February By Alex Dimitrov

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Free LaKeith Smith!

This is not justice. Please do not ruin this boys life.

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Justice for Lakeith Smith and A’Donte Washington!

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Please be honest with your chefs/servers about your food allergies and severity. Trust that people are decent and don’t want to cause customers pain or trips to the hospital. But food service workers are not doctors and are not paid to be or trained to be doing a health history on every single customer who asks for a menu modification. If you have an allergy or are ordering food for someone who does then it is on you the customer to be your own advocate.

Hey real quick PSA: If you have food allergies TELL RESTAURANTS. I know it’s inconvenient and sometimes people are shitty but for real, please, tell waitstaff it’s allergy specific, don’t just order it without the allergy ingredient.

This was brought up in my mind again since my step-MIL would get furious if someone presented her with a food she couldn’t eat with her Crohn’s but she’d never told them in the first place what she couldn’t have or how severe her reactions were.

When I worked at the pizza place a ton of people would order pizzas without cheese for a variety of reasons, but only occasionally would they say it was because of an allergy.

This one day a white lady came in and ordered three pizzas with no cheese. I have no explanation for why I followed up, especially because she was extremely moody and snippy. But I asked, “Is this because of an allergy?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

“If it’s for an allergy you should know we do use a small amount of cheese in the red sauce as well. Is the allergy severe?”

“What? Yes, he’ll literally die, his throat closes up and stuff.”

I stared at her. Someone she was serving pizza to would die on contact with cheese? And she didn’t even bother to tell us that?!!?? Why in gods name was she even in a pizza place???

“Don’t you have anything without cheese?” She demanded.

I ended up doing a garlic rubbed crust with toppings.

I had to scrub down all the counters and surfaces and grab fresh bins for all the toppings to try to avoid any cross contamination and the extra time made her roll her eyes in exasperation. Like I’m sorry safety protocols are inconvenient but I hope this person you’re trying to murder leaves your life.

But anyway. Please be safe. Disclose your allergies.

I’m reblogging this for the discussion of community and elder care. I’m a mom of 2 little kids, and my career is in nursing. So I am not child-free, and I really do support anyone who wants to be child-free for whatever reason (none of my business). But what I do hope for is that you do support children in whatever capacity that you can do**

Find out how you can volunteer at a local school, volunteer with a scout troop or camp, children’s hospital. Put love and respect and empathy into the world of children. It takes a village to raise kids and that village is gone for so many families nowadays. Maybe child-free people can help bring back part of that “village”. You don’t have to be a full time parent to a kid to have a positive impact on future generations’ lives. When these kids grow up having positive experiences with adults in their lives they will have (I hope) more empathy for adults and older adults who need help.

** If you cannot stand to spend time around young children then try older children. If you can’t be around kids of any age without being toxic then please sit this one out and leave kids alone. I don’t know what advice to give you, but follow the advice of the above posters and please work on your other community connections. You can be a cranky old man/lady/non-binary but please do have some kind of personal relationships because I want you to be cranky and cared for 💗

It feels taboo as a childfree person to admit this but I actually do have concerns about who is going to take care of me when I'm old. The elder care system in our nation relies A LOT on the unpaid care labor of adult children. I just don't think that's a good reason to have kids.

"But you'll have more money!" does not completely put this to rest for me. Neither does "Buy care insurance!" Even if I can afford direct personal care, who is going to advocate for me to get it? Who is going to navigate bureaucracy for me when I'm 80?

"If you do have kids, there's no GUARANTEE that they'll take care of you when your old!" That's true, but doesn't solve my problem.

I think childfree people get very defensive about this question because its used as a kind of "gotcha!" against us, but I actually do not feel we can afford to be in denial about this reality. Based on current trends of more people in their 30s stating they intend to be permanently childfree, we are going to see a huge wave of childfree adults hitting the eldercare system at once in a few decades. Childfree people in their 30s should be advocating around eldercare NOW.

Some women are, “built like linebackers, the people so tall they develop back issues hunching over from trying not to be the biggest person in the room, the people who can’t even find well-fitting clothing at big and tall stores, the people who “thigh-highs” barely go above the knee, the people with broad shoulders and high hairlines that bangs can’t hide. And yes a lot of these features aren’t seen as feminine or cute or beautiful.”

All these women are beautiful. I hope we can all find love and peace in our bodies.

Turns out that in real life it’s not just the tiny skinny ones who end up actually being trans women. Sometimes it’s the people who are built like linebackers, the people so tall they develop back issues hunching over from trying not to be the biggest person in the room, the people who can’t even find well-fitting clothing at big and tall stores, the people who “thigh-highs” barely go above the knee, the people with broad shoulders and high hairlines that bangs can’t hide. And yes a lot of these features aren’t seen as feminine or cute or beautiful. I’m sorry that I resemble stereotypical transphobic caricatures a bit too closely, and I’m sorry that acknowledging the existence of people that look like me might make getting trans acceptance from cis people a lot harder. But frankly I’m one of the lucky ones who realized things before I started balding, one of the lucky ones who has many years of youth spent taking hormones in my future to somewhat alleviate the problems that make me hate my own body. And I don’t think any of these issues makes me or anyone else less of a woman, and if no one else wants to even try to depict people like us in a flattering manner then I’ll do my damnedest to do it myself

This is my uncle in 1984. 

Damn, girl, you don't gotta shoulder the burden of propagating the species all by yourself 😍

(Giant Hogna wolf mum 🖤)

Pacific Ocean 😵

go to this random coordinates generator and say in the tags how you would fare if you were dropped where it generates without warning. i’ll go first i’d be dropped in the middle of the fucking south atlantic ocean and perish

Okay, so y'all know the phenomenon where American media companies say they can't produce queer stories because they'll just get censored in foreign markets? It's transparent as hell, because the dominant culture of the United States is still violently queerphobic, and in many cases, state queerphobia in other countries is the direct result of Christian imperialism. The US is not the enlightened gay haven in a world of evil homophobic foreigners, and trying to pretend that American media can't be too gay because it'll be censored overseas is asinine. We all know that, right?

Anyway, today I learned that there is an episode of the Australian cartoon Bluey that has been censored in the United States because it shows the dad character pretending to be pregnant and have a baby as part of a game of pretend. Disney refuses to air it on the Disney Channel or on Disney+. It has been made available on YouTube by the Australian rights holders.

So let's quit fucking pretending that Disney is actually scared of foreign censors, hm? The queerphobic censorship is coming from inside the House of Mouse, and it always has been.