind of sense, I guess, but I reserve the right to think it was a little sad.

[star-anise]

Oh yeah, that’s a very real thing. I tried to do my Master’s thesis on the psychological effects of bullying but when I got a look at the statistics I basically had a wee little breakdown and had to change my degree.

Because the statistics basically say: In a given year, about 5-10% of children are bullied. Very specifically: Your average classroom of 30 kids will, with stunning regularity, choose about 1-3 children and ostracize them. When we get students to rank-order the popularity of their classmates, that is a very effective way to predict who the bottom tier will be, the 1-3 kids with 0 friends. (In lower grades of elementary it’s rare for those 1-3 kids to band together, and if they do, it actually sinks their social status with everyone else even deeper) Bullying interventions that work on identifying that bottom tier of kids and work on getting them as many as one or two friends in the rest of the class, their mental health outcomes improve significantly.

So basically, in elementary school, a bullied kid is always “not like the other kids” because the statistical experience of being bullied is being trapped every day for a year in a room full of kids who almost uniformly hate you. In effect, bullied elementary kids have been traditionally kept in parallel prison cells, unable to see each other’s suffering.

It is sad, MASSIVELY sad, that a lot of bullying victims come out of their experiences hostile and unready to trust anyone else. It’s also massively sad that a lot of them come up with dysfunctional and, yes, oppressive theories to explain what happened, like, “The other girls hate me because other girls are shallow bitches.” 

That especially happens to white kids–kids from minority groups are often more resilient to bullying (though other life forces might tank their mental health) because their parents were more likely to sit them down at a very early age and say, “Look, sometimes people are going to hate you and treat you horribly. They’re wrong, you don’t deserve it, and don’t take it personally.” Meanwhile white parents are more likely (although not the only ones) to go, “Well what did you Do Specifically to Make them bully you? 🙃 This is a totally individual problem independent of any larger social forces and also quite likely your fault.” And if all the adults are saying that, a kid is generally forced to conclude that it IS them, personally, and/or, find something or someone else to blame for what’s happening, and most of the available theories about Why People Suck are… really shitty to the people they’re describing.

IT’S FUCKED UP. It’s a regular ongoing tragedy. Which is rather more preventable than we like to think, if there was the time/money/social willpower to prevent it.  🙃 But “anti-bullying campaign” tends to mean “bring in a guest speaker once a year” not “permanently halve class sizes”.

[maddelineusher-deactivated20240]

#this makes so much sense#i feel like religion is also a factor#i was one of the few non mormon kids growing up in a predominantly religious community#and that was absolutely a factor in why i was often targeted ostracized and excluded#not to mention i was a quiet only child kid#(possibly neurodivergent but i never had an official diagnosis so cannot confirm)#i think that made me easy both to target and to cull out#and i think we also need to discuss this in regards to not necessarily bullying#but kids forming cliques and barely tolerating you but never really considering you part of the group#and excluding you whenever they can#i really cannot begin to describe how painful and humiliating it is as a kid#to learn that the kids you thought were your close friends#only see you as barely more than a present nuisance#and yeah it really does fuck you up#i tend to be very stringent when it comes to who i consider a friend#and with the few friends i have#with all but maybe one or two#i am constantly paranoid that they don’t actually see me as their friend#and just barely tolerate my existence

adding my tags because they were an afterthought and I’m honestly sitting here like “shit there’s a statistical explanation for why I’m Like This and why I constantly think everyone hates me all the time”

[star-anise]

For the record, my research definition of bullying included relational aggression, which is “behavior that intentionally harms another person’s self-esteem, friendships, or social status.”

Ostracism is an extreme result of relational aggression in that it denies the person any relationships at all. On the other hand, there are a ton of things people can do inside relationships that are still aggressive. In a way, although complete ostracism fucks kids up, it at least offers the chilly protection of distance. Friends are close enough to make excellent targets.

Emotional abuse is still abuse.

[sandersstudies]

If you and your partner practice frequent, non-sexual consent, your relationship will be healthier and easier.

“Are you comfortable with me ranting about my day for a few minutes?”

“Oh, this is your poetry? Would it be okay if I read it?”

“Do you mind if I use your phone for a few minutes?”

“Wow, your meal looks awesome. Could I try some?”

It will save a lot of grief, especially in a developing relationship. Eventually, with consistent “yes’s” and “no’s” you can figure out more permanent boundaries and guidelines.

“I need to ask before ranting about my day or taking their food, but my partner is okay with me using their phone whenever. However, my partner does not like me reading their poetry unless they offer first.”

[sandersstudies]

And this goes for friendships too! Even just stuff like “do you mind if I leave this door open?” 

[doomhamster]

…I never fully realized it before but this is a big part of why my relationship with my husband is so conflict-free. Both because him doing this all the time made it easy to trust him, back when we were a new item, and because it helped ME break out of the toxic idea that you should never ask about a partner’s preferences because if you Really Loved Them you should be able to intuit what they want, all the time, about anything. 

[tygermama]

my one son is autistic so I ask ‘hug or no hug?’ I always knock and wait to be acknowledged before opening my sons’ bedroom doors (not just because I respect their privacy but because they’re teenagers and I don’t want to walk in on any personal activities) I don’t go into their rooms without asking I don’t touch their phones without asking (I’ll pick one up to take to them if I find it in another room but I won’t go through it) yesterday, my younger son walked into my room, stopped, said sorry and walked out to the hall and knocked on my door ‘because if I have to knock on his door, he has to knock on mine’ because their trust is important and I want them to know I respect their privacy

[sophygurl]

Consent is not just for sex. Consent is not just for sex. Consent is not just for sex.

[ineffectualdemon]

9 year old me: mom you’re beautiful!

My Mom: no, I’m ugly. The ugliest. I’m a horrible pig of a person

Other people: (to me) you look just like your mom

Me: so I’m ugly

Now:

My 9 year old: mom you’re beautiful

Me: thank you! I don’t always see it very well in myself though because my brain lies to me a lot and tells me I’m ugly even though I’m not. But I can’t be ugly because we look a lot alike and you’re beautiful. My brain is just a bully 

My kid: that’s right! We’re BOTH beautiful!

​Me:​ yes we are!​​​

_____

And that my friends is called thinking about how your self depricating words can hurt other people around you. I can’t see that I’m beautiful most of the time but I can acknowledge that the issue is my ability to see myself in a positive way. 

But calling myself ugly just hurts the people who love me. It could even convince my kid that they are also ugly and further the cycle 

And sometimes it’s really hard just by saying “I’m being mean to myself because my brain lies a lot matters

[neveranyshame]

My daughter: “mama, your belly is chubby.”

Me, internally: ouch

Me, out loud: “well, yeah! Because I am chubby! But also because I grew TWO WHOLE BABIES in it, and that stretched it out a bit!”

My daughter, in the most encouraging tone possible as she reaches up and pets my belly: “it did SUCH a good job.”

And y'know what? Hell yeah it did. #rockon

[profeminist]

“Watching emergency school board mtg re:opening. A veteran just stood up & said “The ghosts of the people I’ve killed to keep you all safe haunt me every night. Are you prepared to be haunted by the ghosts of the children & faculty for whom you are responsible?”

His exact words were: “I’m a disabled combat veteran served in the United States Marine Corp. I came back from my last tour overseas in 2005. Every night since then, I get to see the faces that I was responsible for taking lives. That was a war & they were trying to kill me.”

“This still haunts me today. What I want to know is, how are you going to sleep at night when the faces YOU get to see are those of a child or a teacher or educator or staff because you decided to send them back into a classroom before it was safe?”

“What services will you provide for these staff members, teachers, students who will suffer from PTSD due to your negligence in this hasty power-play to reopen?”

Ppl who want to see Brian Adatto, the Marine vet, can see him speak at min. 18.28 here: http://schoolboard.hcpswebcasts.com from 7/23/20 special session. 

Also here https://facebook.com/HillsboroughSch/videos/951547565330559/?extid=F1jtyL2zdLwmgZ4p….

- Kacy Tillman

[moiyoko]

Hey Tumblr! It’s been a few years since I last did this but I’m back at it again. I like to think I’m the reason they’ve changed the system to get free books but either way nows your chance to help out. I know the power of the internet so just hear me out right quick as I ask for a simple favor. See those cereal boxes up there? If you buy any Kellogg’s product with that Free Book logo keep the receipt! They are doing it so that when you submit a picture of your receipt showing you purchased the product you can get a free book for yourself and donate a book. Or you can have both books donated! It’s super easy to sign up on their site so if you feel like doing that please do! Or maybe you’re lazy and you don’t want to do that. I’m asking you to send me a picture of your receipt! I set up an email especially for this: [email protected] Now I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m bringing it up, so here goes.

I teach kindergarten at a school where the kids have little to nothing. Through generous donations (government, three square, various community partners, etc.) the kids get backpacks, clothes, shoes, free breakfast/lunch, and some school supplies. The school is not in the best part of town. I’ve had students who live with grandparents because their own parents are in jail, kids who have parents that don’t have custody over them for various reasons, and so on and so forth. Now I am trying to get my kids to read books, but they literally don’t have any books at home that they can use to practice their reading. With COVID going on it’s going to be hard to have students get their hands on books because sharing is going to be a no go.

Here’s where you come in. If you happen to buy one of these specially marked boxes and don’t plan on using the receipt please send me a picture of that receipt ([email protected]). If 20 people on here send me a code I’ll be able to get 20 books, which will easily allow me to get each of my students a brand new book of their own. I will gladly take a picture of a handwritten thank you note from my students to show you how excited they are to get a book. They’re five so expect something awesome.

Even if you have no receipt or don’t buy the product I’d appreciate the signal boost. Thanks in advance.

[revivinghenchy-deactivated20200]

Moon Palace Books is an independent bookstore located just behind Minneapolis police precinct 3 - the starting point of the riots last night.

When the police tried to set up barricades around the store, they said, “no thanks” and instead set up a station for protesters to get food, water, treatment, etc… They hung up an “Abolish the Police” banner in their window and are just generally badass.

They are also an amazing bookstore that is doing mail orders. Please consider using them if you are looking to buy something new to read.

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

In 1990, the high school dropout rate for Dolly Parton's hometown of Sevierville Tennessee was at 34% (Research shows that most kids make up their minds in fifth/sixth grade not to graduate). That year, all fifth and sixth graders from Sevierville were invited by Parton to attend an assembly at Dollywood. They were asked to pick a buddy, and if both students completed high school, Dolly Parton would personally hand them each a $500 check on their graduation day. As a result, the dropout rate for those classes fell to 6%, and has generally retained that average to this day.

Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years, under the agreement that if the program worked, the school system would effectively adopt and fund the program after the trial period.

During the same period, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995: The idea being that children from her rural hometown and low-income families often start school at a disadvantage and as a result, will be unfairly compared to their peers for the rest of their lives, effectively encouraging them not to pursue higher education. The objective of the Imagination library was that every child in Sevier County would receive one book, every month, mailed and addressed to the child, from the day they were born until the day they started kindergarten, 100% free of charge. What began as a hometown initiative now serves children in all 50 states, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, mailing thousands of free books to children around the world monthly.

On March 1, 2018 Parton donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of "Coat of Many Colors" dedicated to her father, who never learned to read or write.

[katiemcgrath]

“You clap for us now.”

— Britain’s immigrants and children of immigrants who are key workers 

Credit: created by Sachini Imbuldeniya

[chokit-pyrus]

I saw this one post ages ago where someone said that video games can’t have plus-size characters, because “how could they do cool action?” I can’t find the post, but it inspired me to show you guys some gifs of real people.

[wolfoflightandearth]

All this and also like videogames dont have to have realistic actions.

Videogame characters regularly do things that real life people cannot do.

If youre someone who can accept link turning into a wolf but cant accept someone fat doing flips and parkour and shit maybe youre just fatphobic and you dont actually care whether or not plus sized people can do those things.

[tothemountainsimustgo]

Honestly, zero percent of me cares about video games but 100% of me needs to see images like this because they shouldn’t be so unusual.