Month: January 2018

An Insider’s Guide on How to be Sick

Never say the words ‘this is not my life’

This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the night

This pain that woke your lover, chased her to another room

to another life

This fevered fainting

This tremorring chest
This mangled kite

This panic like a cave of bats

This nurse drawing blood wearing doubled gloves

This insurance doesn’t cover that

This hurried paycheck of doctor after doctor after doctor

This stethoscope that never hears your heart

This hospital bed

This florescent dark

This save your prescription with side effects worse than the disease

This please let me have one month where I read more poems than warning labels

This not knowing what the test will say

This pray pray pray

This airplane’s medical emergency landing

This shame when you can’t walk

Shame when you can’t fuck

Shame when you’re home alone sobbing on another friday night

Say ‘This is my life

This is my precious life

This is how badly I want to live’

Say Sometimes you have to keep pulling yourself up by the whip

Take punch after punch to the face forward

To the head up

And still uncurl the fist of your grief like a warm blanket on the cool earth of your faith

Say every waiting room is the clime where you will finally take shape to fit into the keyhole of your own gritty heart

To open mercy

To open your siren throat

Say every fever is a love note to remind you that there better things to be than cool

Fuck cool

Fuck every pair of skinny jeans

From the month your muscles started atrophying to a size two

Say fuck you to anyone who asks you if you eat enough

Say how do you not know that is so fucking rude

Remember you never have an obligation to quiet the hurricane inside your chest

Especially on a day when another healthy person suggests ‘you would feel so much better if you would just focus your breath into a Buddha beam of light”

Like that light is going to miraculously dissolve the knife that’s been churning in your kidneys for the last six fucking months

Say Sunshine, please go back to your job at the aroma therapy aisle at Whole Foods and leave me alone

I know how to talk to God

and God does not expect me to use my inside voice

God knows how goddamn hard I am working to become a smooth stone

So I can skip on my back across this red red sea

So I can trust deep in my screaming bones

Everything is a lesson

Lesson #1 through infinity

You will never have a greater opportunity to learn to love your enemy than when your enemy is your own red blood

Truce is a word made of velvet

Truce is a word made of velvet

Wear it everywhere you go

Andrea Gibson “How to be Sick” (via ohandreagibson)
Source: ohandreagibson

erwinschrodingerofficial:

slightmayhem:

erwinschrodingerofficial:

An open letter to my teachers: captions aren’t “distracting”, they’re a fucking necessity

With the rise of technology in classrooms, it’s pretty much impossible to get through a school day without having to watch an educational video. Here’s the thing though (@ teachers):

Captions are NOT a privilege! You’re not going out of your way or “doing me a favor”. Captions are a necessary support for some students.

(Important note: I am not Deaf or hearing impaired, and Deaf/hearing impaired students are far from the only ones who benefit from captions. Students with sensory issues may need to limit noise at times, and would only be able to watch videos with captions because of that. Students with a variety of learning disabilities may not be able to process auditory information as quickly as they process visual information, like me. And lastly, there are abled students who find they process information better when they read it instead of hear it! Point being, there are any number of reasons why a student might request for you to put captions on a video, but I guarantee you it’s never to cause a disruption.)

In my opinion, it’s pretty bad if you’re not enabling them automatically (putting students on the spot and opening them up to ridicule when they ask for the supports they need is not cool—better to provide the supports in the first place without being asked). But it’s even worse if a student asks for you to turn on the captions, and you don’t listen! And when you make up an excuse like “but captions are distracting!”, that is sending a message to disabled students’ that their needs are less important than the comfort of their abled counterparts.

The only acceptable excuse I can think of for not turning on captions is when the only available ones are auto generated. In which case… Do your job and check before showing the video, and if it doesn’t have captions, then be sure to provide your own captions and/or transcript for the video. And if you’re not going to take the time to do that, don’t show a video in the first place. Furthermore, NEVER assign a podcast/video to listen to for homework unless you know for a fact that there is a transcript or caption option available. A five minute video is a five minute assignment for most abled people. Without captions or transcripts, a five minute video can be a twenty minute assignment for disabled people.

Foreign language teachers: it’s even harder for students to process spoken language when it isn’t their first language, so enable foreign language captions. I understand that enabling English captions defeats the purpose, but at least enable captions in the language of the class.

Teachers, your ableist discomfort surrounding captions is contrary to what you should believe as a teacher. As a teacher, you should want to provide your students with every opportunity to succeed that you are capable of providing to them. Captions take an extra click of a mouse; they are not a burden. If you deny reasonable requests from students that will improve the quality of their learning simply on the basis of your preference, comfort, teaching style, etc., you’re just a bad teacher.

This also applies in workplaces. I am a hard of hearing medical professional and I cannot tell you the number of required videos I have to watch in a year that are completely inaccessible. Hope I don’t need this info.

It absolutely applies to workplaces and other professional environments. It even applies to watching a fun video or going to a movie in theaters with your friends. Captioned movies are hard to come by and only play in theaters a few times a week, and I know that can be hard to schedule around, but they are a necessity.