@spaceisgayculture / spaceisgayculture.tumblr.com
fucking March of 2022 getting food and there is a hand sanitizer machine at the door that is dusty and missing the sanitizer and it’s like. fucking remnants of COVID like this is some Defunctland horror shit. peeled off “social distancing” stickers on the floor and shit. fucking nightmare. Just sneeze in my mouth at this point I guess idfk
i like small books because i can put them in my tote like sliced bread
Reblog to have a very sexy and very interesting 2013
I feel like there’s an “or else” that this innately implies now
I feel like I should make a post about this because it’s not something that’s very well-known, and that Americans in particular may need to know about given the uncertain state of our healthcare system at the moment. I’ve wanted to write this out for a while, It’s kind of a long post, so sorry about that!
If you have an emergency and have to go to the hospital, you’ll owe the hospital a lot of money. (I got into a car wreck and broke my ankle and my arm. My hospital bill was around $20,000)
You’ll also owe the ambulance provider, if you need one. (My ambulance bill was about $800)
You may get separate bills from the anesthesiologist or surgeon. (My anesthesiologist bill was $1,700)
You may need follow-up appointments. (My orthopedic surgeon billed me for the appointments and his surgery together and it was about $1,000)
You’ve also got to pay for medical equipment you need afterward, like crutches or a walking boot. (Mine cost about $75)
Altogether, I ended up with almost $24,000 in medical debt from one car accident. That’s a really scary number for someone like me who makes $10/hr at a 12 hour a week job.
I got my debt down to $1075 by making some phone calls and submitting some paperwork.
The first thing I did was contact the hospital. They don’t make it easy to find, but many hospitals (perhaps most hospitals?) have financial assistance programs for people who can’t afford medical bills. I don’t make a lot of money, and I have bills to pay, so they were able to help me. I called the billing department and asked if they had any assistance programs for low income people who can’t pay their bills. I had to call multiple times, and I got transferred in circles by people who didn’t know what I was talking about. Finally, I got an appointment with someone in “Eligibility Services” (I don’t know what other hospitals call it, if it’s something different). I had to bring my pay stubs and copies of all of my bills. When I got to the hospital for the appointment, nobody knew what I was talking about so I had to wander a little to find where I needed to go. I spoke with the guy in Eligibility Services, and I waited for a decision on how much of the bill they would forgive. A month later, I got a call telling me it was totally forgiven.
I did the same thing for my ambulance bill and my anesthesiologist, but the process was a LOT easier. I just had to mail some paperwork and it was totally forgiven.
I didn’t bother with the medical equipment suppliers, since the bills came from separate companies and I didn’t feel like going through the process twice for $75. I was assured at the hospital that they had similar programs for debt forgiveness, so I could have probably avoided paying that too.
The only thing I couldn’t get taken care of was the surgeon/follow-up appointment cost, but they were able to put me on a no-interest payment plan.
Medical debt is scary because it’s something that can come from stuff that’s already really scary. I didn’t need the burden of $24,000 in debt on top of trying to get around on a crutch with a broken arm (it’s not easy, believe me!).. but I can’t imagine what it would be like with a bigger debt or a more severe medical emergency. I see lots of people in even worse trouble than I was in, both financially and medically. Please know that there are options for you when that GoFundMe doesn’t do enough. Even if your income is higher than mine, it’s worth a shot even for partial debt forgiveness.
weird how air pods went from being like pretty widely disparaged to being a popular status symbol basically overnight
honestly? probably
someone at an apple board room meeting walked in wearing his air pods and said “smells like broke in here” and the rest is history
oh my god.
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Please note the recalls etc. we’re already seeing with the current US government going after those regulations, and please see Doug Ford up here trying to weaken our water safety regulations again - the last time that happened, under another Conservative government, Walkerton happened and people died. Some died quickly, some lived for years with debilitating illnesses and then died.
wtf this is real bad
disaster capitalism wrecked nearly every facet of new orleans post-katrina, this is the latest in a long line of things that have broken this city. half the black population gone, gentrification in final stages, underemployment is rampant, harsher enforcement of ancient drug laws, corrupt politics, Airbnb, and now a fully for-profit school system designed to funnel those with the best access and privilege to the top, and those without on the school to prison pipeline as early as goddamn Pre-K. New Orleans ain’t New Orleans anymore, and hasn’t been for a long ass time.
Because there are always pregnant people, the average number of skeletons in a body is higher than one
I never needed to think about this, but now I’m reblogging it and all of you can suffer as well.
It’s like two people who don’t exist are interacting
this is a video of two people who accidentally find out that they’re both extraterrestrials after they realize they speak the same language unheard anywhere on earth and jimmy fallon realizes what is happening and he tries to put a stop to it because if the government finds out about it they’ll kill all three of them
It’s like two people who don’t exist are interacting
this is a video of two people who accidentally find out that they’re both extraterrestrials after they realize they speak the same language unheard anywhere on earth and jimmy fallon realizes what is happening and he tries to put a stop to it because if the government finds out about it they’ll kill all three of them
The other day I went to McDonald’s with my family and the guy who took my order was really loud and was basically like “HAPPY HOLIDAYS WHAT CAN I GET YOU” and I was like wow I can’t let this guy outmatch me so I yelled “I’LL TAKE A HAPPY MEAL WITH THE NUG NUGS IF I MAY” you know, like a natural well-adjusted epitome of adulthood 19 year old and he was like “CERTAINLY WOULD YOU LIKE THE MIGHTY KIDS MEAL INSTEAD WITH EXTRA FRIES” and I was so sleep deprived I essentially blacked out and apparently leaned over the counter like I was robbing the place, raised my eyebrow like a suave robin hood and said “HECK YES I WOULD GOOD SIR” and then I sat down and he yelled from across the store “WOULD YOU LIKE THE PURPLE OR BLUE SPIDER-MAN” and since purple is the more superior color that’s how I answered and long story short my parents think college changed me and that I’m now the poster child for being social and I’ve only been asked once why I’m not in a relationship yet but I know it’s gonna be brought up again and how do i tell my parents it’s because whenever I eat in the dining hall I spend the entire time playing bumper cars with the wheeley chairs and all I eat is pixie sticks and the last time I was in the library (where I’m supposed to work next semester, deAr GoD) I ripped my leggings in the bathroom pulling up my pants and I walked the entire 20 mins back to my dorm with my neon underwear peeking out from the holes like a 17th century harlot with a cocaine addiction and I’ve essentially been living off jars of peanut butter and the soundtrack to the bee movie for the past year
there’s more information in this post than there was in the library of alexandria
rewatching these movies also helps you appreciate how fucking FUNNY malfoy is. here’s an 11 year old. he likes to monologue and he’s evil
me when im 11 and evil
when you see a dog and you know youre gonna pet the shit out of it
The older I get, the more I find heterosexual couples so…weird. It’s not that men and women are inherently different in irreconcilable ways, is that they’re socialized to believe they are, and it shows in how male/female couples interact. There is this awkward, unnecessary communication barrier between them based on their perceived gender differences. This obviously doesn’t apply to all heterosexual couples; I’m sure there are plenty with great communication and so on. But the large majority of the ones I’ve encountered in the past few years just don’t. It’s uncomfortable to watch.
They have all these weird notions about each other’s genders, and it’s so out of place for me. Like, women will let their husbands get away with not doing housework because “men are helpless” and men will talk about how their wives are “just hormonal” when they come to them with a legitimate grievance that needs to be talked about, and so on and so forth. Just a lot of back and forth that seems perfectly normal to them, but to an outsider who doesn’t experience this kind of heteronormative behavior often it’s like…
i’d like to share my hypothesis that this exact phenomenon is why straight writers struggle to write gay relationships (or project heteronormative constructs onto those relationships). they literally just don’t understand a relationship where one person doesn’t treat the other like they’re part of an alien species.
pls drink a lot of wine and be extraordinarily well read and buy too much perfume and write a few too many love letters and spread affection and poetry wherever you go
