I did an interview with some of the people at Merriam Webster and they asked me what OTHER places I looked up words, and I mentioned urban dictionary. And the MW people were just like ‘OMG We LOVE what they’re doing.’
There is a similar story of a man who drives a water truck for a game reserve on Africa. There is a man-made watering hole he fills up every day, and it’s like the freaking water truce scene in the jungle book. Every creature in the area politely lines up around the pond and waits for him. A lot of the more social animals like baboons or hyenas will greet him. Nobody messes with him or his truck, because he often is escorted by lions or elephants that know him like DO NOT IMPEDE THE WATER GUY.
After I had a doctor ruin my health, cost me years of my life, and nearly kill me by missing the diagnosis of a tumor which was compressing my spinal cord, I learned this script:
“I’m not here to talk about my weight; I’m here to talk about [problem]. I have a history of doctors focusing on my weight and ignoring problems like ‘a tumor in my spine,’ so I’m sure you’ll understand why I would prefer we did not ignore my stated complaint to focus on my weight instead.”
“I would like to focus on the complaint that brought me in today, which is [complaint], not my weight.”
“What tests or course of treatment would you recommend to a thin person presenting with my symptoms? Why are we not doing that? I would prefer to proceed with those tests and that course of treatment.”
“Please write in my chart that I asked you for these tests and course of treatment that you would give a thin patient with my symptoms, and you declined.”
“I’d like to request a copy of my visit notes from today,” [if the above don’t work and you don’t have MyChart, “what’s the correct email for my written request?”
It may be difficult to insist on a patient advocate to be in the room with you, but in many states you are legally entitled to one. I bring one of my partners bc I have medical-triggered PTSD. They know how to advocate for me or support me if a doctor tries to steamroll me..
If you are in a hospital situation and cannot get an official advocate in the room with you, ask for a chaplain. Chaplains are used to being in a room to comfort and help patients and in many circumstances, just having a witness in the room will change a doctor’s tune REALLY fast.
Medical fatphobia is a big problem, and it really heavily affects but is not restricted to people that doctors perceive to be women (whether or not those people are women). Don’t let yourself be bullied!
[Image description: five gifs from the Hulu show Shrill, showing Aidy Bryant’s character in a doctor’s office.
Doctor: You should think about gastric bypass. You’re at a good age for it.”
Patient: I’m sorry? Think about what?
Doctor: Getting bariatric surgery. For your weight. It’s not healthy and that might be the most realistic solution.
Patient: Ok, um, but we didn’t do, like, any bloodwork or anything today. Isn’t that something that maybe you should look at before you recommend a major surgery?
In the fifth gif, Aidy Bryant’s character is in her car and says, “You’re gonna look at me for ten minutes and tell me to cut my stomach out? How is that medically ethical?”
If your child is in the middle of some activity and clearly enjoying it (and wasn’t supposed to be doing something else instead), DO NOT interrupt them and have them do chores that will “only take 5 minutes or so!”
You haven’t asked them to do anything before they got out the Legos, started reading a chapter of their book or painting the complicated picture, or began playing their video game.
As a result of being repeatedly interrupted, they will learn that their presence in public space of the household=availability to do chores, so they will make themselves scarce so you can’t find them and order them around. They will also become suspicious of your efforts to engage with them as they play, as they’ve learned that these pleasantries are a prelude to “Take out the trash”, or “move your boots and vacuum the entryway, there’s dirt everywhere ”.
“But I need my children to help me around the house!”, I hear you cry. I understand. Children should not be treated like royalty and left to their own devices 24/7.
An alternative is to give the kids a clearly delineated chore chart and stick to it, resisting the urge to add anything to it. There are some chores that are easier and quicker with two people, though. A (in my opinion) even better option is to divide the child’s day into “on-duty” and “off-duty ” time. When they’re on-duty, you can interrupt them as before, but you have *consulted with your child beforehand * and they understand that during this time they can relax, but they must be ready to jump in and lend a hand.
That way they won’t start trying to level up in their video game or break out the clay and make stuff. When they are off-duty, you leave them alone and their only responsibilities are to clean up whatever mess they make at the end of this time.
Also, if they are tearing around the house or whining about being bored, don’t make them do chores so they will “have something to do”; this could make the child conflate extra chores with punishment for whining and make them reluctant to help out when you randomly tell them to at other times because they might think they’re being punished but they have NO IDEA WHAT THEY DID. And IMO children should see chores as things everyone has to do no matter what, not punishments.
I may seem unqualified to offer parenting advice as I have no kids, but I was talking with my dad today and he said: “I wish you didn’t hide from us in your room so much, but every time your mom walked by she’d give you a chore to do, so I can’t blame you for that.” A kid who hides in their room to play has an entirely different relationship to the family than the child who sprawls on the livingroom floor and excitedly describes the city they are building out of Legos.
And today, in times of Covid I play a complicated game of hide-and-seek with my mother as I try to do my online coding homework and apply for jobs. I am now attempting to turn my bedroom into my own tiny office because if I work in our home office, she’ll find me and go “I can’t attach this file to my email,” and so on.
Children *have* to obey their parents when they are young. But true respect and honoring collective responsibilities is stronger than forced obedience. If you demonstrate to your children that you respect them and their time, they will reciprocate.
Tl;dr if your child is “always hiding in their room”, there is a reason for it and setting a regular routine and boundaries will benefit both of you in the long run.
The pennicillin that Fleming famously discovered proved to be effective when first tried on a human patient…. but not effective ENOUGH. The patient initially recovered, then they ran out, and thus the first patient to receive antibiotics came the first patient to die from antibiotic-resistant infection. And that’s when they realised— they would never be able to mass produce enough of this mold to be effective.
So they began to test other molds. They asked countries all over the world to send them mold samples for testing. NOTHING. And then one day one of the ladies who worked on the project discovered that the canteloupe she bought was moldy. They said …. “fuck it, why not, we’re this close to ending the project anyway” and tested it.
It turned out to be not just easy to produce, but waaaaaaay more effective.
That particular mold has never been encountered in the wild since.
You’ve got to understand that this was 2014. I’ve seen some younger lesbian, bi, and queer folks today going, “So what? They held hands. They didn’t even kiss.” Or people watching it for the first time, saying, “I don’t see what the big deal is. There wasn’t any build-up!”
But the landscape of children’s TV was very different six years ago. Like, that moment when they looked into each other’s eyes in a beam of golden light was revolutionary. I was living in a house with other queer people and we ALL screamed and cried, just like this.
Korrasami paved the way for Steven Universe and She-Ra to do what they did in the following years. And, yes, those were leaps forward whereas this was a step. But I saw it on another post, and I’ll echo the sentiment: Korrasami walked so Catradora could sprint.
Same-sex marriage wasn’t legal in the US in 2014.
Not until 2016. Before that, the marriage was only recognized in a few states.
It might not seem like much now, but HOLY FUCK this moment in the finale was huge in 2014.
The first norm-penetrating precedent rarely looks like some great achievement or change. It looks like a small violation of an established norm, radical only in how public it is. Sometimes you use tameness to buy the publicity needed to make progress.
Yo. I was born in 1988.
My canon queer couple?
WAS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH AS COUSINS.
Cloverway gave one of them an offscreen boyfriend and, any time an uncuttable kissy scene came up, they started calling each other “cuz.” Another queer couple from the same show suffered the fate of being heterocized by one of them literally being genderswapped.
(Guess who became the girl. Go on, guess. At least it’s not as bad as France, where they became … brothers.)
That was my mainstream queer rep.
Oh. Until this came out.
… . yeah.
I’m not even in Avatar fandom and when those first gifs popped up on my dash, I started crying. I was 24 years old and crying over a show I had never watched because a pair of women held hands.
You can’t possibly understand what it was like before that.
You don’t want to understand what it was like before that.
I don’t want you to understand what it was like before that.
But there’s a reason we reacted like this.
I pray you never have cause to learn it yourselves.
I do actually want y'all to know and understand what it was like before that because some of the hot takes coming out of younger community members make it staggeringly obvious you know nothing about our history.
Like, I don’t want you to experience it, but I really am going to need y'all to move into Formal Operational Cognitive Development and start considering that yours isn’t the only perspective and that things have changed drastically for queer people WITHIN MY LIFETIME and I am a relatively young queer who was born AFTER like ¾ of our population died of AIDS and we lost nearly an entire generation along with all their history.
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