weird how I became a much more compassionate and accepting person when I realised that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem and not the problem in itself
you also start to realise just how much the War On Drugs was actually a war against the poor, against survivors, against trans people, against sex workers, against the mentally ill and the disabled, against PoC, against queers, against the homeless. how much of it was a government manufactured ploy to sell violence against the marginalized as violence against addiction, as if addiction was not a symptom of systemic abuse.
soooo they a) have a health network that b) diagnoses and addresses mental illness including chemical deficiencies and c) makes store bought brain chemicals accessible to people who need them, which d) allows people the ability to help manage their depression because their chemistry is no longer fucked up and actively working against them?
Yeah no wonder they’re happy. They are getting treatment and aren’t suffering because their lying brains are bullshitting them into anxiety and depression. sign me the fuck up.
Them: people in Denmark who need anti depressants get them
-You discover a new document in your “completed” folder. It’s 20k words of fantasy and adventure. You have no memory of writing it.
– You take a sip of your coffee and set it down to type. After a moment, you take another sip only to find the cup empty. You have written ten words.
– You go to take a shower and discover writing on your skin. Dialogue, character description, tips for edits. You don’t remember bringing pen to flesh.
– The cursor blinks at you. You blink back. Time stretches as you blink, back and forth, back and forth until, at last, you both stop blinking entirely. Nothing gets written.
– The same word appears three times in the same paragraph. You edit them out, only to find them, again, three paragraphs down. You close your laptop and decide to go shopping. You stare at the word flashing by on the way to the store. You feel followed.
– Your pen carves vicious corrections onto a printed copy of your story. Later, you will not remember the way you grit your teeth while editing or why calling a character effervescent is “superfluous.”
– There are words scrawled on receipts, on post its, on torn out scraps of paper all over your room. You recognize your handwriting on most of them and choose to ignore those bits in handwriting you do not.
– Your mom asks about your day. You do not know how to explain the exhaustion in your bones or the way your neck aches with the weight of eyes you’d tried to leave on the page or the way your fingers are still typing phantom words against your thighs. You tell her nothing happened.
– Your roommates are concerned. You have not spoken in days. You wonder who it was you were whispering to last night as you scratched out another outline at the kitchen table.
– Your computer screen goes dark while you stare at your last sentence, trying to think of where to go next. You did not know that your lips could curl like that or your eyes could look so black.
osanfg73qgwhfiuequi some girl from my high school just posted this n like… she’s not the kind of person who would share it out of satire i’m fucking screaming
“Halloween, commonly known in the homosexual community as ‘Gay Christmas”
Ok so imagine your fantasy setting with your typical giant spiders.
Ok, now imagine that these spiders have largely been domesticated for their incredibly valuable silk. They help make clothes, rope, textiles, even ARMOR. They’re almost treated like carnivorous cows in the regions that can support them. They might even name these girls the classic names like “Bessie”. They’re great mothers and produce many young; useful for trade and… even food if you like The Crunch.
People in this world are hardly afraid of big spiders the same as we’re hardly afraid of big dogs. Wary of wild ones, but not scream and cry terrified. Smaller spiders…it depends. Would you be scared if you suddenly saw a tiny cow crawling on your wall? The only type of spider people collectively fear are the hunting types: the ones that don’t spin webs, and instead attack their prey with brute force and a much stronger venom.
These large domestic spiders are incredibly lazy. They’ll sit in their webs and wait for their handlers to put their food on the web. Unless you get tangled, they don’t see you as food. This makes them great guards as well. They build traps for you. The venom isn’t deadly to humans…but can still be used as a weapon or in medicine. They’re just so damn useful that millennia ago, people put aside their instinctual fear just to get those sweet benefits.
Thank you for attending my TedTalk.
Given how smart regular jumping spiders are (they’ve been recorded playing with laser pointers, and they’re pretty docile when handled) I bet they could be domesticated too! They’re the mounts, the companions, the hunting partners. Like the housecat, they develop the ability to bond with their humans, to show affection. They’re also very protective and snuggly.
My students are up to something. They keep coming up to me and handing me pieces of fruit, and when I ask why, they just smile cryptically and say, “Don’t worry about it.”
Like, the apples I get. That’s a teacherly thing to give. But one of them just straight up handed me a grape.
I took a sick day today and sent an email to the first girl to hand me a piece of fruit, asking if I could have an explanation now.
Her response was to send me this meme:
That clarifies exactly nothing, thanks.
Walked into school today to an email from her saying: “There’s more to come, hope it doesn’t leave you *sour* (you’ll get that later).”
Ominous.
Just before my first class of the day, one of my students came floating in, a black cloak billowing behind her, hood pulled low over her eyes.
“An offering,” she said, handing me a plain white bag with a green ribbon.
Inside is this:
Life gave me a plastic lemon.
WE HAVE AN ANSWER!
Apparently this was the result of a number of my students playing Truth or Dare at a birthday party. I’m not sure which one of them came up with “I dare you to confuse Magistra by handing her a piece of fruit without explanation”, but I 100% approve of any thought process that ends with me getting free food.
