Coat Movement! This Weekend It’s The Silly Version Of Vash With A Friend, But I Hope To Do An Actual

LIVE (nothing wrong with me)

LAUGH (nothing wrong with me)

LOVE (nothing wrong with me)

There are people who actually worshipped JKR and there are people who gushed about her because she wrote Harry Potter and they loved Harry Potter who literally knew nothing about her that wasn't in the author bio on the dust jacket. I think fandom oriented people tend to forget how big a population the latter was! But Harry Potter was so huge at its peak that it had a lot of casual fans who deeply, deeply loved the series, maybe even knew the trivia of the actual books inside and out, but never engaged with the fandom side of things or dove deep into meta information. There were normies attending midnight release parties, the series was that big.

Psych wards are psychotic and evil

By the way, friends, if you ever have a mental breakdown or are suicidal or anything like that don't go to the emergency room. The following is not just one bad hospital. It's basically all of them. I've talked to other people in other parts of the country.

I had a massive breakdown summer of 2023 from a new anti-anxiety med and a lot of stress. We called for an ambulance and got 4 cops instead. And I got a nice strapped down ride to the ER. To be fair, I was not in my right mind at the time and was unpredictable.

But it wasn't fair.

ER psych wards are straight out of 1923.

They use hours of stress positions and cold to torture the inmates into "submission" ("coercive measures"). And it doesn't matter if you are already submissive. I was obviously in control of myself by then and fully cooperative. The bastards wanted their fun anyway. After the hours of stress positions, they continue to keep "patients" unsettled with over medication of "anti-psychotics", verbally shame them from being sick, and keep them in a constant state of anxiety and discomfort after they have "coerced" them into submission while way too many heavily armed cops roam around doing their own bullying. All the time denying them obviously needed medical care including simple first aid. The "nurses" and "doctors" themselves have lost their empathy and replaced it with sadism. And they ruin the good hearts the younger ones to be just like them.

I didn't hear a single compassionate word given to anyone.

There are not private rooms. It is a open, tiled area buried in the basement behind many doors and guards and closed to visitors with a bathroom and guardhouse in the center with a few alcoves and no doors. While I was strapped down for hours with my arm cranked behind my head, with my shirt pulled up for cold torture, and the cuffs tightened and biting into my wrists (but they could still shove two fingers into my flesh and squeeze them in there so it was "legal") the other inmates were just wandering around me and I was utterly vulnerable should one of them decide to do anything to me. People are all dressed in paper gowns and sitting on hospital beds, wall benches, and wandering to pass the time.

I have so many stories just from 18 hours of being in there witnessing the worse psychological and physical tortures they were doing to the people they knew had nobody. It was a constant provocation of the most vulnerable people in the hospital in order to excuse more "coercive measures".

I watched them kill an old woman's dog.

It was going to be 115F that day. So early in the morning around 5am she started asking for her phone to call her brother to go get her dog out of her trailer and save it from heat death. They told her she could use their phone. But she didn't know the number (who knows anyone's number anymore?) She asked for her cell phone in her belongings right behind them and they said they would get it and then they strung her along till 3 in the afternoon, making her beg and plead and be oh so polite so she wouldn't end up on a bed with her arm cranked behind her head for being too loud or give them an excuse to simply straight up tell her no for being too "disrespectful."

They were petty too, loudly telling people breakfast was on it's way 3-4 hours before they knew breakfast would get there just to make people feel hungry and get them anxious and waiting assuming it was coming any minute now. As the staff kept reminding us breakfast would be here any minute every few minutes.

And they take away even the ability to escape by suicide. An escape so many would surely make if they could. I doubt Hell would be much worse. The only reason I got out so "soon" was I had an advocate (spouse) trying to bring me home. To be fair people are sent there for being "suicidal". But I don't see how it could do anything but hasten their descent towards taking their own life.

They, like prisons, don't help anyone. It's just for storage and terror. And it caused me trauma that continues to give me flashbacks months later. I'm not sure what state I would be in now without a loving family and a spouse who loves compassionately and deeply to heal me. Or my long-time counselor. Or my chickens. I held my little bunny for hours as my little angry little tribble did his best to comfort me. I slept with terrible dreams for nearly 48 straight. I couldn't even eat for a week. It feels even now like it set me back a year in my recovery from the pit I only recently crawled out of.

I think the second worst thing was the insanity of it all. Why hurt people who are already hurting so much? I get the whole Nietzsche thing is in play. So fucking what? It's still insane.

The worst thing was meeting a young resident doctor who was obviously gay and Latino. He knew what it was like to be oppressed. I could still hear some basic goodness in his voice. But he was already cold and compassionless. They were ruining his good heart just as they had done to so many others. And he will become twice as much a son of hell and traumatize thousands more over his long life.

And I know that is only a snapshot of the evil in our empire.

Email to my first year students about the career assessment the university forced on them:

A little over half of you have not taken the assessment yet and you are making the presenter on Monday nervous. Please finish your SII Assessment before the Monday class so you can have it to look at during the class.

To help you find it: on 1/10/24 the link to the Strong Interest Inventory was emailed to all [redacted] students with the subject "SII Assessment,”  sent by [redacted].

A note on the results you will get:

These results tell you about yourself now. You are not carved in stone and you will not be the same person (at least in several important ways) as you are today. The career you choose, the work you do, and the life you live will all change you and you will change and adapt to live and thrive in those places as best you can. In some places, your personality will still be stressed no matter how much you adapt. There are parts of you that won't change. The person I became in the past few years to do life in the way I do today is not the same person I was when I was happily chasing mosquitoes around and helping run our restaurant back in early 2000's. Or the person I had to be to thrive in a research lab a few years ago.

The main point is that this assessment tells you about yourself now, but not who you will become or what kind of job you must work to be happy and fulfilled. 

You will adapt, improvise, and overcome. Use the assessment to learn about yourself. Maybe you do want some career ideas. Maybe you just want to see which directions you want to grow in based on what you already know you want to do. You realize you don't spring forth from your mother's womb ready to be a nurse, doctor, or research scientist. Or father, mother, spouse, or whatever. You suck at those things in the beginning and learn to do them better. And your personality grows and changes to meet your new challenge.

Our ability to adapt and find unexpected solutions are the keys to human success. (along with being highly social and always having community/help)

If you have dreams and desires that don't line up with what the assessment says, or life goes sideways on you and you end up driving a taxi, understand that for most situations you will change and adapt and learn to become amazing and happy in that new situation. Even if it has a rough beginning.

So take it all with a grain of salt and treat it as a tool, not an oracle.

Peace,

Yours Truly

happy old gnoll

Xanthoparmelia sublaevis

images: source | source

I've been ruminating on the Garden of Eden and what was the point of the magic fruit.

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If the Jews wrote a new creation story, why did they keep the horrible original? A perhaps:

i was worried my cat is dehydrated because i never see him drink water so i’ve started leaving a cup of water that’s “mine” (aka he sees me drink out of it once before he does) in my room so he thinks he is being a rebellious naughty by drinking out of it but rlly he is just following my plan & being hydrated .

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”