#I’M CHRONICALLY ONLINE HOW I’M SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITHOUT TWITTER
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twitter is on risk of getting banned on my country, i’m currently cursing elon musk
#I’M CHRONICALLY ONLINE HOW I’M SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITHOUT TWITTER#FUCK THIS STUPID BILLIONAIRE#FUCK CAPITALISM
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My Mind Turns Your Life Into Folklore
My Mind Turns Your Life Into Folklore
COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: Any recognizable elements belong to Attack on Titan.
NOTES:
Friday January 22nd
chapter twenty-five: said i'm fine but it wasn't true
It was Mikasa and Levi’s grandfather’s birthday.
Mikasa only knew it was by the calendar in the kitchen.
“He was an ass anyway. You didn’t miss much by not knowing him,” Levi informed her as he did every year.
Armin and Eren left that afternoon.
--------------------
Apparently being a dumbass was contagious.
While Zeke was trying to process the file Levi had given him, Armin had dropped Eren off back at the house on Friday morning.
"Niccolo and Sasha broke up," Eren informed him. "Well, not that they were actually together yet…"
Zeke groaned. "Why?"
"Apparently, he had some issues with her still being friends with Connie...is Pieck drunk on our couch? It's not even the afternoon!"
"You're one to talk, tiny Jaeger," Pieck said from the couch.
"Oh see that dumbass there just broke up with her boyfriend too," Zeke said as he pointed at her.
"He wasn't my boyfriend!"
"Wait, is this the mystery guy? Who was he?"
Pieck face planted into the couch and mumbled something that Eren and Zeke didn't understand.
"Is she drunk?" Eren asked him.
"On sugar probably. She already ate the last of the ice cream."
Eren didn’t say anything as he went to his room upstairs.
Zeke looked over the still face planted Pieck.
“Will you go talk to him already? It is not too late to go back and tell him you are a dumbass,” Zeke said as he looked at the scans of the file on his computer.
“It is! I broke his heart and now he’s going to go out with a younger woman.” Pieck said as she sat up.
Why did Zeke have to be the only sane one in his group of friends?
“You didn’t see his face, Zeke. I destroyed him and just left. Without looking back.”
“Pieck...go back. Go admit your fuck up.”
Zeke had seen Pieck cry a handful of times. Once when her father had been diagnosed with cancer and the other when Dina had died.
But not like this.
Pieck hadn’t been in many relationships. She always said things like she was allergic to relationships or why waste time on something that statistically wouldn’t work out. No, Pieck was married to her art.
It was this moment that Zeke realized Pieck had said all of these things to keep herself safe from this.
The tears were streaming down her face.
Eren came downstairs and stopped there.
“Pieck….” Eren said as he crossed to Pieck.
“I just see him in my head. I go back and he’s already with her. She’s so much younger and prettier than I am. I just...I can’t. Eren, I’m sorry,” Pieck apologized.
“Why?” Eren asked.
Zeke moved from the table over to sit next to Pieck.
“He’s your friend and you’re going to find out very soon. It’s Jean. I’m sorry,” Pieck began crying more.
Zeke did not have the first clue about what to do. Neither did Eren.
“I’m going to make a phone call,” Eren said before stepping out of the room.
“Don’t! It has to be over. I don’t want to feel this….anymore..”
“Okay,” Eren said. “I won’t call Jean.”
Eren stepped out of the room.
After what happened with Armin and Mikasa, Eren said he wouldn’t lie about things like this anymore. But Eren had to lie this time.
He went out of the room and pressed Jean’s contact in his phone.
“What do you want, Jaeger? Now is not a good time,” Jean’s voice rang out on the other side of the phone.
“Are you in love with Pieck?” Eren asked.
“What? Why is that any of your business?”
“Because she’s crying to Zeke in my living room right now.”
“She’s the one who ended it. Not me! So don’t come at me about it.”
“I’m not. I just..”
“What do you want me to do, Eren? Beg her to stay? I told her just to say the word and I’d tell my mom not to set me up on a date. I told her I loved her. She said she didn’t feel the same. She said she didn’t love me and it was just sex. So no, I’m not fucking begging her when she’s made her feeling perfectly clear. We’re not you and Mikasa. If she wanted to be with me, she had the chance.”
Eren couldn’t argue with that.
“I’m sorry,” Eren said after a moment.
“It’s whatever. I’ll bounce back. I mean how can I not? I’m me.”
“If you need to talk…”
“You’d be the one I’d call?”
“If anyone knows about losing the one they love…”
“Well, you’ve got a point there. You do know about fucking things up, don’t you? You idiot. How is that going by the way?”
“Good.”
“Good. Don’t do that again.”
“Oh. Don’t worry. I won’t. By the way, why didn’t you make a move on Mikasa when we were broken up?”
“Because unlike you, I’m not an idiot.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I dropped that idea the day I asked her out and she turned me down. She told me she had feelings for you and then when I saw you two together the next day, I knew. You two were meant for one another. Even if you’re an idiot who fucked it up, I wasn’t. I knew there was no way I could compete with you...when it comes to Mikasa.”
“Did you just say something nice to me?”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“Okay, horseface.”
“Fucking idiot.”
“...you want to get online and shoot some shit?”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“Don’t pull my rank down.”
“Don’t pull mine.”
--------------
Pieck eventually stopped crying.
Zeke patted her on her back while she cried.
And Pieck cried until she couldn’t cry anymore.
She was done.
“So teach me another song.”
“Do you..”
“No.”
“Okay. Yeah, sure.”
----------------
Mikasa’s writer’s block had begun to disappear. She spent most of the day in the sun room writing lyrics to one of the unfinished pieces she had from Historia.
Annie had given up on work half way through her shift and shuffled into the sun room where Ymir was restringing her acoustic guitar.
The sound of power tools in the basement could be heard.
“They having any luck down there?” Annie asked before she sat down in one of the chairs.
“They brought up some ripped out carpet,” Ymir said as she tightened the string down.
“So this is actually happening. We’re going to record,” Annie gave a small smile.
“We’ve come a long way in a little over a year,” Ymir replied as she finished tightening the string down. “Speaking of coming a long way, how’s our social media numbers looking?”
Annie sighed, “well, Facebook sits at the same numbers. Twitter gained a few. YouTube has gone up. Instagram is the problem. We’re dropping views on whatever we post in the feed.”
“Why?” Mikasa asked as she stopped playing.
“It’s the algorithm. The more people who see and interact with our stuff, the more it spreads but it has to show up on the feed first. We’re fucked sometimes. I’ve been trying to put everything into stories where I can but people still have to interact with it.”
“You remember the days when things were just chronical on our feeds?” Ymir asked. “Now you have to be a math genius like Annie to get anywhere.”
“To be fair, I still haven’t beat it.”
“You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
“We all need to interact with the posts. That’ll help too. I know we have been but we have to keep it up.”
“Just tag me in that shit and I’ll share it everywhere. Speaking of genius...are we going to have another new song or what?” Ymir asked as she looked over at Mikasa.
“I’m working on it. Have we thought about the idea of collaborating with The Restorationists? Their follower numbers are larger than ours. Plus, they just got a new bassist. Might be a good idea to see if they want to do a livestream with us or something,” Mikasa said before she shrugged.
“What about Niccolo and Sasha?” Ymir asked.
“Yeah, I’m worried about that too,” Mikasa sighed.
“Wouldn’t hurt to ask,” Annie shrugged.
-----------------
Sasha kept her word of not speaking to Niccolo for a little bit. He didn’t try to contact her and she didn’t try to contact him. However, as Sasha had said, the farm was doing great at the farmer’s market. Mr. Blouse even gave both Sasha and Historia a bonus when they finished work today.
“I don’t know how we’re going to have four guitars,” Ymir scoffed.
“And a bass,” Annie added.
“Yeah, that too. I love the song as much as you all do but I’m wondering how we’re going to pull it off.”
“What about a collaboration with The Restorationists?” Annie asked.
“Oh yeah. Niccolo did tag us on their Instagram. We should do that,” Sasha said.
“Even with you and Niccolo being all….whatever?” Ymir asked.
“I can be professional. Besides, I thought you all wanted this to be a more stripped down song. I can use the cajón,” Sasha shrugged.
“What the fuck is a cajón?” Ymir asked.
“The percussion box,” Sasha answered.
“Then just call it that!”
“This song is pretty personal, Historia. I’ll leave it up to you,” Sasha said before she hit the cymbal, causing Ymir to jump.
Ymir responded with a very horrible sound from her bass.
Annie sat down on the piano bench next to Mikasa and Historia as she sighed.
“It is pretty personal,” Mikasa said as she looked over Historia.
“We need four guitars, two percussion, and a bass. Can they read music?” Historia asked.
“Eren can,” Mikasa answered.
“Pieck is their bassist now. She can read music,” Annie said.
“Didn’t she work at the tutoring center with you for a while?” Ymir asked.
Annie nodded.
“Small world,” Ymir said.
“That leaves Zeke and Niccolo,” Historia said.
“Niccolo can,” Sasha answered before looking down.
Levi walked by the sun room with Sawney and Bean following him.
“Hey Levi, can Zeke read music?” Ymir asked.
“Why would I know the answer to that?” Levi asked as he stopped.
“He’s your therapist. Maybe you two bond over music or something. I don’t know but do you know?”
“No, I don’t. It really doesn’t come up in conversation.” He continued on his path with Sawney and Bean followed him.
“I’m sure Zeke can read music. I can always call Eren after practice,” Mikasa said as she turned to the next page of her sheet music.
“Are you okay with it being a collaboration, Mikasa?” Historia said.
“I’m okay with it,” she smiled.
“Guess that settles that. Just need to ask The Restorationists. Do you want me on bass, electric, or acoustic for this song?” Ymir asked.
“Acoustic,” Historia and Mikasa said at the same time.
“All of our band…” Historia started.
“On acoustic,” Mikasa finished.
“Add their band here,” Historia said as she pointed to the music.
“Should we do all five of us singing this lyric here?” Mikasa asked.
“Wait, I didn’t agree to sing on this song!” Sasha said as she stood up from her drum set.
“Oh yes, let’s do that. That should be low enough for everyone to sing, right?” Historia asked.
“It’s hopeless, Sasha. They’re in the zone. They’re not hearing a thing we’re saying,” Ymir said as she put her bass down on its stand.
“If that’s the case, I’m going to go figure out what to make for dinner,” Sasha said as she left the sun room.
“I’m going to go make myself some more tea before I get morning sickness again,” Annie said as she placed her guitar on the stand.
Historia and Mikasa were left alone in the sun room to continue work on the song.
While Rod Reiss sat on his throne, his daughter was dismantling it in her music.
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Hi c: I remember a post, I think it was from you, about long covid and getting it? Was that you? A friend of mine is struggling and I was wondering if you had any advice about what she can do :< Thank you!!
Oh no, I hope your friend feels better soon! That might have been me, I think I posted about it here a few times and there have definitely been twitter threads.
Standard disclaimer stuff: I am not a doctor. What I found helped me might not help someone else. Long covid is kind of fucked up to deal with because it seems to hit everyone in different ways, in different areas, and months later something that wasn't a problem before can suddenly become one. The long haul groups talk about it as something that feels like it moves around the body, like a total shit gremlin.
The thing that helped me the most initially was joining the facebook groups with other people figuring shit out. This was back April/May for me but they're still very active and full of people sharing resources.
Survivor Corps is I think the big one and they've been the ones reaching out to media and doctors to try to gain some recognition with the medical community initially (as far as I know, all kind of a blur tbh). There's also a long covid group here, and if your friend searches for like, long covid + the country they're in there are usually more local/regional ones for resources closer to home too.
Because we don't really know what specific mechanism is triggering a lot of the long covid stuff yet, most of us are just treating symptoms. Some people have been diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and I don't know diddly squat about that but it might be something for your friend to look into. My whole thing has been inflammation and my immune system basically attacking itself because immune systems are both very complex and compellingly fucking stupid. Not to victim blame the immune system or anything.
What helped me depended on what was going wrong at the time, obv, but it means it's a long list.
This is just going to be a brain dump, sorry.
- I never had pneumonia. Mine started in my throat, probably damaged my vocal chords, but never turned into pneumonia. I still had shortness of breath, pressure in my chest, and my oxygen levels dropped. I could breathe but with great difficulty and described it to the EMTs as "breathing is like work." It took all of my energy and focus to breathe in enough. If you are that this point, ever, like, literally fucking ever, call an ambulance.
- Tylenol for a fever.
- Blood thinners if necessary, I never had any but we know now that a lot of problems are blood clot-related. Tbqh my blood is more thin now than anything but I always had anemia and some sort of “your blood is too small actually?” problem and we don’t know why. I just bleed a lot and bruise easier now.
- If they try to tell you it's anxiety or in your head or you're not that bed, tell them to go fuck themselves and go to the hospital. Get tested if you can. A lot of the problems long haulers ran into was that we got sick before tests were available, or we were talked into staying home by the emergency workers, and we never got tested. This opens the doors for doctors to tell you it's all in your head, psychological, anxiety, allergies, etc. Just. Go when you first feel sick if at all possible. Get tested before it turns into long covid.
- I was not sure in the beginning what "shortness of breath" or "pressure" actually felt like, and it made me delay calling for an ambulance for a few days as well. For me, it felt like there was an elastic band of pressure around my lungs. I couldn't fully inhale. My diaphragm was fucked in ways I still don't understand. My lungs also felt heavy, like there was a weight on them or like my lungs themselves were too stiff to inhale. That all counts as pressure/tightness/shortness of breath. So does air hunger, or feeling like you want to be swallowing air.
- I know I'm being super obvious but seriously shortly before I got sicker, I hit up twitter to ask what "pressure" was supposed to feel like because I couldn't tell if what I had "counted."
- Breathing: lying on my stomach with my chest propped up by pillow, in bed helped. So did pursed lip breathing: here.
- I was prescribed salbutamol initially, which did help with the worst of the wheezing and opened up some of my lungs so I could breathe easier. When I went to the ER again a couple months later, they gave me like 5x the usual dose and sent me home.
- I'm also taking Flovent/fluticasone twice a day for asthma maintenance.
- Histamines are a problem for a lot of people. Some develop a histamine intolerance, which can be helped by eating a low histamine diet.
- Antihistamines helped me the most. I was taking Allegra-D daily. Pepcid AC also helps, because it targets a different kind of histamine. There was such a run on Pepcid when this started that it was actually impossible to find in my area and I had to order some online.
- I was recently prescribed Singulair and it has been life-changing this past week or so. As far as I know it's not really an antihistamine but blocks/inhibits a particular receptor involved in inflammation that comes into play when allergies do.
- Electrolytes. I don't know why, but my electrolytes are permanently fucked and too low now. If I don't go through like a litre of gatorade a day (or whatever, pick your brand of supplements), I am even more tired and brain foggy than usual. Helps a lot.
- Inflammation is a major problem all around. Sometimes I go for the naproxen or advil and it will help any really major acute flare-up now (like, I can feel when my gallbladder is getting inflamed and about to spasm and I can cut it off sort of), but mostly it's also daily maintenance. I take cucurmin and black pepper daily.
- Other supplements: vitamins A & D, a multivitamin, NAC.
- CBD oil. This worked wonders for me for a lot of the side-effects of covid, costochondritis and shingles pain especially.
- Diet. I mentioned the low histamine one above. Other people have had some success with a low inflammation diet. Some folks also have so many GI problems that they basically ate chicken and rice and slowly reintroduced foods to see what would trigger something. I appear to get super fucked by nightshades now, e.g. Alcohol is an absolute no. I had to cut caffeine for months because of my heart. (No caffeine/alcohol/red meat was my doctor's first and best advice for heart stuff at the time.)
- Speaking of the heart stuff, if your friend is dealing with that: electrolytes again. I have pedialyte freezies that I would suck on whenever heart palpitations started and it helped calm it down some. My heart was so, so fucked for months that whenever I ate or stood up or sat down it would hit like 140bpm and I had to spend an hour moving as little as possible or I'd just about pass out. There are a LOT of long-haulers now dealing with POTS and I can't really speak to what helps that in particular but if your heart is messing up at all: call a doctor. I still don't know how damaged my heart is from all of this because doctors and wait lists, etc. Get a jump on that.
- Insomnia was absolutely the worst I’ve ever had and I’ve had lifelong, “I’m awake for three days wee” insomnia. The Singulair knocks me right out at night, so that's a bonus, but there has not been a single night since getting sick where I didn't have to take something to help me sleep. I was on Zopiclone before getting sick, at least, but seriously talk to someone about insomnia if necessary. The sleep deprivation alone was making so many things worse.
- Brain fog? Brain fog. I don't have any or many answers for this. My short-term memory is wrecked and usually I'll remember something 2 weeks later, so I live my life on a 2-week lag now.
- Related to brain fog, fatigue. Don't fuck with it. Do not. Chronic Fatigue and Myalgic encephalomyelitis are both brought up often with long covid. I am dealing with it but don't know what to say about it yet because I haven't had a single doctor give a shit thus far. I've spoken to a relative who's an occupational therapist about it and her most helpful advice was about "energy envelopes," which is basically spoon theory. If you feel tired: stop. If you don't, or if you try to push through, we relapse hard and fast and you can pay for one day of walking 10 minutes too long with weeks of being stuck in bed. It's miserable. It will take longer to get back to normal. Some of us can exercise and feel amazing after; others are exercise intolerant and it wrecks them. (I feel best after like, 10 minutes of walking and sunshine right now, which is after months and months of being bedridden.)
- Treat mental exertion the same as physical. Doctors told me to drink Gatorade after mental work because it's still work, and it has helped a lot for whatever reason. It also helps to work on one thing at a time, take a break, switch gears, take a break, etc. I can't multitask anymore anyway.
- Eliminate whatever stressors you can. Stress will make everything worse.
- It comes and goes. Every relapse was a bit shorter and a bit easier for me, so that now when I fuck up it's like 2-3 days instead of weeks, but it's a rollercoaster.
- It can be random as hell. For about two months my gallbladder just decided to up and die, basically, and we were talking about having it removed. And then it was fine. Hasn't bugged me again lately. I know I said it's symptom management, but it's also like... symptom chasing and trying to figure out what's happening every time the sun rises. This is also exhausting. Everything is exhausting.
- Brain shit. Some of us have serious trouble reading. Sentences swim together. Letters wouldn't turn into words. I took this as a Challenge and started reading children's books and then Animorphs again, like... slowly, as much as I could do without pushing it, and it's still not perfect or great but it was an okay place to start. Honestly the hardest part was the embarrassment and going from a PhD program to reading kids books, but. Do what you have to. Do what you can.
- Sticky notes and labelling things around the house so I could see them when I needed them. I am not fucking around when I say brain fog. I can open the fridge, know I have milk, know it is in the door, and literally not see it to find it. I will put the cream in the dishwasher. I will spin in circles in the kitchen remembering and forgetting and remembering why I’m there again. Sticky notes. Also: journals, index cards, write literally everything down if you need to remember something. Put it somewhere obvious. I like writing on the bathroom mirror for the important shit. (Don’t use lipstick.)
- Unsurprisingly, a lot of us are struggling with anxiety and depression. Don't let doctors get it backward: it's not anxiety making us sick, it's being sick and ignored and fighting to be helped that's making our mental health worse. So many doctors tell us it's all in our head. I did not move across the country because I was too sick to take care of myself because of ~allergies~ or ~anxiety.~ Fuck off.
- So, so many people report that they relapse whenever they menstruate so if your friend is in that group, they might want to prepare to feel like fucking trash every 4 weeks no matter what they do. I don’t have any advice on this one, I’m sorry. There are a lot of people discussing it in the FB groups, though, and those are searchable for symptoms.
- So... a tl;dr list of things that might help: anti-inflammatory diets, anti-histamine diets, pepcid AC, allegra or other allergy meds, vitamin A/D/E, multivitamins, electrolytes and gatorade, albuterol, fluticasone, zopiclone (or anything that helps with sleep), CBD oil, singulair, anti-nausea meds (buscopan), muscle relaxants (spasming gallbladder). Rest, so much rest, do not fuck with The Rest if you can help it. I also encourage just getting high and edibles as much as you can because it sure helped me chill out big time and I think was a big factor in my recovery, at least as far as helping me calm down and helping my heart were concerned.
- The actual most helpful part outside of what to take or do was other people. Friends would go out and get me things when I could not, including like, cat food deliveries and all. I had co-workers ready to step in to take over my work on days I could not. I had friends calling doctors because I was too tired to fight them or self-advocate. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say they helped save my idiot life this year. Literally. It's a lot to ask of anyone but it's also that level of support that some of us need, and there shouldn't be any shame in it. (I still feel bad about it anyway but what are you gonna do.)
Depending on where you live, some places are setting up long-haul covid clinics to help people. Reports are mixed: some demand you had a positive test even if you were sick before tests were available. Some people are getting a lot of help regardless. Some are being sent home and told not to come back anyway. It’s kind of a gamble right now but either way, there’s at least some medical recognition making headway now so my fingers are crossed.
Anyway you basically sound like a good bean and your friend is lucky to have you asking around. I have absolutely forgotten something at some point in here because, well, brain fog and no memory, but if you have any questions or want something clarified please just ask. Stay safe!
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sad late august quarantine thoughts
When quarantine first started, I really thought this would be easy for me. And in some way, I was right. This has been easier for me than the average person and, arguably, much better than the first half of my year. I graduated in December and didn’t land a single job after pretty aggressively applying during my last semester. So during the months of January and February, I was completely broke and moved in with my family. I didn’t have any money or means to do anything but sit at home all day and wallow.
Being a student was such a core part of who I was and to suddenly lose that and have nothing to fall back on really did a number on me. Not only that, but the self-hatred was killing me. Not being able to snag a job was entirely my own fault- I just wasn’t good enough. The weight of failure followed me everywhere and I felt so completely defeated all the time. I was trying my best to stay busy one way or another but it felt impossible to find the energy to do anything. I filled my time by watching 12 seasons of Criminal Minds or cramming 30 DCOMs within one week. And when I wasn’t doing something stupid, I was crying. I found a job right before quarantine started and every single day I’m thankful. It was truly no less than divine intervention and it truly made the difference with quarantine.
More than anything, though, what helped with quarantine is the fact that I’m used to being alone. My junior and senior year of college, especially, I didn’t really make friendships with the people I dormed with and none of those previous residential relationships followed me. At this point, I was eating every single meal alone. When I was upset, the only relationships I had to fall back on were ones I cultivated online. I already had a less than traditional college experience. The only parties I went to were my club’s socials and beyond the people I met there, I had nothing. Even then, if I was in large groups of people I would just completely shut down or not go. At first, being alone 90% of the time was very depressing. I cried a lot. But then, I got used to it.
Which, when you think about it at first, isn’t that bad. The moments you have with yourself are just comfortable, neither really good or bad. And people say to live in the moment, yaknow? But moments only last so long. We don’t spend most of our time doing exciting things or going to exciting places. Like, hell, I work a 40 hour work week, do you think I’m trying to live in the moment? No, we spend most of our time reflecting and looking forward. Live in the moment is only a sentiment that’s worth so much. I remember going to Disneyland 4 years ago and when I was riding Big Thunder Mountain, I remember thinking to myself, “You’re in Disneyland this is your favorite place and you’ve been looking forward to this trip forever. Enjoy this moment.” And honestly, I would’ve probably enjoyed that moment just as much even if I didn’t have that moment of reflection. That temporary gratitude is only worth so much. But the memory of that trip is still able to give me happiness. Life is a collection of moments and you get to pick what stays with you. Living for and in the current moment is exhausting and not everyone can find enough joy in the little things to fufil them.
Getting used to your own company isn’t inherently a bad thing, but I think I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I would decline large outings, minimize my attempts at making friends, spend at least a year not talking to people in a group before I felt comfortable because I was so wrapped up in my insecurities. That’s what it all boils down to, I suppose, at least for me. Because when I’m out with other people, I’m happy for a few hours, and then I come home and it’s just straight crippling self-hatred. “Was I funny enough? Was I annoying? Did they like talking to me? I should ask if they enjoyed themselves? They won’t answer honestly even if they did. How would I know, then? Would they not invite me out again? And if they don’t, that just sucks. If they told me what was bothering them, I could fix it but now they aren’t giving me the chance.” And it goes on and on and on until I’ve convinced myself I’m the worst. And then eventually, the person does drop me because I basically projected all that insecurity onto the relationship and made those worries true. And then because I’m worried about doing that to someone else, I end up internalizing all my worries and it just gets worse and worse to the point where I have to go to the bathroom and cry during outings because I already feel like I’ve let everyone down. At this point, when a friendship begins to drift, I’ve already cut that person off in my mind because I’ve convinced myself that this was just an inevitability of the friendship, that I was never good enough for them and they were just talking to me until they found something better. Being alone may have denied me happy moments with others, but it also prevented me from creating painful memories.
This is where social media has kind of crippled my ability to form relationships with people too. Because I don’t want to reach out to a close friend and share this, no that’d scare them off. So let me post about my deepest fears and pain to like 100+ people on my finsta. That’s healthy and normal. Let me complain on my 300+ follower twitter account. And then I develop an unhealthy relationship with those sites when I don’t get the response I’m expecting. Posting online is like having friends without gambling individual heartbreak. When I put effort into a tweet or a project and it doesn’t get acknowledged, I feel it reflecting badly on me. It’s only a matter of time before I get caught up on how I come off online too and suddenly, it’s hard for me to post. I don’t know what to say. I’m not getting engagement, everyone must hate me. I don’t feel close to anyone. Everyone else has such close friend groups and it’s so hard for me to find that for myself, so what’s the point? So I get overwhelmed and leave for a while, but it’s a cycle like anything else in life.
Being so wrapped up in people’s hypothetical perceptions of you sucks so much. In April, I started writing for DiscussingFilm. Film criticism wasn’t really something I imagined myself doing and quite honestly I’m not sure how I ended up there. I’m grateful for the opportunity and everything it’s given me, but it also gives me something more to be insecure about. I’m a chronic overwriter. My stuff is way too long for no reason. That may just be my style, but when I read other people’s reviews, I burn with jealousy. They’re able to condense their thoughts so succinctly and clearly. We have the same words at our disposal, the same complexities of the human language, and yet how I express a thought is so much more awkward and jumbled. I hate it. And I sit at home, stressing to high heaven over some 1.2k word review just sick with worry about how others will perceive it. What they’ll think of it. If they’ll be disappointed. I can’t imagine a bigger heartbreak than the thought of someone opening my work, reading it, and thinking that it was a waste of their time. And that has most definitely happened somewhere in the world and I feel just so powerless to stop it.
That goes beyond insecurity though and speaks more to the feelings of powerlessness. This standard that you’ve set for yourself and if you can’t reach it, you feel awful. Not everything is in our control, but we have to assign a certain level of personal responsibility to it or else the chaos is overwhelming. It’s a fine line to walk, and honestly, I don’t know how to do it. How much of someone else enjoying my work within my control? Or getting hired? Or other people’s perception of me? If they think I’m funny or annoying? Probably less than I’d like to admit, but definitely a lot less than I’m comfortable with. Because even when I’m insecure, I’m still living in a logical reality where my actions have nearly complete control of other people’s perceptions of me and I could easily change them. But it’s not that simple and I don’t think it ever will be, really. So what am I supposed to do about it? Just stop stressing?
One of my favorite musicals is Newsies. The protagonist, Jack Kelly, is obsessed with leaving New York and going to Santa Fe and just becoming a cowboy. He feels trapped by the city and Santa Fe is his idealization of freedom. There’s a moment where he’s talking to his friend and she asks him if he’s going there or if he’s running away. Because, you see, if you’re going there and it’s not the right place you can go somewhere else. But if you’re running away nowhere will ever be the right place.
So when I was in high school, I idolized the concept of going away to college. I thought that if that happened, I would finally have the space to be myself and finally be happy. So when I had a really bad college experience, I realized college was my Santa Fe and I was running away. I had brought all of my baggage with me and my insecurities and my emotional turmoil and nowhere will ever be the right place for me until I work through those things. At first, I thought my problem was the people, so I cut them out. But now, I know that’s wrong.
Quarantine has given me a lot of time to self reflect. Who am I? What do I like? But more than that, it’s revealed to me how incredibly lonely I’ve kept myself. And I’ve always felt this way and somehow each year I manage to push myself more and more away from others. Newsies ends with Jack deciding to stay in New York because he realized he didn’t really want to leave, he wanted a reason to stay. He wanted to feel loved and valued, which is what we all do. To try and trick myself that the best way to protect myself is to shut myself off was stupid. Dumb. There are at least 35 DCOMs that come to this conclusion and I shouldn’t be having this conversation at 22.
I think what did it for me was the realization that I would be in the same place with or without COVID. It’s one thing to say that you’re sad because of all the things you can’t do, but the realization that you wouldn’t be doing those things regardless hurts a little more. It’s being accutely aware of how much you’ve taken for granted. The fact that I’m feeling just as fine now, amidst a global pandemic, as I have my entire life just speaks to how awful the mental prison is where I’ve trapped myself. Just because it’s always been this way doesn’t mean that it’s the best way for me. I deserve to do better for myself, but why won’t I let myself have it?
Normally, I’d internalize this. But that doesn’t really push me to change. Sometimes, all you need is for other people to recognize how you feel so you don’t really feel as alone. I don’t really expect people to read all of this. There’s so much happening in the world that we feel powerless to fix. I try so hard to do my part but it’s just exhausting. So many injustices are than the problems of one person feels so trivial. But I’d like to imagine that the struggles of trying to find yourself, especially right now when we’re so disconnected from another, is universal. This is one thing that we can fix. I am so sick and tired of being lonely and just hating myself so much. I want to be better, I want to feel better, and I want to figure this all out. But I’m not quite sure how. Vocalizing this all feels good and it feels productive, but at this point I just don’t know how to talk to people. But I’ll try and I guess that’s all I can really do.
Quarantine and a global pandemic may be a box we’re forced in, but it doesn’t mean we have to put ourselves in a mental one. When quarantine is over, we are going to walk out of it as new people and now is the time to decide what commitnments we want to make and what actual changes we’re going to work towards during this time to make sure those wishes for ourselves become a reality.
I love all of you so much. You have value and are appreciated in your life. People are so complicated and sometimes it’s hard to grasp that everyone else has lives that are just as complex and nuanced as your own. Everyone is struggling and everyone is succeeding simultaneously in this big, increasingly chaotic world. So give yourself some credit and know your worth. It’s hard to define who you are, especially when you don’t really have others to compare yourself to and better define the differences. But also, remember people aren’t just one thing. Just follow what you like, try new things, and look inward just as much as you look outward.
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June 27th-July 3rd, 2020 Creator Babble Archive
The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from June 27th, 2020 to July 3rd, 2020. The chat focused on the following question:
If you could do your webcomic for a living, how would that change things in regards to how you work on it (if at all)?
Deo101 [Millennium]
I'd definitely put out more content, cause I could focus on it fully every day of the week.
Eightfish (Puppeteer)
i would probably start hating it and get burnt out
Deo101 [Millennium]
thats why I would also have to start another comic or do short stories on the side or something, too.
I would probably keep individual comics update schedules the same, I'd just do more comics
LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)
If it became a part-time job, I don't think anything would change. It kind of feels like that already. If I were in a position where it became a full-time job, I do dread how my relationship with the work would change. I don't think I could ever make as much doing comics as I do in my day job (which isn't crazy, but is comfortable) so I don't know if I could ever 100% transition unless it was really, really worth it It's something I've thought about a lot, for sure.
Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~
In a way, my comic is my full-time job? I don't make very much money with it, but I do put over 40 hours a week into it, and I don't have another job. I am in the very fortunate position of having an SO who is able to support me financially while I try to get my footing with my passion. If I was depending on it for a paycheck though, the main thing that would change is my style would probably get simpler, because there is no way I can make enough pages a week otherwise.
Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS
It is really the dream to be able to do it! Right now I am unemployed, so I basically treat the comic as my fulltime job, until I find the next short project. I want to be able to work on it full time! In Denmark there are some cool possibilities to get funding from the government and I hope we can get enrolled with some of those programs with our comic.
I would also just love to do small videos, podcasts, animations etc. Small fun projects
Mitzi (Trophallaxis)
If I had to do it full time, I think i'd put a LOT more hours into learning how to paint, watching speedpaints, ect. It'd also make a huge difference in my living situation, as the first thing I'd honestly do with a full time at-home job is move to another city with cheaper rent. Another state, maybe! Oh, and I'd do a lot more promo work. posters and animations are fun, but they're not quite worth it with an audience consisting of two my writing partner's friends, and my older brother.
Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho
the biggest difference, I suppose, would be that I would make a lot more pages, a lot faster. But I like it that it's been pointed that the relationship with work changes when you have to do things full time, so there may be some unpredictable variables there
eliushi [Keyspace]
For a living for me can mean many different things: able to sustain living expenses vs full-time. There’s overlap but one gives financial security meaning an element of creative freedom. The opposite end will probably entail working on other comic projects with the current one as a passion story on the side (no change but probably might not want to draw so much after drawing for work!) If we’re discussing the ability to do the webcomic full time without financial worries then I do believe my output will increase but also I will be dedicating more time to the craft (studying story structures, art directions etc) as well as marketing/joining professional associations/pitching/connections. There are a lot of career options within the comic world and I’d love to explore everything before deciding what’s best for the current story. Ultimately if I were to do this as a living, I’d treat it like any other job: a routine, a strive for improvement, and wellness to recharge. I follow several artists not only for their art but also their schedule/workflow to see what worked for others. It’s very interesting!
In reality though, I might work on smaller scale projects on the side to build up the experience and platform needed to tell the story of Keyspace. As a full time comic creator, I’ll be seriously thinking to covert the seven novel series into a hug comic project. So TL;DR if full time, I make more pages
varethane
I'm in an odd place with my comic because.... well, I sort of had an opportunity to spend all of my time on it for a few months, when I was in between contracts at work. But I found that I wasnt getting it done all that much faster than I did when also working full time
To be fair, it's kind of hard to compare my speed between the three periods, because when I returned to work after a few months away, it was after work from home had started and now I no longer have a commute, so perhaps my ability to squeeze comic pages into my free time has expanded.... but I feel like my attention span caps out around 8 hours on any single task
So I didnt work that much faster. But... I'm also bad at keeping track. I could be wrong.
Yung Skrimp (Carefree)
8 hours is a long attention span
varethane
It's not all in one go, haha.
eliushi [Keyspace]
I definitely have to take breaks between pages, whether or not I have just a few minutes to a chunk of hours
It’s about finding a balance that works for you!
keii’ii (Heart of Keol)
I don't think I could put more hours daily into my comic than I currently do. I have a chronic issue with my drawing shoulder, so my body won't be able to handle that much work. Probably wouldn't be great for my eyes, either. I also don't know if I want my livelihood to depend on how many people like my story. This story is a pair of custom-tailored skinny jeans for my heart (and I have an unusual body type, making it impossible to wear skinny jeans regardless of size). It's a story I want to read. It's meant to fit ME. I don't want to worry about how to also make it fit a bunch of other people.
That being said, some people do find themselves in a situation where they're making something they want to read, and a bunch of other people just happen to like it, too. I think that would be nice
chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]
I physically can‘t draw for more than four, five hours a day, found that out the hard wayy
eliushi [Keyspace]
I most recently developed pain likely due to RSI and have made accommodations since then but yeah it was scary to think that I have a limit in drawing time. Gotta find ways to take care of yourself for the long run
cAPSLOCK (Tailslide)
I think if comics were my only job, I'd feel a lot more anxious about what I create, and would struggle to work consistently. Having another pursuit makes me feel like I have more freedom to experiment, learn, and make what I want to make.
Eightfish (Puppeteer)
That's a really good point keii
Would drawing a comic for a living push me to change it to have more mass appeal?
I don't know but it is definitely possible and would be on my mind
Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]
It is the dream, if I could get a decent monthly wage on my comic, yes I will dedicate more time, work out a better schedule. Get an editor and colourist on board to help make a polished series. Altho I'm still doing this method to build good working habits But I agree with Eli's point, have to assign days for breaks for myself to prevent RSI. At present I have a trained mindset to work on schedules, but I may feel the pressure to produce as fast as I could.(edited)
Desnik
Well, for starters, my comic would actually be released somewhere, so it'd be nice if it made something back for me
Miranda
I’d actually release it. And work on it regularly, instead of sporadically like I have been! I’d definitely be more critical of what I was doing, and probably way more anxious every time I posted.
keii’ii (Heart of Keol)
You know, when I was only like 6 years old, I was like "I don't want to be an artist when I grow up. I love art too much, and I don't want to burn out and stop enjoying it. So I'm gonna be a singer instead." I have no idea how 6-year-old me knew about burnout, but I definitely remember saying that in response to an adult asking something like "what do you wanna be when you grow up"/ "wow, you're drawing all the time; do you want to become an artist?"
sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)
The more I do comics the more I think I want to do art stuff as part of my main career. I would love to make sequential art that's for science purposes
sagaholmgaard
Ah that would be the dream! I'd probably feel more secure in my ability to build up a backlog of pages, and be able to make more extra content for the PDF version! And more content for instagram and twitter as well
kayotics
If I were to be able to do comics full time I think it would completely change my current lifestyle. Not even money wise but I’d need to switch up a lot of things. Like make sure I get a good amount of exercise in. I’d probably add in another page a week, but then use the rest of my week to project manage the comic, and promote my work. I’d spend a lot of other time working on creating an online store, because I can’t see the comic working full time without some supplemental merch keeping me afloat. And I’d also use that time to create and work on another comic series I think.
Yung Skrimp (Carefree)
If I were to do comics full time I’d flex on everyone I know
Feather J. Fern
If I was able to do comics full time, be able to pay off debts, substain rent and food, and extra saved for small spluges, I will shove my comic in my family's face(I got a family who doesn't believe in me at all), dancing around screaming "I MADE IT IN LIFE" And then jump out the window because haha this can't be a reality because I don't think I will ever make it in comics. I will still keep my other job of working at a library and drawing on the side becuase I want working job insurance and also I am the type who wants to save all their money if possible(edited)
eliushi [Keyspace]
I was on board until jumping out the window
Yung Skrimp (Carefree)
I wasn't on board until jumping out the window
Now I am
Moral_Gutpunch
If I could do this for a living, I could do so much. I could afford to put my mother ina home, start my dream farm and start a bunch of conservation as well, I could help my husband fund his own sidegig, and I could afford to foster pets like I always wanted.
shadowhood {SunnyxRain}
Personally, if I was able to do it I would be a lot more invested in it. I would also make a lot less excuses as to why I'm not practicing as much; it took a pandemic to happen for me to dry taking it more seriously!
I think overall I might have been more happy.
On the other hand, there's also the danger of burnout, of constantly doing the same thing over and over again for me. I'm the type that needs constant change, so I think I'm more suited to having another occupation be my main profession while comics/art would be a secondary one, where I don't have as much pressure. Furthermore, it's also my backup plan in case anything happens to my main job.
Moral_Gutpunch
^ This. I'd be focusing so much more on comics. And I'd be expanding into more comics and writing more stories. I'd be happier I'm writing more, but more frustrated at writers block
Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)
Man if I could do it full time, might be able to pull more page updates and actually get deep into doing some long term projects I had planned for years. I won't have much of an issue as long i can also do my zine projects on the side. also would be nice to have some job insurance too along with it lmao. the only danger that could take it away if I get incapacitated for no reason lmao
TaliePlume
If I could do comics as my full time job would be awesome! But all that focus would go only to the comic and nothing else which is bad because I would be neglecting a lot of things and not getting other things done.
AntiBunny
I'd finally be able to tell my whole story and start telling another. It drives me crazy that I have more ideas than I can pursue.
snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)
In terms of my actual production, I'm not sure doing my comic as a living would change much lol. I already spend upwards of 40 hours a week on it, I seriously doubt there's more I could be doing. So, earning a living off my comic would just be... one less thing to worry about.
#ctparchive#comics#webcomics#indie comics#comic chat#comic discussion#comic tea party#ctp#creator interview#comic creator interview#creator babble
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The Fuckening, Entry # 1
Despite the novel covid-19 being around for a pretty hot minute now, I have only been self-quarantined about 6 days. There have been several confirmed cases in my county, and today the county had it’s first death.
If it’s not apparent by the title, I’ve decided to officially from here on out refer to this entire debacle as The Fuckening. I will swear. A lot.
I figure it might be somehow lucrative to record my experiences throughout the pandemic, at least as it is pertinent to my country & area. Aside from broader, more public events, it might be interesting to someday look back on my day to day & how we dealt & felt & what we did. I should have been keeping a diary of my life anyway & had intended to despite never making it a priority. Now is as good a time as any.
Anyhow, I anticipate this being a rather disjointed project, variable in moods, topics, formats, etc. & rife with grammatical errors. I haven’t decided how revealing of my identity & location I would like to be, I suppose that’s something I’ll decide as I go. All I’ll reveal for the moment is I live in the U.S. in Pennsylvania.
Recapping what I can right now:
I’m in about day 6 of self-quarantine. All schools have cancelled regular classes and have gone exclusively online, as has happened pretty much everywhere else. My community college also followed suit along with probably every college & university at this point. I’ve had a little over a week off for faculty & staff to prepare for the shift. Class resumes this upcoming wednesday online for the rest of the semester. Curious to how they’re going to structure & grade our biology lab credits.
Bars & restaurants have been state-mandated to shut down except for take-out. Now the liquor stores have shut down as well. Somehow the beer distributor down the street is still open however...
Me & K (boyfriend) haven’t gone nuts with preparations, but we did have 1 significant shopping trip before the state officially began recommending social distancing. We got enough non-perishables for several weeks. We’ve made a couple mini trips for things like milk & fresh veggies.
I also have a few immunocompromised friends who I’ve gone shopping for. I expect to continue doing so as needed. One such friend has a bitch of a rare disease which is frankly on the verge of killing her if she sneezes or coughs too hard. There is so, so much more to it than that, than I dare go into here for privacy reasons but I have spent the last month as one of her actual medical advocates. She is partly the reason I would like to focus my education and eventual clinical research on rare diseases such as hers. Anyhow, despite it being flat out unsafe, she was discharged from the hospital yesterday as my city prepares to get slammed with covid-19 cases.
Both my cats got a stomach bug just 2 days into self-quarantine. It began with Crowley puking, then what looked like bloody emesis & trip to the emergency vet. Sent home with stomach meds & instructions for supportive care before jumping into more than basic testing. He was fine within 36 hours, just in time for Aziraphale to become a little vom-bomb. This lasted for 3 days, with many debates as to when we should finally get her poor little fuzz butt medical attention. She thankfully healed on her own, just as I was about to break down & take her to the vet.
Not to make light of the fact that they were sick, but Zira’s throw-up noise is THE FUNNIEST sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It begins with that usual choppy but also deep guttural *hork hork hork* followed by a very abrupt & very loud scream “rrRAAHH!” as things made their way up & out. I couldn’t help but kinda lose my shit as I pet her & cleaned up the mess. I’m probably going to hell for this.
Me & K have enjoyed spending more time together during quarantine. We have only had 3 friends over since, all being of our regular weekly crew of Sarah, Greg, & Amanda, & all of who are otherwise self-quarantined. Sarah & Amanda came over last Saturday, Sarah made “Quarantinis,” a goddamn delicious cocktail of vodka, lemon, honey, & crystalized ginger. Us girls & K got quaran-trashed, ate dinner together, played Cards Against Humanity, & watched Waking Ned Devine.
We have been making the FUCK outta some food. This is easily the healthiest we’ve eaten in a long time. Thank God we both can cook.
The weather has been fairly forgiving & the two of us have made efforts to get outside as much as possible while it’s nice. K works from home with some good flexibility & I was fired about a month before corona shit hit the fan. We’re enjoying the local parklette & the humongous cemetery in walking distance from us.
Yesterday was mostly blustery & rainy, save for a 2 hour break in the weather where it was sunny and around 70 degrees. We trekked through said cemetery. As we were on our way out, we rounded the bend of one of the long paths, along the side of a large grassy hill. From that initial perspective of the hill, there was a large pile of indiscernible objects about halfway up the hill. As we came around, we noticed the pile was next to a grave very freshly covered in dirt. Upon closer inspection it became apparent that the “pile” was actually a man wrapped in blankets, with one arm stretched over the dirt of the grave. On the road at the bottom of the hill was what I assumed to be his car. I don’t know who he was, I don’t know who he lost, but they’re burned into my memory forever. It was one of those sights that breaks your entire heart. I cried a little & held K’s hand a little tighter as we made our way toward the gate. K kissed the top of my head & gave me a loving squeeze.
I didn’t get fired over anything serious; my chronic migraines plus a personal failure to obtain intermittent FMLA in a timely manner resulted in termination. My bosses didn’t want to let me go, but you can only fight HR of a corporate health system so much. Oh well. I wasn’t happy there anymore anyway. After 3 years I was bored, having trained up as much as possible without my degree. Some toxic personalities made their way onto our floor staff in the last year which made some shifts absolute hell despite my efforts to avoid them & remain utterly professional. Aside from running out of money, I’ve been incredibly relaxed since being let go. I’ve even lost 4 pounds in the last month. My hair is currently a weird ginger-pink, the result of a failed self bleach job, but it’s not entirely embarrassing so I’m going to let it recover before I try it again & go teal.
I never got around to watching Breaking Bad when it was popular, but last night I finally saw the first episode. K has seen it before, it’s one of his favorite tv shows & he’s ecstatic to watch it together. One episode legit got me hooked already. I know the premise of the show & I can’t wait to see how it pans out.
The political fuckery around this has been.... ugh. I wanted to say “staggeringly defunct” but what else is there to be expected from this current administration? I have designed most of my tumblr to be apolitical but that will change with these specific entries. I’m politically outspoken on Facebook & Twitter & I wanted one or two platforms that could just be fun and neutral. My current politics are very leftist, a head-spinning 180 degree turn from my upbringing & early voting habits. The last four years have sent me purposefully, intentionally & determinedly headlong into the progressive movement, feminism, and hunger for democratic socialism. The only conservative thing left about me is my stubborn remaining infatuation with firearms & gratitude for the 2A. Counterintuitively I’m very pro-sensible gun control, but having the discussion with either side of the issue mostly leaves me wanting to knock heads together.
I digress, the administration’s response to the pandemic has been unsurprisingly subpar, yet somehow not as awful as I expected. Trump went from “not a big deal” & “liberal media hoax” to “oh shit, I actually better get my shit together for this” real quick. I don’t know if it’s because it’s an election year or if there’s actually a shred of competency that’s been hiding under the comb-over but I’ll take what we can get from him, including that $1000 check. Getting unemployment has been a bitch. None of this however, changes the fact that Republicans have known about the crisis since December & instead of preparing the public, decided insider trading was a better idea. This doesn’t change the fact that the DOJ is trying to invoke indefinite detention as a “crisis response” and the only thing standing in the way are House Democrats. And it doesn’t change the fact that our hospital system is overloaded & underfunded, and the Republican controlled government would still rather bail out large corporations as we plunge into an inevitable recession.
I’ve spent too much energy fighting ignorant shit sticks on the internet over all this, including people I know in real life. I gotta keep remembering that all I can do is my best, that you can’t change the world but you can make a dent. On that note, I finally introduced K to Danny DeVito’s cinematic masterpiece Death To Smoochy.
Today I finished reading Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald. Quick, fun read, definitely a product of it's time.
That’s all I have in me for today. My neck hurts. Sleep sweet and WASH YOUR FILTHY PAWS.
#covid19#covid_19#corona virus#coronavirus#quarantine#social distancing#wash your damn hands#diary#journal#the fuckening#the fuckening diary#death to smoochy#pandemic
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How the 'x' became a sign of female solidarity in the age of harassment

One letter of the alphabet has more currency than all the others combined. That letter is "x".
Unlike in mathematics, the value of "x" is known in the era of internet messaging. That "x" is most often used to convey a kiss when affixed to the end of a text, DM, or email.
And in an era when women are met with hostility and vitriol on the internet, this tiny, inconsequential letter can be used to communicate solidarity and support during particularly dark times.
There was a time when I thought the addition of an "x" from strangers and professional acquaintances slightly disingenuous. Those days are gone, though. After a bout of deeply vicious online harassment, I realised kindness on the internet was something that's in all too short a supply. This profoundly isolating experience made me completely change my mind about how I felt about receiving "digital kisses" from strangers online.
SEE ALSO: Twitter cliques might feel like high school, but their existence is tied to our human nature
Last September, I endured a two-day stint of particularly aggressive harassment on Twitter after I wrote an article arguing that women and LGBTQ people shouldn't be the punchlines of political jokes. Seems like a pretty reasonable point to make, right? Well, apparently not. I ended up on the receiving end of insults from a group of free-speech defenders who decided I needed to be put in my place. As well as hurling a lot of nasty abuse at me, these trolls went through my recent tweets and personal essays I'd written about my love life. They mocked the fact that a recent Hinge match had stood me up for date, and they told me I should change careers and find something I'm actually good at. According to one troll, it's "unsurprising" that I got stood up because my dates must look me up and "realise what a childish nightmare" I'd be to date. Um, OK?
For two days straight, I lived in a state of heart-racing anxiety, constantly checking my phone to try to stem the torrent of abuse. Incidentally, this bout of trolling kicked off on my best friend's 30th birthday, which basically meant I ended up sitting in the corner of a sticky dance floor in a Clapham nightclub at midnight, trawling through my mentions to make sure everything was under control. Even though I was in a crowded room full of people, I have never felt more alone in my whole life. When friends realised what was going on, they swooped into my DMs to express their support and solidarity. They sent heart emoji and "digital kisses". It doesn't sound like much, but when you've been up against a barrage of vitriol, it was profoundly touching.
Since that incident, I've paid closer attention to women's tweets about harassment and abuse. In the mentions, you'll always find the same thing: scores of other women responding with messages of love and support — usually signed off with a kiss or a heart emoji.
Dr Mariann Hardey — professor in marketing at Durham University Business School, whose research focuses on how women share their stories of chronic pain on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit — says the "x" has become "a way of showing advocacy and support from an anonymous internet stranger" — particularly among women.
"The advocacy of the kiss is a really interesting new cultural form," Hardey tells me. "It's that extension of kindness in reaching out and the expectation of nothing in return." She's noticed that the bicep emoji is also a popular "show of strength" when people are sharing stories that are personal, sensitive, and traumatic.
Hardey says that an "x" can also be used in isolation without any further words to communicate support. "Just an "x" as a reply as a response is acceptable, you don't have to have an extra narrative explaining what you meant," she adds. "In those contexts I've never read it as something that's overtly sexual or flirtatious — it's definitely like a digital hug in solidarity."
Last week was one marked by extreme misogynistic vitriol aimed at UK Labour MP Jess Phillips. UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin "joked" in a YouTube video that he might rape Phillips. "There's been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn't rape Jess Phillips," Benjamin said on his YouTube channel Sargon of Akkad on April 26. "I've been in a lot of trouble for my hardline stance of not even raping her. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave. But let's be honest, nobody's got that much beer."
Guess what I am finding hard is the awakening to an even bigger audience of the "would we or wouldn't we rape Jess Phillips" because of legitimising of the perpetrator. I've dealt with it in drips for nearly 4 years and just deleted or blocked. It's like a torrent at the moment
— Jess Phillips (@jessphillips) May 5, 2019
The abuse didn't end there. Phillips also tweeted a screenshot of Twitter's response to her reporting someone who said she needed "a good fucking to sort out" her teeth, which Twitter said was not in violation of its rules against abuse. To add insult to injury, Phillips was accosted in the street by a man as she left parliament, who asked why Benjamin isn't allowed to joke about raping her before yelling, "I pay your wages."
Just leaving Westminster and and man ran down the street along side me asking me about why Carl Benjamin shouldn't be able to joke about my rape. Shouting "I pay your wages".
— Jess Phillips (@jessphillips) May 7, 2019
Phillips told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme that she "cried in the street" after hearing Benjamin's video. Misogynist invective is something Phillips has been dealing with since becoming an MP in 2015. In 2018, she spoke out about receiving 600 rape threats in one night and said she'd "stopped counting" the number of abusive messages she's received.
One thing that was really heartening to see in the midst of this barrage of misogyny was the messages of solidarity in response to Phillips' tweets. I could see scores of women responding to her tweets with kind, supportive words, often signed off with one "x" or more.
I'm so sorry you have to deal with this rancid shit, Jess. For what's its worth. you are ace. x
— Sarah Phelps (@PhelpsieSarah) May 3, 2019
I am so sorry you have to deal with this filth, and that those who make these threats go unregulated and unpunished. Sending love and solidarity xx
— Sue Perkins (@sueperkins) May 5, 2019
💪 we’ve got your back xx
— Caroline Criado Perez (@CCriadoPerez) May 5, 2019
Women are harassed on Twitter every 30 seconds, per a major 2018 study by Amnesty International. One of the main problems standing in the way of fully tackling this problem is social media companies' — particularly Twitter's — inaction in the face of widespread misogynistic abuse. In the report, Amnesty International’s senior advisor for tactical research, Milena Marin, said: "Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalised voices."
"Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked," Marin continued.
It might not seem like much, but showing your support to someone who's having a really rough time can go a long way.
It’s an absolute disgrace that you’re having to deal with this Jess. Sending love xx
— Rosalind Sack (@Ros_Sack) May 5, 2019
These people are absolute garbage. And those who say “just ignore them” drive me almost as nuts. I’m sorry this is happening AGAIN. We are all behind you. Xx
— Sali Hughes (@salihughes) May 5, 2019
This is absolutely grotesque. Jess I’m so sorry you are feeling tired and low. The sisterhood stands with you. Courage X
— Sophie Walker (@SophieRunning) May 3, 2019
While social media companies are often slow to respond to rife online abuse and hostility, the very least we bystanders can do in times like these is express our solidarity and support — whether that means DMing a person to say that you're sorry to see what's happening and that they don't deserve it, or simply tweeting a heart emoji at someone.
Solidarity Jess. It’s disgusting x
— Tracy Ann Oberman (@TracyAnnO) May 5, 2019
We live in an age where often it feels the default response online is to drag, cancel, and publicly shame. But, what's the opposite of that? Silence?
It's all too easy to stay quiet when our friends, acquaintances, and colleagues are being vilified. It's the speaking up and letting them know they're supported and loved that takes effort and courage.
Besides, you never know, your message might arrive when the person needs it the most.
Be kind out there. xx
WATCH: 82 women walked this year's Cannes red carpet in protest, calling for gender equality in the film industry

#_uuid:73492c4a-a21a-3c56-9084-303efabb9f8a#_author:Rachel Thompson#_category:yct:001000002#_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL#_revsp:news.mashable
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Indie 5-0: 5 Questions with John Dylan
Multi-instrumentalist and producer extraordinaire, John Dylan, has had music running through his veins before he was even born, his parents playing the likes of Elvis Costello, Bob Marley and Stevie Ray Vaughn whilst he was still in the womb. After previously having exhibited his work through the genre-defying band Terrene, (Produced by Phil Ek: The Shins, Fleet Foxes, Built to Spill). John has now gone solo, to focus on his talents as a songwriter. His upcoming album Peripheral Drift Illusion is set for a fall release.
1. Tell us about "Get Beyond." What was the inspiration behind your sound and the video’s imagery?
Well I was at a very low point in my life during the writing of this song. I had been laid off, my house was broken into and I was robbed, my car was stolen, my girlfriend’s car was broken into, I was filing for bankruptcy and the house was ultimately foreclosed on. I had recently gotten a diagnosis of chronic anxiety. The layoff was precipitated by the big financial crash, and it was 2009 and there was this feeling of darkness in my head about my life and the world… But 2009 was also a year the Beatles got a little press. The remastered discography came out that year and also their video game, which was really fun.
I was already a huge fan and have been since I was in grade school. Ever since I heard the jaunty bassline in “All My Loving.” And even though I am most into their experimental stuff, their political stuff, and their more mature work generally, there is just something about Paul’s bass playing that I just loved as a kid and still love now; it’s like he is expressing pure happiness and acceptance through just very intentional bass playing. It just connects.
And that was sort of the beginning of the idea. I was so low, I was just reaching for anything that made me feel better, something that had that real, “from when I was a kid,” true comfort and joy in it. And it just started with that... “bounce.”
I didn’t take anything else from it, just that feeling like, what if there was a bassline that just made people feel better?
The video tries to go from where the song starts (“in haven bed I stay”) to where it finishes (“you must prepare to let your real self show; get beyond!”) visually. It starts with 2-tone xeroxed-looking black and white. Then progresses to vector-traced slow-motion. Then it progresses to psychedelic vector-traced slow-motion. Then you have “gotten beyond” and are floating in space and are free of your pain. I have always wanted to get into vector tracing ever since A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life came out. It turns out it requires more manual work than you might realize for it to look like that. Little variations in the color averaging from frame to frame creates flicker and I couldn’t figure out a way to solve that, programmatically. Still, if you watch it in fullscreen in very high quality you get a sense of the effect pretty well. Not so much if it’s zoomed out or low-bitrate or non-HD; then it basically just looks posterized.
2. How did the collaboration with legendary Beatles artist Klaus Voormann come about?
I was trying to do some collage work for the album art. I have this super cheap laser printer/scanner that basically functions like a xerox machine and I was trying to do black and white surreal collages, maybe a bit inspired by punk flyers. I have a compendium of Cometbus’s work, the book about 924 Gilman by Brian Edge, and even a book called Punk: An Aesthetic that compiles all kinds of brilliant work.
But, I found my efforts to be a bit clumsy, and realized that, speaking of the Beatles, what I really was imagining was something more surrealist, like the cover for The Beatles’ Revolver, that I have always loved. I have it as a magnet. I also have a t-shirt that has the Revolver artwork except it’s a Simpsons shirt and The Beatles are replaced by The B-Sharps and the collage is full of Simpsons references.
So I emailed Klaus and I told him about me, and what I was doing, and work of his that I really like. I told him about the themes of the album, and what I was thinking about, and of course shared the music with him. And he said “yes.” He has been very kind.
As for the punk collage work, my favorite artist in that area was, and is, Jesse Michaels, the lead singer for Operation Ivy, among other bands. So I also wrote him about doing a piece for an upcoming single, and he said yes, too.
I like working with musicians who make art because I feel like they get it in this really cool way and there’s this homemade, earnest feeling to what they make. They’re multi-talented, working from their home. Coincidentally, since I recorded and performed this album at home by myself, that suits the project very well.
3. You’ve played in some notable bands and we were curious how it feels do everything solo on your forthcoming album.
With no offense meant to the members of Terrene I feel like individual musicians who specialize in an instrument can often see a song in a very “this is my part” kind of way. We would go into the studio, and people are just like “alright, my guitar part: done.” “Bass: finished.” But I was always the stickler trying to get all the pieces to add up. So I would stay behind and be like “WE’RE NOT DONE.” And do overdubs. Too many overdubs.
Then, I went too far the other way; the final product of Terrene’s album, through no fault of Phil Ek, who is a wonderful producer, was very sonically crowded with ideas. Way too many layers of stuff on songs that are far too simple to be carrying them. When you read the criticism of “overproduced,” that’s a tough one.
So, I gave myself a rule: Don’t do any recordings that a 5-piece band couldn’t pull off. And, though you would need a very talented band to do it, I stuck to it on this record!
Mars Accelerator was more circumspect, we would sit for hours talking about arrangements and trying to make it work. At the best of times, that’s how it’s supposed to work, at least for the kind of music I’m interested in making; everybody thinking like a songwriter and arranger. Something that gets better if you listen to it a second time and try to find the little things. You can feel the difference in something where all the pieces were thought through. Unfortunately, Mars suffered from the other problem with working with bands: it was hard to get everyone together and commit time. People moved away and… That’s where we’re at. Maybe we’ll resume soon. I would love to. I think playing with them made my music a lot more complex and hard-edged. I am not averse to distortion and more angular, difficult ideas, the way I was during Terrene.
Doing it yourself is empowering. But you have to strike this balance where you discipline yourself and not fall in love with every idea you have, yet you also love yourself enough to call something “done” when it’s done.
4. What artists are you listening to currently?
I actually keep an excellent bunch of playlists up on my YouTube page that I strongly suggest people check out.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAgntbIlnXuy4FfX1u6FRBA
I always love to use my megaphone to highlight good music, and I share thousands of songs on there of stuff I’m listening to right now. Yearly best-ofs going back to 2008. Plus my “writer’s block cure” playlist of stuff that you can put in the background and write to, without it infecting your internal wordstream. My day job is as a writer, you see.
Every once in awhile I get an idea for a themed playlist. A recent one was my favorite female-fronted music. I need to add a lot more to that, actually.
5. What's your favorite instrument to play in the studio and favorite to play live (if different) and why?
In the studio I really like playing drums. Drums were my first instrument, I started playing when I was about 4 or so. I was sitting in my car seat and my parents realized I was hitting the safety bar in time with the music and getting into it. The viscerality of the drum performance sets the tone for the entire track. I am often humming very loudly when I play, which gets picked up on microphones sometimes, because I have the music in my head playing so loud and I want to make a noise over the sound of the drums -- with the drums, mixed into the drums. It’s just a pure state of creation.
Live, I really enjoy playing bass. I feel like the audience starts to “get” the song once the bass player drives the song home. It’s not too hard for me to play, so I can just groove out. Live drums would be too much pressure to be as fun. It’s very different keeping time so other musicians can play to you vs. laying down an idea on tape.
So of course live, I play guitar. Hah!
Find John Dylan Online:
Homepage
Facebook
Instagram
BandCamp / Fan Club
SoundCloud
Twitter
Tumblr
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Krystal doesn’t need some creepy nineteen year old from bumfuck nowhere that posts pictures of their dog on tumblr showcasing a filthy background providing proof that the dog is living in disgusting conditions with a stained carpet, complete with clutter on the floor, visible cotton spilling out of very dirty dog toys that are piled up on a dirt-covered linoleum floor laying next to a set of drawers that have been spilled on and whose owners were clearly uninterested in cleaning it up because they were too preoccupied in wasting time pissing everyone in the Star Fox fandom off on the fuckin’ internet by shoving his own headcanons into the faces of every member that has ever told a story or roleplayed with other people interested in each others’ ideas. Clean your gross shit up before thinking it’s appropriate to spend time acting like this online.
Of course Pigma is redeemable, every villain-character can be redeemable. Fiction is fuckin’ fiction, it’s not the goddamn tablets of stone written by the finger of God. But because your dense-ass isn’t capable of looking at the world past your goddamn nose, all you can manage is writing shit like this to authors that you asked questions. The idea of roleplaying and writing fanfiction is to share ideas and encourage creativity. All you ever do is hammer everything down into the most boring, stale and vanilla bullshit -- I mean, Christ, you dislike a ton of Star Fox titles, why do you even fuckin’ care so much? Writing down a sweet anecdote between Wolf and Pigma isn’t an attempt to redeem Pigma; I am giving Pigma a chance to be a dynamic character--something that you’ve been incapable of fathoming, ESPECIALLY with Krystal. Dynamic character draw in readers’ interest and encourages readers to care about the character enough to look at them from different, creative perspectives and hopefully encourages writers to understand the complexity of villain characters. Pigma is an an important name in this story and he should be treated better than the way you treat him. He’s done shitty things, yes, but without him Star Fox wouldn’t be Star Fox. I’m not justifying his crimes, I’m just giving the people who pay attention to this blog an opportunity to look at the character from a new light. Wolf isn’t Fox, so he doesn’t view Pigma the same way Fox would. You’re a budding author, right? You post to FF.net all the goddamn time. Take two seconds to educate yourself and practice dynamic thinking. You’ll benefit from it as a writer.
I mean, fuck, you’re sitting there, trying to goad me, while I’m writing this response to you. Likely still neglecting the space in which your poor dog is forced to occupy because once again pissing people off on the internet ABOUT FUCKIN’ KRYSTAL is more important to you than your poor fuckin’ dog! You know what I want from you, what I want you to say here? Nothing. I don’t give a fuck about your idiot-fuckin’-ideas regarding your perfect Star Fox scenario. Don’t turn this around on me, you fuckin’ prick, YOU asked me what MY WOLF’S opinion was. It was MY TURN, NOT YOURS. People aren’t asking for your shitty opinions and bullshit criticisms on ROLEPLAY POSTS ON TUMBLR so STOP FUCKIN’ GIVIN’ EM UNLESS YOU’RE ASKED.
And the worst part is, you have the fuckin’ AUDACITY, THE GALL, THE GODDAMN BALLS to tell everybody that your behavior is supposed to be excused because you have a social disorder and because mommy and daddy decided they couldn’t stay married when you were little.
FUCK THAT.
Y’know, I understand that it’s something that you struggle with, being on the spectrum, and everything--that is why I’ve been the most patient with you out everybody--but you CANNOT, YOU ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT--CAN. NOT.--use it as an excuse for and to explain away your shitty actions. There are a LARGE portion of people that fight ADHD every fuckin’ day in this fandom, some of those whom you’ve interacted with. Guess what, bud? There are a fuckin’ metric TON of us that have divorced parents. You’re talkin’ to a child of divorce right fuckin’ now--and I bet you you wouldn’t have fuckin’ guessed. You’re egging on a child of divorce, right now! But I don’t use my past as a chance to explain away actions towards you. You’re talkin’ to a child of one of the most dysfunctional American families you can ever imagine and I’m not waving my personal bullshit around like fuckin’ flag to protect myself every time I fuck up in this community. I have chronic depression and extreme PTSD, but you have NEVER seen me use the shit I’m dealing with offline to shield myself. The only time I’ve ever made public mention of it is in my rules section of this blog, which explains that often my home-life makes activity difficult to keep up with. Otherwise, I handle my shit. I’ve done my best to keep my Is dotted and my Ts crossed. I’ve got lotsa shit I don’t agree in this fandom, as do the rest of us. Yet N O B O D Y B U T Y O U act like this. Using what you struggle with as an excuse is NOT OKAY. It is NOT A REASON TO START FIGHTS AND FLAME AUTHORS. And ALL of your behavior has been an insult to ALL OF US. Every single one of us on this platform, on Twitter, on FF.net, and on DeviantART, have something they face every fuckin’ day. Those of us on the spectrum, those of us who are a child of divorce, and those who fight attention disorders, those of us who have serious depression, those of us who live through abuse, those of us who have extreme anxiety disorders, those of us who struggle with identity. All of us have something. It is not a permission slip and how fuckin’ dare you act like it is?!
Stop fuckin’ acting like this. Stop telling everyone how “sorry” you are and then still fuckin’ proceed to act the way that you do, across multiple fuckin’ platforms within multiple groups of Star Fox fans.
You are a big boy, Jacob. It’s time fuckin’ act like one.
Instead of sending me more worthless messages, how about you get off the internet and go clean your disgusting room.
#links to screenshots are within the post#they are the lower case bolded sentences#OUT OF CLAWS || OUT OF CHARACTER#i am not proud of what you guys are seeing#but holy shit it's been three full fuckin' months of this shit#tw: animal neglect
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August 25, 2020 at 7:00 PM EDT
Under the bright lights of the Republican National Convention on Monday night, California entrepreneur Natalie Harp said President Trump literally saved her life.
“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” Harp said in an emotional address. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”
But experts cast doubt on that story: They point out that Harp’s description of the treatment she received and her timeline for receiving it make it unlikely Trump had any effect on her case.
Harp has repeatedly credited a “Right to Try” law, pushed by the president and signed into law in May 2018 for saving her life. But the treatment she said she has received — “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use” in her own words — would not have been covered under Right to Try because the drug had already been approved.
In online accounts and interviews, Harp said that when she was diagnosed with Stage 2 bone cancer she “failed the two available chemotherapies for my rare disease and was denied from clinical trials.” In the end, she “found another oncologist who was willing to try a different approach — an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use.”
Medical experts say such applications — called “off-label use” — are common in cancer treatment and long predated the law. Right To Try, on the other hand, was supposed to help patients gain access to drugs that have not been “ approved or licensed by the FDA for any use.” Indeed, the justification the law’s backers gave was to allow desperately ill patients to bypass the government to get experimental medicines if they were willing to take the risk.
It is also striking that two months before Trump even signed the law, Harp had already spoken online about receiving her new treatment.
She tweeted on March 27, 2018: “Just so you know, President Trump is setting records in speeding up the drug approval process. The chemo I’m on now wasn’t approved 5 years ago.”
At some point before 2017, the business-degree graduate of Liberty University also wrote a 29-page report that blamed Democrats for her health problems with chronic pain and suffering after a medical error during which a nurse put sterile water instead of saline into her IV.
Harp — a member of the president’s campaign advisory board described on her LinkedIn page as a self-employed entrepreneur — did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment. Officials at the White House and Trump campaign declined to answer questions about the account she gave during the GOP convention.
For the past two years, Trump has claimed passage of the Right-to-Try law as a hallmark accomplishment and a centerpiece in his campaign. He has bragged that it will save “thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands” and last year called it “a miracle — so many people have been saved.”
But Alison Bateman-House, a medical ethicist at the New York University School of Medicine, has tracked the law’s application and estimates that fewer than 10 people have used it to get treatments since it was passed.
“The problem is it’s a classic case of Trump demagoguery. It sounds good — cutting red tape and saving lives — but at the root of it there’s nothing there,” said Peter Lurie, former top official of the Food and Drug Administration, now president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The FDA already had a process that approved more than 90 percent of people who wanted access to these drugs and treatments.”
The measure was originally pitched by a Phoenix-based libertarian think tank called the Goldwater Institute as a way to give terminally ill patients access to unapproved medications from pharmaceutical companies without being bogged down by FDA regulations. But since at least the 1970s, there had already been a way for patients to get access to such drugs That pathway — called expanded use or compassionate use — is used by hundreds of people a year, and more than 90 percent of such requests are granted by the FDA, experts say.
When seriously ill patients struggle to access unapproved drugs outside clinical trials, drug companies, not the FDA, are most often the main obstacle. But the law did not address that.
“They tackled an issue that was not a problem, and did not tackle the issues that were a problem,” Bateman-House said.
After Harp began making claims on behalf of the Trump campaign about how Right to Try had saved her life, Jeremy Snyder, a public health ethics professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, examined accounts she gave of her medical struggles on LinkedIn, Twitter in interviews with conservative outlets such as Fox News. Snyder compiled the discrepancies he found in a detailed essay last year for The Washington Post
Superficially, he said, Right to Try is good fodder for a political campaign because it fits the libertarian and conservative impulses of cutting government restrictions.
“But it falls apart if you dig even a little bit into it,” he said. “If this woman who didn’t even use the Right to Try law is the best example they can come up with, it just shows the emptiness of the achievements they are trying to claim. They are telling dying people that they have given them some new access to medicine. when that’s not true.”
Julie Tate contributed to this story.
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Podcast: Quarantine and Declining Mental Health
Day 1,364 of the COVID-19 quarantine (well, at least it feels like it). How are you holding up? If you’re like most people, you’re not having much fun. But if you already struggle with anxiety, depression or another mental health issue, these days of isolation and uncertainty can feel like absolute torture. In today’s Not Crazy episode, Gabe laments the loss of his routine — those regular activities he clung to religiously to keep his mental health in check. Now what is he supposed to do?
Tune in for a special quarantine episode. Together, we will grieve our old routines and discuss how to start new ones.
(Transcript Available Below)
SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW
About The Not Crazy Podcast Hosts
Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.
Jackie Zimmerman has been in the patient advocacy game for over a decade and has established herself as an authority on chronic illness, patient-centric healthcare, and patient community building. She lives with multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and depression.
You can find her online at JackieZimmerman.co, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Computer Generated Transcript for “COVID-19- Quarantine” Episode
Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.
Announcer: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a Psych Central podcast. And here are your hosts, Jackie Zimmerman and Gabe Howard.
Gabe: Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy podcast. And also what represents quarantine, I think we’re on day 17, maybe by the time this airs day? Day? They’re all running together. Oh, yeah. That’s my co-host, Jackie. I just, if anybody cares.
Jackie: That rambling guy over there, that’s Gabe. I saw a meme this week that was, I’m gonna botch it, but like, welcome to March 97th. And I was like, yeah, it feels like we’ve been in March for about two years.
Gabe: It’s there, is it? I don’t even have words for this. And and I, Gabe but doesn’t have words
Jackie: Right.
Gabe: For this. And we prepare. We’re podcasters. We think about this shit a lot. Like we do this professionally for a living. And the best that I could come up with is, ah, we’re quarantined, and I don’t like it. That’s really what it all boils down to. Like we should just end the show right now. Thanks, everybody, for listening to the Not Crazy Podcast. We’re quarantined and they don’t like it. Tune in next week when there’s still quarantine and they still don’t like it.
Jackie: Yeah. Gabe, how are you? Like,
Gabe: Not well.
Jackie: How are you doing?
Gabe: Not good, not good. I want to be as open and honest as possible without, like, scaring my mom. This is the most mentally unhealthy I have ever been since reaching recovery. This is unchartered territory for me. This is unprecedented. This I don’t even know what to say. And I’m I even I’m like, oh, well, Gabe, you’re being very dramatic. But here’s the thing, my coping skills are all now illegal and I say illegal. And it’s not literally illegal. I’m not trying to catastrophize. I feel like that I should put like a big asterix up for that.
Jackie: But you could get a fine.
Gabe: Everything’s closed. They’re not best practices. Yeah, but
Jackie: People are getting arrested
Gabe: I don’t want
Jackie: For violating these orders in Michigan.
Gabe: All right. It’s illegal, every coping skill that Gabe Howard has to manage bipolar and anxiety disorder are now against the law.
Jackie: Like what?
Gabe: Like leaving the house, like going and sitting and people watching, like distracting myself by working in public. By being able to leave the house. I’m not an introvert in any way. Like in zero way. I once took that test. The Myers Briggs, I think, and the person who administered it said, wow, you’re the only person that’s ever gotten like a perfect score on extroversion. It’s not a, I’m not trying to. It’s just it’s just who I am as a person. I just I really like people, and I like them so much, I need them in areas that maybe other people don’t. Like, again, I’m now having trouble formulating words because I’ve talked to the same people so much.
Jackie: Yeah.
Gabe: They’re now annoyed with me and they love me. I don’t mean this in a mean way. They’re just like, you already told us that story. I’m like, I know. I like to tell every story 50 times. And that means I need 50 different people. I am the guy who randomly talks to people in public. I am. I just am.
Jackie: So I have thoughts and I have ideas and I have feelings and I don’t know where to start. So I’m going to start with feelings first. First of all, I’m sad that you’re feeling that way. I mean, there’s no other eloquent way, like it bums me out. That you’re having a really hard time. That’s hard to hear. Hard to watch. Hard to listen to all of that. Same samesies. Right?
Gabe: I could use a hug. But once again, illegal.
Jackie: Also, I’m not a hugger, so there’s that,
Gabe: You hug me.
Jackie: I am an introvert. I hate everybody, but even I am struggling and I’m struggling in the way that where a lot of people are like, let’s meet up on Zoom and have a check in and connect in. Like, let’s do let’s try to be social even when we can’t be physically social. And I’m avoiding all of that stuff. And part of that is because every conversation that I have now is talking about this. It’s reliving it. It’s diving into it. It’s talking about how much it sucks, how how bad it is and how scary it is. And I just don’t want to keep doing that because it’s making it really hard. So I find myself kind of isolating even more than normal because like every conversation I have for my business, it’s always like, hey, are you hanging in there? How’s everything going over there? Every conversation I have with a friend is like, oh, my God, are you okay? Are you still working or are you still healthy? Like, are you like all of these terrible conversations that I feel like I’m having 24-fucking-7. So I’m just trying to not talk to people, which is not good. Not good. I know it’s not good. It’s like isolation upon isolation. So
Gabe: It’s
Jackie: That’s what I’m
Gabe: All
Jackie: Doing.
Gabe: Anybody wants to talk about. And.
Jackie: It’s all anybody can talk about. I mean, what else is there to talk about?
Gabe: So that actually that that’s. Huh? Huh? It never occurred to me that the reason that people were stuck on this subject is because you’re right. There’s nothing else to talk about. People aren’t hanging out with their friends and families. So there’s no friends and family gossip and/or drama.
Jackie: There’s no sports.
Gabe: They’re not going to work. So we can’t complain about work. Those of us who are going to work, they’re scared or frustrated or. Or.
Jackie: We all think we’re like one day away from losing our jobs. Pretty much.
Gabe: We do. We do. There’s no sports to talk about. I mean, it’s fascinating. But the only thing that really took America’s public consciousness off of the coronavirus for a few days was that Tiger King documentary
Jackie: Right.
Gabe: On Netflix. But I can kind of see why. Because we needed something big, new, different and of course, national. It needed to be national. There’s no public interest stories anymore because the only thing that’s happening in the world is related to COVID-19 and the coronavirus.
Jackie: Remember when I was like, I’m so tired of hearing about the election? I wish we could stop hearing about the election. What election? Are we even still having an election? Is it getting postponed? Like, who is? Is he just gonna be our president until we die now? Because we’re never having another election? Like, I just, I don’t know. I feel
Gabe: The primaries in Ohio were cancelled. I shouldn’t say cancelled. I apologize
Jackie: Postponed, right?
Gabe: The primaries in Ohio, where I live, were postponed. But this is unprecedented. Our election
Jackie: Yeah.
Gabe: Was postponed. And of course, everybody wants to talk about that. And I kind of have a no-politics rule. There are very few people in the world, very few, like I can count them on one hand, that I will discuss politics or religion with because it’s so divisive. Right? I don’t. I have so much in common with people that why do I want to sit down and discuss something that we disagree with and it always devolves into hatred and anger. So I don’t even have that like, like, yeah, I got. Jackie.
Jackie: So.
Gabe: I just have nothing. I have nothing. My business is decimated. My my wife can’t support me because she’s scared, and, by the way, the breadwinner now, I just you know, all those people that were like, well, Gabe lives off his wife. Well, congratulations. You all got to be right in the end. You all got to be right.
Jackie: In the end of a pandemic, you know, like, I don’t know, Gabe, I want to, like, build you up and be like, no, that’s not true and you’re amazing and you pull your weight. And I mean, none of that matters right now because like
Gabe: You’re right.
Jackie: Like, none of it matters.
Gabe: Listen to what you just said. None of it matters. And listen, I agree with you. Like, if we reverse roles, if you became Gabe and I became Jackie, I’d just be like, really? That’s what you’re fucking worried about?
Jackie: No, no, no.
Gabe: I kind of want you to say that to me. Really? That’s what you’re fucking worried about? What people think of you? Literally 200,000 people are gonna die. And that’s your concern? That people think that your loving wife, who loves you, who has a job right now that’s stable while you’re safe. Oh, my God. Public perception is Gabe’s number one concern during a pandemic. But fuck you. It is.
Jackie: Ok. Well,
Gabe: I don’t know why. I can’t help it.
Jackie: Good tirade, but that was actually not what I meant.
Gabe: Well, it should have been.
Jackie: What I meant was like, I can build you up. Like I could sit here for the next hour and tell you how great you are and how effective you are and how like you really are a partnership with Kendall and all. But like what I say to you isn’t gonna matter right now. I’m not saying your feelings about this don’t matter, but I’m saying like I have one. I have no evidence to back it up any more. I can’t be like, look at all the speeches you have planned. I can’t
Gabe: Right.
Jackie: Do that. Right? I can’t be like.
Gabe: They’re gone.
Jackie: That’s not true. Look at all this other evidence that we would normally have to support that. I don’t have it. So why I’m saying it doesn’t matter, because it would just basically be blowing smoke at this point. And instead of being like, Gabe, stop it. Don’t feel that way. I’d much rather say like I feel you and I’m sorry that you feel that way, but your feelings are valid. And like, fuck everybody else. Right? I still want to give a little bit of fuck everybody else. Because you were doing it. You were, right? Like an unprecedented
Gabe: Yeah.
Jackie: Global pandemic. It’s pretty hard to be like. Yeah. But until this one thing until this one thing, everybody was doing a lot of shit. Like we all were doing a lot of things. I never even fathomed the idea of my business failing in the next year, because I was slaying it, I was doing amazing. And now I’m like, I might not have a business in three months at all.
Gabe: But remember what I said in the beginning where my coping skills are just they’re all decimated right now? One of my coping skills, Jackie, is, well, I’m a failure. OK. Gabe, why are you a failure? Well, because nobody hires me to speak. OK, Gabe, let’s pull up your calendar. Oh, look, this person has hired you to speak. This person has hired you to speak. This person has hired you to speak. Well, but I don’t do a good job at them and they would never hire me again. OK, Gabe, hang on. We have evaluations at these conferences and they send them to you. Here’s your evaluations. Nine out of ten. Nine out of ten. Nine out of ten. Oh, look, this person says you talk too much. Okay. Just whatever. This is how the process of dealing with, you know, severe anxiety and racing thoughts and paranoia work. But let’s focus on that last one. Paranoia. I live in constant fear that the world is going to end. And I thought largely that I meant Gabe’s world. I now have this cause to think, oh, shit. You know, I don’t talk about politics for a myriad of reasons. And should
Jackie: Gabe?
Gabe: I have? Is this the fault of the pandemic response being defunded? Is this or is this nothing like is it just this is just life? I just. And that’s the other thing. The news. Whatever you believed before the pandemic started, just turn on the news, and there is a news station that will validate your belief. So it makes it even more difficult to self-soothe because it’s hard to know who’s right. I mean, remember a month ago when this was all a hoax? And now we’re all quarantined in our fucking houses.
Jackie: Well, first of all, fuck should. Stop shoulding all over yourself. OK? No more should I have done this? Should I have done that? Because none of it is something you can change. Thinking about it won’t make you feel any better and the outcome will still be the same. So always fuck should. Never say should. Quit shoulding on yourself.
Gabe: I love that, by the way, that that might be my new thing. Gabe, what’s wrong? I should have on myself. I should have’d all over the place.
Jackie: I have some ideas and these are off the cuff, so they may be horrible ideas, but here are things that I think maybe could help. Again, maybe they’re bad. I don’t know. But first of all, you like people watching. You can still do that in parks or you can go for drives. Adam and I go for drives. We’ve gone for drives for years. He loves to go for drives. What about going for drives?
Gabe: So I don’t want to be like the person that like every everything that you give me, I’m going to like crap all over and say, no, that’s not what
Jackie: Well,
Gabe: I want because these are excellent ideas.
Jackie: Crap all over it. If you need to.
Gabe: Well, I want to be very clear that these are excellent ideas. But remember, there is a reason that I didn’t pick going for drives when I had all the options. So the best that I can do is not the best, which means I’m not going to get the best results.
Jackie: Right.
Gabe: Right.
Jackie: But you can get some results.
Gabe: Yes, I’m doing the things to get some results. I still like. OK. Before the world went poof, here’s my routine in the morning. I would set an alarm because sleep hygiene is very important and I would get up at the same time every day. I would then feed the dog, get dressed, let the dog out, and then I would go to a fast food restaurants and I would order Diet Coke and I would sit there for a couple of hours and drink my free refills of Diet Coke and use my phone or my laptop to do like basic work. You know, answer emails, check the stats of the podcast, you know, send verifications for like all the stuff that you can do, like at a fast food restaurant interspersed with random conversations from the other regulars and the staff and on and on and on. Then after that, for a couple hours, I’d be like, OK, well, now I need to get like deep down and record a podcast. So then I would go home, OK? That was before the pandemic, right? Following along so far? OK, so now after the pandemic, what I do is I get up at the same time every day. I get dressed, I take care of the dog. I do all the stuff. I get in my car and I drive to the same fast food restaurant, which of course, is only drive thru.
Gabe: And I go through the drive thru and I order multiple drinks so that I can bring them all home. So I’m still getting up at the same time, doing the same home routine and still going to the same the same fast food restaurant and getting my Diet Coke. I just now drive it home. But before before when I came home, I went straight up to my home office, used my big multi-screen computer, the whole nine yards. Now I sit at my kitchen table with my device and my Diet Coke, which sort of kind of feels like I’m in public. It’s not. I’m not in public. There’s no people to watch, et cetera. But I haven’t moved into my office yet. So that is the best that I can. That is the best I can get right now, because obviously I can’t sit in public, but I still need to get dressed to go out and get the Diet Coke. I still need to get up at the same time every day. And I don’t move to my home office and still I do all that stuff. And that’s supposed to, I don’t know, like approximate sitting in a fast food restaurant.
Jackie: Ok.
Gabe: So so yeah, it’s second best
Jackie: For sure.
Gabe: Or third best. There’s no people.
Jackie: But I am going to say this,
Gabe: Where are the people?
Jackie: I’m going to say this, and I think that it’s probably not going to be helpful. But you’re trying to replicate the routine that you had. Right?
Gabe: Yeah, I’m trying to replicate the thing that has worked for years.
Jackie: Right. So what if knowing that that can’t happen, we work on a new routine, that is something you can do every day. So the effort of a routine is still there, but the outcome might be different, like the outcome, meaning like you’re not going to answer emails. You’re not going to do this. Like, I don’t have a routine. I hate routines. I’m literally a nightmare. I wake up whenever and then like, don’t do. It’s bad. But I have thought about now that I have like I don’t even have that much more time. But just like I have different opportunities now, like, do we wake up at 7:30 and take a walk every morning? We say we’re going to we don’t. Well, let’s just say that we did. That would be something new and different. Right? Part of the routine, and I know that your routine has been strategically designed to help you manage bipolar and everything else in your life that you cling to your routine for. So what if we just make a different routine? Like what if it’s a drive? What if you host Facebook lives to connect with people instead of, like having phone calls? I know you’re doing interviews like some zoom interviews, I saw the one with your sister. But like, what if the routine is different and the outcome is not Gabe is super productive? And he’s getting jobs and he’s doing all this stuff? What if the routine is Gabe is just existing and he’s still doing it well?
Gabe: We’re going to step away to hear from our sponsors. We’ll be right back.
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Jackie: And we’re back talking about how everything sucks, but we’re hanging in there.
Gabe: First off, thank you for giving me credit that I forgot about. You’re right, I’m doing a shit ton on Zoom. We’re doing stuff on Psych Central every Friday right now at 1 o’clock. Please tune in. One o’clock on Psych Central’s Facebook page. It is facebook.com/PsychCentral. You should absolutely check that out. It’s really cool. It’s a panel discussion. Obviously, Jackie and I are always on The Mighty. The second and fourth Tuesdays, right? It’s Tuesday? Second and fourth Tuesdays?
Jackie: I don’t even know what day it is now. But.
Gabe: Yeah, we kick ass. And so you’re right. I’ve been making great videos through a grant with the National Alliance on Mental Illness – Tennessee. You are right. I am trying to make lemons out of lemonade. But here is what the pandemic reminds me of. You ever been stuck in the airport, Jackie?
Jackie: Yeah, actually.
Gabe: And I think many of us have and here is what happens pretty much to me all the time. So I’m going to leave it at noon. Right? Going to leave at noon. And there’s a delay. All right. And they say, well, we’re going to we’re going to delay by a half an hour. All right. That’s 12:30. So I keep my ass in my spot. And then at 12:30, they’re like, eh, we’re gonna leave by 1:00. And before you know it, you leave at 4:00. So you had four hours where you did nothing. And when you get home, you say to your wife, hey, before I eat dinner, I have to get this work done. And she immediately fires back at yo, you sat in an airport for four fucking hours. Why didn’t you get it done? Oh, my God, you’re already late. Why didn’t you get it done? And the answer is because you didn’t know you had four hours. Everything was in half an hour chunks. And the thing that you had to do takes a whole hour to get done. Building routines is a multi-week process when this whole thing started. I didn’t think that I had many weeks, you know, partial shutdowns, work from home, schools closed. You know, social distancing, you know, big events were going to be canceled. This has all happened, if we remember. And it’s hard to remember. You know, first, we’re not going to gather in groups of more than a hundred. OK. Well, yes, this will decimate my business and then I cannot speak anymore. But my day to day is going to look the same. You know, maybe I’ll have a longer wait when I go out to dinner because they’re only seating 100 instead of their normal hundred and fifty. But then it just slowly clamped down. Now malls are closed. Whoever thought the mall would close? I remember the last blizzard, and the mall was still open.
Jackie: I don’t know how any malls are still in business. So.
Gabe: Well, that’s a whole nother can of worms.
Jackie: Ok. But I’m going to
Gabe: But maybe.
Jackie: Let me but you.
Gabe: Maybe if I would have started this three weeks ago, I’d have odds.
Jackie: Ok. But.
Gabe: But I didn’t know I needed to start this three weeks ago. Nobody did.
Jackie: Gabe, but you know, now, right? We now know it’s gonna be all of April. The words have come down. This whole Easter bullshit deadline is over, we’re saying all of April. OK, so now you have four weeks in front of you that, you know, is gonna be the same.
Gabe: This is helpful. Sincerely. Now that we know that it’s all of April, this is helpful. This gives me more time. And the fact that it could stend out past April. Stend out? Is stend out a word?
Jackie: No, definitely not.
Gabe: The fact that did, the fact that it could extend out past April. You are right. And the weather is warming up. And my wife and I are trying to take more walks and listen, I’m gonna survive. Jackie, we’re gonna survive. We’re all gonna survive. Everybody listening to this, we’re gonna make it. But it bothers me to my core how we’re just not focusing on mental health because we’re all terrified of our physical health. And I’m hearing things from people like, wow, Gabe, you know, your mental health isn’t that important considering we’re in a pandemic. This is indicative of a larger problem that we have in America where we separate mental and physical health. Right now, we’re all terrified about our physical health. So therefore, that’s all we’re concentrating on and fuck people with mental illness. Well, truthfully, we kind of feel that way already. But that’s another show entirely. I just think that we need to be concentrating on the entirety of a person. Just because you’re physically healthy doesn’t mean that you’re living your best life. If you are mentally unhealthy, we want to fix that. We want to be like a whole person. This is the problem with looking at these in two different silos.
Gabe: I think we should just focus on health. If you are mentally stable but you can’t walk, that’s not a good trade. Let’s fix the not-walking thing. Let’s figure out ways around this. We don’t ignore them. Wow, you’re no longer suicidal. So it’s OK that your legs broke? No. We want to stop you from being suicidal. We want to fix your anxiety, bipolar, depression, OCD, whatever. And we want to get you a cast for your legs that can heal as well. I just feel like we already weren’t paying attention to mental illness in this country. We already were not paying attention to it. And now we’re really not paying attention to it. I have article after article of people showing up in emergency rooms, suicidal for mental health reasons and just being sent away because after all, it’s all about the pandemic now. This is horrific. This is horrific. As a mental health advocate. I just want to climb in a hole and die. I don’t I don’t even know how I’m going to a mental health advocate my way out of this.
Jackie: Everything you’re saying is super valid. 100 percent. I’m gonna but you, though. But this is the experience of every disabled person in America until the history of time. Disability and chronic illness.
Gabe: Yeah, and now it’s worse.
Jackie: Who are chronically isolated, who have poor mental health and nobody has given a shit, the whole world is finally kind of starting to see this. And I’m not saying what you’re saying is wrong, but there is a certain part of me that’s like, OK, now imagine if this was your life all the time, though.
Gabe: Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it. I think all of our listeners get it. We’ve all been shit on because we have mental illness. We’ve all been stigmatized and discriminated against. I just feel like it’s even worse now. And this is not gonna be a popular statement among the well in this country. But they don’t listen to our show. So I feel like I’m gonna get away with it. Nobody gave a shit about anxious people other than anxious people. Until now, suddenly everybody’s panic, worries, stress and anxiety is like, oh, no, oh, no, everybody’s anxious. We must calm them down and help them in some way. Well, what about all the people with anxiety? Three months ago, did you want to calm them down? No. They were fake and dramatic bullshit.
Jackie: I’m not defending anybody, but it’s easy to see the cause and the effect, an outright pandemic, scary anxiety for the world, who functions with high anxiety the way that we do. It’s hard to see the cause. You can’t see it because most of the time there isn’t a cause. Spoiler right. It’s just like a thing that we think is a thing and it turns into a thing. This is not an invisible thing. This is something we are all experiencing. I don’t know. I mean we ended the last show on this about like not feeling super hopeful that it’s going to change anything. I still feel that way. I don’t think everybody’s going to come out of this and be like, you know what? Anxiety is real. We should really take this shit seriously. Nope. That’s not going to happen once everybody stops being anxious. They’re gonna go back to their normal lives. Right? I don’t think that we have like a clear course of action here. It’s not like do X and X will happen. And I think honestly, maybe this is also unpopular. Focusing on the fact that nobody is treating or helping or supporting people with mental illness right now is not going to help you, Gabe. I know you are a mental health advocate, but right now this is about Gabe’s well-being. And maybe that means like not focusing on them.
Gabe: It’s hard not to focus on it
Jackie: I know.
Gabe: Because it’s all the whole world. I don’t even have a distraction. Again, I’m going to go back to how we opened the show. I can’t go to a movie. I can’t go out to dinner with friends. I can’t go on a trip. I can’t go away for the weekend. I can’t. I can’t. I had my granddaughter over a weekend ago because her parents needed help and relief and food and and just help babysitting and money. And people gave me shit. I was just like I had a couple of hours of normal where we ate pizza and played cards. And for a couple of hours I forgot. And then as soon as it was over, people were like, well, why the fuck do you do that? I don’t, I don’t have words for this. I just I don’t even have words. I feel like I get attacked no matter what I do. And of course, I felt that way beforehand. So this doesn’t help. We have a policy that we’re now going to throw out the window here on Not Crazy where we always try to end on a positive.
Gabe: There’s not a positive. I can’t come up with one. There isn’t one, Jackie. I agree with everything that you’re saying. And listen, please listen to this show like five or six times, Jackie is killing it. She’s got great advice. We can’t change the past. Don’t should yourself. Change your routines. This is all excellent. That’s the most positive that I can get. I am telling you that people who are mentally healthy are struggling hard with their mental health right now, which means that those of us who are in the best of times struggling with our mental health are even worse. Please, God, reach out. Don’t let a pandemic wipe us out, because I do feel that this is going to end. I do feel that we have shit to do. But for right now, just fucking cry in a corner. I’m serious. I honestly, that’s probably been the most helpful thing that I’ve done this whole fucking time is just cry in a corner. I can’t. It’s all I got. Cry in a corner. Cry in a corner. That’s that’s that’s my advice.
Jackie: I mean, you can cry in a corner. It’s OK, I give you permission if you want permission. I don’t know if you do or not, but you know, whatever cry in a corner I am with you that I you know, I’ve told you, I don’t think we should always end the show on a positive note. But I feel the need just to drop a little just a little nugget of positivity in there of everything is shit. It’s going to be shit for a while in the future. Positivity is coming. But you can use this time to work on finding other coping mechanisms to supplement until you can get back to your other ones. And that might mean thinking very outside of the box. It might mean maybe you’ve learned to paint, Gabe. Maybe all that bullshit that people are saying, you know, all these like online classes. Maybe it’s cooking, maybe it’s painting, maybe it’s journaling. Maybe it’s become a vlogger. Right? Like, I’m not saying like prepare so the next time this happens, you have better coping skills because, again. But what else do you have going on? Right? You can try other things and maybe you find something you like doing. Maybe it’s meditation. Maybe it’s taking long walks. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, listening to podcasts, maybe it’s a myriad of other things. And this goes out to anybody listening to, like, don’t be afraid to try something that maybe sounded really stupid a week ago. Because what do you got to lose? What do you have to lose at this point?
Gabe: Truer words, Jackie, have never been spoken. In order to compromise, Jackie and I are going to say one positive thing about our lives right now so that we can still end the show on a positive note. Jackie, do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?
Jackie: I will go first. I truly can think of no better person to be quarantined with other than my husband. He is amazing.
Gabe: Jerk. Now, if I don’t say that, I can think of no better person to be quarantined with than my wife. I thought that was assumed. So that is not my positive
Jackie: Well.
Gabe: Because that’s just my baseline. All the time I you know, my, mine is about my wife, too, but not so gushy, mushy. My wife is 10 years younger than me and for the entire time we’ve been married, I’ve been trying to get her to watch movies from my childhood. I was like, watch this movie, watch this movie. Of course, we never have time because we’re busy. We’re stuck. So I’m finally getting her to watch like Clerks and Kevin Smith and all the Kevin Smith movies that were really big when I was in high school. So, of course, that would have made her like 8. So not appropriate. But it’s been really nice to share my formative years with her in a way that we just didn’t have time for before because there are just so many movies that we like together. Why force somebody to watch a movie that they have just zero interest in? But it’s been pretty cool. She finally has met Jay and Silent Bob.
Jackie: Wow.
Gabe: She likes them. Do you like Jay and Silent Bob?
Jackie: They’re not my favorite, but I like Kevin Smith, like I like Chasing Amy and I like Clerks, and, you know, I like the franchise.
Gabe: She’s never seen Chasing Amy, Clerks, etc. So Chasing Amy, I think is up next on the gonna watch list. I can’t wait to see what she thinks of it. Jackie, thanks for hanging out with me and giving me some semblance of normal because doing the podcast with you, this is this is normal. So thank you. Thank you for being you.
Jackie: Well, you know, all I can be is me, but I don’t know. This conversation is important and I think it’s important to have it. And I think that other people feel the same way. And yeah, I hate this phrase that I’m about to say, but like, hang in there. Just keep doing whatever you can because we don’t know what’s next. We can’t plan for shit right now. So just take it day by day. Hang in there. Make every day different if that feels good or don’t. Whatever feels good everyday, do that.
Gabe: Yeah, give yourself a break. I agree. Listen up, everybody, please, please, please take care of yourself. But since you are quarantined and you have a ton of free time, now is the time to leave a review for the Not Crazy podcast. You could write a book of words because what are you going to do? Go to your reservation, movie, or sporting event? Your stuck. Share us on social media. Use your words and tell people why they should listen. Email each other. Whatever you do, do not write it down on a sheet of paper and gather in a large group because that’s still not okay. We’ll see everybody next week.
Jackie: Hang in there, everyone, take care of yourselves. Have a great week. I don’t know.
Announcer: You’ve been listening to Not Crazy from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. To work with Jackie, go to JackieZimmerman.co. Not Crazy travels well. Have Gabe and Jackie record an episode live at your next event. E-mail [email protected] for details.
Podcast: Quarantine and Declining Mental Health syndicated from
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What Even are Jokes?
Millennials - and now, Gen Z - have some weird coping mechanisms.
On a late-night browse through Twitter - which, honestly, tends to stir many ideas - I was reading one-liners and social justice observations while Bad Romance, a podcast about ill-conceived romantic comedies, played in the background. As one of the posts, Jourdain, plaintively asked her boyfriend, "why are you like this," I laughed. It's a favorite memetic joke of mine, and a standard in our household, often repeated when something has gone awry.
Similarly, other simple, despairing cries have become a form of humour - such as the one that inspired the title of this post.
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Why are you like this?
A few years ago, it was Generation Y, the Millennials, who were supposed to Save Us All. Whether we do or not, however, it's impossible to deny that Generation Y - most of us barely in our 20s or 30s - are already exhausted.
Fatalistic, often beset by mental health issues, physical health issues, a history of trauma, societal marginalizations, poverty, or often, a combination of these, Millennials have turned to three coping mechanisms - weed, the internet, and each other. Perhaps it's an uncanny combination of all three that's led to a weird comedic renaissance.
Of course, sweeping and broad generalizations have their limits, but suffice to say that I'm talking about concepts that cross and touch on cultural elements from the queer community, the online community of people of colour, the disabled community and autistic community, and other overlapping groups - yes, including straight, cisgender, heterosexual, and white people. Many of us, as I've said, have various struggles right now, but the common language of memes and comedy often unites us.
For the lols
Comedy tends to fall in broad political groups. Those of us on the left try to eschew jokes that play on "punching down" and enforce marginalizing power structures. In search of comedy that doesn't reflect the regressive ethos of the 90s, our era of origin, a strain of Dadaist absurdism has formed the DNA of our comedy.
Millennial jokes and humour really give me pause. There are intricate rules of grammar, both visual and verbal, that must be obeyed for punchlines to land, but it's also easy to form new jokes using or playing on these rules. References to Tide Pods or moral panics of the day, InTenTiOnAlLy PoR oR iNcOmpRehEnSiBle WrItIng, a focus on poor judgement calls, and mental and physical health symptoms all characterize popular topics. GIFS and images - sometimes macros, sometimes on their own - work either as stand-alone punchlines or visual completions of verbal jokes. Some GIFS and images have taken on their own significance, often completely disconnected from the image's original context. Michael Jackson eating popcorn from a scene in the "Thriller" music video indicates an enjoyment of drama ensuing in a conversation thread. Kermit the Frog sipping a cup of Lipton tea indicates a sassy judgement.
Of course, there are many more. Ironic and sarcastic references to educational or edutainment television such as "The More You Know", to childhood favorite cartoons, and even anonymous photographs of strangers' cats can all serve as side-splitting punchlines. References to creative media that cross over with popular aphorisms from Twitter and Tumblr, and sometimes Reddit and Facebook, bleed in and out of fashion. Decontextualizing them for a moment, it's almost baffling or bewildering. Given that much of the humour is highly context-based or simply absurdist, some of it "pure" or "wholesome" (i.e. relying on positive, sweet, or heartwarming experiences) and some of it utterly fatalistic, it can be hard to understand how all of the jokes work, or even why they're important.
A brief history of suicide jokes
But very noticeable is the prevalence of jokes about death, suicide, and existentialism. Multiple media outlets have been horrified and fascinated and wagged their fingers at us for this type of humour.
However, these jokes were also very common during and just after the Great Depression - as demonstrated in a plethora of classic cartoons.
I think there's a sort of nihilistic argument that at least suicide restores a sense of control, and in a world where the climate crisis' impact is more visible than ever, where chronic mental health problems are an epidemic, and where access to medical care or time off for sickness is rarer and harder to get than it has been in decades (well, stable in its awfulness in some cases), maybe people feel like suicide is the one way to take things back. Maybe it's a way to make the very real possibility of succumbing to depression or other illnesses a bit less scary - whistling in the dark, as some writers used to call it. Absurdist things also tend to play into this. If we can't ignore our demons, perhaps we can befriend them.
Is it okay?
Honestly, I was stumped about what all of this means. Why do Millennials turn to humour like this to survive? What does it provide for us? My partner had a wry insight into the vital role comedy is playing in our survival. "Humour at times like this is an important act of balancing that allows us to reject the horrible situation we live with, while still existing in it. We have been told to accept what we have to pay bills and get by, but this balancing act allows us to not accept it, but live with and cope with it," he pointed out.
It also serves the role of a shibboleth, a passcode or phrase of recognition. Users of Tumblr, Twitter, and even Facebook become fluent in both memes from within their communities and outside them. For instance, members of politically conservative tribes (in the ethno-cultural sense of the word "tribe") are extremely fond of the Minions from the "Despicable Me" series, to the extent that Minions have developed their own independent associations.
On the other hand, certain phrases, such as a "good good [adjective or noun] boy" to describe a creature, object, or person of which the speaker approves, evolved out of the My Brother, My Brother, and Me podcast, but has a simple structure that makes it easy to replicate. Even without the original context of the show, the structure of the phrase has an inherent appeal and comedic elegance that gives it broad applicability to a variety of situations.
It's not as bad as it looks
Honestly? Any coping mechanism can be bad for one if it's used in place of self-improvement, but it's impossible to miss the sweeping waves of therapist jokes that have also taken over the internet. And maybe that's a good sign.
The key is to turn our jokes and fears into action. I'm not finished feeling shocked by how effective direct local action is compared to arguing on the internet. Using online connections to build local friendships and develop solidarity both far and nearby is really important, and for those who can't afford therapy, the support of friends really helps recovery.
***
Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.
Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi
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Best-Selling Author + Feminist Clementine Ford Reflects On Motherhood
Best-Selling Author + Feminist Clementine Ford Reflects On Motherhood
Family
Emma Eldridge
Clementine Ford at home with her young son. Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Photo – Sarah Collins for The Design Files.
Two years into writing this column, I receive a ton of feedback and suggestions for future subjects; my circle is invested. When I mentioned my next interviewee was Clementine Ford, everyone had an opinion. A prominent feminist with a Fairfax column and two bestselling books to her name, she incites a fervour – you’re a defender or detractor – that’s tangible and at times alarming (check out her Twitter). Holding up a mirror to society can inspire change, but sadly also hate.
Today we quiz Clementine on becoming a mother, raising a son, concern trolling and Boys Will Be Boys – her exploration of power, patriarchy and the bonds of mateship.
The theme of this year’s Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Awareness (PANDA) Week a few weeks back was ‘I wish I knew.’ Though up to one in five expecting or new mothers and one in 10 fathers experience anxiety or depression, understanding this can happen during pregnancy is rare. Why do you think that is? In light of your own experience, have you any advice for women or men who find themselves suffering – as well as those supporting them?
One of the things that makes it so difficult is this mythical idea of what a pregnancy is supposed to be and feel like. My antenatal anxiety hit me just after the start of the second trimester, which everyone always seems to talk about as some kind of wild high. Your libido is supposed to go through the roof, you’re supposed to stop vomiting every morning (afternoon and night), you’re supposed to bloom, you’re supposed to feel at peace with yourself. All of this is supposed to happen to you, but we only think that because it’s the only thing we ever hear.
I think a lot of that has to do with a general disdain for women’s complaints anyway, one that’s epically magnified when a woman becomes pregnant and then later becomes a mother. Because we’re supposed to be grateful for our good fortune. Don’t we feel lucky to be pregnant or have children? These two states aren’t allowed to co-exist – the one where of course you love your children or desire motherhood, but also feel terrible anxiety or depression about the process involved or some of its reality. And so women bottle a lot of these feelings up because they’re afraid of being judged and, even worse, they’re afraid that their feelings mean there’s something morally wrong with them.
I knew I wanted to have my child and I was excited about motherhood. But I also knew that every day the pregnancy grew inside me and was attached so physically and completely to me was one where I felt trapped and terrified. Thankfully, I sought help almost as soon as I started to feel the familiar symptoms of chronic anxiety. I cannot urge enough how important it is for anyone struggling with perinatal anxiety and/or depression to know that they haven’t failed in any way, and that their feelings or fears don’t mark them as some kind of pariah or bad person. The best and most immediate thing they can do is to talk to a professional about what they’re experiencing. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s no shame in asking as many people as you need to help guide you out of it.
You’ve said, ‘I felt certain my body would only produce a girl,’ and yet you gave birth to a son. I thought of you upon reading Lunch Lady’s recent interview with Dr Arne Rubenstein on raising boys; how possibly the most influential feminist of my generation might be approaching this task. Can you give us an insight into how you’re parenting your son, and the responsibility you feel to ensure he has empathy, respect and understanding in a world where, as a white male, he’s inherently privileged?
When I found out my child was likely to be assigned male at birth, I admit I was pretty surprised. I was also momentarily terrified. How on earth could I possibly figure out how to raise a boy? In less than an hour, the feeling had passed. I welcomed my son into the world and since then he has always felt like the only child that could ever have been meant for me.
I think a large part of me wanting a daughter so fiercely was because I had lost my mother when I was in my twenties. There’ll always be a sense of grief about not being able to replicate that relationship, but it’s something that exists entirely separately to my relationship with my son. I’ve learned so much from the gift I’ve been given of parenting him, not least of which is how important empathy is and the many ways it’s expressed. He is such a soft, kind and gentle little soul and it breaks my heart to know there are so many countless boys like him out there who have these qualities shamed or even beaten out of them by people who fear what it means to colour outside the lines.
At the same time, I accept I have a huge responsibility to raise him in a way that acknowledges his privilege and educates him about it. I have been extremely fastidious about teaching him manners and to respect other people’s space and autonomy. We talk about consent in age-appropriate ways, like how it’s important to ask people if you want to hug them or give them a kiss and that if they say no you have to listen to that. When he tells me to stop tickling him or playing with his hair, I stop immediately and always say, ‘Okay darling, you’ve asked me to stop so that means I have to stop.’ Then, if he’s doing something I don’t like, I say, ‘Can you please stop that? I’ve asked you to stop, and that means you have to stop because I don’t like it.’ He’s still so little and he’s only really been speaking in basic sentences for a few months, but he does get it already. I want these lessons and conversations to be ongoing with him rather than something I decide to teach him when he’s well past the age of having already formed his ideas about the world.
We are also fortunate to have a wonderfully diverse community of friends and neighbours. He’ll grow up knowing people and activists from lots of different communities, so normal for him will hopefully already be the kind of society we’re striving for.
I also have a small son, and have been surprised by how often I’ve been told ‘boys will be boys’ by family, friends and colleagues, even strangers. You’ve recently published a book on this idiom – an exploration of toxic masculinity and how we might change the future for boys today. It’s a confronting but necessary read, but I worry those who’d most benefit from exposure to these ideas are the least likely to be. If you could nominate three takeaways for all of us to consider, what would they be?
Feminists are frequently accused of hating all men and assuming the worst of them, but there’s nothing that denies men’s capacity to control themselves and treat others – especially women – with respect more than the phrase, ‘boys will be boys,’ particularly when it’s used to explain away bad and even criminal sexual behaviour.
Boys can and will be many things, but the most important thing we can do for them as parents is to allow them the space to decide for themselves exactly what that will be.
The biggest killer of Australian men between the ages of 18 and 45 is suicide. If we want to stop men from ending their lives, we need to be active in creating a world where men can be open, emotional and honest about their struggles without fear that it might lead to ridicule or emasculation.
When I revealed to friends that you’d be the next subject of this column, they unanimously requested I ask about your trolls. You’ve always been a target for the worst kind of online hate, but now you’re besieged by a sort of ‘concern trolling’ in relation to your parenting, with some going so far as to report you to DOCS. As parents, we all experience judgment – but this is on another level entirely. How do you manage?
I mean, it’s just honestly so ridiculous that anyone would waste the time of an essential organisation like DOCS by reporting me because I put my son in a pink jumper. I honestly find it very difficult to feel personally attacked by these people because they are so pathetic and fragile. They are completely governed by their own fear and I can ultimately only really feel sorry for them for that.
On the other hand, I feel concerned for their own children because they’re clearly being raised by parents who adhere to the strictest of binary gender stereotypes and filtrate their own bigotry and sexism down to their offspring to ensure the cycle of hatred is continued. But as to whether or not it bothers me or wounds me, I can honestly say it doesn’t. It has been happening for so long that it’s really just become white noise. I should beam it into my son’s bedroom at night to try and get him to go to sleep!
Can you give us a glimpse into how your days start and end with your son?
I’m a freelancer, so I have a lot of changeable days. However, they always start and end the same way. We’ll wake up at around seven (he still ends up in our bed at some point during the night), have a little cuddle and then get up for the day. I put on the coffee and try and tempt him to eat some breakfast, which might be nibbled on before ending up on the floor. On the days he doesn’t have family day care, we’ll potter around at home for a few hours before going for a drive or walking to the park. He still has one nap a day, which usually happens between 1 and 3ish. In the early evenings, we might go for a swim or to the local shopping centre to just be in the company of other people, and then we’ll head home for dinner, bath and bedtime.
The days always feel pretty full to me, but when you write it down like that they seem quite bare! I guess that’s because I didn’t write down all the times I need to wash clothes or clean the kitchen or pick up toys or go outside and take five deep breaths. I love him more than life itself, but let’s just say I appreciate the family daycare.
Moving across time, what kind of adult might you like him to grow into? How would you like him to remember you to his own family, and what do you hope for in terms of societal change for his generation?
I would love for him to retain the softness and kindness that I see so abundantly in him now. I want him to be curious, particularly about the lives of other people. I hope that it’s important to him to always seek perspectives outside his own, and to understand that just because something feels unknown to him that it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in its own right.
I hope very much that we remain close as he grows into an adult. I want him to remember me as someone who loved him fiercely but also gave him the space he needed to figure out who he was. Who listened when he spoke and responded in a way that assured him his thoughts mattered. I don’t want to be the most important woman in his life, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who was important to him.
For his generation, I want more freedom and more peace. I want them to be able to express themselves in ways that even my generation found it difficult to do. To understand gender as something far less rigid and binary than we were taught, and to take delight in exploring it. I want them to love and respect each other and to feel hopeful for change. I want them to drive change and to take us somewhere extraordinary. Ideally, I guess what we should all want as parents is to one day look at our kids and feel like they’ve left us behind.
Family Favourites
Activity or outing
We’re still at the age where everything is a bit tricky to do with any kind of success, because he’s still such a toddler. But we love going swimming at our local community pool. He is just totally natural in the water, and watching the delight on his face is something special.
Dinner destination
Again, we’re lucky if we manage to have a calm dinner at home let alone out! So I’ll say our favourite dinner destination is a BBQ in our backyard during the summer. Our son waters the plants, we can have some wine, listen to music and everything feels just right.
Book, film, or show
Unfortunately, he’s obsessed with these weird YouTube videos at the moment. I keep trying to block all the channels but they’re prolific.
Much more enjoyable is the book I read him every night before bed – an adaptation of Tim Minchin’s When I Grow Up. We sing it together and then he snuggles into sleep.
Place to travel
When he was 11-months-old, we took him to Vietnam. It was amazing. It’s an incredible place to travel to anyway, but so hospitable to children.
White Australia has such a boring, asinine attitude towards children being in public places and learning about the world around them. It’s nice to be somewhere where kids are actually considered people.
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#tumblr ask meme All the hella cute questions (or as many as you can/want) ;)
THANK YOU NONNY! <3 *rolls up sleeves* Let do this. Putting this under a read more because holy shit
1 - 7 answered here!
8. Who from the opposite gender is on your mind?
My bf Alex. You can assume he’s on my mind 80% of the time
9. Does talking about sex make you uncomfortable?
Hella yes I’m awkward and shy as hell
10. Who was the last person you had a deep conversation with?
My friend Zoe. She’s been an amazing friend lately (she always has been but we haven’t been friends for a while). Been there for me during some troubles
11. What does the most recent text that you sent say?
‘We will in a bit since we are going to go bed soon’. In response to room-switching with my brother for a night since Alex was staying over for comic con the following day and we both wouldn’t fit in my room
12. What are your 5 favorite songs right now?
I’ll link the youtube videos–you should listen to them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdVtm_ewHys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9a-EkU3YoM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0afsn_W5rk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QslJYDX3o8s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWxL8fmPpfk
13. Do you like it when people play with your hair?
I looooooooooooooooooooooooooooove it!
14. Do you believe in luck and miracles?
Well luck maybe, even though I hardly get any good luck. Miracles? Not so sure
15. What good thing happened this summer?
Built my gaming PC
16. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?
Since it was Alex, yes, of course
17. Do you think there is life on other planets?
Definitely!!! Millions of galaxies out there and people honestly believe we are the only species ever to exist? Come off it
18. Do you still talk to your first crush?
No
19. Do you like bubble baths?
Yh but I find them too time-consuming to bother with
20. Do you like your neighbors?
My neighbors on both sides are a pain in the ass, the ones on the right side moreso though. At least the left-hand ones are polite
21. What are you bad habits?
Over-thinking, being very forgetful, having to ask people to repeat something they already told me multiple times, getting sad over things that don’t matter or haven’t even happened, begging for attention, overeating or eating nothing at all
22. Where would you like to travel?
Scotland, Ireland, America, New Zealand, Italy, France, Iceland and Japan
23. Do you have trust issues?
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOO definitely
24. Favorite part of your daily routine?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
25. What part of your body are you most uncomfortable with?
All of it
26. What do you do when you wake up?
Go back to sleep, or if I have to be somewhere begrudgingly get up and think about how tired I am
27. Do you wish your skin was lighter or darker?
Well my skin is so pale I have trouble finding good concealer and foundation that matches, so if I could get darker to the stage I can find good makeup I’d love that
28. Who are you most comfortable around?
Probably Alex. I’m always a tad uncomfortable around people though because of my anxiety
29. Have any of your ex’s told you they regret breaking up?
No, only had one ex and we ended on ok terms and we’d only been dating for like a day
30. Do you ever want to get married?
I’d love to
31. Is your hair long enough for a pony tail?
Yup
32. Which celebrities would you have a threesome with?
I’d never be comfortable having a threesome
33. Spell your name with your chin.
asmnjytyt. Was supposed to say Amy. I tried
34. Do you play sports? What sports?
Nope, not athletic and I hate sports
35. Would you rather live without TV or music?
TV. I don’t really watch it tbh
36. Have you ever liked someone and never told them?
Yup
37. What do you say during awkward silences?
Usually nothing I’m pretty ok with silence
38. Describe your dream girl/guy?
One word: Alex
39. What are your favorite stores to shop in?
I like Quiggins, this alternative fashion store in my town, and Worlds Apart–the only good things about my city lol. GAME, HMV, Forbidden Planet and Primark I frequent too. Tons of other places online but we’d be here all day if I listed them
40. What do you want to do after high school?
Graduated 3 years ago
41. Do you believe everyone deserves a second chance?
No. Some people are beyond forgiveness
42. If your being extremely quiet what does it mean?
I’m usually pretty quiet anyways so its just me being me
43. Do you smile at strangers?
Hell no thats weird
44. Trip to outer space or bottom of the ocean?
SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
45. What makes you get out of bed in the morning?
Responsibilities and anxiety teaming up on me
46. What are you paranoid about?
Everything that could possibly go wrong rn
47. Have you ever been high?
No
48. Have you ever been drunk?
No
49. Have you done anything recently that you hope nobody finds out about?
Don’t think so
50. What was the colour of the last hoodie you wore?
Black
51. Ever wished you were someone else?
All the time
52. One thing you wish you could change about yourself?
EVERYTHING
53. Favourite makeup brand?
Don’t really wear it
54. Favourite store?
Oooooooh. Can’t decide
55. Favourite blog?
Follow too many good ones
56. Favourite colour?
Black, blue, red, white and purple
57. Favourite food?
Pizza, pasta, cake, chocolate, cheesecake and sushi
58. Last thing you ate?
Shreddies with sugar on top
59. First thing you ate this morning?
Shreddies with sugar on to[
60. Ever won a competition? For what?
Uhh on this cook-off we had on school where we had to prepare a three-course meal and my dessert won. I made green tea ice cream and everyone loved it
61. Been suspended/expelled? For what?
No, I kept my nose clean in school
62. Been arrested? For what?
Never
63. Ever been in love?
Yup, and I still am
64. Tell us the story of your first kiss?
It was when I was 18. Had a party at my friends house to celebrate us finishing school. She lived pretty far from the rest of us so we stayed over. She lived ina pretty big house but a lot of us had to share beds and the like. I shared one with my new boyfriend, who ad literally asked me out like three hours ago. I wanted to sleep but I think he wanted something else. We kissed, he slipped me the tongue and started pulling at my clothes. I pulled away and asked him what he was doing. He said he didn’t know. Then we just lay down and tried to sleep. He slept easily, I didn’t get any lol
65. Are you hungry right now?
No I just ate
66. Do you like your tumblr friends more than your real friends?
I guess??
67. Facebook or Twitter?
Twitter
68. Twitter or Tumblr?
Tumblr
69. Are you watching tv right now?
No
70. Names of your bestfriends?
(^:
71. Craving something? What?
Too not be tired constantly. To know I am loved and wanted. A cat
72. What colour are your towels?
We have a wide range of colours, mostly blue though
72. How many pillows do you sleep with?
Two
73. Do you sleep with stuffed animals?
I have a load by my pillow
74. How many stuffed animals do you think you have?
7/8. Either way not enough
75. Favourite animal?
Cats, dogs, pandas, red pandas, raccoons, sugar gliders, hamsters, rabbits, japanese flying dwarf squirrels, bearded dragons, geckos, budgies, owls, harvest mice, lemmings, wolves and foxes
76. What colour is your underwear?
Black
77. Chocolate or Vanilla?
Chocolate
78. Favourite ice cream flavour?
Chocolate fudge brownie
79. What colour shirt are you wearing?
Not wearing one rn
80. What colour pants?
Not wearing pants either
81. Favourite tv show?
Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, FMA, PMMM, Mob Psycho 100, Boku no Hero Academia, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures, RWBY and One Punch Man
82. Favourite movie?
You Name, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Ju-On, Ringu, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Nolan’ Batman trilogy and more I can’t really remember now…
83. Mean Girls or Mean Girls 2?
Haven’t even seen the second one
84. Mean Girls or 21 Jump Street?
Mean Girls I guess
85. Favourite character from Mean Girls?
Whats with all the mean girls question? I was really never that invested in that movie lol
86. Favourite character from Finding Nemo?
Wouldn’t say I have one thetyy were all pretty forgettable
87. First person you talked to today?
My mum
88. Last person you talked to today?
Its only 11am
89. Name a person you hate?
I don’t exactly hate anyone who I know directly
90. Name a person you love?
Alex and all my friends!
91. Is there anyone you want to punch in the face right now?
Lord Dampnut
92. In a fight with someone?
No
93. How many sweatpants do you have?
None
94. How many sweaters/hoodies do you have?
At least 8 hoodies, I think
95. Last movie you watched?
Doctor Strange
96. Favourite actress?
Don’t have one
97. Favourite actor?
Don’t have one
98. Do you tan a lot?
No I just burn
99. Have any pets?
One dog
100. How are you feeling?
Tired, a lil nauseous. Thats the norm when you live with chronic fatigue syndrome though
101. Do you type fast?
No
102. Do you regret anything from your past?
I wish I stood up for myself more, and didn’t take shit from anyone, no matter who they were
103. Can you spell well?
I know how to spell pretty well but I still make an appalling amount of typos. Thats just more to do with my garbage-tier typing skills though
104. Do you miss anyone from your past?
I guess? I’m learning to live without them though
105. Ever been to a bonfire party?
No but I’ve always kinda wanted to
106. Ever broken someone’s heart?
Don’t think so
107. Have you ever been on a horse?
No
108. What should you be doing?
Coursework
109. Is something irritating you right now?
The bm-ing bastards on hearthstone
110. Have you ever liked someone so much it hurt?
Yup
111. Do you have trust issues?
Haven’t I already answered this?
112. Who was the last person you cried in front of?
My family when I went to my uncle’s funeral
113. What was your childhood nickname?
I didn’t really have one
114. Have you ever been out of your province/state?
Yup, for holidays
115. Do you play the Wii?
Used to
116. Are you listening to music right now?
My fire playlist on youtube. Mostly weeby shit
117. Do you like chicken noodle soup?
Its aight
118. Do you like Chinese food?
YES119. Favourite book?
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, Game of Thrones, and Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events
120. Are you afraid of the dark?
Kinda. I think I read somwhere that every human is engineered to be wary of the dark
121. Are you mean?
No
122. Is cheating ever okay?
NO
123. Can you keep white shoes clean?
I can’t even keep black shoes clean so probs not
124. Do you believe in love at first sight?
No
125. Do you believe in true love?
Yes
126. Are you currently bored?
Not really. I have enough to keep me occupied
127. What makes you happy?
Cute animals, video games, music, good food and good company
128. Would you change your name?
Probably not
129. What your zodiac sign?
Aries
130. Do you like subway?
Yes
131. Your bestfriend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do?
Idk. Try to be respectful of their feelings and try not to alienate them or make them feel weird
132. Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with?
Again this question has been repeated
133. Favourite lyrics right now?
I was raised in a deep dark hole,
A prisoner with no parole.
They locked me up and took my soul
(Ashamed of what they made)
134. Can you count to one million?
Yes but I’m not going to. What a complete waste of time
135. Dumbest lie you ever told?
Idk I say a lot of dumb shit
136. Do you sleep with your doors open or closed?
Closed
137. How tall are you?
5′9″
138. Curly or Straight hair?
I have wavy hair but I usually straighten it. I prefer curly hair though, I just can’t get my hair to cooperate
139. Brunette or Blonde?
Brunette
140. Summer or Winter?
Winter I guess
141. Night or Day?
Night
142. Favourite month?
October
143. Are you a vegetarian?
No
144. Dark, milk or white chocolate?
Gotta be milk
145. Tea or Coffee?
Tea
146. Was today a good day?
Its only started!
147. Mars or Snickers?
Snickers. I do love me some nuts
148. What’s your favourite quote?
Don’t have one
149. Do you believe in ghosts?
Yes. After the weird shit from last year, yes.
150. Get the closest book next to you, open it to page 42, what’s the first line on that page? (via tchitsnathan)
I actually moved all my books downstairs and I’m too lazy to go get one -__-
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