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deesseshesca · 3 months

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Message from your spirit guide

Message from your spirit team

Just a head up …. We love you

Good afternoon, pretty souls, today I’m channeling your spirit guides.

Choose the image that’s speak to you and allow yourself to soak ONLY what’s reasoning with YOUR SITUATION

Rules and Disclaimer

I am the type of tarot reader to say as it is. Nothing is sugar coated but everything is sent with good intention. If you are not ready to face some truth, you should vagabond somewhere else.

TW: DV, MENTION OF ABUSE

PILE 1

You go ahead and purchase that Cartier bracelet that is not going to destroy your hard work. Make sure you wear it at the baby shower. We know how much you pray for your sister regarding her fertility issue, your niece\nephew is on his/her way. And we are as excited as you. Don’t you dare overthink your body right now. You look amazing. Everyone is telling you so you better believe them. Ok you may not be at your dream weight but babe you must agree that you never looked so good. You better show off ! You told the whole truth and will be rewarded. I know you were scared to say it all because you felt like you messed up somewhere which is ok but that does not mean you deserve it. Yes, you agree to be in a relationship with him. But you did not agree to the mental abuse. You did not agree to the constant yelling, the name calling and disrespect. You did not sign for physical abuse. Whether or not you orgasm or not doesn't matter, if you did not want to do it, then nah. He did IN FACT abuse you. Let’s forget the couple slap here and there and the punches on the wall. People from his family want to drag you but everyone knows you are a good woman and did not deserve anything you were thru. We know it was an extremely stressful moment for you, but now you can sit back and relax. Everyone is congratulating you right now. Even the people on the street can’t wait but to compliment you on your glowing skin and amazing sense of style. But we know that it has been months, even years in the making. You decide to stand up when you had nothing but faith in YOU. The days that you had to stick to your diet. Stop eating your feelings. All the time you had to stick to a budget, so you can have this financial security. The hard work you did in uni so you can get the degree that got you this amazing job. Nothing grew overnight. Success looks so good on you ! The odd thing is you want more . You can see it because of the upgrade in your wallet. You went from fast food, to a five star restaurant. You went from exam week to working in big cooperatives. But yet you want more. There are days where you feel so happy and extremely grateful for what you have but other times you fall into deep depression because you want more from life. People around you don’t get it. ‘’You went from HELL to HEAVEN’’. Not quite. There’s more for you out here. And your soul knows it and calls for it. So let’s do it. Don't let the doubtful people stop you. The success that you have at the moment, you did on your own. With very little support. So, what if you want more ? Go get it ! Stop waiting for validation when you are the standard.

You are all about you right now. Focus on the future that you want for yourself. But people around you are calling selfish. I’m hearing ‘’ Why are you acting brand new ? Why are you so Hollywood all of the sudden ?’’. But you know better than to give those comments your attention.

You may be a lawyer. Or a future one. You may want to start grad school.

Advice from me : You don’t need a tower moment to know when a season is finished. If you want, go get it. That’s it, that’s all.

What it is- Doochii

BIG SALE (CAD$)

General: 22 $

Love : 33 $

Mystery: 41 $

Message me to have the whole run down, ONLY 3 SPOTS (ONE OF EACH)

PILE 2

We heard you… We heard you but are you telling them Always talking in front of the mirror what you are going to tell them. To tell them to fuck off. Tell them they got you fucked up. But nah. You know better. They know better. That’s why they are always coming back because you never switch up. They did. They switch is not just in your head. They are abusing you and anybody with critical thinking can see it from a continent way. I know it may not look like it in 3D but you are actually doing it. Ok you may not have the greatest grade. Ok you may not have the richest boyfriend. Ok your business is not making a milli a year . But let me remind you who the fuck you is. Nobody's surprised when you succeed because you always do. That’s why when you fail or struggle you get way more reaction since they wish upon you. But everyone knows that you are way better than them. They laugh because you don’t have the greatest grade. You are literally in one of the hardest programs. They are making fun of you while they did not even make it to uni. They are making fun of your man for not having extremely abundant funds. Not knowing the way he wakes you up with grateful text all the time, gives the best orgasm, even when he is mad, never raises his voice, always opens the doors for you, will not go to sleep without calling you, will literally throw his whole life away just to see you smile. And he is ACTUALLY studying in a very rewarding and respectful major. Like c’mon. Those girls are out here messing with men for some cash while having a side of beating, cheating and sprinkles of hella disrespect. Literally begging to be heard. While he's literally blowing your phone when he is with his friend because he can’t have enough of you. Your business went from being an idea to making weekly orders. They don’t even have a business. I don’t even think they have an IDEA to bring to life. Except they mean remarks and mean mug face. Since it kills them to see you win all their life, they prefer to wish for your downfall. Instead of asking for advice, lord know you would have given them some. Really girl, they wish they were you. They will accept to change life with you quicker than then their men can last, if God ask them. Why are killing yourself to impress them ? It hurts to see you go the extra mile for people that would rather see you die than to help you. Out here giving your last cent to that one annoying friend that humiliates you in front of everyone. Out here helping your mom knowing them well that she would never nurture you, even if Jesus ask her ? You don’t have nothing to prove to those people, because you are not on the same level as them. So let’s get it together and move on. They are mad at you because you are actually working towards your dream life. They thought you would stay miserable with them forever, but you know better. So YOU did better. If they mad about it let them. They were not there, when you overthink every move, when you were uncertain, when you could not sleep because of anxiety and when you would crash on your bed completely exhausted without real result but your dreams to motivate you to keep going. Do us a favor and act like the queen that you are.

You have a habit of loud outbursts of energy when something excites you. You give me the vibe that look like Jade (aesthetic) but act like Cat from Victorious.

You have been putting yourself out here. The fact that you are surprise by your success get me. People been waiting for you. I feel like you think you don’t deserve it, but all your customers are more than happy. They never had such a good product. I’m hearing this is the best _$ , I spend in my life’’. In school you said you will have a academic comeback and babe YOU DID ! Plus you have a man that is sweeter than anything. Literally goes to the gym, work, study and lives to love you. (Man does he love you)

Rules - Doja Cat

BIG SALE (CAD$)

General: 22 $

Love : 33 $

Mystery: 41 $

Message me to have the whole run down ONLY 3 SPOTS (ONE OF EACH)

PILE 3

We are behind you no matter what. But there's nothing we can do if you don’t act on it. You've been through a hard divorce with a very awful man. Intense narcissistic behavior. He made you believe in all his promises. You don’t have to explain yourself, we saw it coming. We also know that he was a fine con. He was all right at first. Everything a woman could wish for you got it emotionally and materially . People around you saw you guys as the ultimate couple goals. But he was hiding dark intentions. Disrespecting on a daily basis, humiliating a front of his colleague and requesting from you absolute submission and sexual intercourse when he felt like it. When you try to live you fear for your life with good reasons. You are a victim of military men. But you are not a victim of life. He mess you up so much, that your belief system is constant bad self talk. You don’t trust yourself with any decision even regarding that divorce. Knowing damn well he treated you like a piss of shit. How many times did he hold a gun at you ? How many time has he choke you ? How many times has he threatened to kill you, if you ever refuse to listen to him? Good looks and a good d were not good enough and will never be enough to deal with a deranged man. Now, finally divorce, he is going around calling you cheater when you never did. Not that you never wanted too. Sometime you wanted im to feel as fuck as you did. But were too afraid of the repercussions. You literally have medical proof of STD’s he gave you. But God was he slick with it. Never laying hands on you but destroying everything around you. Never telling what to do or not do. Just warning you of how he would react if you did not act like he wanted. Never telling you he was cheating, just told you he needed space or asking for a threesome. Now here you are, years later. You rebuild your life on your own, brick by brick. Boundaries stronger than ever. You thought you over the self sabotage but damn is it biting you right back in front of that new man. The man of your dream. Is this one the real deal ? Or is it a trap ? You can’t take another heartbreak. But he is everything you need. There is a block coming from you. You know you are the problem. He knows you have a blockage that you are terrified to reveal and swear he will wait for you. Is that not something your ex-husband used to say before it all went south ? How can you actually trust your judgment with this one? Imagine if you are stopping him from meeting the real one while he falls for the mess you are in. Please set yourself free. You got your divorce, you went to therapy, you develop strong boundaries but yet you are still bound to the past. You made a mistake, like all humans do. You deserve good things to happen to you. You have a way better judgment now than you did back then. Now, you actually know how to recognize a monster. You know damn well it ain’t him. Go for it, you deserve it. If it is too scary, set the pace, I swear he ain’t going anywhere.

SELF SABOTAGE

I was never there - Weeknd

BIG SALE (CAD$)

General: 22 $

Love : 33 $

Mystery: 41 $

Message me, to have the whole run down. ONLY 3 SPOT (ONE OF EACH)

PILE 4

There’s a lot of things we don’t understand about you. Your love for rap music and obsession with Nicki Minaj. We don't understand that you love to learn everything and anything. We don’t understand half of the things you chat about regarding chemistry, physics or whatever other science took over your heart. But we LOVE YOU SO MUCH. We support you every step of the way ! We can’t not wait for you to have that damn degree in science that makes you cry on school night but brings a sparkle in your eyes the second a person asks you a question about it. Sometimes we push random people around you to ask about the likelihood of a cell in a decade body or something like that so we can hear you speak for hours. It gives you a glow. You aura shine so bright when you are in the lab. Even your teachers are in awe of your dedication. I know you keep reminiscing about the good old times. When having A’s in your fav subject was as easy as closing your eyes. Now you spend hours just to understand one slide in the professor PowerPoint. It is useless to beat yourself up. You are deepening your understanding about one subject at the moment. It is ok if some parts of it are harder to understand than others. I must warn you it will not be easy. You will spend more time in the library than with your friends. You will spend most of your time in the school year stuck in your room away from your loving family. But don’t hurt yourself with guilt. We are not taking your disappearance as any form of disrespect. We are so supportive of you. We never knew such a beautiful bundle of joy and knowledge would ever be born in our lineage. You know, we are a family of lawyers, business man, psychologist and philosoĥer. Your parents may not get half of that you're saying. Your brother may roll his eyes sometimes when you go on about one specific detail that sparks your interest but they are all amazing by the way your brain works. Let me tell you this, you will succeed. You will get it. We will be waiting at the finish line, with flowers and gifts to celebrate the day you will be walking on the podium. As proud as you, because we know how much work you put into every step of the way. The lonely nights, the hard exam and way too big project . Also stop procrastinating and start developing some discipline. You are not here to succeed in your exam but to prepare for your future career. Is time to build some stamina.Don’t worry, I PROMISE YOU: NOTHING BAD IS COMING YOUR WAY. It may get a little gray here and there but we are protecting you from any evil. You can calm your anxiety and enjoy the journey. I won't let ANYONE get in the way of my favorite prodigy. You may not be realizing it but are living in one of your prayers.

I LOVE YOUR SPIRIT FAMILY. GOD ! They are amazed by you. Literally anything you do is an event that needs to be accelerated. Since you first breath they were going coco about you. I had a clear image about your spirit team. I see 3 chair. A lot of wealth around them. One of the chairs is a throne where an older man sits in power. He was the one speaking but everyone else shared that feeling.

So high - Doja Cat

BIG SALE (CAD$)

General: 22 $

Love : 33 $

Mystery: 41 $

Message me to have the whole run down. ONLY 3 SPOTS (ONE OF EACH)

#free tarot readings #tarot cards #tarot witch #tarot spread #tarotblr #tarot tumblr #tarotcommunity #pac reading #pac #pick a picture #pick a card #pick a pile #pick one #tarot #paid tarot reading #tarot blog

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alex51324 · 2 months

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Dear it/its users

OK, so this is a speech I've been working on ever since my sister told me that my two nonbinary niblings had added it/its to their list of pronouns. So far, they haven't indicated that those are their first-choice pronouns, so we've kind of been skirting the issue, but I've been getting this ready, because I love them and want to try to help them avoid long-term unintended consequences as they enter the adult world. Now I'm sharing it with you, because doing so is as nice as I know how to be.

First: If I, as a queer elder and active Tumblr user, have the initial reaction of, "Fuck, these little shits are going to get somebody fired with their 5-edgy-4-U bullshit," that is super-important context for you to know in considering taking this choice out into the larger world.

Now, I have made the effort of educating myself, and I understand that many people who make this choice have substantive reasons that go beyond edgy teen bullshit. However, you have to allow for the fact that the majority of people will not move past their first impression regarding this choice.

Being gender-nonconforming is already a strike against you in a lot of contexts--even in reasonably liberal settings, unconscious bias is a thing. Is being it/its important enough to you to add another strike against yourself?

Second: People are going to be uncomfortable calling you "it," even if you've thoroughly explained why you want them to.

This is different from people not wanting to call you by your chosen name, or wanting to call your by the pronouns for your gender assigned at birth, because these people will be coming from a place of wanting to respect you.

Yes, you can argue with them that calling you as you want to be called is the most respectful option, but they will still be uncomfortable. You can't reason them out of feeling uncomfortable, because they didn't reason themselves into it. It's a feeling. They may get over it in time.

But.

If those people do not already have some prexisting love, loyalty, or commitment toward you, that motivates them to sit with that discomfort and work through it, the easiest way out will be to simply decide that--for some totally unrelated reason, that their conscious mind will be fully convinced is true--you and they just didn't click! You don't seem like a good fit for the job, team, walking tour of the Lake District, whatever it is.

Because people don't like being uncomfortable, and if mentioning your existence puts them in an ethical dilemma, a lot of them will just nope right out of it.

And again, these will be people who are motivated in part by their desire to respect you and your autonomy. They will feel, consciously or not, that you have put them in a shitty position where no matter what they say, they'll feel like they're doing something wrong--

And they, dear nibling, will feel that way because you have. You didn't intend to, but you did.

I love you, and if that is your choice I will get used to it, but I am writing this in the second person for a reason.

Story time: I was trans/nonbinary in nine-teen-fucking-ninety-six. The LGB* organization on my college campus didn't know what the fuck to do with me. When I said in "let's go around the room and introduce yourself" time on the first day of class, that despite what the roster said, I was actually a boy called Alex, people got nervous and looked away, and kind of avoided talking about me for the rest of the semester.

(*By the time I left, it was the LGBT organization.)

And then when I was ready to go to grad school, I had professors tell me that they weren't sure how to write me a letter of recommendation, because they knew I didn't want to be called "she," but if they put "he," the recipient might be confused, and if they put "they" they'd look bad because we were in the English department and "they" is plural.

When I got to grad school, I kept "Alex," but skipped saying anything about my gender identity. It didn't help all that much. I got along well enough with my classmates, but all of the professors seemed to be waiting for me to cause trouble, and as a teaching assistant my student evaluation comments made frequent reference to my gender presentation and how they found my name "confusing." (Another grad student, whose name was James or something like that, went by Kip, and nobody gave him shit about it.) I got an anonymous rape threat in my campus email about my "indoctrinating students with my radical agenda," and the campus cop who responded to the complaint said maybe I should, "Tone it down a bit." (Tone what down? I was dressing and acting pretty much the same as the male half of my class cohort.) I ended up dropping out after the Masters, even though the plan all along had been to do the PhD and have an academic career.

Throughout all this, I was a bit more oblivious than I should have been about the underlying pattern behind all this--blame the autism, I guess.

I don't know, if I'd realized it all, whether i would have made different choices regarding my identity and presentation--since my choices were pretty much limited to "present as my gender assigned at birth, or suffer the consequences."

You, today, nibling, in 2024, have the option of being a "they/them," and if you choose your company right, it won't be a big deal--it'll close some doors, but mainly ones you don't want to go through anyway.

Or you can be an it/its, and watch doors slam in your face.

I will love you and support you either way, dear nibling, but I can't make the world love you.

I--we, my generation--changed the world enough that there's a space in it for people like us. I hope you make that space bigger, better, and brighter, but it hurts to think about you dragging yourself through the same shit we went through. We built a path behind us, so you wouldn't have to.

(P.S., For the love of god, please don't get a nonbinary gender marker on your driver's license; the last thing we need is you getting shot at a routine traffic stop.)

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olderthannetfic · 11 months

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https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/733632507529117696/its-good-to-listen-to-criticism-if-youre?source=share

Some of it's just that marginalized people are capable of being wrong about stuff. Sometimes because they're misinformed, but also they might just be petty or in a bad mood and lashing out, and so on. The idea that the marginalized person is ALWAYS right and the privileged person is ALWAYS wrong doesn't recognize the ability of marginalized people to make bad faith arguments just like anyone else. I think a better way of thinking of it is that marginalized people are more often than not, when framing things this way, coming from an understandable place.... but you don't have to agree with someone to understand them.

There's also the fact that whenever you decide a particular group is always right, that is basically telling someone from that group how to abuse and gaslight people. We've seen examples of this over the course of Tumblr, abusive users like Riley and genderbitch who used their marginalized status as an excuse to doxx people. But I've also seen this happen offline in progressive communities, where the danger is that framing things purely in terms of broader societal dynamics fails to recognize how there can be other power dynamics in smaller communities and more intimate relationships, and also how guilting people over their supposed unconscious biases and how that affects your personal relationships with them can be used as a way of controlling and abusing them.

I knew this awful guy when I was in grad school who was a trans man of color and would assume this was the case every time a woman rejected his romantic overtures, even though he did tons of other stuff that turned women away (such as bombarding them with texts/DMs within minutes of meeting them) and also, some people just don't find you attractive for reasons that have nothing to do with your being trans or your racial identity. This was mostly just funny and cringe when he struck out dating, but he'd use this as an excuse to stalk and creep on cis white women he was attracted to, the idea that their rejection was racist/transphobic and therefore he shouldn't have to honor it. He also had a habit of dating really insecure cis white women, getting super serious in those relationships really fast, and gaslighting those women about how they're just unconsciously racist/transphobic when they took issue with that or his other decisions in those relationships. The fact that trans men of color in general have less power than cis white women didn't matter about the fact that he had more power in those relationships (and he was also a big name on campus within queer groups there, and a lot of these women were younger and newer to these communities), nor the fact that the way he used those identities to abuse women is abusive and coercive no matter what the power dynamic.

To give some more minor examples, you see some similar stuff in academia and other professional environments where the fact that someone is marginalized just matters way less in one specific interaction than the fact that they're an established name in that discipline with a comfortable, secure job and the "privileged" person they're going up against is a young newbie nobody.

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 1 year

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aita for being mad at my best friend/roommate for repeatedly disregarding our plans to do other things?

sorry this is long, i have no concept of how much detail to add to things. so myself (21f) and my roommate (22f) have been best friends for almost a decade and have lived together for a year. it’s been hard for us both (i think) as i’m pretty codependent and get jealous when she has other friends or guys she’s talking to (it’s something i’m trying to get better with but that’s also a reason i’m seeking to see if i’m the asshole or if i’m just being clingy).

She is very into talking with guys/casually dating, and every instance of her changing or bowing out of plans we have is due to a guy she’s seeing or talking to. the first time this has happened (out of 4 that i can remember from the past ~6m) we had made—what i believed to be—concrete plans to go out on her birthday, as she’d agreed the night before this and i’d mentioned buying her drinks. around 8-9pm she gets a call from the guy she’s currently talking to and he asks her if she wants to go do something, which she immediately agrees to. i was really upset about this one but knew i didn’t have a right to be as it was her birthday and i wanted her to enjoy herself, even if it wasn’t with me. so i told her that, that i was upset but it wasn’t an issue with her and that i wanted her to have fun.

the second time, with a different guy, was when we’d planned to go out for drinks to celebrate my grad school graduation after a concert. she was going to be taking a guy to the concert with her and told me we couldn’t go out after as she didn’t want to just make him leave after the concert. i didn’t see the big deal as the guy had to work in the morning and it would already be late for him, but agreed, despite knowing that meant we would never celebrate that (and still haven’t)

third time was fourth of july when i’d asked her repeatedly if she was still going to be coming with me and my family (who she loves) to watch fireworks. i was excited because i’d never gotten to go with a friend to see fireworks. the day of, morning of, she tells me the guy she was talking to invited her to fireworks so she of course was going to go to those instead.

this is a lot of backstory to the reason i’m really asking aita. for the last three years i have worked a job with a 3am start time, meaning i always went to bed early, like 9pm early. meaning we could never do anything if i worked. yesterday was my last day and so i didn’t have to go to bed early last night. because of that, we had talked for a few days about going out to get margs to celebrate me finally leaving. she got home from work excited about margs, but her new boyfriend was having a slight crisis, nothing pressing or worrying, just a hiccup with his band. she told me she’d asked him if he wanted to call like 20 minutes beforehand, and then laid in my room for about half an hour waiting for him to call (so 50 minutes after the initial text). i asked if she still wanted to go out or if she would rather just call him and deal with that (which i would’ve understood, at this point, hence why i asked) and she said she still wanted to go out. i said we should just leave and if he called we could leave the bar. she agreed and i had started getting dressed, when he called around 9pm. she’d said it would be like a 45 minute phone call and i told her i wanted to try to leave by 10 at the latest. so i’m just hanging out, killing time, and at 10:05 go to check if she’s done, and she’s changed into her PJs. she’d decided she cared more about chatting to her boyfriend than she did about our premade plans to go get drinks and celebrate me leaving a job that made me miserable.

i’m currently not talking to her, i haven’t had much opportunity to so i’m not like actively avoiding her, and this morning i did tell her i was upset. i know i’m allowed to be upset at the situation but i don’t want to be mad at her if i’m just overreacting, as I do have an issue with last minute plan changes or not knowing exactly how something will go. i know we do live together but going out is our ‘catch up’ time because we’ve had pretty opposite work schedules for a while. not to mention it makes it seem as though she views our plans as optional, as if they’re just placeholders until something better comes along. i really don’t know how to feel as i never let myself actually be mad at her since i’m always convinced i’m overreacting. i’ll probably talk with her but i need strangers on the internet to tell me if i should just be upset about the situations or if i have a reason to be mad at my friend herself.

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

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theladyragnell · 1 month

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G foooor Alion/Tiriel or, if you really wanna stretch option, Lilly/Elsbeth? ;)

(Look, I love Alion and Tiriel, but did you really think you could give me an excuse to try writing these two and I wouldn't immediately leap on it? Anyway, a brief moment from right after the magic pearl. (For the confused, these are two NPC allies of the party in the game I am running, I really should do a little primer on this game sometime since I keep vagueblogging about it.))

“Any word?”

Tuesday evening shifts at the library are usually pretty quiet, which means Lilly tends to spend a lot of them doing her homework. She’s still kind of deciding how she feels about the fact that Elsbeth has figured that out, and started stopping by for a few minutes on Tuesday evenings, even when she’s got a party to go to. Like, she likes it. She just also is kind of not enjoying the return of her embarrassing freshman year crush. She’s in her last year and applying for grad schools. She’s supposed to be cooler than this.

This isn’t about her crush, though. This is about her friends, who keep doing things so scary she can’t look at them head on, so she puts down her textbook and looks at Elsbeth, all bundled up in her winter coat, leaning against the counter in the same spot she always leans. Like it’s her spot. “Other than that they’re back? No.”

“Assholes,” says Elsbeth, in a tone of voice so fond Lilly wants to do something stupid. “I hate waiting for news enough when it’s Uncle Gildo and he’s just taking on a few mimics in a well-mapped dungeon.”

“It hasn’t happened that much,” says Lilly, but that’s just stupid, because once things like this start happening to people, they keep happening. They happen to Lilly too, sometimes, now. And this one was big, and Morye’s god is involved somehow, and she really wants a whole lot of details and also doesn’t want any details at all. “And you were with them, for the crab thing.”

Elsbeth frowns and shoves her hands in her pockets. “And you were with them in that factory.”

Lilly has nightmares about the Quicksilver Soda Factory sometimes. About good people dead for stupid reasons, and about how they all almost died when she was supposed to be team leader, supposed to have the information that would keep them protected. If Morye’s god didn’t love him, she and they would both be dead. “I know that.”

“I wish I’d come with you,” Elsbeth says, straightening up from her lean, and talks over Lilly before she can even start saying anything, catching the way she’s shaking her head and getting ready for it. “That’s what I do, and what I’m going to do. None of you had ever been in a situation like that before, and I should have just canceled everything and gone.”

“Everything’s okay now,” Lilly says, like there’s not a faint white scar on her breastbone, a little circle of branching lightning that keeps her from wearing her nicest date top because people ask questions and they aren’t ones she wants to answer on dates.

Elsbeth just looks at her. That’s fair. Elsbeth’s got a few physical scars, but they both know the worst ones are inside, and that she knows better than pretty much anyone how it’s never really okay. “You think they’re okay?”

Lilly has been doing a lot of research on magic pearls, since they sent her a message. They’re not malevolent, but they are a once-a-century phenomenon that are dangerous to defuse and even more dangerous to ignore. “We’ll check in on them. Just like you’re checking in on me.”

“I guess so.” Elsbeth shifts a little, not quite her confident lean but not quite awkward either. Just watching Lilly like she’s waiting for something Lilly doesn’t know how to say. Or maybe Lilly’s reading too much into it, because a second later she’s straightening, taking a step back. “Anyway, just wanted to check in, see if they’d told you more details yet, but sounds like they want to sleep it off first. Stay in touch, okay? I might not be helpful on the research jobs for them, but I don’t mind listening.”

“You’re always helpful,” says Lilly, too fast, too honest, and definitely not believed, judging by the way Elsbeth’s mouth quirks. “Stop by anytime, though. And I’ll tell them to tell you too.”

“Only if they want,” says Elsbeth, and backs up another step. “And only if you want. Have a good shift, Joy. I’ll catch you later.”

That’s new, and enough to leave her speechless for a second. “Joy” is for talking herself down, for scolding herself, for being encouraged by her grandmothers and begged for another story by her little brother. It’s just the second syllable of her name, but it’s intimate, and Elsbeth’s got to know that, because there’s something a little tense in her shoulders, like she’s waiting to see if Lilly is going to say anything about it. Maybe she would, if she could think of anything to say. “Catch you later,” she promises, a little strangled, and it seems like it’s good enough, because Elsbeth is off, ducking back out into the cold, leaving Lilly at the desk with her usual list of tasks to complete and no attention left over to do them.

#sovinly #answered asks

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emjee · 1 year

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do you have any thoughts on veiling? i’m catholic, so veils tend to be….. extremely linked to things i don’t want to associate with. but i am kind of passively interested in it as an outward sign of my purpose in certain moments of reverence

Oh boy do I ever! I totally know what you mean though; when I was first investigating veiling myself I mostly found resources from very conservative Roman Catholic sources that had me going "ahaha no <3" Once when I was attending an Anglo-Catholic parish in grad school a man I had never seen before in my life grabbed my hand on the way out of church and gestured to my veil and told me it was "good to see someone doing things the proper way." I did not tell him to fuck off because I was in the House of the Lord and all that, but he had no idea what he was talking about.

I became interested in veiling when I was in college for similar reasons that you mention--I like tangible things that help direct my focus or intention in moments of reverence or spiritual concentration (I'm also a big fan of prayer beads, icons, stained glass, etc for this reason). I decided to first try it on a school trip abroad, just in a kind of "wear a scarf everywhere and when you go into a church, pull it over your head" kind of way, and I really liked it, and ended up having some really lovely conversations with a Muslim classmate on that trip about the differences between hijab (which she wore) and veiling in church, but also the similarities in terms of outward signs of inward spiritual dispositions.

What also helped is that I attend an Episcopal church where some women cover their heads--not with chapel veils, but with dupattas or headwraps or hats or because they're habited nuns. So I felt like less of an outlier and more like someone who was participating in a tradition that was still happening around me, but wasn't a requirement. I just needed to find the form that was right for me.

My dad also reminded me that my grandmother and aunt used to wear chapel caps and kept one in every handbag in case they had to run by church for altar guild. I actually ended up inheriting my grandmother's chapel cap and that's the one I wore consistently when I first started veiling, until it disappeared when I was in graduate school. Since then I've inherited caps from older women at my church who were happy to pass them on to me, and I've also received many dupattas from my church aunties who are happy to see me use them as a veil. During the choir season I wear a brown lace veil that matches my hair.

While I tried to do a lot of research when I first started out, and read the passages from St. Paul that some folks like to cite when talking about veiling, I've ultimately made my own meaning (derived from tradition) about it. Veiling for me is tied to the presence of the Blessed Sacrament* (I believe wholeheartedly in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist) so it's partly a sign of reverence, but also partly a way to set aside time in church as different from other times. That's why I'm also going to start veiling when I say my prayers at home (a tradition supported by practice in various parts of the world), to help me concentrate and set that time apart from other times.

*Fun fact, for this reason I don't veil on Good Friday! By the time the service is over there is no Sacrament left in the building.

I find it to be a really joyful and fulfilling practice. Also, not gonna lie, scarves are pretty, and matching scarves to Sunday outfits is fun.

Thank you for asking this, I am literally always down to talk about it.

#veiling #christianity #the means of grace and the hope of glory #mg says stuff #asked and answered #viveperdiemnoctemque

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your-dads-top · 8 months

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I'm in a weird space right now

I've been thinking a lot about dropping out of teacher's college/my B.Ed program. I'm not happy with my fellow teacher candidates in my stream after an A.I. plagiarism incident (that my group members pulled for an assignment). If I was doing this when I was 22, maybe I would feel different and more energized, but at 30 I cannot handle these Zoomers and the way they want to cut corners. I hate the fact that my faculty liaison for any issues related to being gay and going into education as a field is an enby-identified lesbian and that the group there hates any sort of "negative" talk. As a gay man, I have valid concerns about what my place is going to be and how to navigate it. I can't relate to women in education, because they don't deal with the same risks.

I'm also not happy with the placements I've had. The first one was at a high school where both my associate teacher and her department head made an underhandedly homophobic comment about another teacher in the board. They were talking about a comment he made to the department head about how he would trust her to sub in his class (he's Franco-Ontarian, teaches French Immersion, and has high standards) and they brought up his husband for no goddamn reason. If you thought his comment was rude, fine (it wasn't rude). But what the hell did his husband have to do with it?

On the same placement, I also dealt with my associate teacher being passive aggressive as hell. She would not explain to me the logic of her grading process. At first, when we came to a disagreement, she would say my way was "interesting" so I would just defer to her and try to understand her criteria (which was entirely vague and seemed to just be based off of feelings). By the last week of the placement, I would ask her how she wanted to grade certain assignments (so I can't help you) and she would fuck off for 30-40 minutes during the prep saying she was in the bathroom.

On this second placement, I felt the need to call Children's Aid because a kid was threatening to kill herself and cut herself. She had also said that her father was unjustly punishing her for things and getting randomly angry. I was able to get my associate teacher to take her to the office while I tried to make the call. He and the principal are now pissed at me for doing it because I should have followed the internal rules (that no one fucking told me). I went by how i was taught by the faculty. We had it reinforced to us to make these calls, otherwise our future licencing will be on the line. Oh, and despite me telling the case worker I wanted to be anonymous, they (teacher and principal) told the kid's father.

I'm just exhausted. I don't feel like I can go to the local gay bar because they decided in taking over the 'queer' bar that they would have go-go boys. Good for them, but it means the space is off limits for me due to the potential for cameras (both official for the bar as well as random people's social media). I've had to pull my face picture off of Scruff, too. I have no means of connecting with other gay men and I'm left feeling drained.

I've sacrificed so many years of my life to get to this point just so I have the opportunity to be in a place where I'm making enough money to live on my own and actually have any shot at life. The thing is, I regret it.

I'm in debt, most part-time jobs have no interest in hiring me because of my schedule even outside of placement, I'm completely demoralized, and I just want to die

I don't remember writing "I just want to die." I had just gone back to add something in, but fuck me if that isn't the truth right now. I hate being in a position where I'm at the behest of other people. I miss being in positions of independence and control.

Part of me wants to fail just so I have an excuse to leave, find work, pay off my debt, and move out. But not completing this program means that my current plans for grad school in the future will also shoot me in the foot because it will make me overqualified in most people's eyes. I hate that it took me until my late 20s to find something that I'm passionate about and I hate even more that it's something that is only considered valuable in this one context.

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inkofamethyst · 3 days

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September 20, 2024

It's not at all that I'm annoyed or frustrated with my advisor. I absolutely trust his judgement over mine right now. I am frustrated with myself. It's like.. I'm really, really trying to prove myself. I want to be good at science, and I think I'm improving, but every time I try to.. demonstrate, like, brilliance or something (and maybe "brilliance" is too egotistical of a word for what I'm trying to say, perhaps "engagement" or even like "ability to analyze, synthesize, and propose scientific thought"), I come out of the conversation having failed entirely. And that failure feels humiliating.

A big part of it is that I feel like the road my PhD is currently on is laid out for me in a way that literally just follows what my postdoc has done for the past few years. I mean, in all fairness, she's done amazing work! I think the methods I plan to use will be excellent for answering relevant questions robustly. I look forward to following in her footsteps, actually. It's just that, like, it feels like cheating? It feels like being given a cheat code, but in a bad way (and like, look, I know that science is iterative and builds on itself and is meant to be replicated, but full replication isn't actually encouraged by scientific culture, regardless of what scientists try to tell themselves). And while it may make my program progression more straightforward, I will always feel like I will exist in the shadow of the person who did this first. And it's honestly not even that I want fame or recognition or whatever. It's literally that I want to be seen as a scientist in my own right. That's all!! That's where the frustrations stem from!!

And if I dig deeper, I'll likely find that it really just stems from insecurity (or course). I feel uncertain, I feel like people are observing me to see if I will fail or fly, if I'm all that my recommenders made me out to be. Part of me recognizes that it's incredibly self-centered and that, ultimately, most people do not care. But I can't seem to help it! I can't seem to help but compare myself to members of my cohort who seem particularly On It as second years ("second" years.. some were research assistants in their labs before starting grad school tbf).

So I try to thoroughly digest primary literature. I make note of all the various methods so I can try to be informed, so I can propose study systems and keep up when others are talking.. but I just can't seem to crack experimental design.

It's also tough when the most recent lab graduate and the next up lab graduate seem brilliant. And when the graduate before them seems brilliant. I just feel devastatingly normal and even a bit out of place because of it.

Also, I spent a number of weeks testing and writing out various ideas for this fellowship I want to apply for and I wasn't sure if any of them were good enough ("good" standing in for several factors), but I'm going to just end up proposing the first thing I wrote: a copy of my postdoc's work but just applied to a different study system, "my" system. So it also feels a little like a waste of time and effort when I could've been basically through a whole draft or two by now instead of trying to be creative, trying to prove that I have what it takes to maybe be brilliant, if not today then one day.

hhhhh at this point I don't even want comfort. I just want to get over myself.

And oreos. I also want to eat just enough oreos that I feel better but not so many that my stomach protests. But I need to eat real food first.

Today I'm thankful that I for some reason decided to look at the microscope schedule to discover that I had fifteen minutes left booked, not an hour and fifteen, as I'd thought. Also thankful that I was able to export my images in just ten minutes (on the flip side, that may be a sign that the images suck ugh). At least my day didn't get worse.

Thankful for my island-friend who is always down for a chat, even one where I just moped the whole time. Thankful for the discord chat's newly-formed Fart Crew ("fiber art crew" bc I threw out a bad idea to get the brainstorm going and everyone rallied behind it (much to my dismay)) and the chat we had a few days ago. I like my friends here but I also miss those guys so much.

[edit: my angst could very well be related to hunger.. need to fuel better]

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bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue · 3 months

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hihi!! I hope you're having a good day and feel better soon : ) I know you're in college right now and I'm starting soon (this fall!!!) and I was wondering if you had any advice for finding roommates? Im pretty sure im also some flavor of neuro divergent and I'm kind of worried about finding a roommate for my freshman year and becoming friends with them.... what did you do when you were trying to find someone? did the transition feel okay? I really hope I find someone who likes me and im really worried that ill be too awkward when first meeting people

Hi, anon! (And thanks for asking about my feeling better—I am indeed recovering from my cold, slowly but surely!)

How exciting that you’re entering college this fall—congratulations to you, the Class of ‘28! You’re right that I’m currently in college—I’m a senior (and currently in Grad School Application Hell)—and it’s really nice revisiting all the excited feelings I had as I was entering college for the first time, too, and I’m so excited FOR you! It’s not an easy transition, and I understand if you’re nervous, but in the best of circumstances, it can be SO much fun—the new environment, the newfound freedom, the new friends, the endless possibilities of this new chapter in your life! (Do I sound like a cliché and/or some overly-enthusiastic person from an admissions office taking you on a college tour right now? Maybe. Sorry about that.)

I’ll start with the caveat that I’m by no means an expert on this, just speaking from my personal experience (in which I’ve been lucky to have two absolutely lovely roommates!), largely drawn from how my college functions and what worked well for me. I’ve done my best to make this explanation more general and inclusive of how other schools might work, though. (And if you or anyone reading this has any more specific questions, feel free to shoot me another ask or a DM!)

So, given my lack of qualification…I’ve put on my Advice Columnist Hat and basically written a LOOOOOONG-winded treatise on how to find roommates for your first year of college, especially if you’re some flavor of neurodivergent! That will be under the cut, so let’s go!

How To Find Roommates For Your First Year Of College, Especially If You’re Some Flavor Of Neurodivergent

An Unnecessarily Long-Winded Treatise By bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue

Part 1: Picking Prospective Roommates Based on Questionnaires & Compatibility

The way my school does roommate selection for incoming first-years is that you can choose either to “go random” (be assigned a totally random roommate, who I think will always be someone else who’s also chosen to go random), or you can fill out a questionnaire and be matched with people who’ve answered it similarly. If, for some reason, your school just assigns random roommates to everyone and you don’t have any choice in whom your roommate will be, then you can skip this whole part and scroll down to Part 2. (Sorry!)

The aforementioned roommate form/questionnaire has questions about how you prefer to live/what you’d like your housing situation to be like. Whether they’re part of an official form from your school or not, they’re all important things to consider when you’re deciding who would make the best match for you as a roommate, especially when you’re neurodivergent and have specific routines, sensory needs, socialization-related needs, etc. (but also just for everyone, because it makes accommodating the other person and their schedules/patterns so much easier if they’re already the same as your own schedules/patterns!) These will be things like:

Have you ever consistently lived in the same room with someone before (a sibling, a roommate at boarding/prep school or sleepaway camp, etc.)?

What time do you like to go to sleep/wake up?

Do you keep your room neat and tidy, cluttered but clean, or messy?

How often do you plan to be in the room? (As opposed to: in class, in extracurriculars, in OTHER people’s rooms, going out/partying, working at a job, etc. Some people hardly ever leave their rooms, and some treat their room more like a waystation.)

How often do you plan to have people over in the room?

Do you use substances (do drugs, drink alcohol, smoke, etc.), and how would you feel about a roommate who used substances?

How do you feel about roommates using your stuff? (what’s mine is yours / ask first / please don’t touch)

Do you need darkness to sleep, or are you okay with some lights being on?

Do you need quiet to sleep, or are you okay with some noise?

Do you want you and your roommate to be acquaintances, friends, or close friends?

The questionnaire for my college, as I recall, also asks some general questions about your personality, hobbies, planned majors, extracurriculars, etc.

If your college’s housing form has a questionnaire like this, hell yeah! Go ahead and fill it out, if you haven’t already! After you’ve done so, the program will match you with people who have answered similarly, in an attempt to create nice, concordant living situations. My college’s program provided a list of a bunch of possible prospects, with their compatibility percentage (91% compatible, 86% compatible, etc.), and showed their provided description and their answers to the questionnaires, so you could see where you agreed and disagreed. Kinda like this character personality quiz, but with, y’know, real people. If your college DOESN’T have a questionnaire like this (I think most do, but I’ll freely admit I’m not very up on how colleges that aren’t mine work…), you can use a roommate-finder website like Roomsurf or Diggz, or an app like Roomie. (Yeah, the names are kinda stupid…) Finally, some social-media profiles for schools’ incoming classes (like a Class of ‘28 Discord server or Instagram page) let you write up a little profile on your own, with your answers to these questions. When they post it, people can look at it determine their compatibility with you on their own, then comment/DM you expressing their interest in being your roommate.

Whatever method you choose, I’d suggest that if you’re neurodivergent, you do some sort of questionnaire like this—or at the very least find some way of expressing your preferences—instead of going random, if that’s at all possible. It reduces a lot of stress if you have at least SOME idea, going in, of what it will be like to live with your roommate, and it goes the other way around, too—you’re letting your roommate know what it will be like to live with you. And although a perfect, 100% match is next to impossible, it’s really nice to get a roommate who has similar habits to yours and is able to tolerate yours—if you go to bed and wake up at around the same time, if you both need quiet at a certain time, if neither of you wants people over in your room often, etc. I’d argue that this is almost more important than friendship based on things like shared interests (majors, fandoms, etc.). In fact, I’ve known people who are the best of friends, but who’d make terrible roommates! On the other hand, I’ve known people who were perfectly cordial, respectful roommates who got along well and liked each other fine, but barely hung out in other contexts. To sun up, living compatibility is important, and I’d argue that neurodivergence makes it even more important—when things like this are less “wants” than “needs”.

Speaking of which: in your answers to these questionnaires or in your profile, you might or might not want to disclose that you’re neurodivergent, or that you suspect you are. That’s totally your choice, and you don’t have to disclose anything you’re not comfortable with. If you specifically want a neurodivergent roommate, then it might be a good thing to disclose that you are or might be neurodivergent too. (Although, as the saying goes, if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. And that’s just one specific category of neurodivergence! Someone else might have totally different sensory needs and routines than you do—or they might be a different flavor of neurodivergent or have co-occurring physical/mental conditions. This is always a good thing to talk to them about more specifically and in more detail, if both of you are comfortable with it.) It might also be a good idea to say you’re neurodivergent as an explanation for why you need your living conditions to be the way they are and why you may be less willing or likely to budge on them—they’re not just preferences, they’re accommodations, things you NEED. However, if you’re uncomfortable disclosing this information—if you think that mentioning it might alienate potential roommates who are ableist or have misconceptions about neurodivergence, or if you’re just uncomfortable with saying you’re for sure neurodivergent when you’re not entirely sure (believe me, I get it; I’ve been there, and still kinda am!)—then you don’t have to say it. Another option is to see if any potential roommate matches mention that they are neurodivergent—then you can privately message them and say you suspect that you might be, too. This way you don’t have to disclose it to the world in your profile, but you might still find people who are wired the same or a similar way that you are.

Aside from that—my advice is to be as honest as possible when filling out these questionnaires. Obviously you can’t predict everything about how you’ll ACTUALLY turn out to live and behave in college—maybe you anticipate spending lots of time outside of your room for an extracurricular that you don’t even end up doing, or you liked to keep your room neat in high school, but with all the responsibilities and stress of college life, cleaning your room ends up falling by the wayside. You can’t predict that with absolute certainty, and the prospective roommates looking at your answers know that—it’s all preliminary guesswork. After all, they’re guessing how they’ll live, too! But given that, do your best to be as honest as you can. Don’t feel bad or ashamed, or like you need to hide/downplay any of your living habits! It’s not “bad” or “wrong” to have a messy room, go to bed late, or use/not use substances. It’s better to be upfront about things like this, so your roommate doesn’t feel deceived when your living patterns turn out to be different than how you made them out to be in the questionnaire—or so you don’t have to feel like you have to overhaul your own living habits. Self-improvement is a great thing to aspire to, but with all the changes that come with moving to college, it can just cause more stress—especially for neurodivergent people who need routines and familiarity. (Even if going to bed at 3 AM is your routine—*cough* me *cough*) And feeling like you have to tiptoe around another person or suppress your own needs can cause resentment to build up over time, and that’s not fair to you or your roommate. You don’t have to disclose anything you’re not comfortable with, but be as honest as you can.

To close out this section, here’s a quick, funny comic about how these questionnaires often go for people filling them out!

Part 2: Narrowing It Down Through Conversation

So! What next? If your college has picked out a roommate for you, or if you’ve got a list of contenders for your future roommate—people who have high compatibility scores with you on the roommate questionnaire or who have commented and expressed interest in being your roommate over social media—then the next thing to do is reach out to them! There might be a messaging feature embedded within the housing portal, or people might put their Instagram/Twitter/Discord/etc. info in the part of the roommate questionnaire that asks for a brief description of them. If you found someone through social media in the first place, you can just DM them on that account! Worse comes to worst, you can just Google “[person’s name] + [college name] + [‘28]”, and you’ll often get a social media profile for them that way.

What I did was take the top few people from the list of possible compatible roommates that the program spit out, then sent them each the same message I’d written beforehand. From what I can remember, I introduced myself, explained that the roommate portal matched us up/suggested that we’d be compatible, and said I was excited to get to know them more and see if we’d like to be roommates—and, if that wasn’t possible, if we could be friends as we both entered our college. I’d usually find a little detail from their profile and expand on that to start a conversation—things like: “I noticed on your profile that you like anime! I love it too—my favorite is Cowboy Bebop, but I like all kinds! What are your favorites? Do you have any recommendations?” or “I saw on your profile that you’re a fencer! That’s so cool, I’ve always wanted to learn that! Are you planning to join the fencing team or take classes at [School]?” (To be clear, I just made these up—I hadn’t watched Cowboy Bebop yet when I started college! I also hadn’t tried fencing yet, which is actually true to the message I made up—now I have taken a fencing class and can confidently say that I absolutely SUCK at it. But I digress.)

The next few messages, back and forth, are where you begin to get to know this person and (hopefully!) establish a friendship with them. Beyond just the logistics of living, you get to see if you click. You don’t want to live with someone with whom you’d always have an awkward silence or feel on edge, or whom you just plain don’t like or find annoying—even if you have the exact same schedules and living preferences! A good roommate is someone with whom you feel comfortable—because, after all, they’re the person with whom you’ll spend the majority of your time for a year. Things like shared interests are a bonus, even if they’re not strictly necessary—it’s nice to have built-in ways to spend downtime with your roommate and bond with them. For instance, if you’re both into anime, you can watch it together; if you both like biking, you can go on bike rides together. Again, you don’t have to be best friends with your roommate—and if you don’t expect to be best friends with them, it lowers the pressure on both of you as you get to know each other!—but it’s nice to click with them, at least a little. (If you’re having trouble carrying on the conversation, I’ve written this guide to getting-to-know-you conversations and socializing, specifically for autistic people! Again, I’m by NO means an expert, but hopefully it can prove a little helpful!)

If you’ve messaged back and forth and are seriously considering the possibility of being roommates, I’d suggest at least one video chat before making it official, for a few reasons:

You can get a sense of how well you mesh in spoken back-and-forth conversations…which you’ll be having a LOT of if you’re roommates! Texts/DMs don’t always translate to spoken conversations (whether IRL or over video calls) the same way.

The two of you can see what the other looks like beyond their curated social media profile.

You can give each other a virtual tour of your rooms at home, to show them what your living situation is currently like.

If you’re comfortable with it, you can meet each other’s families—whom you might be seeing a LOT of during move-in!

And remember: if you message lots of people (who themselves are also messaging lots of people), it’s inevitable that some roommate relationships won’t work out! Sometimes the other person might ghost you, or find another roommate, or YOU might find a roommate and have to let the other people you messaged down easy, or you might decide that you’re better as friends than as roommates, or they might just annoy the hell out of you. That’s okay! Barring the first and last situations, just because you’re not roommates doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. And, in fact, by messaging a lot of people for roommate selection, oops—you’ve accidentally made lots of good, friendly connections for when the school year starts, and now you know more people you’ll see in your dorm, in class, in the dining halls, etc.! Even if someone’s not your future roommate, they could be your future study group member, or partner for meals, or person with whom to laugh at terrible sitcoms, or whatever.

Part 3: Maybe Not Even Having A Roommate At All?!?!?

One more thing to consider: if you’re worried about having a roommate, then, depending on your school, you might be able to get a single room to yourself and not have to have a roommate at all! The rules are different from one school to the next—my mom spent all four years of her undergraduate education happily in singles, never having a roommate, whereas my school requires you to have a roommate your first year. That is…unless you have medical accommodations that require you living in a single. If you’re really worried about roommates—if you think that the stress of having one might be sensory overload or detrimental to your mental health (and it can be a lot, being around someone All The Time!) and you need time to unmask & be truly on your own, then it might be worth looking into accommodations. These can look like: a “medical single,” an early room-selection slot to make sure you can pick a single before they’re all taken, etc. See if your school offers something similar; it’ll usually be under an office with a name like “Accessibility,” “Accommodations,” “ADA,” etc.

However, two caveats:

Accommodations like this often require some form of paperwork confirming an official diagnosis. Some accessibility offices aren’t very lenient about self-diagnosis or even diagnoses that are in progress. I assume, from your saying that you’re “pretty sure you’re some flavor of neurodivergent,” that you haven’t gotten an official diagnosis, and I can totally understand all the reasons you or others may not have one—lack of access, lack of permission, doubtful doctors, worries about how a diagnosis may affect other aspects of your life, just not wanting to or not being sure yet! I myself am just at the “maybe-possibly autistic” stage and only recently considered the possibility of a diagnosis as a Real Thing In My Future. But keep in mind that accommodations offices, ironically, might not be that understanding or accommodating.

Sometimes, unfortunately, accessibility administration can just be bad at their jobs and a hassle to deal with—so getting accommodations like this might be a long fight, and might not happen until you’re already in a room. Then you’d have to deal with the stress of having a roommate for a few months, compounded with the stress of having to pack up and move into a new single, sometimes in another building entirely!

This is where it’s good to look into resources for incoming students to your school, preferably ones where current students can answer questions freely and with candor—like those social-media pages for incoming students (if they’re run by students themselves), or groups on Facebook, Discord, Sidechat/YikYak, etc.—and see how good your school’s accessibility office’s track record is when it comes to granting accommodations quickly, helpfully, and fairly. People who have dealt with them before can answer and give you some insight. (I’ll admit, some of my rancor might be coming from experiences I’ve witnessed at my school, whose accessibility office can, to put it in the nicest way possible, be hit-or-miss…)

Part 4: My Personal Experience/Conclusion

Now for a bit of a tangent about my personal experience. Luckily, I’ve had really good luck with roommates the two years I had them. My first-year roommate, whom I met through the questionnaire, was really nice and made a good, respectful roommate. Although we haven’t crossed paths much after first year, we’re still friendly when we do see each other. Then, in my second year, I couldn’t room with that person again because she became an RA and was assigned a single, so I roomed with one of my best friends, whom I’d met at the beginning of first year! Unfortunately, they and I ended up sharing the world’s tiniest “dingle” (a single into which the college shoved two beds and pretended it was a double), where there was hardly room to move around without bumping into each other. But both of us proved very accommodating (at least, I hope I was!) and actually ended that year with an even closer friendship, instead of coming to blows and wanting to kill each other. I’m not sure I would have been able to share that single with anyone else but them! (Actually, I’m Tumblr mutuals with both of these people—to be clear, we followed each other here after knowing each other in real life; we didn’t meet on Tumblr and then happen to go to the same college—which I guess speaks to how we’re similar flavors of weird??? And if either of them see this post, I hope you know how wonderful you are and I apologize if I’ve misrepresented you!!) My third year, I was assigned a single due to an on-campus job I had, and I’ll have a single this coming year because I’m a senior.

I won’t lie and say the transition was easy—it’s never easy going to college for the first time, especially when you’re living in a dorm away from home. But when I followed the steps I outlined above, it made it a lot easier for me and gave me two lovely roommates; I’m so glad to have shared the experience with them. I really hope my super long-winded guide was helpful, and I hope you have similar luck and a great experience, both with finding a roommate and with college life in general! I’ve had so much fun in college so far—for me, it’s been worlds better than high school!—and I wish the same for you. 💖

#ask #answered #anon #college #roommates #neurodivergent #maya’s musings

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margridarnauds · 1 year

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Sleepover ask time! I give you permission to rant about shit on main

That's an ungodly amount of power to give me, let's go.

This is going to be unpopular with some people, and I totally get why, but...every once in a while on this site, there's a lot of furor raised over "You CAN'T call the Aeneid/The Divine Comedy/Arthuriana fanfic, you don't UNDERSTAND, they're MEDITATIONS on fate/divine will/mortality, they're DEEP." Many outraged posts made, blood spilled, lives lost on Tumblr as the most unlikeable people that you know on both sides write bad faith thinkpieces that wildly miss the point. And...I get it. I do. I emphasize that I get it. These texts are, overwhelmingly, being manufactured in a time before copyright protections, as we know them, existed. (Though Cervantes, in the 17th century, provided an early example of an author...very firmly asserting his own exclusive ownership of the characters.) These works, rather than being fanfiction in and of themselves, are part of a cultural tradition of transformative borrowing and exchange that fanfiction is ALSO a part of.

...but that being said. Lads. Lighten up.

People who actually work with stuff day in, day out don't care as much as randos on Tumblr, or self proclaimed English Majors™ who couldn't hack grad school and have decided that, in retribution, they're going to subject us to complaining about YA, fanfic, pick your poison here (mandatory "Education =/= intelligence or critical thinking skills, especially given the RIDICULOUS cost of a degree in the States, but if you're going to promote yourself as an English Major™, and play into that hierarchical system, I reserve the right to call you on it and pull rank.) I've sat at tables filled with medievalists who will gleefully call Arthuriana fanfic (we also had a lovely discussion on MPreg, Omegaverse, and protecting curious senior scholars from the former two when they go on their regular sojourns across the internet.) I've read articles from respected medievalists that will adopt a transformative approach towards reading texts, arguing that they are, essentially, fanfiction. (Matthieu Boyd's paper on Mesca Ulaid, for the interested.) I've talked to tenured Ivy League professors who will compare respected medieval literary traditions to fanfic. (Three, actually.) As a soon to be published Arthurian scholar myself, *I* don't care, and I'd like to think that, at this point, I've earned my laurels enough to have an opinion.

Like, I just think we have to consider what our goal is here -- is it to educate people on the way that pre-modern literary cultures worked, or is it to make ourselves feel superior? Is it because we want to clarify that our own situation re: copyright is the exception rather than the norm historically, or is it because we feel somehow threatened by the comparison between something that we hold to be significant to something that we hold insignificant, especially since the latter is something that is something that can be written by anyone as opposed to a specific literary elite that overwhelmingly consisted of men? When we're here, in our capacity as ambassadors for our fields, are we doing more harm than good by trying to puff ourselves up? Are we actually ENCOURAGING people to engage with this stuff, or are we making them think that we're all Like That?

When I was younger, 17-18, I was terrified of interacting with people who did this sort of thing specifically because there was one person on here, back in the day, who was SUCH a prickly asshole that I was scared. And if I hadn't, I wouldn't have entered grad school for this, I never would've gotten my MA, I wouldn't have gotten into my PhD program. God knows how many other people might have had similar experiences. That matters more to me than whether Arthuriana technically counts as fic.

...also this is the funny meme website. The reason why a lot of people aren't giving the most nuanced takes on medieval literary networks is specifically because, besides being laypeople...this is the funny meme website. None of us are making any of this into a conference paper, it isn't going on our CVs, so I'm not going to focus on getting all the nuances down right because. This is the funny meme website. I go here. To make funny memes. And to escape my program. And if you have enough time and energy to get angry, wonderful, fight the good fight, but, ala the Cervantes example above, you might find yourself tilting at windmills that you've mainly created.

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classicslesbianopinions · 2 years

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how do you even go to grad school, i have two years of undergrad left and i'm already so scared. i have this fear that they will see that i passed all my exams not because i know stuff but because my writing is good enough and they will all laugh at my poor little collection of credits i got from my poor little college lmaoo

well my college closed and a global pandemic hit partway through my degree and my final transcript is from a college that straight-up does not offer latin or greek and i've been recommended for admission at a phd program so. anything's possible really.

anyway first of all if your writing is good enough to pass your exams, 1. that's a sign that you do know stuff, because it's really hard to write well without knowledge to back it up and also 2. writing is a huge part of academia and good writing is something programs will be looking for. like good writing is a selling point in its own right, completely separate from your knowledge.

secondly like... i had a lot of the same worries when i was applying, i graduated in december 2020 and it took until december 2022 for me to actually get any applications in. because i went to a tiny liberal arts college that closed, and because i spent my last semester working almost entirely independently at a school that did not offer anything in my field, i was worried my degree and coursework wouldn't be enough, and that i didn't know enough to get through. i applied to one masters and two phd programs and have been rejected from one phd program and recommended to the dean for admission (but not officially offered admission yet, i'm still waiting to hear) at the other (the masters had a later deadline and i haven't heard officially but i did have an interview). i thought basically if i didn't get into the phd program i could do the masters for a stronger foundation, which is still my plan, but i was also told by my current greek instructor that my language background looked strong enough without it (i have four years of high school and two years of university-level latin, and four-ish years of greek) and i would be a competitive candidate. i still don't necessarily feel like a competitive candidate, but honestly this field just breeds so much impostor syndrome that at a certain point you've just got to assume you're underestimating yourself.

but like... no one has laughed at the poor collection of credits i got from my now-defunct college, both programs i interviewed with took me seriously as a candidate and an academic, and also like... if it doesn't work out for me this year for whatever reason, i'll probably just work on my application and apply again next year 🤷‍♂️ there's no shame in applying multiple times, it can be a bit random where and when you actually get accepted.

also to answer the practical question of "how does this work": you pick out programs you would like to apply to-- i just went through this list of graduate programs in north america from the society for classical studies, although if you don't want programs in north america you will have to look elsewhere (and probably ask someone else. i live in the us and applied solely to schools in the us, and i know it works differently elsewhere). decide if you're applying to masters or phd programs or both. a phd program will include a masters as part of the program. masters programs are shorter and might prepare you to get into a phd program or to do other work in the field, and phd programs of course take a long time and qualify you to be a college professor and also let you put "doctor" in front of your name, which kind of rules. i picked programs by size and location (i do best in small communities), and i also was told to make sure that when applying to phds i could see faculty in the program that i could see myself working with, and to mention a faculty member's work in my statement of purpose for the school. so i actually might've applied to more phd programs if i had found more faculty whose work interested me, but honestly i pretty much knew where i wanted to go from the start and it's very likely that that's where i'll be next year.

check to see if the programs you want require the gre, mine were gre optional but i sent the scores anyway because i'm really good at standardized tests. but also taking the gre was a very dehumanizing experience, so like if it's not required and you don't test well, just skip it. and make sure to ask faculty for letters of recommendation a few months in advance. (they might also want to look at drafts of your application material, so i would recommend having that pretty far in advance.) every program i applied to asked for a statement of purpose to say "this is what i want to do and why i want to go to your school" and a recent writing sample (which was hard for me to find because of the haphazard nature of my last two semesters). i also attached my cv because i've done a lot of stuff outside of school in the last two years, and i held a lot of leadership positions when i was in college. also purdue owl has a page about applying to graduate programs, which was really helpful to me and might be to you!

if you're still in undergrad, also, you probably have faculty you can ask for advice etc-- part of my problem was that i was a year out of college when i tried to apply the first time, and the second time it was two years after i graduated. and i didn't have any way to contact any of my past classics professors. so if you have an advisor or just any professors you like and get along with, you should talk to them about this as you start researching programs and planning out your applications! you'll need their recommendation letters anyway, but also a lot of the time people are really glad to help. anytime i've asked for help i've been met with support. (and remember that it's pretty normal for professors to be asked to help with this sort of thing! it's something you're doing for the first time but they've almost definitely helped tons of people with it, in addition to doing it themselves.)

anyway i don't know how much help this is, but just know that you are almost definitely way more qualified and competent than you think you are, and grad school applications are super intimidating but incredibly possible.

#mod felix #wow. imagine answering an ask without a whole wall of text. couldn't be me.#resources

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kyidyl · 2 years

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I was reading this article and was wondering if you had just...rando boxes of bones that you were taught with. Were they labeled at all? Did you wonder where they came from? This is stemming from an article at MSNBC about a Berkley's professor's hesitation to return Native American remains because basically the bone collection (majority unlabeled) they have is a small percentage of donations and the rest were admittedly stolen.

Congrats, you have secretly unlocked something I have Thoughts (TM) on, lol.

Firstly, if anyone is wondering, here's the article. I actually saw it right before coming to Tumblr when I got up bc someone had posted it in one of the bioanth groups I'm in.

The short answer here is: for undergrad, no, I didn't because most colleges in the US don't have collections of human remains. We just used bone clones. And in grad school yes, I did, but I went to grad school in the UK and we knew where they came from bc we'd (and previous classes) excavated them ourselves from the Poulton churchyard. You can read more about the dig here. The UK obviously is a much different set of circumstances than the US.

Bone collections are not just random assemblages of bones. They're meticulously sorted, labeled, and categorized whenever that is possible. And when the remains are comingled (mixed together), the reason is that we don't know whose bones are whose and we don't want to like....put one person's humerus with another person's femur. Unless the bones are articulated (joined in the position they exist in the skeleton), it's exceedingly difficult to tell which bones go to which individual without a DNA test. DNA tests are difficult to do on historical remains in the post cranial skeleton, they're expensive, and most tribes don't like it when we do them. It isn't feasible for a university to DNA test every one of hundreds of comingled bones, so they leave them together. It's better to have more than one person in a box together than it is to have the wrong parts to an actual, human person stuck together as if they're the same person. That's incredibly disrespectful. And, yes, they're often stored in cardboard but like...it's not because that's what was laying around, it's because it's a good storage method and it's cheap. Like they make special boxes.

Bone collections across the world are a very, very thorny subject. I can tell you that as a student handling human bone was an absolutely vital part of my education and without it I'd have a MUCH harder time sorting human from animal. Bone collections are an important teaching tool, but I also think those skills aren't skills undergrads need to have because most of them aren't going to be digging up human remains.

In the US a lot of bone collections are actually not Native American. A lot of them are, but a good deal of them aren't. Not that they're necessarily more ethically sourced - I'll get to that in a bit - but they're not Native American. But we're talking about Berkley and theirs are NA.

If you read the article (general you to anyone reading this, not you nonny.), it mentioned that when NAGPRA came into effect a few decades ago any institution that takes gov't money - which is basically all of them - was required to disclose and notify the tribes that they had remains. From there it was on the tribes to decide what they wanted to do with them.

And this is where tumblr would say "that's not good enough, just give them back". Thing is guys, some groups don't want them back. I know it sounds wrong, but I want you to know that not every culture is as attached to their ancestor's remains, and they're not just pretending they don't want them bc they're afraid of consequences from colonizers. Let me give you an example. This is an article about a set of remains found in Ethiopia that was excavated by two of my professors in undergrad. The optics of this are: a bunch of white people went to Ethiopia, dug up a skeleton, and took it home to start testing it for stuff. What that surface read doesn't tell you is that those two professors - John Arthur and Kathy Weedman-Arthur - have been working with the local Gamo people for almost 30 years at this point. They have friends there, they speak the language fluently, Dr. Kathy has been spending years helping them create a written version of their language so that they can tell their own stories in their own language to the world. They *want* to do this. And they also don't consider anyone not in their burial forest to be Gamo. It doesn't matter if they clearly are from an outside genetic look, they aren't Gamo if they're not in the forest and they don't care what happens to the remains. And in the US, some native groups don't care what happens to the mortal remains of their ancestors. You (general) don't get to decide that for them how they feel about it, even if you think it's wrong. And I can tell you 100% if no one cares, scientists are going to keep the remains. There are also often issues with figuring out who to repatriate the remains TO. Colonizers re-burying them with the wrong funeral rites is, IMO, just as bad. Plus the natives like to re-inter them in places that aren't told to outsiders so they can't be retrieved.

But, obviously, the groups dealing with Berkley DO care and so the remains should be repatriated if they are Native American. It's pretty easy to tell if a, you know where they came from bc you dug them up (like Berkley) or b, the markers on the skeleton and the context are Native American. And here's where we come up against another problem: a lot of medical specimens in the US come from grave robbers in India and other Asian countries. It was, for awhile, a huge industry over there. People would sell their relatives remains, or grave rob and sell them to companies that will sell them overseas. There are still ethical complications here, and if anyone tries to sell you "ethically sourced" human remains they're lying *coughjonsbonescough*. It's impossible for an individual in the US to have an ethically sourced set of remains unless those remains were directly gifted to them from the family of the deceased. That definitely happens on the medical or university level - people leave their bodies to science - but not on the individual level. Thing is though that Asians have the same skeletal markers as Native Americans. East Asians, South Asians, doesn't matter. I'm using the generalized Asia on purpose. You will find shovel incisors or extra cranial sutures on the vast majority of Asians and Native Americans bc they're related. So if you've got a collection of bones of uncertain origin it's impossible to tell the source without DNA tests, and even if you did those tests it would be impossible to repatriate the Asian ones bc Asia is huge.

But again, that's not the case with Berkley. They know that most of those bones were excavated and that professor doesn't want to give them back. I can tell you know he's going to lose that fight. Because a, the article says they've removed him as the liaison and person responsible for the bones and b, Kennewick man. There is now legal, genetic precedent for remains in a given area to be directly related to the natives living in that area. So I'm like 99% sure Berkley will be giving up all of the bones that they know are Native American. And the vast majority of archaeologists and anthropologists agree with the repatriation of those remains. A lot of people have native remains that were grandfathered in for one reason or another, and they still don't keep them because it's more than clear that a good relationship with the natives leads to us doing better science.

Some people feel that bone collections are unethical in and of themselves, but I disagree. I think that, especially in places like Europe where the remains are more likely to belong to the community they exist in, there are ethical ways to build bone collections. The truth of it is that there's orders of magnitude more dead people than live ones, and if the community doesn't care, why NOT use them for education? Honestly I'd like to be donated to science and I'd be sad if my bones *weren't* used to teach other students to do the thing I love. Like that seems like an awesome use of something that would otherwise go to waste. Human remains are only as holy as the culture they belong to believes they are. Otherwise, they're biological material same as any other animal.

Anyway yeah...hope that gave you more of an insight into what's going on there, and I love answering these types of questions, lol.

#anthropology #archaeology #NAGPRA #human remains #bones #bone collecting #bone collections #human bones #native americans #ethics #bio archaeology

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elfpen · 2 years

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Hi!!! So, this is going to be a weird (and probably invasive) question to ask a stranger on the internet but. um.

So I saw your add-on to the post about historical remedies and such and it FASCINATED me. The cross between historical and scientific study was just... so cool!

And I'm in High school, right now, and I'm still trying to decide what I want to major in. So I wanted to ask--

What major did you write that thesis for? How did you get into that major (like, what kind of credits/ background/grades did you need to get accepted)?

And-- this one you don't have to answer at all, bc I don't want to pressure you into doxxing yourself or anything, but-- What college/colleges did you go to/ consider going to that had good programs for said major? (I live in America, if that helps?)

Sorry for the random (and a lil' aggressive) questioning on major details of your life is uncalled for-- which it probably is. I just!!! Your research was really cool and it felt like something I'd want to consider pursuing!!!

TY for your time <3

No worries! None of those questions are what I would consider really invasive, and I don't mind talking about the basics.

That thesis was one that I wrote for my Master's degree. My major in undergrad was history—no specific area of history because it wasn't an option at my school—just history. While there were some classes I was required to take, whenever I was able to choose my own classes, I took classes that dealt with medieval history, which was something that interested me. Most of my large writing projects in undergrad I wrote on medieval topics. My uni didn't even have that many of those classes, but I basically found ways to work those subjects into my work anyway lol. In topics as broad as history, you have to carve out your own space.

I graduated with good grades and went straight into graduate school. I'm not sure I would recommend going straight into grad school after undergrad, but I knew myself and knew that if I didn't do it right away, I would not go back.

At the graduate level, no matter where you go, if you study history you will pick an area/region of history to study in depth. I chose medieval history, and within that carved out an unofficial specialization on early medieval British history. My advisor wasn't even an expert in that topic, but she was supportive, and connected me with other academics who knew more about it. I was a bit of an oddity in the department because I was one of the few students who was getting only a masters degree, rather than going for a PhD. The only reason I did this was because I was also studying for another degree which was more relevant for my desired career path; I chose to study history as in addition for the broadened experience and also because it really interested me.

Now, I know you're in high school still and this kind of decision is a long ways off, but for the sake of my on conscience I am going to pause here to say that you should not get a masters in history unless you are either going on for a PhD and are committed to a career in academia, or if you have another solid career path open to you (like having another degree or other experience). Studying history can give you a lot of great skills and experience and insight that will make you compatible for a lot of jobs, however, if you already have a bachelors, a masters degree in something like history will generally not increase your marketability, and can be very expensive. Alright, you didn't ask for career advice, but I couldn't not say it.

But yeah! As far as prerequisites and such, it's a fairly straightforward matter of keeping up your grades, which may sound kinda lame. The harder and more vital part of pursuing the research you want is to define your goals, communicate those with your professors, and foster relationships with professors who can help connect you with opportunities to present your research and meet others in the field. If you have the chance to present at an undergrad conference, do it. If your professor has office hours, talk to them not only about the current assignments, but about the kinds of things you're interested in. By the time you're a senior in college, having positive relationships with one or more professors will help you find connections beyond college.

This has turned into career advice, I'm sorry if that's not what you were after! I hope that helps.

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notjanine · 1 year

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spent the summer prepping for and taking the worst exam of my life, riding out the lease at the worst place i've ever lived,* then being temporarily kinda homeless,** and getting dozens and dozens of job applications rejected. i had some fun in there, but my anxiety has been through the fucking roof on top of my regular summer depression.

then the last two weeks of august happened 😳

everything happens so much. somehow, i managed to find the perfect apartment for a reasonable rent, and now me and Books are living (together!) in a fantastic and charming new home- lots of space, big kitchen table, a balcony facing undeveloped woods, just off one of the major roads in the city that has my favorite grocery store and our favorite sandwich shop (where we were already regulars). plus, i've gotten not one, not two, but three (three!) job offers- and i can take them all!!! one is with a hospital where i did my favorite internship rotation, and i'm so excited that i get to go back there and get paid to do that job, it was a blast. another is right by my new place and it's similar to the other hospital, but it's slightly bigger and sees more complex cases, so i'll be comfortable and confident, but i'll still get some new, specific clinical experience in areas that i'm interested in.

and the third position is... literally my dream job. it's the job that's been the end goal since the moment i chose my field of study. grad school and the internship made me rethink all of my professional goals and push them back, thinking i wouldn't be able to get to them for so long because i'd need ~more experience~. but now i'm. uh. i did it. i did it??!

the two hospital jobs are just part time, but they both pay well. the other won't start for a few months bc my boss*** has to get insurance approval to add me to her private practice,**** but that's okay, because i have a lot of reading and learning i want to do in the meantime to prepare! and then it will start as part time working up to full time as i build up my case load, but i'll also get to decide my own hours and do some work from home. i'll get to work with my favorite kinds of patients! and i'll get fantastic professional development opportunities for specialization, if i want to. the other dietitians in the practice seem lovely, so i'm excited to work with them. and the pay is realllly good, gosh, for being fresh out of the internship, it's nuts.

so things will pick up as i go through orientation and onboarding for the two hospital jobs next month. but it'll get calmer again after that, so i'll have the time and energy to prepare for the more challenging work that starts later, which is really nice.

and in the meantime, i'll be tending the wee garden on my balcony and playing board games with the love of my life 💗

#* all of my windows faced a wall. the walls were so thin i heard a neighbor yawn once #my air conditioner literally broke ten (10) times in three months. they just stopped fixing it. i just didn't have ac. in june. in texas.#** like i was fine i stayed in an airbnb for a week and then with Books which was not ideal bc they were in a 200 sq ft studio but hey #*** this woman is... something else. she was also one of my preceptors during my internship #on my first day with her we went over the assignments i had the option to do and one of them was about my main terrible chronic illness #and i mentioned oh yeah i am very familiar with that bc i have it. and this woman. was EXCITED #like she was interested in and valued my perspective as a sick person. which is wild #also that was my last rotation and i got really sick during that time. i had a flare up and didn't finish any of my assignments on time!!#bc of that illness! which she is now familiar w bc i did an assignment about it! and yet. and yet #SHE reached out to ME months later to be like. hey i have this position open if you want to apply here's the link :)#and then i had to interview with her and she did not pull any punches it was the longest interview i've had and she asked killer questions #and at one point she asked the question. what do YOU bring to this profession w YOUR perspective. and i just...#i said fuck it i went for it i answered honestly and said i'm autistic and autistic ppl understand each other in ways nts don't #(but like. framed intelligently w references to published research and good resources)#and you have autistic clients already and you will have more in the future bc all of us are weird about food!#and. she hired me. this woman knows i am 1. physically disabled and 2. autistic #and she hired me anyway. scream. remarkable woman. i want to know more about her.#and i don't want her to regret her decision so i gotta be on the ball!#**** it's private practice but the boss the one whose practice it is she's on a soft maternity leave so she's not seeing clients rn #so she's managing the practice. and on top of that there's also one woman who's job is just admin and insurance and billing etc #so after i finish the onboarding paperwork (almost done already) i won't have like... any more boring paperwork #it's a private practice job and i don't have to worry about billing which is the nightmare everyone dreads. incredible INCREDIBLE #ANYWAY gosh. it's all a lot! but good!#oh AND it's Books' birthday next week!!!!! we're gonna go out with their family one night then with their friends then just us #and i know exactly what i'm gonna wear (a tiny slutty dress) and i just got their gift (which i know they'll like) so everything is so !!!

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