I Want To Hold My Tongue And Not Share The Depth Of My Opinions About The Two-headed Cow But It Upsets

I had a seizure in response to dental epinephrine. That provided some solid insight into the fact my body was already reacting horribly to my natural adrenaline / epinephrine. I freaked my poor, poor dentist out so badly.

So I go to the dentist and the appointment I had was not the appointment that I thought I was going to have (normal maintenance vs deep clean) so i warned the dentist "hey heads up I burn through dental anesthetics super quick and also I'd like to use as little as possible because putting the dental anesthetics in my body is the most painful part of the process unless I'm having a root canal or something" and she's like "Hmm. Okay. Is it just the injection site?" and I was like "no, it will feel like burning on the opposite side of my face and in my nose and eyes and stuff." And she was like "Hmm. Do you turn really red when this happens?" And I was like "I don't know, I can't really see myself when it happens." And she was like "are you willing to experiment with this a little?" And I was like "sure, no worries" and she injected me with one anesthetic and it hurt like a motherfucker and she and the assistant both went "OOOH" and she was like "Yeah you got really red right away let's try the other," and it was the same thing and then she was like "okay I think this is the one that will work" and it hurt a little bit but it was fucking NOTHING compared to the comprehensive full stabbing burning facial pain from the others and long story short the dentist was like "You're reacting to the epinephrine in these other anesthetics," which I guess is fairly common for people who have autoimmune disorders.

So I guess this is to say: If you get spreading, burning, stabbing pain when you are being injected with local anesthetics it's not supposed to do that and you should say something.

Where's your copy of Les Mis by Victor Hugo?

The book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier has a section about how social media brings out the worst in people.

I think Joy did a great job explaining but I’d like to chime in.

I was bullied a lot in school, from Elementary til High School graduation, by both my teachers and peers.

I got into physical fights, I was iced out, called names, sexually harassed. But also my bullies tried to turn the teachers -- who already saw me as a dumb, difficult, non-compliant student -- against me by saying I was the one being a bully.

I don’t recall how often it actually worked. One memorable time the boys accused me of scratching them on purpose playing capture the flag and I had to see the principle. They targeted me because I was the only girl who actually liked to play the game. I sweaty and gross and was sneered at for it. But I was also really good. The best kids told me to stop trying because I’d never be as good as them.

I’m not sure if I was able to point this out to the principle or if there was anything else sus. I had my nails inspected and was told I could cut them shorter / more often but that I didn’t have to, the length they were was fine.

I see so, so, so much of the internet as an extension of this. Argument bait, the hate terms which were the precursor to transmisandry got, of course, the hate transmisandry is currently getting, there’s more but I’m drawing a blank. It can get way, way worse than switching bully and offender.

This is the building blocks to worse behavior. And I completely understand why Joy would want to shut it down before it can even get a start.

Ultimately, dog piling doesn’t do anything. We can support / commiserate with Joy or anyone else dealing with bullshit without having to know the identity of a meaningless stranger.

I'm not going to reply publicly because I'd inevitably get accused of bullying for failing to protect the sender from the consequences of their actions when my followers got a hold of them.

But if you're going to send me a message along the lines of "I like your novel, but I ran it through a filter, and you use too many adverbs, you should consider using less" I hope you know I'm killing you with my mind.

Just mentally holding you underwater until the thrashing stops.

Hope that helps.

Hi. What the fuck.

And why did I, an artist, who went to art school, not know this?

Describing gender as a spectrum implies that there are people whose gender cannot correctly be displayed in digital media because it falls outside the RGB colour gamut.

do you ever read a ‘callout post’ where the summary on top is like ‘they EAT BABIES and RUN A COFFEE SHOP FOR MURDERERS and they HATE GAY PEOPLE’ and then you scroll down and actually read the post and it’s like, they posted about lamb chops once, they work at starbucks and one time someone who killed someone had a coffee at that starbucks, and they made a ‘fruit (derogatory)’ joke once

I’ll need this tomorrow I think.

Workout For Daily Life

Hey!

I have some flavor of dysautonomia and had psychogenic non epileptic seizures related to the fear and adrenaline rush caused by fainting.

Focusing on my breathing, mostly in the sense of following guided meditation was a really good way to immediately make me feel floaty, distant, unfocused and then to faint.

When I'm out of breath from exercise (like walking the dog, carrying laundry) I don't notice I'm panting at all. I do have to fight that floating away feeling but it's not my biggest complaint about my body during such activity.

Very interesting?

Every time a medical professional tells me to do breathing exercises and then measures my blood pressure they freak out because I'll go from like 110/60 to 170/110 in five minutes and I keep telling them that the slow-count breathing just makes me feel dizzy and like I have to pant to make up for it after the fact.

Writing this post has been miserable because even looking at the word "breathing" this many times has made me feel like I can't catch my breath but when I walk away for a couple minutes and stop thinking about inhaling and exhaling I know I'm going to feel fine again.

I fucking hate it when that four square breathing gif circulates or when I get an ad for a relaxation game on Duolingo, that shit breaks my lungs/brain for minimum twenty minutes every time.

Image converted to text under the cut:

Please stop

I am begging, BEGGING you, whoever you are, to stop writing these. About ten years ago the titles were funny, and the twitter account was funny, and the lore around the clearly fictional Chuck Tingle was funny, but around the time Trump was elected, they turned into increasingly deranged, uninformed and mediocre political diatribes masquerading as whatever the hell this is supposed to be. Literature? Satire? I think the author is going for satire, but unfortunately these books are not satire. They're not funny, they're not clever, they're not subtle, and they're not nuanced. And they're not funny. Did I mention that?

This one is particularly hellacious, because it's clearly just the author getting frustrated about something and thinking "Time to write a Chuck Tingle book to tell everyone how I feel about this subject!" The creators of South Park occasionally do something similar, but their show is actually witty and relevant, unlike this hot garbage. The only thing funny about this book, if it can even be called a book, is that it very obviously and embarrassingly reveals the author for who she is (I'm going out on a limb and guessing "Chuck Tingle" is female). Because although obviously a bisexual in a heterosexual relationship is still bisexual, nobody who is actually gay OR bisexual will disagree that there is a huge influx of functionally straight people opting into being "queer" (I hate that word) out of guilt for being part of the majority, or the desire to partake in the fetish of victimhood that has permeated our society in the past ten years, or maybe they're just trying to be cooler than they are. They're mostly straight women. Wild guess here: "Chuck Tingle" is one of them, and is mad that she was called out at some point for doing exactly that.

In any case: Chuck Tingle, go away. Go away and put down your pen and call it a day and close this tired, unfunny, embarrassing chapter of your life. And get some counseling or something.

all time funniest review. someone please check on the scoundrels they are very riled over our joy

the audiobook for NOT POUNDED BY BI ERASURE BECAUSE MY CURRENT HETERO-PRESENTING RELATIONSHIP DOES NOT INVALIDATE MY QUEERNESS is available here

So glad to see the weight loss encouragement in literally the most unexpected place. It’s been a difficult battle but ever pound loss reduces my pain. I want being pain free to be possible and I’m pursuing every possible solution.

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.