inanimately: the intimacy of inadequacy

Y’all !!!

LINK TO THE BOOK

bro do u really have to circle it when it’s the only thing in the picture

That’s it’s aura

Look, all you science-types classifying “bugs” with your “science names”. Just stop it. The truth is out there. Those are fairies and you know it.

Jeweled flower mantis? That’s a fairy.

Lace bug? Nice try, government. FAIRY.

Satin moth? FUCK YOU. FAIRY.

it is past time we jettisoned the useless false dichotomy of introversion vs. extroversion and just accepted that everybody has a minimum amount of social interaction, failing which, they get really weird. and everybody has a maximum amount of social interaction, exceeding which, they get really weird. these levels are different for everyone, for a variety of reasons, and have no moral dimension. and that is all.

why would you come to this club and just shoot Myers & Briggs like this

IMO, it’s healthier to conceptualize it this way. So instead of being like “why am I being so weird? I’m an introvert, I like being alone!” you say, “Ah, I must be supergluing googly eyes to my bathroom faucet because I haven’t met my minimum threshold of social interaction and I’m trying to fill that void with these tiny pieces of plastic. Maybe I should invite someone over for dinner. They sure will be surprised by all these eyes watching them while they poop.”

Marilyn Monroe tries archery. Photo by Anthony Beauchamp, 1951.

This tiktoker shared some simple ASL for people to know to help deaf/hoh people communicate their needs while everyone is wearing masks !

Reminder that facial expressions/head shaking is very important in ASL!!!

For example, when you sign, "I don't understand," BE SURE to shake your head no. Otherwise, you are saying the opposite. This is because ASL is NOT a picture version of English. It's its own language with its own grammar structure.

Be safe!

Me_IRL

the way i wanna dress vs. the money i have vs. drawing attention when i dont want it

no one tells you how much of life takes practice. not just writing, painting, running, singing, etc, but practicing how to make friends. how to make the right ones. getting practiced at how to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good person. practice identifying when people haven’t earned that. learning to recognize your right to rage and, eventually, how to offer mercy. so much of life is muscle memory, and i’ve begun to realize there are so many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch and strengthen than those we’re taught in anatomy lessons

when welcome to night vale said: “Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us, we can cope with that. We can do this together you and I.”

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

An occupational hazard of cab driving I had not previously considered

I love that the nola problem here is not “ghosts in my taxi cab,” but “ghosts are FUCKING BROKE DEAD BASTARDS & I GOT BILLS”

Horror is when ghosts get into cabs and scare drivers Magical realism is when cab companies have to develop policies to prevent ghastly fare-theft

In a book about the tsunami in Japan in 2011, the writer talked about how there was a huge increase in reports of ghostly activity. Apparently in Japan treating ghosts rudely is basically considered the stupidest thing you could possibly do. For months after the tsunami, taxi drivers would pick up a passenger only to have them give an address in one of the devastated areas. The cab driver often looked up halfway to the destination to find their fare had disappeared. Not wanting to be impolite to the person (even if they were dead) they’d drive to the address, open the door to let them out, then drive away.

^That is the most Japanese thing I’ve ever heard

thinness is not the end-all-be-all, i promise you. don’t waste your youth, your energy, your light obsessing over it.

SO LET ME JUST SAY, AS A MORBIDLY OBESE WOMAN WHO HAS BEEN FAT HER WHOLE LIFE, I WISH I HAD SPENT MORE OF MY YOUTH WORKING ON IT. WISH I HAD SEEN WHAT LIFE WAS LIKE AS A THIN PERSON. IM  38 AND STARTING NOW. DONT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES I DID WHERE YOU WAIT UNTIL YOU HAVE PHYSICAL PAINS AND ACHES FROM BEING OVERWEIGHT BEFORE YOU MAKE THE CHANGE. FOR REAL THO?!?!? YOU WONT HAVE ANY ENERGY AT ALL BEING FAT, SOOOOOO, LET THAT RESONATE

Why are y'all like this? I mean really.

There is so much to unpack here that I am overwhelmed at the idea of doing so but some of you don’t know how to mind your own business so something clearly needs to be said.

In many cases where it’s linked to unhealthiness, fatness is more often a symptom of something than a cause of something. Physical aches and pains have more to do with lack of movement and lack of proper form when moving, and will happen as you age REGARDLESS of weight. Aches and pains even happen to the thinnest and most visibly muscular athletes who have worked out consistently, as well as to people who do, or are assumed to do nothing. Aches and pains happen because we have human bodies that break down. No one is going to last forever, and when you are 38 and unused to physical activity you will feel it, fat or thin. That’s call aging and being unused to movement. And guess what? Still has nothing to do with whether or not you deserve respect and representation.

If anyone has concerns about fitness and health, start with gentle, regular movement to see how you feel and build up. Obsessing over a number on the scale or how small your body looks is pure vanity as opposed to actually linked to your health. The only morbid thing about you is your personality and readiness to piss all over my post, so you can fuck right off.

i’ll probably expand on this later, but the best ADHD Hack ™ I’ve found/sussed out is: 

bundle habits together, but don’t bundle tasks together.

Explain …

So okay. When you have ADHD, one thing your brain is very very good at doing is making connections between things- ideas, concepts, people, states of mind, etc. This can be a superpower- if most people wouldn’t think to make a connection between doing a) and b), and you make that connection, sometimes you can outthink people who aren’t as good at snapping things together.

The problem comes in when you start connecting things that you don’t need to connect, like “mild displeasure” with “OH GOD EVERYONE HATES ME” or “I feel a little crummy” with “I AM THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD”.

So when we’re talking about Life Skills/ADLs, you gotta use that power to make your life easier, not harder. You gotta connect things when it makes your life better and NOT do it when it makes your life harder. 

Here’s an example of the habits: 

I had a stretch of time where I was too sick to do much of anything. I could barely get out of bed to get to the bathroom. I was walking with a stick and generally just… le dead. And one of the problems I had was that I could almost never remember to take my morning meds. 

I decided that the first time I got up to use the bathroom every day, I’d take my meds. That way I was taking them no matter how crap I felt- I had to get up to pee, like it or not- and it was getting done pretty early in the morning. 

Getting up to pee meant taking my meds; they were the same thing. I didn’t have to remember to take my meds separately, or set an alarm to remind myself, or anything like that. I just did it as part of something I had to do anyway.

As time went on and I started getting better, I realized I could do the same thing with other parts of my routine. If you connect something you need to do with something you have to do, the thing you need to do gets done.

So like… say I’m already in the habit of getting up to take a shower. I’ve lived in crappy apartments my entire life, so the water takes a minute to warm up. Since my countertop dishwasher is right outside my bathroom door, I’ll take a second to empty and load the dishwasher while the water’s still heating up. It just becomes part of the routine of taking a shower. 

You don’t have to think about Doing The Extra Thing. Connecting it to something you’re already doing means that, after a certain point, it just… happens, automatically.

 The problem comes in when you start trying to do this with tasks- things that you only have to get done once, that already have a fair few steps to them. Especially if that task is has a lot of steps, has a time limit, or is otherwise Hard for you. 

Figuring out tasks with dependencies (I have to do this before I can do this!) is already hard for us ADHDers. Sometimes what happens is that you bundle two tasks together- you decide you can’t do something until you’ve done the other thing, even though these tasks are in no way connected. 

Here’s an example: 

I have three packages I need to mail. One of them is a gift for a friend in Australia, which costs a lot of money; one of them is a package for my Etsy store which is Not Finished Yet, and one is a very late Christmas package. 

I might decide, “hey, I need to mail all three of these packages together! I can’t mail any of these packages until I bundle all of them!” But it’s probably smarter to mail them separately! I don’t want to make my friend with the late Christmas package wait any more, so I can mail that first, and then mail the Australia package when I have the money and the Etsy package when it’s finished. 

But if I insist that I have to bundle these tasks… I won’t get any of them done. I’ll be too stressed out about the Etsy package not being done to mail the other two packages, and then I will run out of money for the Australia package, and the Christmas package will not get sent til Labour Day.

If you’re stressed out about a task with a lot of steps, sometimes it’s worth it to check and make sure you’re not bundling multiple tasks together. Can you do the thing without doing the thing that comes before? Do you have to do the other thing immediately after? 

bold text in lowercase kinda feels like when a parent is really steamed but they’re talking in a low composed tone so you know you’re in the shit now