incomprehensiblelentils - Tumblr blog

[incomprehensiblelentils]

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Planning for an acrylic painting I want to do of my wife & I. It will be titled "2 Dykes Kissing Out in the Hot Hot Sun"

[incomprehensiblelentils]

the bond between mutuals who only share one or two fandoms is stronger than an entire fandom combined… I do not know what you are blogging about but you are right, pip-pip and bing-bong are homosexuals who crave blood and understanding and I will heart that in support

[incomprehensiblelentils]

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

[incomprehensiblelentils]

We know you're not fond of mammals in general

BUT

would you consider small bats to be honorary bugs? They have the right vibes.

I know better than to answer this one

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Ok so today I was on the bus with another trans guy and we were talking about how hard it is to get testosterone. The waiting lists, the price, all the doctors you have to go to, that kind of stuff. Except, we were calling it ’T’, like you do when you’re both closeted and in public.

Then suddenly the elderly lady sitting behind us was like ‘young men, either I’m going crazy or you both have never heard of supermarkets, they have shelves full of tea there! Do you need directions to one?’

To which my buddy starts to explain, because why not. ‘Well you see, we’re both trans, and… ’

The lady didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘Oh no, I don’t mind that at all! Now do you want to know how to get to a place that sells tea? I’m actually heading there right now!’

We let her take us to the supermarket. We let her show us, excitedly, where the tea was. We both bought loads.

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Something I do really love about The Tumblr Experience™️ is that you get everything. The whole blog, in order, not by popularity or (usually) tailored to fit an audience.

I followed this person for one thing, but this is a really gorgeous picture of a bird. A gifset of a movie I never would have seen. A poem about brothers or frogs or ribbon or love.

It's odd but it's meditative, almost. I think it's part of why mutuals, especially ones we don't really talk to, are such a specific phenomenon. I've never spoken to you, you stopped talking about the thing I followed you for forever ago, I don't even remember what it was, but I like seeing you there, still reblogging gifsets of 1990s cult classics and parasocially blogging about Bob Dylan.

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Edit it out, edit it out!

[incomprehensiblelentils]

the brightest minds of our generation

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT

[incomprehensiblelentils]

So I’m reading through the Princess Diaries series again as I do every so often, right, and in book 5 there’s a subplot where Mia becomes fixated on the possibility that she and all her friends have Asperger’s Syndrome, and y’know, it doesn’t really offend me bc I genuinely think you could make a case for Mia. BUT I think the true autistic Cabot heroine is Samantha Madison from All-American Girl (and her sisters)

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"

[incomprehensiblelentils]

googling ‘jobs for autistic people’ and realising that everyone still thinks autistic people are either sheldon cooper or really tall toddlers

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[incomprehensiblelentils]

mice are having sex in my walls :(

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Dangers of working on a set.

That’s what I said.

[incomprehensiblelentils]