Bubblegumming

Having Avoidant Personality Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder is wild because my avpd will be like "i don't want to do this thing" and my ad/h/d is like "when i have i ever helped you do something you need to do?"

🐧 by あい@i_sensei97

Tell me a soft memory

we would find out later i had burned off my entire cornea - about 65% of my eye. my doctor told me it is the organ with the highest concentration of nerve endings - i was in an amount of pain that can't be spoken.

and i was blind. for the first time in my life, i was totally blind. i kept thinking about reading, about writing. weirdly, just once, about driving. we had no idea if i would ever see again. just like that - my entire life was different.

it is a strange place to reference for a soft memory, to begin here.

my siblings were taking excellent care of me, but there was a moment in the hospital where, just through bad luck and timing - both of them had to step away for a moment. i was crying at that point; not emotionally. for 3 days after this i would still be crying, my tears, like a mermaid's, a frothy pink with blood.

my brother worried about leaving me. he had another, just-as-bad emergency.

"i got her," someone said. "don't worry."

a soft hand held mine, and then she started talking.

her name was jess. she has a wife named clyde. they live a few blocks up the street. clyde fell down, but the x-rays seem to be coming back better than expected. jess says she's got long dark hair and "more wrinkles than an elephant". jess describes every chair in the room and every person. she talks about her two kids and her cats and her favorite memories from college.

a doctor came. i had to switch to a different waiting room. i tried to stand up to follow the voice - i found jess's hand, following me. she didn't let go. she kept talking the whole way: lamp to your left, just a few more steps, okay to your right is the ugliest painting, good, now a little more walking straight, you got it baby

in the new silence of the next room she sat me down and called my brother for me, telling him where we'd gone to. and she stayed there for a bit, just chatting, her voice echoing in the eerie quiet. gently describing the room to me. and then someone was rude. from the sound of the voice, a kid, i think.

"why is she crying?"

"she just lost her vision," jess said. "she can't see."

"oh." said the kid. "that's scary."

the kid tells me he is here because he has peas stuck up his nose. that makes me laugh, his mom (?) groans. she tells me about the kid (he's 6, he likes paw patrol and eating cheese), about herself, about moving from cali.

jess says she's sorry, but she has to leave now, she's gotta go check on her wife.

"don't worry," says the mom. "i got her." and then i felt her hand press into mine.

for hours like that: i am taken care of by strangers. each person just talking with whatever comes to their head - not for any reward or celebrity or real reason, i guess. just because i am scared and alone and in the hospital and blinded and need to be distracted. not everyone even got told the story - they would just pick up in the silence with - oh by the way the television is playing HGTV - do you like that kind of a thing? yeah, me too, but could never quite get into those open-floor plans, i'll tell you -

by the time my brother is able to come back, the room is buzzing. we talk to each other like old friends, laughing, cracking jokes about if you don't like hospital food wait until you get on an airplane and can't believe i'm up past two in the morning what a party animal i'm becoming. i am holding the hands of someone named drew, who likes my crow tattoo and making crochet snails.

there are many dark moments full of pain in this world. this - in the low of absolute-dark, absolute-pain: people find a way to paint in it anyway. the color splash of their voices: this triumphant, radiating kindness of - let's be here together, let me help you, let's keep going.

i never saw their faces. i can't remember many of their names. but i think about them often, and the way we all took a deep breath - and did something gentle amongst the pain.

Bats in their natural habitat

I am always blown away by the mental disconnect between rich people and the rest of us.

I work for a doctor. He pulls in $70,000-$90,000 a month before tax. After tax, he's still $200,000+ a year.

I earn $52,000 a year.

Yet his wife will still talk to me and say "oh, we're not rich." She drives a Porsche. She wears Carla Zampatti. They live in a new townhouse that cost well over a million.

So, when she gives me recommendations on things to buy and I tell her I can barely afford Kmart, she seems genuinely perplexed.

They are NOT bad people. I've worked for them for 12 years now. They are good people with good hearts. But they no longer connect with reality on level and it's absolutely mindboggling.

And I think a large part of this is that rich people compare themselves to other rich people, not to the regular people.

He doesn't earn as much as a surgeon. He doesn't own a mansion or a helicopter (both of which I know a couple of surgeons own).

In comparison, they aren't as rich.

They were once poor, 25 years ago when he was starting to become a doctor. But that memory is skewed now. Or perhaps they always aimed for the Porsche and the month long holidays in Scotland so the journey meant something else.

But, holy shit, when she shows me something on sale that's still out of my price range, I feel that gap. And I don't envy her. I don't want a Porsche.

I just want to actually afford Kmart without saving up for it.

And since there seems to be some belief that I earn a huge amount, that is AUD.

It's $34,000USD, rounded up.

And yet, horrifyingly, she's kind of right.

Like yeah, the surgeon is unfathomably wealthy compared to someone who struggles to meet their basic needs... but he's fundamentally still working class. He gets his money from his labor, not by virtue of merely owning something.

Does the surgeon make more than he "deserves"? Maybe. Even if he's a plastic surgeon, I can still squint and kind of see how it makes sense for him to get paid that much. However, I do know that people who get their wealth by merely owning things absolutely don't deserve it.

And like, the important thing is that it's a difference in kind... but the difference in scale is absurd too. If her husband worked since Egyptians first started writing on papyrus, and didn't spend any money, he'd still have less than what Jeff Bezos makes in a week. The pay ratio between Bezos and the surgeon is 60,000x greater than the pay ratio between the surgeon and you... and he literally doesn't do anything besides own companies. Bezos literally does less work than you.

I don't like this fact at all.

I need a little help here

me decoding and reading the message

Tineco Floor ONE S3 Cordless Hardwood Wet/Dry Vacuum

Oh my god THANK you

Once again:

Giving a thunder stone to your eevee be like ... Kaboom ! Yeah, pokemon again... I like pokemons but it take time to animate them.

every single time

Pangaea was wasted on the dinosaurs. Imagine the railway network.

KEEP UP WITH THE WAYNES

Damn, the never-ending tags plis send help

Who controls the 🍑?

what they dont tell you about adulthood is that it’s startlingly easy to go long periods of time without having any fun at all not even a little bit. btw this causes ur brain to try to kill you with knives and hammers.