Just curious, are your dude and my dude related? Because socks. Everywhere. No other clothes, just s

via http://ift.tt/2vjieoU:
oh… no…. he doesn’t put any clothing away. I might have not phrased that right. I meant, not so much as a sock. He doesn’t really own a dresser because he said he’d never use one. His preferred method of clothing storage would be just to dress himself out of a laundry basket, but i put the kibbosh on that because he would never empty a laundry basket, he would collect every single laundry basket we collectively owned, and stack them, and only use whatever he could reach that was in the top one. 

I put up a set of plastic basket shelf things in the corner, and I put his socks into the top basket, because it’s approximately as easy for me as throwing them onto the bed. (I do all the laundry, because his laundry methods were desultory and unsatisfying, and also I have OCD about the laundry. He does other chores, it’s fine. I’ve said, conditional to me doing his laundry, that he has to put it away, but that will literally never happen, so.)

I’m so dysfunctional about so many things, and have a lot of angst about my various problems and why am I this way and so on and so forth.

He’s just as bad if not worse, and considers himself a perfectly normal person who needs no therapy or medication and doesn’t worry about it. So. I mean. 

Who even knows. But, no, he has never put away a sock, or any other thing. 

Huh I can’t append tags when I answer asks anymore, that’s an interesting new development… 

fullsharkbarbarian:the true tumblr experience is blocki

via http://ift.tt/2waRZQ2:
fullsharkbarbarian:

the true tumblr experience is blocking posts not because they’re offensive or bad, but just because you’re fucking sick of seeing them for the 100th time

this is basically the only reason i block posts

I used to have an anonymous blog back when I was a bartender in an airport. This is August...

via http://ift.tt/2vwCb7n:
I used to have an anonymous blog back when I was a bartender in an airport. This is August 2005– Katrina. 

Spent Friday night at a wedding, and Dude’s sister spent the night alternating having a great time and dancing a lot with staring grimly at her phone. Her mother-in-law had been refusing to evacuate from the trailer where she lives near Corpus Christi. (I guess she left eventually. So did the sister-in-law with the infant. Not sure about the relative with twelve dogs, that’s a tough one.)

I get real worked-up over this sort of thing, for no reason than I have a very good imagination, and it sounds goofy to say it like that, but it’s extremely easy for me to project myself into situations and imagine how it would feel, and so when I read about disasters like this sort of thing, I just cry and cry thinking about how awful it is for all those people. It’s good for writing, it’s just sort of bad for daily survival kind of stuff. So, it’s kind of A Lot. My heart really goes out to people affected, of course, but also to people who’ve lived through stuff like this before and for whom it must be really setting off memories. 

It’s a hideous distraction to have an incompetent, malignant, beyond-words situation in the White House spewing hate and vitriol as it’s all unfolding– it’s a distraction, so at least I’m not crying over people’s grandpas being hauled up into boats and little children staggering for miles clinging to their grandmothers in terror because neither of them can swim and no help is coming and so on and so forth. 

(And Mexico pledging military aid again even as Pendejo says horrible shit about their country… *praying hands emoji*)

It’s just. It’s. It’s a lot. My anguish isn’t helping anyone, I don’t think my thoughts and prayers would be useful much, so I’m just trying to stay basically informed and be ready to pay attention at how it all shakes out. 

But, for the record: thoughts and prayers for those affected. 

My old-man Car Notebook thing, I was talking about

via http://ift.tt/2iDz4Zr:
My old-man Car Notebook thing, I was talking about before– I took some pictures of it as I was putting it away (I’d had it in my purse to write down notes about the maintenance I just had done).

I have a nagging feeling I’ve posted about this before so if so, I beg your indulgence, it’s hard when the mind goes.

Do other people do this with cars, or is it just my family? I went slightly above and beyond what I was raised doing, since this was my first very-own new car, and I copied out the maintenance intervals into the back cover so I’d have a reference of what the car needed. On the inside front cover, I wrote down things like the recommended tire pressure, because I always forget and it’s a pain to look it up every time.

NB the most important feature of the book: the pen, a decent one that won’t explode if frozen, is tied to the book and stays with it always and cannot be removed. (I hand-braided that tether, I tell you what.)

And since the notebook was wide, I added a column to write down where I was when I got the gas, which helps me keep track of how much traveling I do and how much more gas costs out west than back east.

Mostly, though, I like it because it makes me feel better about driving around so much.

Look how terrible my handwriting is…

In that one, I wrote down two instances where I didn’t fill the tank, but rather had to get a dollar amount because I had no credit card. That explains why I got so few miles before the next tank.

Also, I was raised on cars with faulty fuel gauges, so I reset the trip odometer every time I get gas, and then I know how many miles I’ve been on this tank, so if it still says half-full, I know that’s got to be bullshit. However, that doesn’t work if your trip odometer didn’t get reset, so. I hate when other people get gas in my car, for this reason, because if that thing’s up over 400 I’m lowkey constantly freaking out even if I know, somewhere deep down, that the fuel gauge works in this car and it would tell me if it was low. (There’s even a button that tells you how many more miles you can probably go on this tank, and it’s pretty close to reasonable, but I don’t *believe* it in my heart.)

Funny what sensors I’ll believe and which I won’t…

I’m on my third attempt posting this, so we’ll see. I have a suspicion it’s the tag art that’s keeping it from posting, but I don’t know. 

nothing2c: textualdeviance: warrenellis: Okay.

via http://ift.tt/2vlBQso:
nothing2c:

textualdeviance:

warrenellis:

Okay.  Someone asked me how I feel about writing fiction in a world that still needs actual activism and hands-on work to make life better.  They said something similar to, “I get pulled away from writing fiction because I feel guilty for not making tangible benefit to the world.  Isn’t fiction just escapism?”

But I also got the following message, which I’m filing some of the serial numbers off of, as it were:

“I just wanted to tell you something. When I was 18 years old, my life was a fucking mess. I worked at a store that sold comic books and one day I stumbled upon Spider and the filthy assistants. Your comic kept me from killing myself. There is a character limit here so I can’t say everything I want to but thank you. From the very deepest part of my heart.”

I post this not to self-aggrandise.  It is not a unique message, for good or ill.  I get them surprisingly regularly.  Frankly, messages like that scare the hell out of me, because I’m not very smart and not a very clever writer and I fuck up all the time.

But fiction speaks to people.  Even fiction like mine acts to tell someone, somewhere, that they’re not alone.

You want tangible, social benefits to writing fiction?  There are people walking around today because other people wrote words that spoke to them.  That’ll do.

And thank you.

I can, on some level, acknowledge that my work has the potential to make a difference, if not on a large scale, at least for someone. My goal as an author has always been to tell the same kinds of SFF stories I’ve always loved, but with characters who are something other than the attractive cishet white people who have dominated the genre. We’re finally getting more of that these days, across all media, but it’s not like there will ever really be enough. My work may not be great art, and it has yet to get wide attention, but it’s out there, and maybe it can help someone somewhere.

Where the problem comes in for me right now is that such benefits are long-term and big-picture. They’re butterfly-effect things when we’re in an immediate crisis that requires something bigger and more tangible. I’d love for a queer, half-Egyptian kid to see himself in my story and know he deserves to be a protagonist, but when kids with Middle-Eastern features, whether Muslim or no, are being labeled “terrorists” and threatened with deportation or worse, such benefits are rather less critical in comparison. I feel like I should be doing something more immediate than simply adding to the diversity of genre media.

Beyond that, I also have my own fears. I have the benefits of being native-born, English-speaking, white, somewhat cis-passing, in a legal marriage, financially comfortable (for now) and living in a very blue area of a very blue state. But those things alone aren’t enough to keep me off the list of undesirables. I’m also atheist, queer, genderqueer, fat, have expensive physical and mental health conditions and am an adoptive parent of a child with autism. I’m also a very vocal feminist and publicly dissident. Beyond that, many of my loved ones are even higher on the “undesirable” list. We may be fairly well protected here in our liberal corner of the country for now, but it wouldn’t take many changes in federal law to put us and our families at risk. All it would take is for atheist, queer, Trans and/or not-perfectly-healthy parents to be declared unfit, and our kids could be taken away from us. In such a situation, how can I justify wasting hours immersing myself in writing fiction? I have to be working to stop this.

But that comes to the other problem: There isn’t much I can do that I’m not already doing. We have to be careful with money right now for various reasons, but we’ve donated to orgs that are fighting this and helping people in far more dire circumstances. I’m lucky that all of my government reps are awesome, and I’ve made a point of telling them so and encouraging them to keep up the good fight. But aside from voting and volunteering for registration and GOTV drives, there’s not much else I can do. My health and responsibility to my child preclude me doing boots-on-the-ground stuff, and anyone who would ever be inclined to listen to my anti-bigotry campaigning already is. The only thing left, then, is trying to save my energy and secure my own mask, so to speak, so if the wolves start threatening to come to my door, I can get the hell out of the country or go to ground before they get here.

So it’s rock and hard place, I guess. I want to write, but I’m too afraid of missing a sign that I’m in immediate danger, and also feel like I should be doing something more (even though there’s not much more I can do.) Making art is always worthwhile, I know, but I can’t help feeling that my own work isn’t a big enough deal to justify the time/energy sink. Writing seems self-indulgent, maybe, when the world is on fire.

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, but not in the context of whether or not to create art. More like, I’ve been wondering how I can create more art, because storytelling is one of the best ways to create compassion, understanding of others, and seeds for people’s activism. 

So to all the storytellers out there, NEVER UNDERESTIMATE the power of a griot, someone who speaks to people with hope and power and gives them patterns for how to continue living.