It's Becoming Usual

Disabled, married, bisexual, book loving, nerd

[queer-as-city-folk]

5 minutes of research on what American troops did in Vietnam will make you understand why people called them baby killers

[queer-as-city-folk]

[knownqueerbaiter]

idk who needs to hear this but it’s healthier for you to just accept that you’re gonna be kinda fat than it is to live the rest of your life miserably trying to monitor yourself to maintain a skinny weight your body doesn’t want to hold onto

[knownqueerbaiter]

“nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” what feels even better is living a life where your self-worth isn’t entirely dependent on your thinness and you don’t constantly monitor and shame yourself. attaching the tweet that was worth at least five hours of therapy for me

[blumineck]

Be yourself as best you can whenever you can.

[i-survived-that]

ID: A youtube comment with 11 likes by Niceone, it says "I've lived 46 years without knowing this. How nice of life to save some of the best bites for later." End ID.

Normally, people tend to get frustrated, even jokingly, if they miss out on something. This comment was on a song from 1974 and it made me smile quite much. Simply appreciative. Like a dessert after dinner.

[phinarei]

It is genuinely mind blowing to me just how many Tumblr posts have changed my life for the better and taught me to be happier. Not all of the thoughts originate on Tumblr, but the way people collect and frame them has literally changed my brain chemistry.

[renthony]

I was 12 when the first of my siblings was born, so I have very vivid memories of the way my mother was excluded from a lot of spaces because people find children annoying.

If you think "children should not be allowed in this space," you HAVE TO reckon with the fact that you are now excluding parents (and very often women specifically) who don't have access to childcare. You are isolating people who are poor, or rural, or single parents, or any number of other factors that might prevent someone from having on-demand childcare. You are cutting them off from being able to exist in public. You are denying parents and children the ability to fully participate in society.

My mom spent several years only leaving the house to buy groceries or take me to school, and even then, people would still come up to her to complain TO HER FACE about how she shouldn't bring a crying toddler to Walmart. Entitled strangers would literally try and demand that my mom leave and come back without the kids.

"Why can't your husband watch them?" Because he was at work, usually working extreme amounts of overtime so we didn't get evicted, because landlords don't like it when you stop paying rent.

"Why can't you send them to daycare?" Because that costs money.

"Why can't your teenager stay home with them and babysit?" Because I also deserved to be able to leave the house for something other than school, and taking me to the grocery store was how my mom taught me to manage a household budget, shop sales, and meal plan.

"Don't bring your kid in public if you can't CONTROL them and make them stop crying!" Kids cry when they're upset, and being dragged around a store is upsetting! Don't be an asshole! Children are human beings who are still learning how the world works, and they don't have a lot of agency. You'd cry, too.

"Spank them until they learn to stop crying!" That's just straight-up child abuse, Jesus Christ.

What the fuck was our family supposed to do? Never go to the grocery store? Starve because strangers couldn't handle a toddler existing in public?

[nature-travel-photography]

The Netherlands - Author: SoftlyUnhingeddd

[porterdavis]

[myrandomstuffpage]

Support your local library 📚

[tainbocuailnge]

just thinking a lot lately about that tiktok series of a guy asking strangers 'do you think this person is gay or straight' and its this whole chain of people being like oh im obviously straight everyone can tell and then getting called gay when their picture is shown to other strangers. overall pretty funny series exposing how fake and fragile it all is. but very notably the videos with all men are just calling each other gay but the ones with all women are completely unpromptedly calling the strangers in the photo trans.

the question of "do you think they're gay or straight" is being interpreted not as "can you guess this person's sexuality from their appearance" but "what kind of deviant do you think this person is" and trans men just do not occupy the societal headspace as a potential deviant to watch out for the way trans women do. fail to live up to the standard of cishet man and you're still a man you're just gay. fail to live up to the standard of cishet woman and you're not even a woman

[ink-the-artist]

"i hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. i hope you can hear the laughter from the next room"

[baybelletrist]

Americans Are Cutting Down Flock Cameras. The Company Calls Them Terrorists.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.

[fraught-with-peril]

So much of the hatred against gig economy drivers is just racism tbh but nobody wants to have that conversation

[fraught-with-peril]

I spent a while in the DFW airport queue, which is just a massive hidden parking lot at the airport where Uber and Lyft drivers must stay while waiting to be assigned a ride. Since it's too expensive to sit there with your car idling in the A/C, just about everyone is milling about in the grass outside of their cars to avoid baking to death in the setting sun. It's surprisingly welcoming compared to the stops I've had to make running food delivery. People are singing, dancing, and sharing sodas out of a cooler.

There was literally maybe one white person at a time in the crowd for the entire hour I had to wait for my turn. Out of a crowd of between 200 and 300 people at any given moment.

I'm not saying that Uber/Lyft drivers are all innocent little babs that need protecting (driver conduct is a serious issue ever since they stopped training ppl and making sure they had decent communication skills) but you NEED to listen for anti-immigrant sentiment and racism when conversations about driver conduct come up bc some of you are literally validating stories like "a Black man had the audacity to say hello to ME" as evidence that they're all bad...

[fraught-with-peril]

Further insider info on UberEats, DoorDash, etc. and why drivers hating you isn't about ableism, from a disabled gig driver:

What I need people to understand about rideshare food delivery apps in the vast majority of the US is that the driver quite literally does not get paid unless you tip. You need to forget what you know about tipping culture and start learning about how it's legal to pay tipped workers NOTHING. If you want to keep using the app, you have to tip. If you don't want to tip, fight to get the drivers legal protections and a living wage. If you keep using the app without tipping, fuck you.

Unlike with rides, an app delivery driver is not paid per mile OR for time. It's a flat rate, usually between $1.50 and $3 regardless of how long the order takes, how long the restaurant takes to make it, etc.

Deliveries in many markets usually take most or all of an hour to complete due to the distance & sheer volume of traffic, so we're looking at functionally $2 per online hour (not booked hour, booked hours are BULLSHIT because we can't do ANYTHING else while waiting on orders) on a good day if nobody tips.

I will remind you a gallon of gas costs more than that, and the round trip from the restaurant to you is usually enough to consume most of a gallon or even over a gallon of fuel. This is because the app doesn't always select a location near you. Instead, it often chooses the restaurant closest to the driver, which...honestly, on a busy day, it could be like 15 to 20 miles away from you because THAT was the closest place they could find a driver to. It's not our fault your food's cold, either, in other words.

The reason your food is taking an hour to get to you when you don't tip is because the apps will try their hardest NOT to raise this rate unless they're forced to. Your food isn't even being prepared because drivers are seeing an offer to go 15 miles for $1.50 and going "haha, no, I'm not a fucking idiot" and taking the offers that are higher. Your order floats around in the system getting $0.20 tacked onto the base pay until someone FINALLY takes it.

I literally never stop moving when I'm running deliveries unless I am at the customer's front door, so when you open said door and bitch at me for how long your food took to get to you, I know instantly that you didn't tip & the algorhithm didn't even bother showing it to me until it was worth my time because I always hit no on orders that ask me to do unpaid labor.

When you try to justify not tipping w/ any reason, you just look like an asshole to the people actually doing all this work for you. "I need you to do unpaid labor because I'm poor" yeah babe so are we, and we're usually poorer than the ones saying this shit

[shamebats]

[3liza]

[shamebats]

Meanwhile this was what various medical professionals in that reddit thread had to say about it.

They do not, in fact, love it.

[fittingoutjane]

The proof that chiropractic is an utterly failed medical profession is not that adjustments can cause harm, but that the profession has responded by ignoring and denying the harm, rather than studying it.

All medical treatments (other than complete placebos) have some risk of harm, but for real treatments given by real professionals, the harms are tracked, measured and warned about. If the harms are too severe, the treatment is no longer used.

[robotslenderman]

One of my colleagues was a chiropractor. After a while he began to suspect that a lot of his patients actually just had muscle tears, not spinal issues. He bought an ultrasound machine, learned how to use it and how to read ultrasound, and found that to be the case. Between that and the constant pressure from management to get customers (because lbr, they're not patients, they're customers), he got sick and tired of it and bailed to become a sonographer full time.

And before people pipe up with "but my chiro is good, they have me do exercises and so on!" that's just regular ass physiotherapy. See a physiotherapist. A lot of people who sing the praises of chiros because they saved them from chronic pain would have gotten the same benefits from seeing an actual licensed physio, who can prescribe the same or even better exercises because they have an actual fucking education.

[wisteria-wolf]

The amount of fucking charts I've seen where a patient went to a chiropractor and now needs a surgery is fucking insane. All I do is medical charts, day in and day out doing medical code. I've gone over hundreds of patients whole year of appointments. Unless the chiropractor is also a physical therapist, that patient is going to get worse and need surgery with very few exceptions. It doesn't matter when they mention seeing a chiropractor, by the end of the year they need surgery for issues that started after *shock and awe* a chiropractor appointment! I've seen patients needing multiple surgeries to be functional after chiropractors. I've seen patients lose their ability to walk because of chiropractors. And all the way up till they need surgery, through the issues piling up and needing more pain meds, the patients insist it's helping because the want so badly for it to be helping. I wish it did

[nitewrighter]

Couple + Sibling/relative third wheel is honestly an S-tier trio dynamic and I wish we saw more of this in media.

"You are my soulmate. We are forged together by battle and tears and love. Also my brother's coming along."

"Yo."

[nitewrighter]

Bonus points if the non-related half of the couple is just as committed to keeping the third wheel around as the related half.

"Isn't it weird that your brother in law is always hanging around?"

"You've got a problem with Andrew?"

[notebooks-and-laptops]

[ultrafacts]

According to the CDC, in 10 percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning—Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene magazine, described the Instinctive Drowning Response like this:

“Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs.

Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.

Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.

Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.

From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.”

This doesn’t mean that a person that is yelling for help and thrashing isn’t in real trouble—they are experiencing aquatic distress. Not always present before the Instinctive Drowning Response, aquatic distress doesn’t last long—but unlike true drowning, these victims can still assist in their own rescue. They can grab lifelines, throw rings, etc.

Look for these other signs of drowning when persons are in the water:

Head low in the water, mouth at water level

Head tilted back with mouth open

Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus

Eyes closed

Hair over forehead or eyes

Not using legs—vertical

Hyperventilating or gasping

Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway

Trying to roll over on the back

Appear to be climbing an invisible ladder

So if a crew member falls overboard and everything looks OK—don’t be too sure. Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

Source/article: [x]

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts!

[mermaibee]

BOOST FOR THE SUMMER. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.

[1q8njk-deactivated20221112]

Can I just say thank you to OP for putting such a detailed description on this?

I’ve been a lifeguard for 6 years now and of all the saves I’ve done, maybe two or three had people drowning in the stereotypical thrashing style. And even those, like the save I made last weekend, it was exactly like OP describes where the person’s head is going in and out of the water but it isn’t long enough to get any air. Mostly you recognize drowning by the look on someone’s face. If someone looks wide eyed and terrified or confused, chances are they’re drowning. That look of “oh shit” is pretty easily recognizable. And even if you can’t tell for sure: GO AFTER THEM ANYWAY. I’ve done “saves” where a kid was pretending to drown and I mistook it for real drowning, but that’s preferable to a kid ACTUALLY drowning.

Also please remember that even strong swimmers can drown if they have a medical emergency, get cramps, or get too tired. If your friend knows how to swim but they’re acting funny get them to land. And even if someone can respond when you ask them if they need help, if they say they do need help? GO HELP THEM.

However . If the victim is a stranger, I can’t recommend trying to get them. Lifeguards literally train to escape “attacks,” because people who are drowning can freak the fuck out and grab you and make YOU drown as well. If you do go in after someone, take hold of them from the back and talk to them the whole time. IF YOU ARE GRABBED: duck down into the water as low as you can get. The person is panicking and won’t want to go under water and should release you. Shove up at their hands and push them away from you as you duck under. Don’t die trying to save someone else.

Please guys, read and memorize this post. Not all places have lifeguards. Being able to recognize drowning is such an important skill to have and you can save someone’s life.

[inspector-loki]

Just incase!

[witchofobsession-deactivated202]

In a water park once, I was suddenly grabbed by a child and he dragged me under the water without warning. I was going to get angry with him when I resurfaced because I thought he was being an ass, until I looked at him go back in and out hyperventilating the entire time. I grabbed him under his arms and began trying to drag him out while screaming for the lifeguard.

When the lifeguard got us both out, a woman came running down and accused me of harming him and said he had been completely fine in the water. That there was no reason to drag him out of there. The lifeguard had to explain to her that her son had been drowning, to which her response was to say that she didn’t hear him call for help.

People seriously need to learn the signs.

[princedrewwrites]

http://spotthedrowningchild.com/ really demonstrates how easy it is to miss drowning 

[maelwife]

Maybe one reason time seems to speed up in adult life is because when your full time job leaves you roughly 5 hours of free time a day plus two days off a week your life turns into a sort of monotony that makes the days blend together and creative pursuits move in slow motion as you can only get to them when other your commitments are done.

[maelwife]

When you look back and think damn 2019 wasn’t that long ago where did the time go? Job. Your Job took it.

[southernsolarpunk-deactivated20]

Original

[chicorystreetcoffee]