Gosh i love occupational therapists. I’m at a webinar about pacing through summertime, and this OT just shared a “success story” from a client who got a banner for a party they hosted. Instead of saying “happy birthday” the banner said “please leave by 9pm”.
This is the same OT who apologized for not being able to put someone in a coma to reset their pain responses. A queen.
One time I finished listening to an ambient album but I didn’t realize for 45 minutes because the dishwasher was on.
One time I sent my work chat a link to a website that autoplayed a weird ambient soundtrack, but I didn’t realize because I was already listening to weird ambient music and it blended right in.
But none of these beat Simon, inveterate listener of weird ambient music. One time he was reading alone in a room with no music on, and our child walked in and announced “this is the weirdest music you have ever listened to” about the sound of a sprinkler coming in through the window.
So if this was your hand in Wingspan, what would you do?
Hint
I made a new bonus card to give points for horny bird names 🤷
Because come on.
As with all categories, debate is raging about some inclusions and exclusions.
Reading up on aftercare for chemical weapons exposure and I can’t decide how to feel about the way it overlaps my existing practices for wildfire smoke season… Take the win, I guess.
It really is a relief when the necessary defenses to different aspects of the polycrisis are not in conflict. I remember dealing with wildfires and a heatwave during early covid lockdowns in 2020. Back then before the PNW heat dome, hardly anyone had a/c so we needed to open the windows to deal with heat, but we needed to keep them closed to keep the smoke out. We couldn’t socialize indoors due to covid and couldn’t socialize outdoors due to smoke.
The Beaverton spoke to my heart:
“Marginalized communities are often hit hardest by situations like this,” says Cablebill, “because they do not have easy access to resources that would enable them to be neither in nor outside.”
This item from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is such a common complaint about cishet husbands… Someone should check how many other CIA sabotage tactics double as stereotypical husband behaviour 😂
When you go to the lavatory, spend a longer time there than is necessary.
I treasure the moment when a podcast host realizes on-air that they’ve been pronouncing a word differently from everyone else. Just got poignant as “poig-nant”.
Is there a name for that type of realization? It happens to and around me a lot. Does this only happen in English?
Today’s small pleasure is putting together some fancy root vegetable, wild rice, and mushroom phyllo pastries (prepped slowly over several days). They are delicious, but the main pleasure is in calling them Turnip Rolls
I got physically agitated about the section numbering in a book that Simon showed me 😂
Spent time on the alt text to try to bring this chaos to you.
All but one of the top-level sections group everything under a single sub-head. WHY. My urge to refactor is so strong 😂
This year’s addition to the Halloween bookshelf, made from a rain-damaged hardcover I found in a little free library with a broken door.
Background info for today’s small pleasure: a friend and I recently started a soup swap, which just means we drop off soup for each other whenever we feel like it.
So today’s small pleasure was texting my friend “HOT SOUPS IN YOUR AREA” to find out whether she was home
(Prompted by this cool zine from the WHO about coping with stress)
I find myself looking at this comic kind of often, in a non-casual way. I waffle about sharing it. It seems like over-simplifying to say that Wolverine really speaks to my divorce experience, but also… I mean, I look at this comic a lot. My living bones!
The impassioned claim that there exists an unemotional, value-free scientific method (or context of justification) may be interpreted as an emotional rejection and repudiation of the feminine and, if this is so, it would mean that scientific practice carried out (supposedly) in an “objective,” value-free, unemotional way is in fact deeply and emotionally repressive of the feminine.
— Brian Easley, “Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Warriors”
Galen forwarded me a reading for his feminist men’s discussion group and I laughed out loud at this part. The rest is here: Patriarchy, Scientists and Nuclear Warriors, by Brian Easlea.
Surprisingly / not surprisingly, I have thought a lot about the value of “douche” as a politically correct cuss word. I’ve adopted it as my all-purpose, positive family values cussing option. My take is that douches are maligned for feminist and body-positive reasons. Douches are marketed to clean vaginas that are already self-cleaning, and the unnecessary douches can cause microflora imbalances and infections. Douches are terrible, urban legend birth control that can actually increase the chances of conceiving. Douches: body hating, body damaging, anti-choice, agents of unnecessary consumption. And fun to say. Doooosh.
Meanwhile, almost every other cuss word is maligned for some body-hating, bigoted reason. Genitals, bodily fluids, sexual activities… I love all those things. I need a bigger pallette of loving cusses before I can give up the fun sounds of fuck, shit, tits, ass, cock, sucking, blowing, and company, but it’s good to have a start.
Other takes on douche as a swear? Seeing it paired up with enemas is actually giving me pause. I’m thinking the only reason enemas get a bad rap is because of taboos about buttholes, and related taboos about gay sex and maybe enema sex play. I’m pretty much pro-butthole on all those issues. So then I wonder if I should be considering the sex play possibilities of douches, and any douche fetish communities I might be further marginalizing. The problem: everything can be used for sex play. That criteria would eliminate every possible PC swear word. I’m sticking with douche for now, but I’d love to hear from anyone offended by that.
Alternate title: To Anthony’s dad whose use of exclamation marks is getting out
of hand!
Capitalism works on the same principle as a glass company whose employees spend their nights breaking people’s windows and their days boasting of the public service they provide.
— Alfie Kohn in No Contest: The Case Against Competition
This reminds me of my favourite t-shirt.
This sounds like fado, and I want to add halos to every bearded image.
