It takes guts to be gentle and kind....

Teachers have tried this and are amazed when their classes don’t go feral like in the book.  It’s almost as if the book was supposed to be satire and not a treaty on the nature of humanity.

there’s a timeskip

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

after losing control of the signal fire there’s a FUCKING TIMESKIP and when the next chapter starts everyone’s hair is several inches longer and their clothes have rotted to shreds and they’re still just kind of chilling!!!!

IT TAKES THE TERRIBLE IMPERIALISM MIND-POISONED EXCESSIVELY BRITISH BOYS IN THE ACTUAL BOOK SEVERAL MONTHS TO COMMIT A SINGLE ACT OF INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE, EVEN THE ONE (1) CHILD WRITTEN AS AN ACTUAL SOCIOPATH

AND then when they DO turn on each other it is because

THERE’S AN UNSPECIFIED WORLD WAR HAPPENING

AND A PILOT’S CORPSE CRASH LANDS ON THE ISLAND POST-DOGFIGHT AND THE CHILDREN MISTAKE THE PARACHUTE FOR A MONSTER AND SPIRAL INTO PARANOIA

BECAUSE CHILDREN INHERIT THE LEGACY AND TRAUMA OF VIOLENCE FROM THE ADULTS WAGING WAR AROUND THEM

HURR DURR IN THE REAL WORLD IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN LIKE IN LORD OF THE FLIES -

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN THAT WAY IN LORD OF THE FLIES EITHER YOU JUST HAVEN’T READ IT SINCE HIGH SCHOOL IF EVER AND DON’T REMEMBER WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN THE GODDAMN BOOK

#tbf the dude wrote it to be a dick

yes. yes he did. i’m also gonna direct you to the real life ‘lord of the flies’ which occured in the 1960s, when six tongan schoolboys got stranded on a desert island for over a year before being rescued by an australian fisherman (who, it should be noted, later took on all six as crewmembers because the reason they were out in the first place was because they wanted to see the world, and named his ship the Ata after the island they were stranded on). nobody died. the only injuries that occurred were accidental, and when one of the boys broke his leg falling down a cliff, the others braced it and looked after him so well that it healed perfectly. if they argued, then they would literally go to opposite sides of the island until they’d cooled off. after leaving the island, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. here’s a photo of them as adults, with their rescuer (who is third from the left) and other members of his crew.

i read about this in rutger bregman’s human kind, a book i cannot recommend highly enough, but if you don’t want to go and read a whole book about the inherent goodness of humanity (which again, you really should) then the relevant excerpt can be found here.

My contribution for the foxhole fund💕

[ "Then run," Kevin insisted, low and frantic.

Kevin was silent for an endless minute and then said, "You should be Court."

"Will you still teach me?" Neil asked.

"Every night." ]

No, but people don't GET IT how Kevin always gave chances to people who had already given up on themselves. He was the first to see Andrew and Neil's potential and fought for them in his own way.

"Run" Kevin said.

"Run away and hide" Neil heard.

"Be free" Kevin meant.

"Survive" Kevin meant.

"Give me your game" Kevin said.

"Let me have control of you" Andrew heard.

"Let me help others see how amazing you are" Kevin meant.

"Let me help you" Kevin meant.

one of the most challenging skills i've had to learn as an adult is the art of figuring out whether i'm proportionally annoyed with someone or just tired and overstimulated and looking for reasons to be pissed off

Andrew is the favorite uncle. Not just for Aaron and Nicky’s kids but all the foxes kids are just obsessed with uncle Andrew.

None of the foxes understand why except for Neil. But that only because Neil is there when Andrew gets up at three am to answer a phone call from their sobbing niece, who admits for the first time out loud that maybe she isn’t a boy and “is that okay uncle Andrew”. Or when Kevin’s kid shows up at there house after getting in an argument with her dad and Andrew lets her rage and rant until it doesn’t seem like the end of the world anymore, then walks her home (hc: they live pretty close for a while cause their on the same team). Or when nobody can get Aaron’s twins to stop crying but as soon as Andrew is given a turn at trying to calm the babies they stop immediately.

The kids all love Andrew he’s the first one they go to with their issues, he’s the first one they run too when all the foxes are together, he’s the first one that they come out too if they’re queer(Nicky is so mad when his kid comes out to Andrew before him)

He’s just a really good uncle.

aftg is poetic in the same way all fall out boy songs are poetic. if you even care

I see a lot of ‘cis’ women say they wish they were androgynous in the way men were or they wish they were pretty in the way men were. This is your sign to go try to do that. You may find you enjoy being an androgynous woman. You may find you no longer identify as a woman. You may find you don’t like androgyny. You will not know until you try. Cut your hair if you’ve always wanted to but have been afraid to. Shop in the men’s section if you’ve been too nervous to. Wear clothing with an androgynous  silhouette. Experiment with binding, take baby steps with compression bras if you want. Wear unisex scents. Live life. Try things you want to try. A lot of cis women do not understand the joys of mens pants and mens deodorant. I think everyone should try both of those things.

(via @monimolimnion)

[screenshot of tags which read: 

#much more comfortable being a woman when I realised it literally doesn’t have to mean anything  #unlock cis+ it’s good for you]

Trans people don't own gender. We stole it the way Prometheus stole fire, so it would be available to everyone.

this is so real

After I complained on here about my difficulty in getting ADHD meds, a friend referred me to her psychiatrist and other friends helped me actually get an appointment set up and I went to it and I got prescribed ADHD meds. A couple different kinds, so I can document how they affect me and figure out with the psychiatrist which ones work best.

I took them for the first time last Thursday. They’re supposed to last a fairly short time, four to six hours; I took one before I went to work and had a fine day at work, productive but not outrageously so, nothing to particularly write home about, and I had mostly forgotten that I was on ADHD meds by the time I got home.

There was a choir staging rehearsal, so I was watching the baby for the evening, and the dishwasher was broken so there was like a week of dishes in the sink, and I really wanted pasta with homemade tomato sauce so I started that on the stove and put the baby in his high chair with a spatula to chew on and sang him songs while I washed the dishes -

- and about halfway through this I realized that all of this was so profoundly out of character that my roommates, if they’d been home, might have suspected bodysnatching aliens.

I am too tired when I get home from work to cook dinner. Sometimes someone else cooks a thing I can eat, and sometimes I just drink an Ensure and go to bed. I hate doing dishes when the sink is full; I kind of hate doing dishes even when the sink is not full, and I’d done the dishes exactly once in the previous six months. I am not usually too tired to play with the baby, but only if he wants to come headbutt my pillows while I lie in bed.

Well, I thought, I guess ADHD meds actually do something! And I finished the dishes and finished the dinner and fed us both and did my laundry and cleaned my room and started putting the baby’s books on the bookshelves, which he objected to (he firmly believes that his books should be evenly dispersed through the house, so if he wants one it is always nearby), so I gave up and worked on a writing project I’m in the middle of.

If you knew two people, one of whom came home from work and cooked and cleaned and did childcare and then wrote fiction, and the other one who came home from work and crawled into bed and browsed Tumblr all evening, you would probably attribute other, underlying differences to them. The first one is motivated and driven; the second one is immature and not used to having to keep her own space clean and do her own chores. The first one is trustworthy and conscientious and gets things done; the second one, maybe not. The first one has more willpower; the first one works harder. 

It’s none of that. It’s brain chemistry.

I’m not saying that you can never accomplish anything through concerted effort - obviously you can, and effort matters a lot. I’m not saying that there’s no point in trying to expand the number of things you can do without changing your underlying brain chemistry; there is, and I do a lot of that, and it often works really well.

But I am saying that we attribute far, far too much of peoples’ behavior to virtue, to hardworkingness, to willpower, to passion, to values, when the actual underlying thing is none of those. And because of that, people hate themselves for being lazy, for being slow, for not trying hard enough. I wasn’t trying harder on drugs. I wasn’t trying at all. Cooking dinner on a normal night really is about willpower and effort and careful planning around my limitations and advance strategic decision making and triage. Cooking dinner on stimulants is just - the thing that happens when I walk into the kitchen and want to eat something. 

Drugs don’t work for everybody. (Honestly, they don’t totally work for me; I don’t like taking them two days in a row, and I wouldn’t want to take them if I had to get a specific thing done instead of Doing Things in general.) I think people who have a drug sometimes work for them are really lucky, in a lot of ways, because it’s hard to really believe that it’s not your priorities or personality, it’s your executive function, until you can observe how you behave with the same priorities and the same personality and vastly boosted executive function. But I also think this is true of people who never have a drug work for them. 

People vary, a lot, and one axis along which they vary is executive function, and it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like to be someone with way more executive function or way less executive function than you. At least for me, it doesn’t feel like trying harder or caring more. It feels like not needing to.

| POLLY'S WARDROBE | S1 | S2 | S3 |

"Much of her pain in that breakdown is due to embarrassment, Polly tries to be someone she isn't, which is more embarrassing than when a relationship doesn't work out. That adventure was supposed to usher in the 'New Polly', one that was going to be accepted as part of society. The whole thing was shaming." - Helen Mccrory

Thoughts under the cut:

Neil and the cats! Next up is Andrew🐈

On a plane for the next..14 hours?? Have some Neil and Andrew wips with cats

Gentle hands💕

Late, but happy valentines!