emotion is the new punk

#i like to think that one day he was drawing glasses on superman’s picture in the paper #and that’s how he found out

does whatever a sipdre cna

The Cutest Meow Compilation

By Bubba the Cat

Hey look at the title for my school’s tube ensemble, where there are 9 tubas.

“Music Played On Wildly Inappropriate Instuments” is my favorite genre of music.

In case you’re wondering what this sounds like:

everyone was curious so here’s a version with sound 

it can be tempting to live your life like a prequel. to live as if you’re setting up your own story.and once you lose the weight, once you have the money, once you graduate school, once you’re in a real relationship, once, once, once. then finally, you’ll begin to live, and everything you do up until that point is some kind of half-life, some unimportant foreword you can skip. don’t do this. inhabit your life completely. sink fully into the wealth of your existence. the power to manifest is in the fearless owning of who you are, so that you can shape where you’re going.

i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough

when you’re a 14 month old french infant in a military hospital in the late 18th century and that weird hungry guy comes into your room

cant stop thinking about this post. i dont think any “that face you make when” type posts has prompted over 20 minutes of research in me before

Just an FYI for those in the US with insurance issues

this sounds oddly plausible

a good doctor will pester the insurance company on your behalf. a couple times in my Back Pain Odyssey my insurance noped out on a procedure, and my doctor called them up and was like “no, really” and they gave in.

so if your insurance is in the habit of going “you don’t actually need TWO months of physical therapy, just walk it off,” tell the doctor who ordered it, and they may very well volunteer to, or agree to, call up the insurance people and go “simon says pay for the fucking therapy.”

For all my peeps out there fighting the good fight against Big Pharma Bureaucratic Bullshit.

How do you explain to someone that this is your sense of humor

I was wondering where this was going and lemme tell you I fell out of my chair

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

This casual rant is like a primer on weight science. Amazing. I second their book recommendations, and would add to the list Body Respect by Drs Bacon & Aphramor, Body of Truth by journalist Harriet Brown, and What’s Wrong with Fat? by UCLA professor of sociology Abigail Saguy.

literally all four Fs of trauma typology lmao

Flight—Responds to abuse by constantly attempting to escape it, devolves into self-repeating perfectionism in the belief that it will prevent future abuse, obsessed with either geographical escape or forcibly recovering instantaneously to escape the continual, constant torture.

Fight—Responds to abuse with anger and aggressiveness because that is the only thing that appears to give control in family dynamic. Responds to anything that resembles attack with cruelty and defensiveness and attempts to manipulate with intimidation and disdain before others can manipulate them.

Fawn—Responds to abuse by attempting to become the perfect victim in the hopes of being less hated and less mistreated in exchange for cooperating. Turns off all personal desires, boundaries, traits, and emotions, tries to become exactly what the abuser wants. Continues this set of interpersonal rules even with non-abusive outsiders.

Freeze—Responds to abuse by attempting by any means to dull or numb it. Shuts down mentally, tunes everything that is said or done out, drowns it out with electronics or isolation or addictions. Prefers being disconnected and unaware to actively living.

Yes!! Fawn is a rarer response just because it requires more complex work in the brain than the other responses, and so most people don’t realize or act like it exists so both as a therapist-in-training and semi-former fawner this is great.

I had no idea that was a thing but oh wow does that ever explain what I was doing before.

i’ve been doing my homework on how to break into a writing career and honestly. there’s a Lot that i didn’t know about thats critical to a writing career in this day and age, and on the one hand, its understandable because we’re experiencing a massive cultural shift, but on the other hand, writers who do not have formal training in school or don’t have the connections to learn more via social osmosis end up extremely out of loop and working at a disadvantage. 

like, i didnt know about twitter pitch parties!! i didnt know about literary agents and publishers tweeting their manuscript wishlist, in hopes that some poor soul out there has written the book they really want to read and publish!! this isnt some shit you learn about in school! you really need to know the ins and outs of the writing community to be successful! 

for anyone interested, here’s what i’ve learned so far in my quest for more writing knowledge:

1. Writer’s Market 2019 is a great place to start– it gives you a list of magazines and journals that you can send your work to depending on the genre as well as lists a shit ton of literary agents that specify what genres they represent, how you can get in contact with them and how they accept query letters. this is a book that updates every year and tbh i only bought it this year so i dont know how critical it is to have an updated version  

2. do your research. mostly on literary agents because if you listed on your site that you like to represent fluffy YA novels and some asshole sends you a 80k manuscript about like…gritty viking culture, you will be severely pissed off. always go in finding someone who you know will actually like your work because they’re the ones who will try to advocate for you in getting published.

3. learn how to write a query letter. there are slightly varying formulas to how you can write an effective query letter. you’re also going to want to get feedback on your query letter because its the first thing the literary agent will read and based on how well you do it, it could be the difference between them rejecting you outright and giving your manuscript a quick read

4. unfortunately, you’re gonna want to get a twitter. Twitter is where a lot of literary agents are nowadays, and they host things like twitter pitch parties, where you pitch your manuscript in a few sentences and hashtag it with #Pitmad #Pitdark, some version of pit. a lot of literary agents and publishers will ALSO post their manuscript wishlists, which is just the kind of books they’d like to represent/publish, and they hashtag this with #MSWL (it is NOT for writers to use, only for agents/publishers)

5. connect with other writers, literary agents, publishers at book events. you will absolutely need the connections if you want to get ahead as a writer. thats just kind of the state of the world.

does this apply to nonfiction as well?

THIS IS THE MOST RELEVANT THING I’VE EVER SEEN ON THE INTERNET. EVER. 

Casually fixing this every time it crosses my dash.

I like the fixed version better.

I love using “good catch”

I also say “thanks for the update” or “thanks for the head’s up!”

“I really appreciate the head’s up!” also a classic

If I haven’t gotten back to someone in a swift enough period (i.e. one work day max) I say “thank you for your patience. after some consideration, I have decided…”

don’t apologize for piddly things! 

thank you > sorry

I need to remember

thank you > sorry

Thank you for waiting for me > sorry for being late

Thank you for helping me/for your time/for listening to me > sorry for bothering you

Thanking someone when they do you a favour > apologizing for your existence

This is especially hard when you haven’t been taught that people need to respect your limits, but with a bit of practice you can absolutely get there!