locusimperium

[locusimperium]

we have a Baby Day, the baby will be here on November 30th (if not sooner)!!!! 

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also, I’ve been so incredibly lucky to have good medical care and access to culturally sensitive doctors. My OB is fantastic, the head nurses are amazing. 

I’m looking forward to winning Medicare for All so that the reign of death over our bodies isn’t monetized by capital before Jesus ends it once and for all, amen. 

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some updates:

I have gestational diabetes! which is a bizarre experience wherein my pancreas can’t keep up with the anti-insulin hormones my placenta is producing. so now I can’t bake anymore (boo) and get to prick my finger four times a day and feel like some Silicon Valley weirdo trying to ~optimize my levels~

I’ll probably have the baby thanksgiving weekend because of this, unless I go into labor sooner!!!!

I also, apparently, have pretty severe hyperthyroidism that was triggered by the pregnancy (v rare) 

on one hand I was pretty bummed out by this, like, my whole body is falling apart, what the fuck

but I also started thyroid medication literally five days ago and my entire existence has gotten 100% better

I no longer feel like I’m full of angry bees, and trapped in a garbage compactor that’s actually the present and future, and hot all the time. it turns out that this was not the state of the world but actually my thyroid attempting to murder me!! 

I’m so excited to have this baby already

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Please enjoy this article about the worst people in the fucking world, whose lives I have been devoted to ruining for the last two years. 

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I’m very sad that we may have to send my trash son to live with his grandma because he and his sister have stopped getting along after her vet visit. It’s been four weeks at this point and we still have them separated with only supervised visitation, and he’s just got it out for her every time they see each other. 

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pregnancy is honestly a pretty terrible physical experience, and most of the social narratives and scripts used to render it tolerable are both deeply patriarchal and fundamentally irrelevant to my life. the only one that really works is being excited to be a parent! but I also wish I could fast forward for the next 17 weeks until there’s a baby. 

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did you know that if you have multiple cats and just one of them needs to go to the vet, they can... forget each other... in the trauma of it? my cats literally have been together their whole lives. and now i have one cat who lives in the bedroom and one cat who lives in the rest of the house and they will not tolerate the strange intruder cat with whom they must unfortunately share an apartment

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~HALFWAY DONE WITH GROWING THIS NEW HUMAN 

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heterosexuality is fucking grim, I am part of what are probably the three least ridiculous parenting groups on facebook and just today: 

a woman suffering from post-partum depression posted that she needed just an hour to sleep and didn’t know how to get that hour; it came out in the comments that her boyfriend wouldn’t hold the 7 week old baby for even five minutes, and forces her to do all the night feeding because he “has to work in the morning”

a woman asked about people’s experiences with tubal ligation because her husband refuses to get a vasectomy*

the ways in which men use childbearing and childrearing to control, punish, and torment women are myriad and disgusting. 

*for those of you who don’t know, vasectomies are more effective at preventing pregnancy than tubal ligations, and also are, significantly, not major abdominal surgery, with a recovery time of ~2 days vs several weeks. 

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being pleasant to spend time with is an underrated revolutionary skill 

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things have been very tough these last few days, I have been feeling increasingly despondent and fragile and unsocial -- excepting Pride, which was great -- and so we are implementing the Urgent Self-Care Protocols: early to bed, early to rise, exercise every day + yoga video in the evening, prayer reminders, minimum 10 minutes uninterrupted non-sleep cuddle time. 

I think it’ll get better when I feel it move more regularly - a source of awe and a reminder that my body is doing strange things for a reason. 

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it’s always a bit awkward when you are at this big mass rally and the speaker uses it as an opportunity to air some intra-community beef that maybe .5% of the attendees are familiar with. 

anyways, between that and the hectoring speeches about why are you all out here for the alt-pride and not rallying against the concentration camps (when the speaker is offering no opportunity to do so and definitely has not herself done so!), I give the rally a solid B, but the Queer Liberation March and overall experience as a definite A, lots of absolute beautiful community sharing and joy and celebration and protest. 

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people keep being surprised that we wanted to know the sex of the baby (we found out very recently at an anatomy scan) and it’s like... yes... being in the dark for another five months will not prevent society from aggressively gendering the baby??? 

we are not trying to raise it ‘gender-neutral’ because I am unconvinced of the efficacy of that (and it’s also just so much fucking work managing everyone who ever changes its diaper), so it’s probably best for us to make conscious plans about raising our kid in a patriarchal society that will attempt to enforce gender role conformity through violence! 

anyways, we told our parents only after making them swear that they would not buy anything that is overly gender-specific. no floofy dresses or “macho man” onesies! just colors and patterns and dinosaurs/trucks/unicorns/cats. and they must share these rules with anyone they tell the sex, too. 

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I seriously looked to confirm that my delivery hospital was NOT baby-friendly before I pre-registered there. absolutely not, I am going to give the baby to some kind nurses and get some sleep. 

The baby-friendly movement is straight up evil.

cc @larkandkatydid

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I’m Very Curious about the # of “shout out if your mother was toxic or your relationship with her is complicated!” posts on facebook and other social media before Mother’s Day vs the same for fathers before Father’s Day

at least on my timeline, they easily outnumber 8:1, which, given the statistics on parental abuse, is an interesting sociological phenomenon among sensitive liberal types. 

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@partysoft:

idk, do u want to be another NYC person with an empty home somewhere out of the city? will it sit empty when u 3 aren't using it? on a scale from 100% local yokel to this family (https://www.allotsego.com/visiting-california-couple-with-son-at-b-ball-camp-buys-a-retirement-home/), where do you want to be, and is that possible in this property? also, is it pretty?

one of us actually works remotely and so expects he would be there more often than not, we also have other friends who are artists who want to contribute labor to improving the property in exchange for being able to stay there, the property is actually currently empty (it’s owned by movement friends who have moved to another country but lived there for decades and hosted many a retreat there), it’s pretty but also humble - not fancy at all, but with the ability to build more buildings on the land too, like a couple of small cottages. 

also it’s like a two hour bike ride from Ithaca, soooo 

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@bottleofink: 

LLC? 

Limited Liability Corporation - they’re incredibly easy to form in NY, and basically that entity would own the property but be controlled by its shareholders (us), allowing for a collective management entity.