Day: May 1, 2018

Click here to support Help Disabled Mother and Daughter Pay for Medication

sssibilance:

I’m Paige. She/her or they/them.  I have bipolar type 1, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and chronic pain syndrome.  I use a cane and a wheelchair, but am mostly homebound and unable to work.  I’m in the super long SSI app process.  Meanwhile, my cripple mum and I are living off her tiny SSDI payments.  I get food stamps, she does not.  I try to get editing work (I have my MA in English), but it’s hard to come by.

My late father’s family has disowned me for identifying as queer/genderqueer (they think it’s a bad word) and “panhandling” (having a fundraiser).  My mother’s family is anti-queer, so we don’t have much support.  I have Celiac disease, and my gluten free food is more expensive than normal; we struggle to pay for food when the food stamps run out.

Please, please RT if you can.  Any donation amount helps; truly.  I am also available to do editing, copywriting, and resumè makeover work.  Thank you.

Click here to support Help Disabled Mother and Daughter Pay for Medication

Still more gratifying than it should be, though, knowing what’s going on there.

Maybe especially with the fun pattern of “dentist inevitably tears your gums all to hell, then makes unflattering assumptions and lectures you about hygiene, is possibly even rougher the next time”. Nope, that’s just how they are because lousy collagen 😵

I really liked the one who was all, “That shouldn’t cause bleeding! *purposely jabs at a few other places with the pointy metal implement to see what happens* *promptly decides it’s my fault I keep bleeding at them* *starts lecturing*”

(Then again, I also ran into one who decided that obvious demineralization from the celiac must also be poor hygiene. That’s not how anything works…)

Ridiculous Annoyance OTD: Forgetting to do a thorough antiseptic mouthwash rinse before I went to bed. Popcorn strikes again! 😬

I should maybe go ahead and try buying some “hulless” variety, with the aggravatingly fragile gums and my apparent inability to stop eating the stuff. When I know full well there’s a decent chance I’ll be feeling it later.

I could tell last night that some inflammation was starting up, and while the rinsing doesn’t totally fix it? It usually calms down a lot faster if I do. Thank you executive function! 🙄

This time it’s making it hard to chew on the one side of the mouth where chewing works. Both the top and the bottom at the back of that side. Annoying, hopefully it will calm down again (and a couple of molars will stop freaking itching too) ASAP. Soft food in the meantime.

‘McStrike’: McDonald’s workers walk out over zero-hours contracts

them-witches:

McDonald’s workers in Britain are striking in a dispute over zero-hours contracts and working conditions that is being closely observed by both the fast food industry and trade unions.

Staff from branches in Manchester and Watford will join colleagues in Crayford and Cambridge as part of a ”McStrike” as workers demand a minimum £10-an-hour living wage.

Members of the Bakers’ Food and Allied Workers Union are also asking for a choice of fixed-hour contracts, the end of unequal pay for young workers, and union recognition.

Happy May Day, everyone!!!

‘McStrike’: McDonald’s workers walk out over zero-hours contracts

genderqueerpositivity:

I’m so done with entertaining opinions about queer identity from people who don’t identify as queer. It’s easy to look in from the outside and complain about how queer as an identifier is “vague” or “useless.”

That is, it’s easy to reject queer as “vague” if you’re completely unwilling to listen to queer people. It’s easy to say that queer is “useless” if you have the ability to identify with labels that are already widely understood and widely accepted in LGBT spaces. What is telling, to me, is that most of those who I’ve seen reject the reality of queer as an identity are those who have no use for it.

For many of us, queer is obviously not a useless term.

When I was questioning, when I am questioning, in the future when I am questioning again–queer is my constant. A fact about who I am, a connection to my community and history, an open canvas of possibilities. Clarity.

Even as a constant, queer allows for fluidity and change. How I identify has changed a few times over the past decade. Across all that time, the queer community welcomed and supported and celebrated me, not in spite of my other labels, but because of them.

If, ten years from now, I identify in some other way than I do now, I know that I will still be queer, and that I’ll still be welcome in the queer community.

The same has not been true of my experience in the LGBT community. The farther I’ve moved away from being easily categorized as L, G, B, or T–the more intracommunity hostility I’ve encountered.

And, even so, I’m queer. Sometimes queer as in fuck you, always queer as in proud.

When the constraints of the gender binary and even the limitiations of nonbinary identity are too stifling, when I am a gender that is outside of what we consider to be gender altogether, when I am no gender at all, I am still queer.

As long as the LGBT community continues to define LGB identity as “For SGA’s Only”, I am still queer.

Queer is the rock I’ve held onto and the rock I’m constantly tossing through the window of every queerphobic and transphobic assholes’ house of cards.

Queer is and will always be the most accurate and most honest way for me to identify myself. Gender: queer. Sexuality: queer.

Queer is the quickest way for me to communicate that I’m not cisgender or straight without being forced to other myself.

“Why can’t you just say you aren’t straight, everyone knows what that means?” I thought we were fighting for the end of heteronormativity and straightness-as-default. Or is that a right reserved only for those at the front of the acronym?

Queer is breaking down gates and replacing them with solidarity.

Queer is smashing binaries and replacing them with freedom.

Queer is how these words are mine, and another queer person will have a different story, and yet we’re connected by shared pride and history.

Queer is anything but vague or useless to me.

jewishdragon:

rosymamacita:

gokuma:

12drakon:

redgrieve:

lierdumoa:

greenbryn:

whatthecurtains:

cthullhu:

nonomella:

Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me

Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age

“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”

-Neil Gaiman on Coraline

@nightlovechild

This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”

Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much

An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.

Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning

i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.

Also, in an interview, he said that Coraline was partially based on a story his not yet 6 year old daughter would tell him 

SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?

GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.