From Hark a Vagrant!

(Use your imagination)

Do I have to?

This is why I love lemmy.

I get all angry on someone’s comment, and someone else has already made my point, and better. We’re even doing mutual aid in comments!

I have an answer for this that’s from my personal life if that’s helpful.

I’ve lived either in the great plains or in the rural south my entire life, and I only found out a year ago you can pay $20 to rent a pickup truck. So up until that point, I thought, every group (of friends or family) has to have a person with a truck in it, in case someone needs to move, or in case of an emergency (like a tornado effing up their house and now you have to clear the property).

When I found out that renting a truck is so cheap, I was so mad! All that time wasted paying extra for more car than I needed! I prefer something small and cheap and efficient, personally, but so does everyone else I know so I always wound up with the truck. (And I helped a LOT of people move over the years as a result.)

Obviously this is n=1 but at least it’s my story? And my answer is legit, “ignorance and being too poor to own my house, and landlords like to jack rent on someone staying in one place every year so you have to keep moving to avoid that needless creep of fees.”

On the plus side, if anybody reading this ever has reason to think that they might need to go into a police station and remove someone being held there, apparently if you and a friend or two look sufficiently the part, you can just walk in, in plainclothes, and claim to be Homeland Security, and just… take a dude and leave.

I want regular pasteurized milk so I can make clotted cream. But I’d rather have ultra high pasteurized and not have to worry about shit like that.

I have terrible news for you. At least in my part of America, the only milk you can buy is ultra high pasteurized.

Of course, that’s what they’ve been doing until now. Let’s see what happens without the FDA on it.

This response vexes me because while Uncle Barry here is certainly an example, what these people are forgetting (and what this thing about Uncle Barry glosses over) is that until the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the fights from the 70s onward, if a family in the US had a child with an IQ of under 70, they were often shipped off to an institution.

Deinstitutionialization didn’t really begin to gain steam until relatively recently in our collective history- here in Tennessee we still had one of these facilities open until the nineties. These people didn’t believe there were people with severe mental disabilities, because our society hid them away!

Look up Clover Bottom. But don’t, because it’s horrifying. I’ve met people who lived there their entire lives. What was done to them was disgusting.

It is awful what was done to them. But it’s awful that people with a greater severity of condition, a greater need for care, are often glossed over in these comment sections. It feels like they’re made invisible in these conversations just like they were in those institutions! And I’m terrified that assholes like RFK Jr will disappear them for real!

The stories I could tell you from my time as a caregiver for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities…

::: TW: neglect, abuse, SA

Here is a link to a lawsuit against Clover Bottom Mental Hospital, which was one of these institutions. The lawsuit happened in 1993. This was not that long ago.

“At the defendant state institutions, plaintiffs spend their days waiting out the hours. They sprawl in ill-fitting wheelchairs or carts. They are parked in dayrooms or hallways unattended, or are left alone in their rooms. Many plaintiffs languish in hospital beds or cribs, with no stimulation except when they are changed or fed. Others are left in wheelchairs, unattended for hours, with no stimulation or human contact available to them.”

“Plaintiffs’ basic care needs are ignored; they are left alone for hours. Clover Bottom residents in diapers are often wet, their clothes soaked through with urine.”

“Defendants have failed to protect residents of the institutions from physical abuse and neglect.”

“Verbal abuse is widespread. Staff at Clover Bottom use abrupt, verbal commands to communicate with residents; often, they scream at them.”

There is so much more, and so much worse. The thing is, some of these folks are still alive, and still members of our community, and they still have the evidence of this ongoing trauma writ large. The current system isn’t ideal. There’s never enough care, and the people who are providing care are often under-trained and under-paid and over-worked. But at least it’s better than this.

ETA: I had to come back and add: I left out all the sexual abuse. There was… a lot. There’s evidence. It’s mentioned in that lawsuit but there are stories I can’t bring myself to tell. :::

Here’s a link to the song “Pet” by A Perfect Circle.

Don’t know why your comment made me want to add this.

And now we are friends!

That’s the other cool thing about the Sailor Moon fandom. I’ve never once met a Sailor Moon fan who was a racist, or a bigot, or… anything. It comes with the ‘love and justice’ thing.

Every time some liberal recommends peaceful protest, I yell that MLK Jr. couldn’t have got where he got without Malcolm X, that Stonewall was a riot, and if someone takes away my right to vote, I’m going to behave in the way that got my foremothers the right to vote!

lmao

toxic positivity

Oof, you’re not joking. There was a community somewhere else on the internet who was 100% about that bullshit. Some days, you just want to be able to do the fucking laundry. Or in my case, make the marinara sauce. I took meds today and I’m all focused but I’ll be damned if I can start cooking. Executive dysfunction can really fuck right off forever.

why I’m not interested

There’s that depression-like emptiness where once a whole-life obsession was! I’m really grateful that I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I recognize that feeling for what it is, because that helps me a lot in coping with it. “Why am I not having fun anymore?” It can be such a bleak thing, but I’m lucky enough (I recognize not everyone is!) to be able to objectively realize that’s what’s wrong with me, and now that it’s been identified, to set aside that feeling and wait for the next hyperfocus.

You’re for sure right. There’d be less struggle. There’d be less strife. And I wish you could give it up, and be those things, and not have to kill yourself to do basic, normal things every day. But I think I’d keep it.

Hey, thanks for the conversation. If you ever need an accountability person, my DMs are open!

Oh, thanks very much for the link! Always looking for cool new places on the fediverse!

Also, nice to finally meet you, Odo. You were an excellent part of my favorite Star Trek.

Okay! I’ll maintain the unflappable facade until you become… less flapped.

That sentence really got away from me. The point is I mean well and I get at least some of what you’re talking about. And! I can ask you to come be angry for me when I’m unable to flap! A perfect system!

I found mansplain on Merriam Webster, and also on Wikipedia. The Merriam Webster article says “of a man,” and the wikipedia article says “for a man” at the start.

Usually for these things I’d be all for abolishing the gendered nature of the word, but I feel like it would dilute the original meaning. So if anything, instead of gender-normalizing ‘mansplain,’ I think we need to add ‘womansplain,’ which is something I’m very guilty of doing to my partner whenever he’s cooking because I keep forgetting that it’s something he does very well.

But also, my reply still has merit here, because that individual was obviously weaponizing ‘mansplain’ to try and gender me, a woman, when what they likely wanted to convey was that they found me condescending. They shouldn’t be appropriating a gendered word to say something else they mean, so… uh. Sorry for all the extra words. I took my ADHD medication today and language discussion fascinates me.

I also have that aura, and I am here to lend credence to being able to see it in others, and them seeing it in me.

I have this cute phrase for when it’s not just that aura but also the obvious background of trauma, “We have so much in common! I’m so sorry.”

Mine is a super power in a crisis. The rest of the time it is a massive hindrance. But! I also think it’s why I’m so unique and why I developed so many other skills, so I wouldn’t trade it so much as living in a world that can’t accommodate me.

This might be one of those things we haven’t discovered yet, like the soap/cilantro thing.

Cucumber has a very strong flavor to me.