sorry not sorry (credits to @arianwen44 for the artwork)

WHAT THE ACCTUAL FUCK WHY

Add “distress” to your pain scale

Pain scale? More like pain in the booty. No two people seem to read it the same way, and chronic folks tend to downplay their pain.

So here’s an idea: when asked to rate your pain, provide a number to rate your distress levels in addition to your pain levels.

Some examples:

It’s a great way to consider how your pain is impacting you—and to get a doctor’s attention where it’s actually needed.

OP is a genius

Reasons I believe my friend is secretly some kind of deity

1) First time we spoke was a week after the beggining of freshman year she summed up my entire character and most of the events of my life Sherlock style. I asked her how the hell she knew all that. She just shrugged and said she figured out our entire class already.

2) The one time we had religion class instead of ethics she listened to the teacher for a few minutes, laughed and told me:

“Humans have wished to be gods so much they’ve forgotten they have to ability to create them. Imagination has truly suffered from this ‘monotheism’ stuff.”

I was confused and asked her if she was an atheist. She rolled her eyes and said:

“Oh I believe in god alright. I just don’t think the bastard deserves to be worshipped.”

3) Out of nowhere she gave me this advice:

“The only truth a liar ever told was that lies weren’t going to save you. Don’t become the liar who has to pass that wisdom on, because they speak from experience.”

4) To this day, she has one of those old-timey phones with buttons she only uses to ocassionally call someone. When I asked her why she never got a smartphone she got pouty:

“I hate social media. On Facebook they talk a lot but never say anything. If I wanted to listen to people moan about their problems and ask for help they don’t expect I’d listen to their prayers.” (Notice the choice of words)

5) I noticed she was stiff and I offered her a massage since I’m really good at it but when i started kneading her back I swear to this day those were not muscles I felt. I asked her what she did to turn her muscles into rocks covered with a thin layer of skin and she kinda froze then shrugged and said she was just really, really stiff. My hands hurt after ten minutes when I can usually go for an hour. Next time I offered she seemed surprised and laughed. She still has rocks for muscles.

6) We were having a debate over the way neural pathways are formed (I study biology and she forensics) and I jokingly asked if I could have her brain for study when she dies. She laughed.

“Sure, if you find a way to kill me you can have it. I’m actually curious what you’re gonna find.”

7) One time she was tired and miserable and I tried to comfort her. We both have really dark sense of humor so I told her she could scare the dead out of their graves with that glare. She told me the dead can’t come back and I rolled my eyes and said ‘obviously’ but she continued:

“When you die you descend to the underworld with nothing to lose. To keep you, they give you something to lose. When you want to return, they will demand it back. That’s why nobody ever leaves. The only way out is to never enter.”

8) One day she just came up to me with a disappointed look on her face. When I asked her what was wrong she was quiet for a few seconds and then just told me:

“Betrayals committed in good intentions are still damning. Just… keep that in mind.” Then she left and didn’t speak to me for three days. I still don’t know what she meant but even three years later I haven’t forgotten it.

9) We were casually sitting on a bench when, out of nowhere, she asked me: “Is it just me or have humans gotten dumber? Or have they always been this stupid and I just haven’t been paying attention?”

10) She asked me if I ever wondered what it was like to die. I said no but told her I would tell her when I found out. I meant it as a ghost joke but she smiled at me and said:

“Great. I’ll wait for you to come back. Maybe you’ll even remember me.”

In conclusion, she is some kind of low-key god and she lost her faith in humanity even before we lost our faith in her but she’s stuck with us because immortality is a bitch.

P.S. I just remembered her name is a variation on ‘Eve’. Maybe I should reconsider my atheist status?!

She totally sounds like a goddess from one of Rick Riordan’s novels honestly. I kinda love her. If you have more stories, update us, cause I love this stuff. 

wow this is actually an excellent little horror piece

if you have a mental illness you know exactly what’s behind that door

What’s popping, you ask? Why, it’s my joints.

Dancing Goddesses

These are AWESOME.

(Source: Nina Paley)

I.. the sheela…. I….

*falls over laughing*

Those are all AWESOME.

oh my god, the lions just boppin’ along holy ffff

THIS IS MY 2018.

My life is now complete

Let’s all enjoy this one while we can. I can’t fucking believe this. 

Big fucking mood right now.

It’s not even ok how accurate this is.

I regret having to make this addition:

Every time my extended family gets together in upstate ny, we (the Adults) all get wasted & at least 1 giant Family Scandal comes out…..tonight is that night..

So apparently my aunt cecelia (not really my aunt, just the best friend of my dads cousin, whomst we also call aunt) once married a dude referred to only as Florida Asshole. He was named such because he apparently left my aunt cecelia while she was in the hospital, stole all of their stuff, and fucked off to florida. Aunt cecelia then hired a p.i. to find him, as u do, and went down to florida with my dads cousin (who was going to florida for a work trip, and had no idea Florida Asshole was there). Apparently the p.i. told aunt cecelia which city the guy was in, but hadnt found the exact address yet, so ofc aunt cecelia did what any other able bodied half insane scorned person might. She went to a costume shop, bought a full nun costume, and went door to door under the assumption that she was collecting charity. (She did, in fact, donate everything she collected. This was an important fact to her). At one of the houses, she looked in the window and noticed an awful lot of furniture that used to be hers. So she, obviously, went to a gas station and bought several cans of gasoline, threw a molotov cocktail through the front window, and began pouring gasoline over the rest of the house. At this point, Florida Asshole came outside, recognized his ex wife looking like a renegade nun sent to punish him for his sins, and began beating her. The neighbors, seeing the strange new man beating a nun in his front yard while his house was on fire, did the only sensible thing in this story and called the police. Who promptly arrested Florida Asshole for assaulting a nun. Aunt cecelia did not get arrested, came clean to her best friend, and was immediately sent back to new york with a ticket bought under my other aunt’s name. We don’t know if she still has an arrest warrant out for her in florida, and that’s tonight’s Family Scandal!

Makes sense to me.

The worst part of a chronic illness is having the desire to be productive, but your body simply won’t. do. the. thing. 

“Don’t call Trump supporters nazis, it hurts their feelings.”

Yes, this is real (link to tweet). Yes, Tucker Carlson is literally repeating Nazi propaganda that aided the genocide of the Romani during the Holocaust. Yes, I am furious. 

(Also, although there is a large population of Romani in Romania, they aren’t indigenous to Romania. They’re a diasporic group originally from northern India.)

Romani and Jewish have been screaming at the top of their lungs for years about neo-fascism in Europe, and Americans were totally aloof.

Then neo-fascism reared its head in America, but Roma and Jews were left out of the conversation in terms of people being impacted, because our oppression was “over.”

Now Tucker Carlson is on live TV using slurs and Nazi propaganda about Romani people, and I’m 90% most people on the left are just going to ignore it.

It’s fucking starting y'all. It’s happening again.

If you’re not Jewish or Roma PLEASE BOOST THIS.

Okay, friends, let’s talk about going to protests and weaponizing our whiteness, if in fact we are white.

You know what the protesters who marched with Dr. King wore? Their best. Their clergy stoles, their suits. If you’re a doctor or a nurse? Wear your scrubs. If you’re a parent? Wear your PTA shirt if it’s too hot for a suit. If you’re a student? Dress like you’re going to go volunteer somewhere nice, or wear a t-shirt that proclaims you a member of your high school band, your drama group, your church youth group. Whatever it is, make sure it’s right there with your white face.

This is literally the tactic of the people who marched with King in the 60s, and we need to bring it back, and bring it back HARD.

I do this all the time when I go to marches. I wear my cutest, least-offensive geeky t-shirt, crocs and black pants, or I wear my t-shirt that mentions my kid’s school district, or now I’ll wear the pink t-shirt that says I’m part of the Sisterhood at my shul. If it’s cold enough, I wear a cardigan and jeans and sit my ass in my wheelchair. (I need to anyway.) I put signs on my wheelchair that say things like ‘I love my trans daughter’ and ‘love for all trans children’ or something else that applies to the event. Dress like you are going to an interview if you can, or make yourself look like a parent going to pick up a gallon of milk at the corner store. Make yourself “respectable.” Use respectability politics and whiteness AS A WEAPON.

Fuck yes I will weaponize the fact that I look like a white soccer mom. And you should do this too if you can. Weaponize the fuck out of your whiteness. If you are disabled and comfortable with doing so, turn ableism on its head and weaponize it. Make it so that the cameras that WILL be pointed at you see your whiteness, see your status as a parent, see your status as a community member. See you in your wheelchair or with your cane. If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.

This has a fair number of notes, so maybe it’s already been mentioned but …

The “Sunday Best” thing from the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s & 60s, or wearing markers of an assigned profession (e.g. scrubs) is an established tactic of social movements.  They’re part of what Charles Tilly (one of the academic god father’s of social movement theory) called “WUNC” displays.  WUNC can be broken down to:

While I’m very much in support of anti-fascist protesting in whatever form it takes, especially when engaged in a counter-protest, one of the great tragedies of the American political climate right now is that we’ve really forgotten some of the biggest lessons of the Civil Rights Era.  King didn’t trot out fresh-faced students, church women in big fancy hats, or the elderly and disabled without knowing what he was doing.  He (and the other members of his affiliated organizations) knew that if the police were photographed using violent repression against a mother holding her child, or a student in slacks, a cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses, it would go over very differently than if they were photographed beating up “unruly thugs”.  Their presence alone would be notable to people locally, especially in the heat of the south.  But so would photographs of repressive violence against “nice people” that would then get picked up by the national media, and maybe in markets that were more sensitive to racial oppression.  

[And like, there are other factors as well.  People also sometimes think the Civil Rights Era erupted spontaneously from Jim Crowe and segregation in the South, and those are giant factors (”depravation” and “grievance”, in jargon), but there were also legislative things and court rulings brewing since the 1920s (the NAACP had been trying Civil Rights cases, and looking for test cases over the years), and the Cold War meant that America needed to appear to be the perfect image of opportunity and equality (together these things manifest as an “opportunity structure”.  again, jargon).  Not to get to down on protest as its own thing, but the structuralists do have a bit of a point.]

…  There are other types of anti-fascist counter-protesting that have developed in various ways through the years. And like, a big thing in social movement theory overall is that while there are common tactics (”protest repertoires” in jargon), historical contexts matter a lot and some groups will have to do more dramatic performances of the WUNC to get attention.  There’s also the move revolutionary antifa-type riot mentality.  I’m not gonna call that one wrong either, mind, but since the Civil Rights Movement was brought up, it should be noted that those two forms of protest differed intentionally.

Anyway, as someone turning in a dissertation on this in a couple of days, here’s some drive-by political-sociology.  If you want to learn more about the research behind processes of social movements, where they succeeded, and where they failed, I totally recommend checking out:

(McAdam has a quite well-regarded book on the Civil Rights Era specifically. I haven’t read it personally as it relates less to my regional context. However like, that’s worth noting and looking into.  Also all of these are stodgey academic texts, but they’re not uncommon in university libraries, or even in some bookstores. They’re also all a bit old now and shouldn’t cost you a ton online.)

As a note – My point here isn’t to descend from the Ivory Tower of Academia and say “you people on the streets are doing this wrong!!1!”.  Theory doesn’t always match up with Practice, and as noted by pretty much every notable theorist anyway… Context matters a TON.  Not all movements will be able to use the same practices or performances.  Sometimes their inaccessible, sometimes they just don’t have the cross-context appeal.  It’s about experimentation and finding opportunity.  To be clear, this isn’t about me telling folks how it should be done.  Still, I think it’s worth sharing information when it’s available, especially if people who might not know are trying to draw specific links to historical cases.  Social movement theorists have pretty much all agreed that WUNC displays (along with other factors like media diffusion) are super duper important and can be recognized in movements across historical contexts.  I think it’s worth it for younger activists who might be looking for protest repertoires that work for their movement as it’s developing to take heed of the successes and failures of the past.  Especially since a lot of it is either a) so much a part of history and culture that it doesn’t really get examined for its constituent bits, or b) has been mythologized to the point that it’s hard to look for really good popular historical information on its technical processes.

(If people have questions, feel free to DM me.  I might be a little slow the next couple of days as I finish up proof-reading and checking all my citations but yeah.  Let’s share knowledge and smash the fash.)

The Nazis of 2017 gained the ground they have with articles about how they were “dapper.” That was a political choice, and it worked. It snowed a lot of gullible goyim. People refused for almost a year to call “the alt-right” Nazis because they looked “like average white people.”

Nazis see their whiteness as a weapon already. Get yours out there and show them – they will never sway everyone. “If you have privilege or a status that allows you to use it as a weapon or a shield, use it as a shield to defend others or a weapon to break through the bullshit.”

Not someone who typically adds to an already long post, but I have done the whole dressing dapper af thing and it WORKS. A few years ago there was this big city council vote about an anti-discrimination ordinance that was going to be passed in my relatively progressive, but still very southern hometown. There were huge protests on both sides, both for and against the ordinance, with each side wearing a specific color (red was for, purple against) to show which side they supported. Most of the people against the ordinance were bussed in by hyper conservative churches and many didn’t even live in the town. It was a lot of old people and many of them wore nice clothing. I knew this would probably be the case, so I, being a southern girl at heart and knowing how these people work, broke out my crinoline and nicest red dress and perfect white gloves. I curled my hair and put on makeup and I showed my ass up to the protest. Made a point to be the picture of a perfect southern belle. And it threw the bigoted assholes for a serious loop. It was like they were short circuiting or something. They kept telling me how I reminded them of someone from their church or how pretty I looked and “how would a nice girl like you like a big cross dressing man in the ladies room???” which of course allowed me to explain, ever so nicely, that they were being bigoted assholes. And they Did Not Like that, because I was forcing them to look in the mirror, at someone who looks like them/someone they claim to be “protecting” and question their motives and beliefs. Seriously guys, it fucking works. Weaponize the fact that you look like the oppressor and throw it in their faces.

Bless this last comment.

say it again:

Weaponize the fact that you look like the oppressor and throw it in their faces.

@ whites