Figuring It All Out: My Genderfluid Life

Getting work done on my house and the contractor was like “I saw ur sign….. r u yknow in the community or an …ally?” And I was like doing the major side eye and was hesitantly like “……in the community…” and the guy whips out his phone and goes “cool let me show you a picture of my daughter and her 4 kids and her wife and did u know the baby is theirs biologically which is very cool and” then I got to listen to him tell me all about being an ally and how much he loves the queer community and also he thinks it’s despicable all the friends they lost when his daughter came out and they haven’t won the best yard since they put a pride flag out and how it’s about making sure people have safe spaces and know they aren’t alone- to my complete astonishment I really did get the full essay from him

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE NEANDERTHAL CHILD WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME? Because they're all I've been thinking about when I'm sad for the past few days. Their existence makes me less sad.

A quick, sloppy little comic about Magritte

Oh god I felt that

sometimes i think i miss high school and then..this is pretty accurate

This is why I love pierce. He’s the kind of punk who understands that sometimes the most effective fuck you to authority is kindness

sorry but it’s actually so horrific how little of a sense of community people have, how little regard they extend towards the other humans around them. killing people for being loud on the subway or turning around in your driveway. loading your gun and waiting at the door because a child ran your doorbell unexpectedly. ring cameras, neighborhoodapp, community watch group Facebook pages. you’ve assigned yourself the role of the one true peacekeeper and casted everyone else around you as a threat to be controlled. there’s no connection or love or compassion. just a deep distrust and hatred.

and the people who face the most significant consequences from this are the ones who are already deemed as outsiders. people of color, especially Black people, disabled people, people with mental illnesses, homeless people.

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

Reblogging for the website.

This leads me to wonder if you could have medical debt go into collections, then buy back that debt yourself for an actually reasonable price. 

The people who don't know how to apply kindergarten rules to adult social situations genuinely don't know how embarrassing that is. Like, a six-year-old will get this, how do you not. You don't call people things they don't want to be called, it doesn't matter if you don't think it's a bad word. You don't do things that upset other people just because they don't do any other damage than upset people, that's still bullying. Don't take things from other peoples' hands, don't interrupt people. Say you're sorry if you didn't do it on purpose.

I'd like to ask how the fuck there are grown-ass people who struggle with this kind of thing, but truth is, the reason their parents didn't teach them how to act is because their parents don't have manners either.

This is what hozier meant when he says he falls a little bit in love everyday with someone new

I once watched a girl in the produce aisle pick up a bushel of bananas that were precariously perched on the edge and move them farther back and under her breath she said “there you go sweeties - that will be more comfortable” before shuffling off and… I think about her often.

« Silent lovers » is such a sweet way to put it.

I was driving on the highway and passed a dude absolutely JAMMING alone in his car, doing those little half dance moves you do when you’re stuck sitting down in a small space, bellowing unheard lyrics at the top of his lungs, and my instant reaction was to think “I love you.” And then to pray he had a good day, or whatever, because those fleeting moments of connection are so incredible.

im so sick of ppl defending their loved ones who let their friends talk to them crazy. idc how kind or shy you are if your FRIEND is being rude to another friend or significant other you need to say something!!!!!! like you don't need to be rude just tell them to stop wtf

THIS is the energy i want from everyone in 2022!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

thinking about the time they sent me a seven year old autistic patient to investigate if he was suffering abuse because in every psychological test he kept drawing awful monsters

and I start the consultation already miserable as fuck and I give the kid some pen and paper so I can maybe communicate and see what's on his mind

and then I go WAIT A GODDAMN SECOND I KNOW THOSE MONSTERS

turns out the kid just had a special interest in Five Nights at Freddy's

I pointed at the monster and went "That's Freddy!" and I've never seen a kid that ecstatic in my life

the mom looked at me as if her son and I belonged at the same satanic cult and that's why I knew the names of the demons in his head

I wrote back to psychologist like "I'm not sure how to explain this but looking up five nights at freddys might bring you progress with this patient"

at some point the nurses realized the autistic children and I were like, Really Vibing

so they decided to highkey just appoint all of them to my day and it took me almost a month to realize that the fact that I kept arriving and finding that all of today’s appointments were autistic children was Not A Coincidence 

anyway this one time there was a kid who was really into christianity but it was like, specifically angels 

so I’m trying to start up a conversation with him and I ask what he’s reading and he goes “do you know what a nephilim is”

and like for one hellish second my soul is suckerpunched out of my body and thrown straight into supernatural-fanfic-on-wattpad hell, and then I reassume control of my flesh prison, ignoring the mental edits of Dean and Castiel making out, and go “Aren’t those the guys who are half human and half angel?”

and the kid was so fucking happy but the mom was staring at me like ‘why are you privy to this bit of occult jesus lore’

and my heathen lesbian of a self just looks at her and goes 

“i love bible”

This reminds me of one of the first clients I worked with as an art therapy intern. Staff were concerned that this 10-year-old boy might be “preoccupied with death” or even had suicidal ideation because he kept drawing pictures of “death-related imagery”.

However, since this boy had ADHD, was on the autism spectrum, and was a recent immigrant who didn’t speak English well, staff couldn’t get him to explain to them what his drawings were about.

I asked to see some of his artwork and immediately realized that the “death-related imagery” that this kid was drawing was actually fanart of Sans, from Undertale.

I remember telling the staff that, while I didn’t expect this to be an easy case, I had a feeling that they needn’t worry about this kid quite so much anymore.

There is a Jewish story about a wealthy man who came to his rabbi and said “I have decided to build an orphanage, can you put me in touch with the relevant people”  

The rabbi was delighted to do it, and introduced the man to some charities.  After a few weeks, the man came back to the rabbi.

“I have decided not to build the orphanage,” he said.  “I realised that I was only doing it because I wanted to be admired as a philanthropist, my motives were selfish.”

The rabbi answered, “do you think the orphans will care what your motives were?  Build the orphanage!”

this… makes a very good point.

According to ongoing studies into happiness in the psych department at Berkeley, making yourself happy by making other people happy is how it’s meant to work

Be kind to humans abused and exploited by capitalism

Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.

“yeah see uhhh i love the pocs trans rights haha” *is the most abrasive and hateful person you’ve ever met*