adreamyouhadonetime

[adreamyouhadonetime]

Don't ever start smoking- obviously because of health and money and all that- but also because one day you might try to quit and find yourself waking up in the middle of the night ripping your nicotine patch off because you were having a ridiculously vivid dream about trying to sculpt The Eye of God in polymer clay.

[adreamyouhadonetime]

Repeat after me: I draw so good. Not everything needs to be a banger. I'm not a content machine I'm a person who makes art and art takes time. Inspiration comes in waves and when it recedes that's when I should let myself rest

[adreamyouhadonetime]

why does the "pour milk on your eyes for tear gas exposure" myth pop up like clockwork every time...please do not do that please only do eye flushes with water. please please please

[adreamyouhadonetime]

i think its ok for children to be exposed to potentially harmful things, actually

[adreamyouhadonetime]

Anti public defender sentiment NOW of all times has GOT to be a psyop and I’m not being hyperbolic

[adreamyouhadonetime]

If you treat homeless people like circus animals that you can exploit for entertainment I hope an anvil falls on your head.

[adreamyouhadonetime]

i feel like no one really wants to hear that sleep/exercise/nutrition/hydration are major factors in treating mental health issues bc we’ve all talked to that person who thinks your depression would be cured by one good session of goat yoga or whatever but unfortunately they do help and i’m chronically annoyed about it

[adreamyouhadonetime]

humiliation ritual but it’s just me being me

[adreamyouhadonetime]

In my experience as a third culture kid who travels a lot the best indicator that you as a non-x is appreciating x culture is if the locals actively invite you to participate in it with them

Yes, you are allowed to buy those handmade Inuit winter clothes if an Inuk is literally selling them to you. They would not be offering you a price point if they didnt want you to buy and wear them. And you might discover that theyre the best winter clothes youve ever worn because of COURSE they would be if theyve kept this culture warm in harsh winters for thousands of years.

Yes, you are allowed to join those Cambodians in that local holiday theyre celebrating during your visit if they literally invited you to it. They would not have invited you if they didnt want you to participate. And in the process you might learn a lot about a culture you never wouldve interacted with and you can all have a laugh together about your clumsy but genuine attempts at getting your footwork right in one of their traditional dances.

Yes, you are also allowed to ask if you can participate in something from the local culture you are visiting. Sometimes you will get "sorry, thats a closed practice" but in my experience most of the time you'll get "of course, let me show you how to do this!" And in my experience people tend to appreciate when others make an active effort in sharing their culture and wont stone you to death if youre clumsy about it while youre learning. I guarantee that the local children doing all of this for the first time too make the same mistakes you do and they can tell if youre being disrespectful or genuine.

So much "cultural appropriation" discourse really starts to sound like "you cant participate or visit any other cultures if youre from a Colonial Culture and have to stay in your little box and never relate to other people"

[adreamyouhadonetime]

infighting

[adreamyouhadonetime]

every time someone makes schizophrenia or psychosis joke , every single psychotic in the world should get a million moneys as compensation

[adreamyouhadonetime]

And fuck an efficient society I want one that actually works

[adreamyouhadonetime]

I really hate to be the 'man, it depends' guy but man it really does fucking depend

[adreamyouhadonetime]

Something that is vital to understand and truly digest in adult hood is that everyone sucks a little bit. Some people suck at emotional regulation and communication, some people suck at organization and time management. Some people are great coworkers but bad friends, or vice versa. Some people are good friends but bad partners, some people are good people but bad parents. Some people are good listeners but bad communicators. It goes on and on and on. You have weaknesses, your loved ones have them too, but here's where the fun part comes in - We get to fill in each other's gaps. That's what a society is, that's why diversity of experience and preference and skill is important. Because yeah, I might suck at organization. But my wife doesn't, and she's helped me put together systems that work for me and our house. Yeah, my mom might suck at emotional communication, but I don't, so our problems don't fester because I don't allow them to. My coworker isn't the best with sales but she leaves the place more spotless than seems humanly possible, so I focus on the customer relations part.

Everybody sucks, including you. That's beautiful, actually. Because when we work together, we have limitless potential.

[adreamyouhadonetime]

The Tyranny of ‘the Normal’: Why the BMI has always been a hot ton of oppressive bullshit

A few years ago I was getting a pap smear. The doctor—whom I had just met that morning—had me in those cold metal stirrups and was rooting around in my vagina when she asked, ever so casually, “so, do you know what the BMI is?”

I laughed.

As if a woman who has been fat all of her life might have never heard of the BMI.

The thing is, we all know about the BMI. It’s a simple chart that measures our height against our weight, right? The number that comes out of that equation places us into categories—underweight, normal, overweight, obese.

The BMI is supposed to be a value-neutral way to assess bodies across populations.

Except that, did you know that the BMI has never been neutral?

Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1847), a French statistician, came up with the system we know today as the Body Mass Index. But Quetelet, influenced by early 19th century astronomers (!), charted human height and weight in an effort to establish ‘normality’—not health, or anything to do with medical risk at all. Quetelet believed that by constructing “l’homme moyen,” (the ‘average man’) through his chart, one could determine at what point bodies could be identified as deviant (by the way, Quetelet was also super interested in criminology and his work influenced the super shitty and oppressive fields of phrenology and eugenics). The chart shows that variances in body size more or less fall into a bell curve.

He noted in his work that artists have long used a similar way of looking at bodies: “deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted [for artists] ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution”. Quetelet noted from the get-go that the BMI is not understood in neutral terms, but is instead inscribed with cultural meaning.

So, Quetelet—this genius-level polymath with zero interest in health and 100% interest in categorizing certain bodies as ‘normal’ and the rest as ‘deviant’—created this nifty chart that even he knew was not value-neutral.

Then, in the early 20th century, life insurance companies decided to adopt Quetelet’s index as an indicator of mortality. The chart was a way for them to justify charging deviants—people at either end of the bell curve—more money for insurance.

You guys, the BMI is about capitalism.

Okay so eventually the medical community caught on, and studies were conducted in order to confirm that this NOT value-neutral categorization system could at least show us that some things were true about the different categories across incredibly large populations (but not at the level of the individual).

So again, a chart that was created to measure normalcy and deviance, which was acknowledged from the beginning as not being free of bias, was adopted by one industry as a way to make money, and then another as a “neutral” predictor of health risk??

Right. Okay.

Fat studies and disability studies academics have written about the BMI—and its construction by Quetelet—at length. Disability activist and theorist Lennard Davis calls Quetelet’s index “a symbol of the tyranny of the norm”. The norm, he argues, is even far more oppressive than the ideal: whereas the ideal is understood by most to be unattainable, the norm is something to aspire to, a “hegemonic vision of what the human body should be”.

Rosemary Garland-Thomson, another disability theorist, argues that the superiority of the ‘normal’ body (white, male, able-bodied, thin, etc.) appears “natural and undisputed”.

This is important. Because of the BMI, because of work by people like Quetelet, because of the way we value bodies culturally, what we think of as normal is actually just a social construction that seems natural because it has been hammered into our heads over and over again for the last 200 years. First by artists, then by astronomy-obsessed statisticians, then by money-hungry insurance companies, and, finally, by the medical-industrial complex.

Of course, it doesn’t take all this research to know that “normal” is a fucked up oppressive concept. But it was definitely fun to see the look on the doctor’s face when, still knuckles-deep into my vagina, I told her just how much I knew about the BMI.

(Note: information from here, here, and here.)

[adreamyouhadonetime]

the thing about caring about ableism and fighting for disability rights, is that you can't center it about just your disabilities. i'm not d/Deaf. i still care whether an event has sign interpreters. i don't have photosensitive epilepsy. i still think that strobing lights are 99% of the time totally unnecessary and serve as a needless barrier to photosensitive people. i can transfer to a toilet mostly independently. i still think that public accessible bathrooms should have lifts and adult changing tables in them. you can't stop your disability activism where it stops benefitting you. that's not activism. that's selfishness

[adreamyouhadonetime]

“no one’s ever mad at me unless they tell me so” is the best assumption i’ve ever made