jaffacakerebellion

[jaffacakerebellion]

[jaffacakerebellion]

okay now that we’ve a had couple lesbian blockbusters and milfs are having a romance moment, we need to bring back the manic pixie dream girl. she was never fuckin suited to fixing all the problems of some boring twenty year old everyman, but you know who could actually benefit from a quirky free-spirited blue haired girl with pronouns (she/they)? a newly divorced forty-something mom who’s trying to learn how to be herself for the first time in her life

[jaffacakerebellion]

I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

[jaffacakerebellion]

2007 -> 2025

[jaffacakerebellion]

The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.

Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.

In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.

From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.

It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.

Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.

Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.

So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.

[jaffacakerebellion]

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[jaffacakerebellion]

whats even the point of drawing a pair of huge juicy honkas if youre not gonna show off their softness and weight??

[jaffacakerebellion]

Our neighbors are getting a new driveway poured today. The guys pouring it have been listening to music all morning, which is unremarkable by itself except for the fact that the constant stream of Mexican rock music just got interrupted by the Muppet theme song followed by Paul McCartney's "We All Stand Together."

Which I like to think would make anyone say, "What?" out loud before getting up to look over the fence. Only to find one of the guys showed up with his kid, and now the old guy in charge of the music is playing what I can only define as 'Eighties Kids Music' while the little kid runs in circles in the shade.

I don't know who is having a better time. The kid or the old guy picking the tracks 😂

[jaffacakerebellion]

I don't even want kids. I agree that I shouldn't have them (either any time soon or possibly ever). I have no business being a parent, and my awareness for that is exactly why I do not have kids. I am glad I had a miscarriage at 17, and personally, I have never spent a minute being sad about it. Not one.

But it gets REALLY fucking old when people tell me it's a good thing I don't have kids as an insult or some kind of character assassination. Like there's something wrong with anyone who can't/shouldn't have kids. Like the capacity to parent is any kind of baseline for being a decent or functioning person.

When it comes from parents who also should've never had kids, had no business having kids, and due to their lack of awareness for this now have a kid who's Noticeably Fucked Up, it's almost comical. Not for their kid, obviously, but I can appreciate irony.

[jaffacakerebellion]

as a cis guy, when presented with the "99% you get a ton of money, 1% you turn into a girl" it honestly would be dumb to not hit that button until it breaks. like ok now i have 100 bajillion dollars and gender dysphoria. big deal. i have all the money in the world to turn me back into a guy. like with that kind of money i could have obama do me a phalloplasty. he wouldnt be able to do it as he isnt a surgeon but the point still stands

[jaffacakerebellion]

[jaffacakerebellion]

[jaffacakerebellion]

Fun ADHD hack is that you're allowed to just go to the library and reserve a study room for a couple of hours and make all your phone calls or whatever adult shit you need to do but can't because your house is for House Stuff and for some reason your brain has designated "phone calls for doctors and other such things" as School Adjacent and therefore refuses to do it in an insufficently academic environment. Like it's free. You can just do that.

[jaffacakerebellion]

meadow pics? plz plz plz?

I am small and I can't do very much. That is the despair of an individual in a big and violent world. But the plants teach me it is okay to be small. Everything is either small, or made of things that are small. We are all connected. Symbiosis.

So, on the subject of bugs.

It is the fourth summer of the Meadow. My plants grow strong and wild and cover more space than ever before. I have worked to eradicate the invasive lawn grass and carefully curate large clumps of only native species (with a few esteemed naturalized weeds allowed---I have no quarrel with Chicory, it has a positive effect on the ecosystem).

I have tall, huge native Field Thistles, multitudes of tough and aggressive evening primrose, wild strawberry spreading everywhere, a dozen vigorous gray-headed coneflowers, giant clumps of cup-plant, and so many asters and goldenrods that I've had to start targeting them in my weeding.

Yes, yes, I have the showy ones like purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, but I also encourage and cultivate weird little weeds that are too inconspicuous or ugly to be often planted on purpose. White avens, lanceleaf frogfruit, nettle-leaf vervain.

There are too many plants. I'll spend forever listing them all. What is really interesting, is what's happened with the bugs.

Every year, there has been a much bigger variety and population of insects. I am both seeing many more species, and seeing the same species in much, much larger numbers. Even on the same plants that were already there 4 years ago, I can see way more bugs.

Flower flies, for instance. There are tiny yellow and black flies known as flower flies that are very beneficial for gardeners, because their larvae are predators that attack aphids. It used to be that I could often see a dozen, but now I see hundreds of them every time I go outside!

Or wasps. There are more species of wasps than I possibly could have imagined. It used to be that I would only see the reddish paper wasps, the ones that make big paper nests in the eaves of your house, but now, there are dozens of different wasps. Some are black, others black and white, others black and yellow, others black and brown, and they come in all different sizes. A bunch of blue-black wasps with white stripes live in the log next to my pond.

I identified them and looked up the species, and they had not been studied at all since the 1960's. Supposedly they are solitary species, but several different wasps have made nests inside the log right next to each other. That's the first interesting thing. The second interesting thing is that the nests were first inhabited last summer, and the same species of wasp still lives in them, so their town has been inhabited for multiple years instead of being abandoned when the larvae emerge. Has the next generation taken over the old nests? I am observing something about the species that is not known to science.

Wasps are hated and feared, but my wasps have never been anything but peaceful and polite, and they have so much beauty and importance in the ecosystem.

And the bees! I am observing bees this year that I had never even heard of before. Many of them are so tiny, I doubt they could even reach the nectar in large flowers like purple coneflower. What if the small, inconspicuous flowers are essential for smaller pollinators like the tiny bees? That would make sense. Different flowers evolved to attract different bees.

Beetles, ants, leafhoppers, flies, moths, butterflies, all kinds of bugs. Specific plants attract specific bugs, but it is not the plants individually that restore insect biodiversity, it is the way the plants interact and form a bigger ecosystem.

What I mean is, as my garden grew, the increase in bugs was not linear in relationship to the plants, it was exponential. The combination of the many different plants into an ecosystem attracted many more bugs than would be expected from the sum of each plant individually.

I remember the emptiness and barrenness before. I see it around me when I visit other places. The disappearance of bugs. The insect apocalypse. It's so clear to me now. The cause is biotic homogenization. I call it plant sameness.

Everywhere around me, landscapes have been made into expanses of the same few plants. But when plant sameness is replaced by variety and diversity, many plants interacting in many different ways, everything changes.

[jaffacakerebellion]

[jaffacakerebellion]

[jaffacakerebellion]

btw if you’re fat and your partner doesn’t love you wholeheartedly, if they’re attracted to you “despite” your body, if they avoid touching you, if they look away from certain parts of you, you’re allowed to break up with that person. look at me. you can do better. you are not unloveable and you don’t have to settle i fucking promise.