I know it seems early– does it seem

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I know it seems early– does it seem early?– but it’s time to start making the holiday décor. That’s what I spent this weekend doing. My fingers are black with pine resin and shredded from needles and rose hips, but the first batch of wreaths are set, and I promise they’ll last the season– the greens everyone uses are all in from the same truck. (We local harvest a lot, but the main body of all the greens are balsam boughs from Canada; nothing else can match that aroma. We mix with local pine, juniper, spruce, fir, and cedar as we can find it to harvest, but that powerful beautiful smell is balsam.) This baby features most of the above plus local rose hips. We’ll surely stick a bow on it to finish it, but we do that last-minute.

magickedteacup: curlicuecal: deathcomes4u: greenjudy: joebidenfanclub: it seems so strange to...

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magickedteacup:

curlicuecal:

deathcomes4u:

greenjudy:

joebidenfanclub:

it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?

My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.

It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.

It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.

I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.

According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.

Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.

I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.

(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).

Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.

A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)

The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”

More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.

The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway

Out foraging for greens and such, my two younger sisters pause...

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Out foraging for greens and such, my two younger sisters pause to analyze the droppings of various animals. And apparently contribute. #latergram #yesterday #farmlife

Gotta drive across the state today. What shall I ponder,

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Gotta drive across the state today. What shall I ponder, on my drive?

1) Kes and Shara’s tirefire-awesome relationship

2) The ending of the porny epilogue to Found Cat, which is almost post-able

3) My failures as a human

4) Logistics of how to get all the shit done in the next two weeks that I need to

5) How exactly Leia and Kylo’s confrontation is going to go down in Never Wrote A Letter (I’ve written, like, the leadup to it)

6) why my car is making that noise

7) how much i don’t want to go back to my dayjob this coming week

8) why god why is new york state so fucking wide

?

The answer to the question posed in the previous post is

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The answer to the question posed in the previous post is none of the above, I’m going to cry about my BFF’s mom’s horrible cancer prognosis instead. :(
Long boring solo car rides are, at least, great for getting s good cry in. I’ve paused in Little Falls to rehydrate though. Three and a half more hours to go.

timeforalongstory: eridaniepsilon: ouyangdan: dadbob: contrary to popular belief, someone who is...

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timeforalongstory:

eridaniepsilon:

ouyangdan:

dadbob:

contrary to popular belief, someone who is fluent in their second language (L2) is unlikely to slip into their first language (L1)  in these circumstances:

if someone just said something to them in L2 (this a big unconscious cue, and you’d be really unlikely to respond in L1 right after that)

when swearing in the middle of a sentence (e.g. “oh merde, i forgot my keys!”)

during sex

when speaking to someone they normally speak to in L2

it is slightly more common in these circumstances:

swearing, as long it’s not part of a sentence (e.g. they might just mutter “merde” if they forgot their keys)

if they’re surprised (especially if falling/tripping or experiencing sudden pain!)

when speaking to someone they normally speak to in L1

in their sleep or talking to themselves

when very disoriented, such as when concussed or on certain drugs

that being said, it is very common for people to intentionally use their first language in front of people who don’t speak it for a variety of reasons (they might use a short expression they only know in L1, call their partner pet names, dirty talk during sex because their partner finds it attractive) – but this is on purpose!

also this doesn’t account for people who grew up in an environment where people often mix multiple languages in their speech (e.g. spanglish or franglais) – in that case, they may accidentally drop an L1 swear into an L2 sentence, though they’ll still generally stick to L2 when speaking to people who only speak that language

also: if you for some reason forget a word in L2 (or L3 or L4) in many cases your brain will automatically try to recall it from the last language you learned, not necessarily your mother tongue/L1. it’s a really nifty little phenomenon that has the bane of my existence for some time.

When we are with her daughters, my former boss asked me to speak to her in French, and as I spend 5 years talking to her in English, I automatically skip back to English afer a while.

“also: if you for some reason forget a word in L2 (or L3 or L4) in many cases your brain will automatically try to recall it from the last language you learned, not necessarily your mother tongue/L1.”

YOU MEAN THIS IS NOT JUST SOMETHING MY BRAIN DOES TO FUCK WITH ME