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Have you talked to the surgeons that your insurance will pay for? I'd think they'd be a bit more confident about their chances of success than the specialist tells you. Anyway, it's got to be better than living with the tumor, which is probably growing!

Today I found out that my insurance will not cover any of the surgery I need to remove my tumor if I get it done with the specialist. However only the specialist has the tools necessary to make sure it is a success.

I guess I just have to deal with a tumor that is the size of a tennis ball or bigger and pain forever

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Incidentally, this also explains why men rarely talk about their feelings among each other. They probably think they'd need to have sex with each other if they did: "mental intimacy and bodily intimacy go together".

I’m????

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Everyone knows this is fake since shortly after Trump posted this in November 2015 (real numbers below). Everyone who can use google, that is.

The FBI shows roughly similar number of back and white victims and offenders (53% black, 44% white for both). The linked report also states that often, victim and offender know each other (and in >12% are family members), so since we know how society works, that tends to favor white on white and black on black crime. (Got that, @ebtrips ?)

Blacks killed by whites: 7.6 percent.

Whites killed by whites: 82.4 percent.

Whites killed by blacks: 14.8 percent.

Blacks killed by blacks: 90 percent.

Source: http://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime-graphic/

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#not that I never do stupid shit

but I like to think that the stupid shit I do is just eye roll worthy

and not shaking your head in near disgust worthy

The difference is that you know what led up to you doing your stupid shit, and for the other people you don't know, and can't imagine it either.

Also, a lot of the stupid shit floating around the Internet is fake.

Anyone ever see someone else doing something, or posting something, or whatever, and just think, “Wow, how is it possible for someone to be that much of a fucking idiot?”

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I do. I want the sad story of just an ant. There is no boss on tumblr. If you do not want to whine, post another thought. If you want to whine, please do. You might invent a new artistic style of whining.

Your thoughts are meant to be heard. All of them.

Your blog is called "my thoughts are meant to be heard". please share more of your thoughts! One thought a day that is not a reaction (aka tagged onto a reblog) would be ideal, but I'll take what I get! :-)

The life I’m currently living is full of fickle situations in which I am simply an ant. Most of my opinions, actions, and thoughts are just that-MY opinions, actions and thoughts. The “queens” (my boss, or higher ups) tend to not take most things I say into consideration. For the last year I’ve been like a robot- just going through the same motions. Eventually you stop expressing yourself, once you realize nobody is listening. Along the way you become a number. One in the crowd. I stopped posting my thoughts for the meantime though; because who wants the sad story of just an ant? Or just a face in the crowd? Odds are that I’ll start posting more thoughts soon- when I become a Queen.

TLDR: Basically that’s a really over dramatic story of:

“I’m just busy working my way to the top, and nobody wants to hear me whine about my problems on the way there.”

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How to Eat Paleo as a single person on about $5/day

This is super off topic for this blog, but…

I did this for about a year in college. Last night at the LGBTQ center we were talking about healthy eating and I mentioned it, and was challenged to bring in a shopping list/meal plan detailing what I had done.

What I consider Paleo: I lived on my own version of paleo, which I called “Functional Paleo.” I defined this as “no grain, no dairy, no legumes, no refined carbs, and no artificial sweeteners, flavors, or preservatives.” It is not organic, the meat is not free range, and I did not use coconut or other substitute flours for anything (except when cooking for my parents or special occasions). I bought very few things that had multiple ingredients, but didn’t concern myself too much with small amounts of soy or sugar (like in the tuna, stewed tomatoes, or condiments).

My other caveat is that I had (and continue to have) an Aldi near me. All prices cited are Aldi prices as they exist today (though prices can be similar at other value food stores like Marc’s and Save a Lot). You can actually do paleo significantly cheaper than this if you have to, but this level provided enough variety for me to not flip my kitchen table on a regular basis. This is what I did personally.

***Items listed are “Per Week” unless otherwise specified***

Protein:

Eggs- 2 dozen, about $1 (Aldi eggs cost anywhere from 20c to $1.29/dozen, usually on the lower end of that with a limit of six dozen per costomer. I used 50c/dozen here as a good average)

Meat- 2lbs of either chicken breast, stew meat, or chorizo, about $8 (get the middle-range (Never Any! brand) chicken, its the same price as the low range if you factor in that the low range has 15% broth in it by weight, which will cook out anyway).

Tuna: 2 cans, packed in water, about $1.40

Vegetables:

Sale veggie- 2 pkg, about $3 total

Cauliflower- 1 large, 1.79

Broccoli- 1 bag, 1.50

Stewed tomatoes- 2 cans, $1 total

3lb Onions- $1.50 (every other week)

3lb Sweet potatoes- $2

10lb Russet potatoes- $3 (once per month)

Fruits:

Sale fruit- 2 or 3 pkg, about $4 total

Canister Prunes or Raisins- $3 

Frozen fruit of choice- $2

Nuts:

Whole raw almonds- 1pkg, $5

Other:

Dark Chocolate- 1 large bar, $1.50

Tea- 100 tea bags, $2 (once in a blue moon)

Instant Coffee- 120 cups worth, $3 (once in a blue moon)

Olive or sunflower seed oil- $3 (once per month or so)

Salt- one large canister iodized or box kosher, $2 (literally once per lifetime)

Condiments (I excepted these from paleo rules for my own sanity) mayo, ketchup, pickles, mustard, etc…- $1-$2 per item (once in a blue moon)

Dried spices- $1 each (get a good blend for about $2-$3 at Wal Mart or collect them separately and make lots of your own $1/spice) (once in a blue moon)

Vinegar of choice- $3 (once per month or longer, depending on how much you like vinegar)

Bouillon cubes- $2.50 (once in a blue moon)

Assuming you’re starting with an utterly bare cabinet and you buy all of the “once in a blue moon” and “once per month” items on your first trip (including condiments and spices), your initial investment will probably be about $50-60. After that first week, assuming you keep to the intervals outlined here, it should average a little less than $35. 

Meal Prep Tips:

Boil most of the eggs, leave a couple for if you like fried eggs occasionally or want to make banana-egg pancakes. You can easily take boiled eggs in a lunchbox or eat them with prunes or raisins for a quick breakfast.

The prunes/raisins and almonds were and still are my go-to easy breakfast.

Grate the cauliflower- steam it with salt, oil and spices as a side later or mix it with the crumbled chorizo for a 1-bowl meal

Cook the sweet potatoes and regular potatoes ahead of time. There are lots of ways to do this and they are all delicious. They are also easy to pack in a lunch box.

Hard veggies like carrots, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, and broccoli are AMAZING when tossed in olive oil, salt, and spices and roasted or broiled.

Cook and pull the chicken (easiest in a pressure cooker but you can also boil the crap out of it too). Makes it super versatile. You can make like 10 different things with it and they will all feel different. No more plain chicken boob for you!

Stew with the stew meat, any veggies (including onions and potatoes) and spices will give you many easy future meals and can be made with just about anything you’ve got (throw the stewed tomatoes in this too).

Tuna salad (with oil and vinegar and spices if you’re really feeling paleo or mayo, onions and pickles if you’re me) and leftover roasted veggies make a great lunch.

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"All the articles" go back to one or two studies, as far as I know. Read those. Then ask yourself: did the people in those studies really want to lose weight, or did they just do what the doctor ordered? Was the weight loss a one-time thing, or did they change their lifestyle and eating habits? Does putting on weight again but staying under your initial weight count as a success or a failure? And how did the people in those studies who did manage to keep their weight down manage to do it, if it is "impossible"?

Your primary goal is to stop weight gain. This is possible in the short term. Your next goal is to lose weight. This is a long-term goal, and you will probably experience temporary setbacks while pursuing it. (Also temporary success, e.g. going low-carb will lose you a couple pounds of water quickly that will come back on once you go back to a different diet.)

what do you think ofall the articles about scientific research saying that it's nearly impossible to permanantly lose weight? I want to lose at least 150ibs but at this point I keep reading all those articles and I don't want to have to completely focus all of my energy on not being obese. i want to draw. i wnat to write. i want to have fun and not constantly have to be eating a certain amount of callories or excersizing for 2 hours every day or else i'll become obese agian. i feel like cryign

Ignore those articles. 

Seriously, stop reading that shit. 

If you want some reading material, start reading about the people who did manage to lose weight and those who did manage to keep it off. 

Here are a few, to get you started: 

(1,2,3,4)

Yes, losing weight is hard work and it does require commitment, but it doesn’t get any easier when you surround yourself with people who tell you it can’t be done.

You know why else you shouldn’t be paying attention to those articles? 

Because those articles lie. 

You can draw, write and have fun and still lose weight. You don’t even have to exercise to lose weight.

You will have to eat a certain amount of calories. That is non-negotiable. That’s how you lose weight and keep it off. 

But please, please, please believe me when I tell you. It gets easier. 

Everything in life gets easier the more you do it, and that’s not an exception.

Hell, you don’t even have to start cutting calories right away. You can simply start writing a food journal where you write what you eat so you can be more familiar with your eating habits. 

It’s a good way of knowing yourself more and getting into the habit of tracking your food intake. 

I know it seems impossible right now, but feeding those feelings won’t help you. 

You can lose weight. It can be done. 

You just need to want it badly enough to be willing to change your life to do it.

And if you don’t want to do it? 

That’s okay too. It’s your life.

Just own that decision. Recognize that it’s a choice rather than something you have to live with. 

Because let me tell you something. Counting calories can be tedious, yes, but it’s nowhere near as soul-crushing as feeling like you can’t do anything about your weight. 

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Part of the problem with depression is that you'll have learned that eating can make you feel better, and that is hard to act against. I've been counting calories, and found I am most successful when I consider them while buying: don't buy more than I want to eat (I'll tell myself I can exercise self-control, but I can't) and when I come home, compute the calories of my haul and figure out how many days that has to last me on my calorie budget. If you can exercise self-control when buying, when tempted to buy, you don't need to exercise self-control at home because you have nothing to binge on.

The other part of the problem is that exercise is best for you when you feel worst; I have learned to sometimes go out for a walk even when I feel like I need to do 1000 things, because I know I won't get them done anyway. It would really be best if I had someone to make me go out walking for 15 minutes when I felt that way. It's a really tough thing to learn for me.

i noticed you give advice sometimes... do you have any for someone who wants to eat better and exercise more, but has trouble sticking with it due to depression? i really want to make a change in my life, and lose weight but sometimes i don't have the motivation to do basic things, let alone make a major change. it's difficult because i know i would feel at least somewhat better if i got healthier but it's like there's a huge weight on my back that makes everything harder and more stressful.

Hi!

I was asked a similar question a while ago and I made a small presentation on the matter: 

You can find it here.

Since I don’t have depression, I don’t have any experience on the matter but I looked through various sources on this very subject and focused the presentation on how to start, small things that may help you stick to the exercise, etc. All of them written by people with actual experience in the matter. 

You won’t find any hacks in there. No magic advice that will help you get up in the morning full of energy and motivation. Not even tips to make you feel happy to exercise. 

What you’ll find are just steps to get started and integrate some form of physical activity in your daily routine. But I’ve found that, when facing something that might seem impossible at the moment, breaking it down in small steps always helps to ease the burden. 

You can also look through the tag “depression”, though the resources are very limited. I’ll make sure to add more in the future. 

As for healthy eating while depressed, I haven’t done any research on the matter, but I’ll consider doing a similar presentation as soon as I have the time. 

I know this isn’t much, but I hope it helps. 

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@cluelessbutch @cracksandcraters When you google a distinctive phrase from a text, you can usually find it online, in this case at burmamuslims.org: BurmaAlert US Aug 29 2017.pdf, turning a transcript into simple copy&paste.

The small print reads:

Burma Task Force USA is a coalition of several Muslim organizations and activists who previously worked together for Bosnia and Kosova Task Forces to stop genocide in those countries. Our fiscal agent is a coalition member, “Justice For All” which is a non-profit, tax exempt 501 (C) 3 organization 27 E. Monroe St. #700, Chicago IL 60603 • www.BurmaTaskForce.org • facebook.com/BurmaTaskForce

#SaveRohingyaMuslims

I don’t know if anyone has posted this set on here yet, but I haven’t seen anything on my dash about it so I thought that I would post it. Muslims in Myanmar are being burnt alive and I’m not gonna post videos or photos because they’re brutal and I feel like muslims are dehumanized enough and I’m sick of seeing our dead bodies plastered everywhere. Unfortunately all I know is from what I’ve seen on instagram and twitter, so if anyone has anything to add on, feel free to. Keep Rohingya Muslims in your duaas.

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Mother Earth will survive, she always has. Our species might not.

mother earth is literally committing suicide right now and y'all still think climate change is a hoax

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Choose to be yourself.

"Choosing your gender" in the sense of choosing your body physiology is a long and difficult process; you can't choose your genes.

However, every other aspect of us can be freely chosen by us as an expression of our personality, and it does't have to fit any standard except those that we ourselves choose. Clothing, makeup, hobbies, interior decoration, sports, voice, social roles, profession, sexual partners: your choice, and you can mix and match from "boy" and "girl" roles, or do something totally new.

You may have internalized gender roles, and hence feel the need to choose a gender, but the real way forward is to realize that you can transcend gender and simply be yourself.

Choose to be yourself.

i’ve seen more than a few comments about the topic of choosing your gender on my posts recently, as well as other people’s posts in the past, and like…

i want to make it very clear that the truscum (and others) who react to any post about this topic or any post that says “if you want to be a boy/girl/enby, you can be!” by screaming that “it’s not a choice” and that the people who make those posts are transphobic “transtrenders” are doing tremendous harm to questioning trans people.

for a lot of questioning people, the process of figuring out what hecking gender you are isn’t an easy one. not everyone goes to bed IDing as cis and then waking up the next morning going “wow, i’m so dysphoric! i am obviously trans and i know exactly what gender i am”.

one part that is very often included in the questioning process is thoughts and feelings of “i wish i was a girl but i’m not” or “if i could choose to be an enby i would” and similar things to that.

a lot of those thoughts, although maybe not all of them, have to do with internalized transphobia. because they were not assigned the gender they want to be, they feel like they can’t be that gender. so the thoughts are prevented from becoming anything more that “i wish i was that gender” because they don’t know that they can be that gender.

a questioning person saying “i wish i was a boy” is very often code for “i am a boy”. it’s just that they don’t yet know that they can be a boy, that they are indeed be a boy.

and that’s the people that those posts are often aimed at, even it’s not explicitly stated. the questioning trans people. those who don’t yet know that they can actually be the gender that they wish they were.

so. yes. go on and choose to be a boy, a girl, an enby. you are allowed to choose your gender, to choose what labels and words you identify with and want to describe yourself with.

the idea that nobody would ever want to be a gender other than their assigned one, that nobody would ever choose to be trans, is ridiculously transphobic in itself. but it is also directly harmful to the people who haven’t yet figured themselves out. so i want that narrative to get stomped out for good.

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That's not entirely true.

"In essence Mitläufer were found de facto guilty of contributing to Nazi crimes, even though they were not ideologically committed to some essential Nazi doctrines, especially biological racism and the policy of Jewish extermination.

"The Nazi Mitläufer often were of a slightly different sort: they sympathised with the Nazis but only indirectly participated in Nazi atrocities such as genocide. This is why this category was often used as an easy way to excuse most Germans legally from Nazi crimes."

Read more on Wikipedia: Mitläufer, Denazification

Historians at the United States Holocaust Museum caring about motivations here.

Nazis were not judged on motivation, but on their deeds. Facilitate crimes, and you didn't get off lightly. However, what you do obviously does depend on your motivation. If did join the Nazi party, you had to justify yourself, or have others exhonorate you. ( @wilwheaton )

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you want to control your destiny so control your change or pretend your now is your destiny and lose control

What are you afraid of?

Do I really want to recover? Who will I be if I do? What will I become if I don’t?

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It depends on the business type. Supermarkets and DIY stores are like that (cashier chairs, customers bag themselves); gas stations, baker, butcher, fast food, clothing stores have employees stand up and usually bag the merchandise, too (removing hangers, folding clothes etc.); for big electronics/media stores, it differs. With cinemas, the ticket cashiers are often seated, the concession stand workers aren't. Basically, when your task mix requires to be mobile a lot (e.g. to access merchandise kept behind the counter), you won't get a chair; being dedicated to running the cash register, you would likely have one.

To all of the employees representing the EU: What things are considered normal standards for working in retail for y'all? I've heard many stories about cashiers having chairs, not bagging, and so on. I was just wondering if that was true, or if it's true based on location? I've been considering a move to Europe (possibly for school), and wanted to know how the retail experience differed from the U.S.

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I don't understand the message at all. They don't sound regretful, they sound nostalgic about the time they were overweight -- and "only a few pounds" is in relation to an arbitrary cutoff, what really matters is your body fat percentage, and whether your eating habits reveal an impaired metabolism.

Is "now" being at more than overweight = obese or worse, or is "now" the struggle to keep a "normal" weight?

And why is it such a struggle? What are the reasons? Is the weight-control regimen unsuitable to their current life situation? There are probably other options to try that might be less exhausting. Or is there a physiological/medical reason for that difficulty that is still undiagnosed and untreated?

Then there's the psychological impact of "control" and "disappointment"--it isn't the same for everyone, and there are healthy ways to deal with failure that can be learned. If it's exhausting, maybe they could learn better ways to deal with these issues.

tbh the whole thing sounds ready for someone to say, "do yourself a favor and join the fat acceptance/HAES movement, put on some weight again, and all your struggles will be over", which, given the theme of your blog, would be a provocation. But this can only work by choosing to not think about the options I have talked about; by abandoning hope. And we don't know--maybe that's what it takes sometimes, to abandona false hope for a while, to then rebuild a better one, because they false hope contained assumptions that restrict you needlessly. But we don't have enough information to decide if that's the case here.

Asking a sympathetic question, like you did, is a good way forward.

I regret the time I was overweight. It was only a few pounds, nothing to put my health in danger. I didn't have to worry about every mouthful and I wasn't disappointed with myself every time I looked in the mirror because I wasn't expecting to see any progress. Now I've been stuck between control and disappointment for the better part of a decade. I'm exhausted.

It sounds exhausting!

Maybe I didn’t understand your message, but what are you disappointed about?

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Rising Canes, also by Pendo: