went out to dinner downtown. misread the street signs, got a parking ticket. but Dude is an old hand

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went out to dinner downtown. misread the street signs, got a parking ticket. but Dude is an old hand at parking tickets now, and immediately read it.

7:19 AM. Not PM. By regulations, it’s not illegal to park at the listed location at 7:19 AM, so the ticket is invalid. He can just mail it in and mark that it’s invalid, and it’s not very likely that he’ll have to come in and defend it. (If he does, he works right down near the office, so.)

Probably everyone on that street who got a ticket (the side was parked solid) would have the same issue on their ticket, but many of them won’t notice and won’t contest it. 

So the takeaway is, always check the details of the ticket and be ready to fight.

… 

I’m still upset about my health insurance problems but I did the math and I guess if I have to pay the penalty for not having insurance for the whole year that would only be $300something, and that sucks, plus I’m uninsured, but it’s better than I was afraid of. 

Of course, I make little enough that if I were enrolled I’d pay nothing, so that’s $300something more than it would have cost me to have access to healthcare, and that sucks, and if you think I won’t cry and kick up a fuss and write a thousand angry letters about how they never notified me and how was I to psychically be informed of needing to renew my service if the only thing they ever actually sent to me was the form for my taxes? but. Anyway. At least I’m not upset to the point of nausea about it.

I’ve gone years without health insurance before. I don’t want to do it again, I was sick with anxiety the entire time, but what the fuck am I supposed to do. All I can do is wait to find out if they accept me even though open enrollment is over and it’s only open if you’ve had a life event change. I meet all the criteria, except nothing changed; my life event is that I found out that they fucking booted me without fucking telling me. 

I don’t know what the point is of having hoops for the sake of hoops, but there they are, and that’s one of the “features” that really stuck out to me about the ACHA, how many loopholes there were that you had to make it through, so that you could be perfectly eligible in every way but if you hadn’t gone through the hoops in the right order you couldn’t get anything, even if you were the textbook case the program was designed for. That’s how any social services are in America, and it’s fucking sickening and obnoxious. Ugh. 

New York, that’s cool that you just passed a

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New York, that’s cool that you just passed a free college bill, but you also just voted down single-payer healthcare, again, and a bill that would raise the marriage age from 14 to 18 which has now been voted down a staggering number of times, so what the fuck is up with that, before we give ourselves carpal tunnel jerking Andy Cuomo off for this?

The Ableist, Racist, Classist Underpinnings Of 'Laziness' - The Establishment

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dr-archeville:

Hello, I’m a lazy Millennial.

In other words, I’m from a generation that has worked more hours for less money than any generation before me, but occasionally I eat a granola bar for breakfast instead of pouring myself a bowl of cereal.  According to some, including many writers of online thinkpieces, that’s enough to make me “lazy.”

But the problem isn’t me, or young people in general, or any group that’s historically been decried for its idleness.  Like Millennials, groups that are called “lazy” are often the hardest-working people around.  They’re just subject to ableism, racism, classism, and other bigotry that codes exploitation or exhaustion as “unwillingness to work.”

I myself have had a very confusing relationship with “laziness” from a young age, often being called “lazy” for enjoying reading and video games by the same parents who praised me for always getting my homework done on time.

Needless to say, I became rather confused about the quality of my work ethic.  Was I lazy or not?  In my teens, I developed an anxiety disorder and a perfectionism that made academic shirking impossible, but the constant state of worry disrupted my sleep and left me so exhausted that I would often come home from school and go straight to bed for a nap.  Sometimes, all I could do was lay in bed, awake, ruminating on everything I could possibly worry about.

But because I was in bed, this was called “laziness.”

I worked so little at that office job, I couldn’t believe it.  I could spend multiple hours each day scrolling through Tumblr or playing on social media.  My “work” time involved reading articles vaguely related to my work — mostly because there wasn’t much work for me to do.  Compared to being on my feet all day, being expected to work every moment on the clock, it was nothing.

I worked three times as hard at my food and customer service jobs as I did at any of my digital marketing positions.  And yet contemptuous thinkpiecers keep on describing people who work in those industries as “lazy.”  Why don’t you get a REAL job?  Like reading Tumblr while sitting at a desk, instead of busting your ass at McDonald’s.

According to Dr. Alison Munoff, a licensed clinical psychologist, “laziness” is nothing more than a value judgement.

“‘Laziness’ is not a personality trait, it is simply a matter of a lack of proper motivation and reinforcement, as it is a behavioral pattern rather than a part of who we are,” says Dr. Munoff.   “The ability to actively approach a task in a time-effective manner changes depending on the task and its value in our lives. For example, in a situation of obtaining limited resources, people find themselves quite motivated and resourceful, meaning that this task is simply a priority based on its value and necessity, and has little to do with someone’s personality.  Unfortunately I find that when asked about the first time people were told they were being ‘lazy,’ it was from a parent or caregiver who was unsuccessfully attempting to motivate the child without a good understanding of the way this idea would be carried forward.”

In nature, animals spend a lot of their time being idle.   Most of the footage shot of big cats like lions are of them lazing around.  Part of this is because many of them are nocturnal, but it’s also because animals will hunt, forage, and eat until they’re full, and then most of the rest of their time is spent conserving energy.  Laying around doing pretty much nothing is completely natural.  It’s adaptive.  Yet laziness has this negative connotation in many human societies.  And that negative connotation is often deployed in ableist, racist, and classist ways.

Today, we can all enjoy reasonably priced produce thanks to the many exploited Latin undocumented immigrant workers picking our fruit and vegetables — labor that is so intensive that we “non-lazy” white people simply can’t handle it.  And let’s not forget that all of this land was stolen from the Indigenous tribes that were here before we floated over and laid claim to it all.  Isn’t stealing other people’s hard work supposed to be lazy?

Or is it just that it’s easier to call people lazy than admit that you exploited them?

Even if you’re not racist, you’ve probably used the idea of laziness in a way that hurts a lot of people.  I still struggle with an anxiety disorder and go through bouts of depression, and a lot of what’s involved in these mental illnesses looks like what people call “laziness.”  Depression saps your energy and makes everything seem pointless.  Anxiety is paralyzing, making even some of the simplest tasks (like calling people on the phone) seem daunting, so I avoid them.

Combine the two and you’ve got me huddled into a ball on the bed, unable to do anything but listen to Netflix playing in the background.  It looks like laziness, but I’m actually engaged in an exhausting war in my own head.  Anxiety is like pushing a giant boulder in front of you wherever you go, and depression is like dragging a giant boulder attached to your legs by chains.

People with physical illness and disability are also prone to being accused of laziness, especially if that illness or disability is not visible to others.  There are people who are nearly constantly in pain or constantly fatigued, but you would never know by looking at them.  These individuals work much harder than able-bodied and “healthy” people.  Not only do they often have to work to survive because disability payments (if they can get them) are not nearly enough, they have to navigate a world that caters to able-bodied people, and they have to navigate that world while their bodies work against them.  But article after article decries the “laziness” of people who use motorized carts or take elevators up one floor instead of using the stairs, not for a second thinking that there are people who wouldn’t be able to shop or go up floors at all without these “conveniences.”

It’s easier to think of someone as “lazy” than to face the fact that school costs too much, that better jobs are inaccessible, that childcare is unaffordable, that people are forced to work so hard for so little that there’s no way they could have enough energy to attempt schooling or finding better work, and that what we give to people who can’t work is insufficient to the point of being shameful.  I could say that calling people lazy is, in itself, lazy, but it’s not just an intellectual shortcut.  It’s a defense mechanism.

Everyone has a finite amount of energy.  Some of us have greater drains on our pool of energy than others, whether it comes from the stress of racial microaggressions, the stress of poverty, or mental or physical illness.  Needing more time to recover isn’t laziness.  Having less time or energy to make breakfast than the previous generation isn’t laziness.  When you take a second to look into the reasons behind the behavior, you’ll never end up finding laziness.  Because laziness isn’t real.

^^^ THIS

I don’t give a shit that no one will ever read

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I don’t give a shit that no one will ever read it, it was cathartic to write. You’re nothing, John McCain; certainly, you’re no patriot. Party over country. You think complaining about it excuses you somehow? When it came down to the decisive moment, you didn’t even abstain. You’re nothing.

bob-belcher: fakethistoyourgrave: what’s the

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bob-belcher:

fakethistoyourgrave:

what’s the word for horny but not in a sexual way like i’m horny for halloween but i don’t wanna fuck a pumpkin you feel

i think the word you’re looking for is “excited”

my dude has decided that since I’m picking my high school spanish back up, he should learn a language too. But I guess he figures he’s too far behind in Spanish, so he decided instead to learn his mother’s family’s native language: Latvian. There’s no DuoLingo for Latvian, though, so he’s making do with whatever random content he can find online. Mostly he’s reading a textbook from Google Books, and then as much news as he can find, with videos and things. (He does have the advantage of native speakers in his immediate family, but he doesn’t know the language at all, just how it’s supposed to sound.)

Google Translate is sort of… patchy, though, and so this morning he was reading something and burst out laughing so hard he almost fell out of his chair. i came over and it was a story about football hooligans, how at a soccer match there had been some scuffles– and the line was translated, “the crowd was horny for a fight”. 

Accidental art from a customer roll of film that clearly sat in...

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i wonder if this was actually a sunset? what color was the sky?
i don't know what this is. i couldn't figure it out. also, it's light-struck.
this is the best thing on the roll for sure
turn sideways: this is a flower, clearly an iris, if you see it properly
Accidental art from a customer roll of film that clearly sat in a drawer for a minimum of 20 years. From other exposures on the roll, given the clothing, glasses, and fashions, not to mention the late-70s Chevy pickup, I’m guessing this roll dates to circa 1985, and was never developed until last week.

This is what happens to the latent images in exposed, but undeveloped film. (It was C-41 process color film, most likely from a disposable camera since it had 27 exposures.)

I edited them slightly, first on the printer itself by increasing the contrast and lightening the exposure, but after export I tinkered a little in Photoshop and in Lightroom, to bring up some more contrast and increase the saturation, but they’re impressive nonetheless. 

Today’s extremely unimportant and tiny whiny

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Today’s extremely unimportant and tiny whiny post is that I still have not hit any skills in Duolingo that I didn’t already know, but the more I practice, the more my fluency percentage goes down. I did a string of lessons yesterday where I got no questions wrong, and I got combo bonuses and all, and I’d started at 44% fluent and when I stopped, I was 38% fluent.
Why the hell bother trying to make it like a video game if the score bit is so overtly meaningless??

Trash now joined by construction debris. My

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Trash now joined by construction debris. My “nature” vista out the store’s back door. I pretend it’s really a forest sometimes. There was a squirrel carrying some trash up a tree…

ltfrankcastle: Okay, good.

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ltfrankcastle:

Okay, good.

for the last two weeks or more i have been pecking pecking pecking away at my zillion WIPs and...

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for the last two weeks or more i have been pecking pecking pecking away at my zillion WIPs and adding a word, taking away a word, adding a word, taking away a word, and never ever ever ever finishing enough for an update ever, ever, and it’s the most sisyphean-feeling thing, nothing is going anywhere, nothing is exciting, there’s no purpose to any of it. BUT i think I finished a chapter in Sled Dog Guy, maybe, but I have to decide if I’m going to cut to the sequel for a POV change or what, and i need to revise it a little, but okay, I’m getting there I think, and also I think I’m getting there with the Kes/Leia epilogue bit, maybe, which I was working on in christ, November? december? i was well into it before the tragic passing of ms fisher herself, i can tell you that, and i wanted to get it out as a tribute, and that never happened so, but anyway. ugh. 

incremental, like filling buckets with teaspoons, like that post about filling lakes from the ocean in your head, however that went. Ugh. 

why would anyone choose this as a hobby. do you know how satisfying it is to bake things for fun. take up baking, children. do not take up writing. it is a foolish thing to do, writing is. 

*lies down on the floor*

I’d post excerpts but I’m sure I’ve posted literally every good scrap as excerpts already, even the shit I just fucking wrote, because it’s been so long a dry spell my desperation for attention has led me to excerpt-post through time to do this. I’m absolutely certain, if only I were organized enough, I could just forgo writing entirely and assemble all my chapter updates by combing through my excerpt posts to see the future. 

I wish I knew what the fuck was wrong with me, but

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I wish I knew what the fuck was wrong with me, but I’m so stupid lately, I can’t have a successful conversation on the phone, I can’t read and follow directions, I can’t be trusted to fucking follow up on important issues and understand whether I’ve done things correctly– I just feel like I need to have my Adult card revoked. I don’t know. I’m really really really stupid when it comes to actually understanding what’s going on. Is this ADHD? Will I ever know? I don’t know.

seriously though who the fuck fails at basic normal adulting tasks with this kind of shocking regularity. I don’t know! I used to get great test scores in school on my reading comprehension, but now I can’t follow basic fucking instructions.