Can we normalize doing nothing, please?

I work with kids. These kids are at my program before and after school, and then some of them have sports/dance/music sometimes all of the above before they finally go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat everyday, and games and more classes on the weekend, etc.

I’m all for extracurriculars, but this turns into the teen who is not only in the school play, but they’re on the newspaper, the football team, and seven different clubs. In college they take double the courseloads, and then once they graduate…what?

They work themselves raw because they arent used to downtime. They’ve been told they can always be doing something, and they don’t know how to relax. This turns into the adult that has anxiety because there’s nothing left to clean, the adult that desperately wants to watch that TV show but can’t force themselves to sit long enough for it.

Then they turn into the moms and dads who spend all their free time ferrying their kids to extracurriculars.

Like, these kids don’t know what downtime is? I told a kid I did nothing last weekend, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He asked what I was doing this weekend and I said “Probably sleeping, mostly,” and he actually gasped. Then he rattled off a bunch of things I could do, to which I had to stop him.

“No, you don’t understand. I plan on sleeping. I’m booked.”

“But you could–”

“Nah. I’m just gonna rest.”

It was as if I had said a bad word or something. I asked what he does when he gets sick, and he says he goes to practice anyway. I asked him what he does if he doesn’t feel like going, and he said he goes anyway. I asked when he takes time to rest, and he said when he sleeps at night.

Bring back lazy Sundays. Bring back Saturday morning cartoons. Bring back the idea of relaxing and soaking in your day before moving into the next thing. Bring back the right to breathe, the right to rest.

Bring back mental health days, and taking a break. Bring back taking a walk or watching a show or setting a timer to remind yourself to stop cleaning and relax.

If you’re running at 100% all the time with no time to recharge, then your battery is going to die spectacularly, and probably at the worst possible time.

Mood

All right I got like five requests to tell the story of the Shakespeare Mansplainer, so: 

Today I went to the bookstore to buy the Arden edition of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore because I need it for one of my term papers. But I looked at my punchcard and realized buying it would get me a free book, and because I’m standing right there in the drama section I start browsing around. Enter the Mansplainer. Now, I can only assume that this guy saw me flip through a few books and put them back and decided I didn’t know what I was doing. Mansplainer to the rescue. Up he swaggers. Now, this guy is average-looking but so am I, so at first when he says, “Oh, are you looking for some Shakespeare?” I’m willing to entertain the possibility that he might be worth flirting with or at least talking to, but he literally doesn’t give me enough time to even answer the question before he says, “You know–” And this is like, the most fatal phrase in a dude’s vocabulary, because as soon as he says it odds are 90 to one he’s about to start telling you what he thinks you don’t know. So I shut my mouth. I shut my mouth and I stand there and smile and nod like I’m in utter awe of all his manly wisdom while he proceeds to tell me every wrong “fact” he learned about Shakespeare in secondary school. For those of you who don’t know me, here’s what makes this hilarious: I’m getting a master’s degree in Shakespeare. I’ve been a Shakespearean actor for ten years. I’ve written a fucking book about Shakespeare. I know more about Shakespeare than this guy knows about breathing.

Anyway, for two, maybe three minutes I let him go on about how the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet is actually a sonnet and they were both like thirteen because that’s how young people got married in England in the 1700s and so on and so on. (All of this is wrong, by the way.) Towards the end he starts to flounder, because he was clearly expecting me to jump in and start cooing like a fucking pigeon about how romantic it all is or whatever the Great Mansplainer expects a woman to do when he dazzles her with his dizzying intellect. He finally finishes with a showstopping, “So, yeah.” And this is my cue. So I say, “Actually,” and then proceed to correct literally everything he said while I beam at him like the fucking sun because I want to watch his ego shrivel up like a fucking raisin. And it does. By the time I’m done (which only takes half the time because if women take up more than 25% of a conversation men think they’re dominating it and I’m 100% certain his little Mansplainbrain would just explode under the stress) he’s physically taken two steps away from me and is looking toward the door like he’s grappling with some intense fight-or-flight instinct. So I stop and smile again and because I just can’t resist I wave my staff pass and say, “Sorry, I need to go now, I have to be at the Globe in twenty minutes.”

And that is the story of the time a guy tried to mansplain Shakespeare to me and I will cherish the look on his face until the day I die.

Can I just turn this in for my Econ paper and call it a day

looks like a Classical Economist

Five-year-old Harley and her father, Dino, attended Star Wars Celebration Orlando 2017 with one mission in mind: deliver the Death Star plans to as many Princess Leias as they could. Their final set of plans were delivered to the original princess, placed in front of the gown Carrie Fisher wore in A New Hope. The galaxy is now safer thanks to this little rebel! 

See the full photo album here.

Harley has also cosplayed as Rey, complete with a Millennium Falcon!

im somebody

ARE computers flammable? I feel like they’re probably not?

This depends entirely on how much uncooked rice you have shoved in the floppy drive.

…Ok I feel like there’s a story behind this.

There is, yes!

After I quit school, I worked briefly as a computer repair tech.  Going to people’s houses or businesses, fixing their various bugs, etc.  While I would rapidly decide that field was not for me because of the one businessman who needed multiple “cup holder” replacements (you know, you push that button and that plastic holder thing with the hole comes out … I think it is technically call the “Cup Depository Tray”?  CD, right?), he is not the most memorable encounter.  No, that goes to one of the nicest ladies I ever encountered on this job.

She called us out because her computer had stopped turning on, and wouldn’t even make a noise when she tried to push the button.  One day it had just shut off while she was using it and stubbornly refused to come back on, and could we please see what we could do to fix it?

So I go out there expecting some wire had gotten loose and there was no power getting to the machine or something.  It happens sometimes if a machine gets banged around enough, or if someone fiddles with it wrong or is careless putting it together, computers are finicky like that.  But as soon as I get to the box itself, I know it isn’t that simple, because of the smell. I have smelled computers with dust all up in them, that isn’t uncommon, but this is just vile and, more importantly, entirely new.

I am now more curious than afraid, so I open it up and there is a mass of goopy off-white mush spilling all over everything, parts of it are burnt to circuits, there is almost nothing untouched by the mass.  But by far the worst off is the A drive.  That is the obvious source of the problem, and the thing has … not “exploded”, but more burst from the pressure of whatever this stuff was.

So I ask the woman if she had used the floppy drive recently and noticed any problems, and she says no, not until the whole machine stopped working.  But I come to find out what she used it for.

Turns out this woman was a devout Shinto practitioner and believed that her computer (among other things) had a soul that needed to be respected an honored.  Which, fair enough.  But she chose to honor it by feeding it a grain of rice every time she had to wake it up and disturb its rest.  For years this kindhearted woman had been putting a grain of rice into the A drive every time she turned it on or woke the thing up from sleep mode.  And eventually that was enough pressure to break the drive and start spilling out onto the internal bits, where the heat melted it all and caused no end of problems.

After that it was a simple enough thing to explain that there are better ways to honor and take care of your computer’s needs, what with virus scans or defrags and the like, but that poor device was entirely lost.

I guess the moral of the story here is that you can try your best to be good and still wind up hurting people?  Maybe?  Or else it’s that even the most horrible out of context problem isn’t nearly as frustrating as one middle aged jerk who won’t freaking listen when you tell him that CD trays are not for your dang coffee cups!

The end~

ok but im so taken with the fact that she was feeding her computer to apologise for waking it up?? thats so sweet????

“Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands, they just don’t.” Legally Blonde (2001) dir. Robert Luketic

wheres all the support for the emotional abuse victims

no, seriously. victims of emotional abuse have it hard because they do not have the physical marks or the records to “prove” to someone they were hurt and are hurting. most people will not take emotional abuse as seriously as physical abuse, saying “you should get over it” or “sticks and stones”. thats fucking bullshit.

emotional abuse victims who have been forced to do or say or be things you never wanted to, i love you.

emotional abuse victims who have been gaslighted and manipulated to the point where you no longer know what is real, i care for you.

emotional abuse victims who are told they will never be loved by anyone else and they are not a good person, you are amazing.

emotional abuse victims who feel manipulative and often catch themselves mirroring actions of their abusers and feel sick to their stomachs because theyre “turning into them”, you are not them and never will be. you are so much better than that.

emotional abuse victims who have to live every day suffering because nobody understands how messed up you are from what they said or did or made you do, you arent alone.

anyone who reads this, i care for you. please support all victims of abuse every single day because they deserve it just like they deserve the love and care those in the past have failed to provide them

literally the most BASIC holocaust/sociology class will teach you that jokes targeted at a specific group of people are one of the base steps of oppression and eventual genocide because it dehumanizes a group and once a group is seen less than human it’s easier for people not to care as things get worse and worse for them so please fuck off with that “this person’s antisemitism was just a JOKE !!” bullshit

Hope y’all have some great ideas today.

This pleases me

omg i want a barbie that says EAT LEAD, COBRA