Day: May 11, 2018

Current plan: enough food for lunch too, most likely!

Running low on spoons anyway, but the main thought here was that if I order food in, I can hopefully have energy left to get my hair trimmed and washed too. Overdue, and ‘tis the season for sweaty heads đŸ˜©

That place had great reviews, and jerk sounded appealing. But, the prices are reasonable enough that the delivery minimum took a bit of doing for one person. Wouldn’t have added a drink otherwise, either.

But, I can’t say I’ll be sorry to have half a chicken to myself either 😅

jellyberries:

floozycaucus:

Saying that a disabled child or adult “will never live independently” is such a slap in the face. I think it’s unacceptable and I think it’s lazy. No one will ever live independently! No one is living independent of medical care, emotional support, and goods/services provided by others. Humans are a deeply interdependent species. Disabled people are sometimes rendered ~dependent~ specifically on a state or family apparatus in a way that makes them vulnerable to abuse or exploitation, but this isn’t the only way to experience “”dependency.”“

Some people are just told that they are “independent” because their lives and needs are normalized to such an extent that the enormous amount of support they receive is invisible.

I feel the need to summarize two other commenters posts on this because, while well meaning, just glosses over things which is a problem.

When people say “will never live independently”, they aren’t talking about the medical system, emotional support, or goods/services. They’re talking about being able to count change. They’re talking about not scalding themselves while running hot water, [
] being able to feed themselves, being able to protect themselves, and countless other things that most people take for granted.

We know most people still rely on one another, on their family, for help. But the fact is that disabled people face these “normalized” issues and then have more so on top. To imply that the level of help needed for both disabled and not disabled and that it’s really NBD is detrimental. It’s kind of like the whole “I don’t see race, we’re all human”. On the surface yes we are human, yes we still need help, but that ignores and glosses over their situations that makes them unique. Sure you need to ask your parents for financial help from time to time, but do you need direct help to do the most basic every day things? Do you need to be spoon fed, need help showering or going to the bathroom, need help talking, help walking from room to room? Do you need a nurse to come to your home?

Like. I see people talking about how moving out of your household is a western culture thing as if that’s what it means by living independently. Which honestly isn’t that true, families will still move out when it gets too crowded you’re just not expected to as a young adult. Back in my mother’s home country several generations live together and help each other with groceries or cooking and things. But you can’t kid yourself in comparing niceties to constant essential aid that is purely for living. You can teach an able bodied person to remember a number in a heartbeat. Doing so with someone who has short term memory loss due to severe brain trauma? Not so simple and I say that from experience.

My point is that disabled people need extra help and that’s okay!! It’s nothing to be ashamed of nor does it make you a burden. It’s a part of life and that extra help is one given lovingly and willingly. Saying you get more help than usual isn’t an attack on your abilities.

And also as a side note you WILL inevitably live without any help from family members or friends, just not as a young adult. It can happen when you’re 40 or even 50 although I knew a few who were forced to be completely independent at 19. I feel like we’re expected to be some self made, worldly, experienced business man making 6 figures right out of high school or college. But it’s just not true and parental wisdom will always be there for you.

superqueerartsyblog:

A short comic about a girl, her mother and their different Black clothes.

I made this in late August this year for SeriefrĂ€mjandets yearly contest. The topic was comics for young people
 and guess what, I actually won! 

En serie med otroligt bra kÀnsla för karaktÀrer, med god kÀnsla för hur utseende och subkulturer betyder i ungdomens sökande efter en identitet. En serie som man ser pÄ första anblick har hjÀrta, och som subtilt pekar pÄ Àmnen som andra skulle göra till huvudpoÀngen i historien. Som en liten bonus fÄr vi en tjej i huvudrollen som kÀnns levande och som man kÀnner starkt inför.

I’m incredibly surprised, happy and grateful to have won. Since it got so much praise, I figured I should post it here. Thanks to Keetande for helping me with the tricky translation! 

Source: eliasericson

autismserenity:

kickair8p:

cookinguptales:

Today is the anniversary of the Capitol Crawl, an event in 1990 in which disabled activists pulled themselves from their wheelchairs and quite literally crawled up the steps of the Capitol Building. This was done to protest the living conditions for disabled people in the United States, and it was done to pass the ADA. And fuck yeah, they did it.

These activists along with hundreds of others managed to secure rights for disabled Americans for decades to come. However, all that heroic work is now being threatened by H.R. 620.

I’ve been talking a lot about H.R. 620 lately because frankly, it scares the shit out of me. It’s a bill that’s designed to strip rights from people with disabilities, and it has already passed the House of Representatives.

A little background:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, the year I was born. Because of that, I have lived under its protections for just about my entire life. When my high school tried to prevent me from graduating because of my medical struggles, we were able to use the ADA to procure a 504 plan. When my dorms and classrooms were inaccessible, it was the ADA that got me accommodations. I am afforded extra assistance when traveling, when voting, at the doctor, and the only reason I can do any of these things is because of the ADA.

I now have a college diploma and a full-time job. I would have neither without the ADA. It’s not a perfect solution, but the protections it does provide have been invaluable in my life and the lives of my family. (My family members with a different disability have also Gone Through Some Shit but that’s really their story to tell.)

I think most of Americans know that some semblance of protections for PWD exist. I’m not sure most Americans understand how difficult they are to use. It’s not like the ADA provides, idk, inspectors who go around looking at buildings to see if they’re accessible. They don’t take complaints from PWD if the elevator in their building stopped working and their landlord won’t fix it. There is no safety & health inspector of the disabled world. The ADA is instead enforced via lawsuit.

To put it simply — if a disabled person has been discriminated against, they have the right to get a lawyer and sue the establishment that has discriminated against them. They cannot sue for damages. They can only get the place to change. (Though some courts have levied additional monetary damages for noncompliance.)

This is already a pretty arduous process. I mean, you have to get a lawyer and go to court. No one enjoys doing that, especially when you know there is no financial reward. But H.R. 620 aims to make this process much, much harder. It requires PWD to gather a ton of evidence and documentation, it requires a system of letter-writing and complaints, just a mess of things that many PWD will not have the time, money, energy, and/or know-how to be able to do.

More importantly, though, H.R. 620 changes how businesses need to comply. H.R. 620 aims to change it so a business or institution has six months before they even need to start showing a plan to change. I repeat. This is not six months before the work is done. This is six months before they even need to start moving. Six months would have been an entire semester when I was in college! And even then, all they need to do is show “progress”. Progress can mean anything! It sure doesn’t mean that I can get in the building!

In effect, this would strip PWD of their ability to actually have the ADA enforced. It puts a very onerous process on the back of the people being discriminated against so they’ll be too confused, tired, or burdened to exercise their rights in the first place. And then, if they get through that wholly unnecessary roadblock, the place they need to get into may not actually become accessible for — well, ever. There is no part of the desired amendments to the ADA that would actually require accessibility. Ever. Which is mind-blowing.

H.R. 620 is popular amongst business conglomerates and real estate developers, for obvious reasons. They don’t want to deal with the extra expenses that come with making their properties accessible. Because of this, they have started a misinformation campaign saying that PWD are using the ADA to attack small businesses with frivolous lawsuits, which puts undue burden on people ~just trying to make it~.

  1. Wow, talking about what “burdens” PWD are. Like that’s not a misconception that leads to self-harm and discrimination every day.
  2. There is no evidence that there is an outbreak of frivolous lawsuits. There are a couple lawyers who have been engaging in fraudulent lawsuits, but frankly, it’s not hard to find an unscrupulous lawyer, and none of them have been successful in court.

  3. Even if there were some uncontrollable outbreak, taking away protections is not the way to deal with this. I can’t imagine this being the reaction to any other group’s civil rights. “Oh, well, some lawyer’s being a dick, better take away civil rights for an entire marginalized group just in case someone tries to abuse it!.” There are so many better ways to deal with misconduct than systematically stripping a marginalized group of its civil liberties.

  4. Again, PWD CANNOT MAKE MONEY FROM THESE LAWSUITS. There is no one sitting in some wheelchair made of gold that they got from taking sandwich shops from cute grandparents who just wanted The American Dream ℱ. This is a boogeyman that does not exist — but it does play into a lot of nasty stereotypes about disabled people.
  5. It is telling and depressing both that PWD fighting for their right to live with the rest of society is being framed as “frivolous”. So many things that disabled people need are framed as frivolous every day. So many things people insist we don’t really need. This bill would deny us access to stores, hospitals, schools — you know, the things we need to survive. But even if it were just some shop down the road? The ability to live in equality with our peers IS NOT FRIVOLOUS. Our enforced separation from the rest of society has led to a series of abuses against us that can only be rectified if we are allowed to live lives as independently and openly as possible.
  6. The ADA was passed almost thirty years ago. Properties that are not accessible have already had almost thirty years to fix this. Businesses aren’t given thirty years to make sure their fire safety measures are up to code. Restaurants aren’t given thirty years to make sure their health measures are up to code. This is a law that already wasn’t being enforced, and now you act like this is some new issue that’s onerous on property owners? Good lord. Historic buildings were already exempt — what, are y’all just waiting until every building is old enough to be historic? Jesus.

The long and short of it is that the businesses who make money off of our oppression are trying to turn us into the villains of the story so they can pass legislation that will remove their financial responsibilities and take away our civil rights.

H.R. 620 has already passed the House. It moves on to the Senate shortly. Please, please call your senators and tell them that you support the ADA and want them to vote against H.R. 620. So few people are even talking about this issue, but it is a matter of life and death for a lot of people. This, paired with our current administration’s other crimes against the elderly and disabled, is looking to make this country uninhabitable for PWD. And that’s terrifying.

Please help us.

(Note: If you’d like more info on H.R. 620, the ACLU has put out a handy guide on myths and misconceptions about the bill.)

March 12th 1990

I checked (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620) and the Senate hasn’t done anything with it yet as of this writing (May 7 2018) so keep an eye on it and start educating those senators!

butterflyinthewell:

The more important a message is, and the more social pressure I’m under to deliver it properly



the more likely it is that I will screw it up or not deliver at all because my brain forgets what words are or how to say them.

Being able to speak and being able communicate via speech are extremely different things.

People who hear an autistic person talk love to assume speech means no communication difficulties. That is so far opposite to the truth that it’s beyond a lie.

If you are not autistic and have no speech issues of your own, you cannot understand how this feels. 

You can’t grasp that rising sense of panic or the way your vision gets super sharp yet blurry at the same time. 

You can’t grasp how your eyes can’t stand to see faces when this panic rises in you, so you look to the side or turn completely away from anybody who talks to you in person(usually to ask “did you make that phone call yet?!”). 

You can’t fathom weird pressure you get in your teeth from grimacing or the choking feeling of trying to swallow your spit past the knot in your throat because you’re under pressure and what are words again?

You can’t understand how it feels to be staring blankly at somebody in front of you or at the wall with the phone receiver pressed tight to your ear while questions are being fired faster than you can comprehend or answer them. 

You don’t know the frustration and terror of realizing the very important words you need to say have completely fled your mind at a moment when everybody expects an instantaneous response.

You can’t experience the embarrassment and odd relief that happens when you stammer something that has no relevance to the situation or you say “I don’t know” in response to questions you know the answers to.

You can’t understand what it’s like to collapse in a meltdown afterward because you don’t know if you just screwed up something people say is so simple. 

You can’t feel the dread of having to wait until tomorrow and face all of that again to find out if you did the thing right or not.

Stop saying I don’t have communication difficulties because I can talk.

glumshoe:

vampireapologist:

it’s so common for “being straight & cis is normal” people to get hung up on what’s most evolutionarily “efficient” like they come at you with “if Men and Women didn’t have sex and continue the species we wouldn’t have made it this far so it doesn’t make sense to be anything but Straight and Cis,” and I really want to ask them when humans have Ever Ever Ever picked the most efficient route. Why did we ever leave the equator then in the first place, to willfully live on tundras and freezing islands where not much grows? 

Why did people move to mountains where future generations needed to be born with bigger lungs to breathe right?

Why have humans historically, for tens of thousands of years, cared for the sick and the disabled and the injured even thought that wouldn’t be an “efficient” use of resources? Why did we ever develop a sense of compassion at all?

Why did any human ever leave home to cross an ocean, or a desert, or a jungle, hoping to find a way to live whether they ended up?

We have never followed the rule of “efficiency.” In fact, read any reputable paper on human evolution and success, and you’ll see it argue that our refusal to follow the “efficient” road is what actually made the human species so successful–that our unrivaled adaptability and unprecedented resilience in an ever-changing world is what put us on top for so long.

So if you can’t keep up with “all these new genders and sexualities,” it seems like you’re the inefficient one, the weak link, and you’re going to get picked out and left behind.

Humans consistently make choices that are weird even by our own standards and that’s about the only thing that is consistent about us. 

smidvargandthegang:

fierceawakening:

callmebliss:

feynites:

minesottafatspoollegend:

i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”

When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.

Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.

The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.

The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler – or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.

But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:

Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!

Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!

Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!

Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs
 *insert iconic evil laugh*

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).

And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.

::closes tab, shuts off computer, and proceeds to have the best day ever just by knowing this exists::

i will always reblog Evil Chancellor Traytor

this is how children play

funereal-disease:

It’s occurred to me recently that our collective idea of “old” and “middle-aged” names seems to be lagging about a generation behind. The OED defines “middle-aged” as “between 45 and 65″; “old” is over 65. However, what people call “old-lady names” tend to be names that very few living people still have, whereas people with “middle-aged names” are more likely to be 65 or over than to be fiftysomething. 

It seems that the relative “oldness” of a name isn’t necessarily something that corresponds with the actual ages of people who bear it. Rather, there are certain names that have become linked with certain ages and ossified there, even as the bearers age and die. 

There are a few possible explanations for this. One is exposure to older media, in which names like Ethel and Gertrude accurately reflect the 70something demographic instead of the “90something or dead” one. Another is childhood associations: if you knew a 40-year-old Linda 20 years ago, she’s probably still 40 in your mind. A third is our collective inability to understand the passage of time: “what do you mean 1990 was almost 30 years ago?!” A fourth is the Berenst(a)(e)in conspiracy.

Anyway, to test this hypothesis, I asked Tumblr users at large what names they associated with old women and middle-aged women respectively. Data, analysis, and methodology under the cut.

Keep reading

pervocracy:

The United States has the largest GDP in the world, larger than the entire EU combined.  Even per capita we’re in the top 10, with most of the countries ranked above us being small ones with lots of oil wells.  We also have the largest government budget in the world, the largest Gross National Income in the world, and have the most per capita wealth in the world.

We are not a poor country.

We should not, looking at the numbers, be in a state of desperation.  We should not be in the kind of disaster triage situation where it’s acceptable to write some people off because we don’t have the resources to help them all.  If any country in the world has the money to take care of its people, it should be us.

I routinely see patients who have been taking veterinary antibiotics because they couldn’t afford human medication.

“Budgeting isn’t easy, this country is like a modest household where everyone has to tighten their belt,” people try to tell us.  Bullshit.  This country is like an ultra-deluxe megamansion with people starving to death in the basement.

I don’t know if this makes me a democratic socialist or a socialist or a communist or whatever, but I’m whatever kind of “ist” you need to be to live in a country where everyone can get medicine that is labeled for human use.

bittersnurr:

karalora:

pervocracy:

pervocracy:

Proposal for a new law: you get a maximum of ten million dollars.

Yep, no one living or doing business in the US is allowed to own more than $10 million in personal assets.  Investments, savings, real estate, cars, gold, everything; you hit that cap, and anything over is seized and redistributed as no-strings cash payments to everyone else.  You get caught sneakily using a shell corporation or offshore accounts or anything else clever to subvert that limit, it’s a criminal penalty.  Greed in the First Degree.

I’ll be merciful here; that’s ten million per individual so your spouse and children can each have their own ten million, it’ll go up with inflation, and I won’t even include your house.  (Maximum one house per adult, and only if you actually live in it, so don’t get creative.  Farms/ranches can be counted as homes, but only if you live full-time and personally work on them.)

Yeah, this means that certain people would lose literally billions of dollars.  But they’d still have ten million!  How bad can you feel for them?  That’s still enough money that you can live comfortably without putting in another day of work in your life.  It’s very hard to make a case that anyone needs more than that.

I haven’t worked out exactly what the redistribution payments would be, but my extremely-poorly-sketched guess is at least $50K per non-ten-millionaire person when the law first goes into effect.  Not enough to be set for life, but it would be a hell of a lifeline for a lot of families.  More importantly, there would be a continuing benefit from companies being unable to divert all their profits to upper management and wealthy investors.  They’d have nothing to do with that money except reinvest it in workers and facilities.

And I wouldn’t worry about demotivating workers.  If an ordinary person is debating whether it’s worth their time to go back to school or apply for a management position or open their own shop, they’re not going to be thinking “Why even bother? All I stand to earn is ten million dollars.”  Not if they have any sense of perspective.

Oh, but high achievers will stop working or leave the country once they get their ten million.  Good!  That’s the point!  They’ve earned all the money they need, so they should let someone else have a chance!  If they love their job and don’t want to quit, they can still do it for a minimal salary and distribute the rest among their employees.  Or they can quit, and we can learn that this whole “only ultra-rare magically gifted people can be successful CEOs, so they deserve to be treated like princes” thing was a wealth-worshipping myth anyway.

We’re in an economic emergency situation right now.  20% of households with children don’t have enough to eat.  500,000 people are homeless.  More than a quarter of people struggle to pay their medical bills.  Sorry, but it’s a sad fact: Ultra-rich people are a useless luxury that we can’t afford.

I haven’t thought through all the details or economic impacts or long-term consequences of this, but I think by now it’s clear that the people who make the real laws don’t either.

To all the people replying “but rich people will just leave”:

– Well I certainly hope the door doesn’t hit their asses on the way out.  They have no irreplaceable talents or knowledge.

– There will be measures in place to prevent them from taking more than $10m with them when they move out.

– The US is a huge market and has a tremendously valuable workforce.  My plan might not work for starting a new country on an empty island, but we’ve got shit worth sticking around for.  Even if McDonald’s moves out, it will still be worthwhile to sell hamburgers to Americans.  Even if Microsoft moves out, America will still have lots of talented software engineers.  I don’t think we need billionaires to organize all our bountiful supply and demand into a functional economy.

– Foreign companies won’t be allowed to do any business here if any of their employees/partners/investors has over $10m.  This will cut us off from a lot of business, but again, because we are the US and have so much to offer, it will be worthwhile for smaller foreign businesses to trade with us, or possibly even for large ones to retire all the rich guys to come into compliance.

– I’m not entirely serious about this and I’m no economist.  I just wanted to entertain the notion of radically interrupting America’s slide into oligarchy, of taking action based on the premise that vast inequality is wrong rather than merely unfortunate.  We have to do something about this situation, so fuck it, here’s something.

I like this idea.

It reminds me of an idea I’ve entertained with a similar level of semi-seriousness: requiring all holders of federal-level public office to donate their personal assets (money and real estate) to the government as a condition of taking office. For the duration of their government service, they live in assigned middle-class housing and receive a salary equal to the median income across the entire country. Whatever said income is at the time they leave office, that becomes their pension. They are barred from receiving income from any other source, for life.

It’s tyrannical and wildly impractical, but the benefits speak for themselves. The 1% would be discouraged from holding public office (since they would forfeit their wealth), and lawmakers would have every incentive to set policies that raise the median, instead of funneling everything to the top.

Also like.

Currently people on ssi have an asset limit of 2000$. No I did not miss a 0 or anything. For perspective a wheelchair usually costs at least that by itself and this applies to a bunch of stuff, you literally are banned from saving for emergencies.

So what do you do? You go over the limit and you have to spend it. This would not have any effect on EARNED MONEY, as long as you spend it immediately upon making it. It doesn’t prevent making money, just hoarding it.

So basically this would be encoragement to say, pay your fucking employees instead of sitting on your riches like a fucking dragon as the economy tanks