Welcome to a World of Endless Wonder

Holy SHIT guys I commissioned Kevan Brighting to say some comforting things as the narrator and it’s giving me LIFE. He did such an incredible job. Please give this a listen. AAAAAAAAAA

So while I was getting my haircut, the lady asked me if I had other plans for the day and I said:

“I’m just going to pick up the boy from daycare and then it’s date night.”

And the lady says “Oh! How old is he?”

“He’s three.”

“Mine too! Where are you registering him for kindergarten it’s such a hassle-”

And that’s when I realized I said “boy” and not “dog” because I always think of Charlie as “good boy” but this slip up has lead to a miscommunication.

The lady is now 6 minutes into a clearly needed rant about how unnecessarily complex shopping for schools is, esp when you have a neurodivergent child, so I can’t just tell her that Charlie is a dog because then she’ll feel awkward for unloading on me and she clearly has enough going on.

So the rest of the haircut became a game of “how much can I say about Charlie without revealing that he is not a human child?” And the answer is “enough to cover a half hour hair appointment, quite possibly several hours worth if I’m specific enough”

“is he very verbal?”

“It really depends on who he’s with. He’s very quiet at he but won’t shut up if he’s at the park or has a friend over.”

“was it hard to potty-train him?”

“he’s adopted, but I was genuinely amazed at how good he already was with hygene and potty stuff.”

“mine’s just obsessed with paw patrol and Frozen, drives me crazy!”

“I imagine. Charlie is colorblind so he’s not as into tv, but he always wants a toy if I take him anywhere with them.”

“oh gosh the toys! And the kids are so rough on them!”

“yeah Charlie can destroy a stuffed animal in about 2 minutes, so I only buy him the really cheap ones.”

“Does he throw tantrums when they break?”

“Not really. It’s meditative, really, taking them apart. He has hysterics if the cat takes his toys though. Runs downstairs and cries at me until I retrieve it because he’s not tall enough to get it out of the cat tree.”

The Very Good Boy in question, Charleston Chew.

(if you want to read more of my much weirder adventures, I have pre-orders for my book on Patreon right now: https://www.patreon.com/gallusrostromegalus )

once i beat the depression and the burnout and the anxiety and the loneliness and the exhaustion and the guilt and the awkwardness and the apathy and the low income and the chronic illness and the impatience and the vulnerability and the creative block and the capitalism and the cruelty THEN you'll see

The Six Stages of Having Too Many Books

By Vi-An Nguyen

For The New Yorker

"Sorry I have a boyfriend" is of course a time-tested and reasonably reliable no-fault rejection strategy. But what many tacticians may not realize is it has an even more powerful counterpart, the preemptive boyfriend name-drop. This is when a conversation with a stranger veers into high-alert territory and you make up a guy named Raphael (my boyfriend) who you mention due to his extremely-relevant interest in the current topic of conversation.

Raphael is a powerful tactical piece here due to his simultaneous love or hatred of every single topic ever, due to he's not real.

HOBBES vs. TIGGER cage match TO THE DEATH say goodbye to your childhood because ONE! WILL!! DIE!!!!

Picturing two tiger plushies just kind of sitting there facing each other in Thunderdome

i am picturing it

Calvin and Christopher Robin are screaming from the sidelines, and neither plushie moves. Next shot, you have Tigger and Hobbes playing cards, and Hobbes is like "I can't believe they expected apex predators like us to waste energy fighting. Seven?" And Tigger says "GO FISH!"

okay but "would i were a man, i would eat his heart in the marketplace" is like. The Line of the play. it's beatrice's anger and frustration and, most importantly, her complete lack of power as a woman. her best friend and cousin was humiliated, abused, and left for dead, and there is nothing that she can do, because, even if she's allowed to make fun of the men when people find it funny, she ultimately has no power as a woman. and no one understands, no one believes her, no one gets the absolute rage that she feels on behalf of hero. to the men it's all a game. and it's this line that makes benedick understand. after that line, he goes from refusing to hurt claudio to promising to fight him, because he understands. he sees when no one else does that beatrice has no power. and he agrees to fight his friend, not because he wants to, but because he sees that she can't.

btw disabled people. please make things easier for yourself in any way you can. shit is hard enough already we don’t need to refuse ourselves any help we can get

just overheard my wife spelling something on the phone and i shit you not saying the words “E as in Eeyore” i am on my hands and knees wailing screaming crying pleading and begging people to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet

like the reason this exists is because none of the words sound like each other, which means that even with a terrible signal both parties should be able to clearly understand the words being spelled

i am dead serious that i believe this should be taught in school

thank god i have pop enjoyer gene in me

sorry i'm being an absent friend i'm being an absent self too

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

I'm not the first to mention this, but one bit that I thought was really clever in Steven Universe is the ways in which the show subtly justifies the cartoonism of the principle cast always wearing the same outfit for ease-of-animation purposes. The gems are a gimme in that they're all hardlight-projections, and even before that's solidified as a plot point they're otherworldly and superheroic enough that you don't really think to question it. But Steven canonically just owns hundreds and hundreds of those star shirts, which are leftover merchandise from his father's fizzled-out career as a rock star. Into which you can read a whole bunch of other stuff if you really want to, right? And I do want to. It's reflective of Greg's misplaced optimism that he got hundreds of those made in the first place, and it's a benign but visible example of how Steven's life is shaped by the knock-on effects of decisions his parents made before he was even alive. He's got his mother's superpowers and he's wearing his father's shirts.

It’s weird how everyone hating you when you’re nine years old still affects your self esteem when you’re 26 like yeah nobody came to my birthday party but that was like 17 years ago why is it stopping me from going to a gay bar

The human brain needs the ability to be recalibrated faster. Yeah we’ve been doing this healing process for like six or seven years now make it snappy hurry it up

Quick bit of neuroscience here: the brain has no "delete" function. Barring brain damage, every memory you form will be a part of your brain from the time it is formed to the day you die, and it will try to assert itself every time you think or experience something that you associate it with. So if you want to break a traumatic memory's hold over you, you'll need to find ways to drown it out: figure out what triggers the nasty feelings, then try to create other memories that have an equally strong association with those triggers so that the trauma gets pushed to the back of the line.

*showing visible symptoms* oh my god i need help desperately

*symptoms go away for one day* what if im just faking it