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last time my mom visited I was talking to her about parenting and how I appreciated a lot of the choices she and my father had made about raising me and my brother and she agreed that just listening to the child and taking them seriously was the One Weird Trick to cutting out like 60% of conflicts between parents and children. and she said one time I was about three or four years old and we were all going to the grocery store, and at the threshold of the store I just had a meltdown. i was overwhelmed, I was crying, I was just at the end of my rope like kids get sometimes. and instead of dragging me through the store my mom and dad stopped what we were doing and just asked me what the problem was. and I was able to say I didn't want to be there, I couldn't do it, I wanted to go home. and she says she and my father just looked at each other and back at me and said "okay" and we all went home that day instead of forcing the grocery store trip. and I had so few public meltdowns as a kid despite being pretty autistic because, I think, I knew that if I ever really needed to leave, my parents would understand and back me up. and that was the case throughout my childhood. which paradoxically (one might think) resulted in me having fewer incidents of being overwhelmed in the first place, which then made me better able to handle increasing amounts of stress and so on. it also taught me that expressing feelings and communicating them to my caretakers wasn't going to be punished or ignored or called weird, so unlike many other autistic kids who get judged or rebuked for expressing sensitivity or opposition, I didn't need to constantly blockade everyone and internalize everything all the time.

it's a pretty simple concept whether your kids are autistic or not, but most parents don't seem to get it. their parents taught them to just force everything and let the child deal with it alone so they just repeat the cycle even though they know how it feels.

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Rescue cat Theodore making biscuits with all four paws :)

Cats of San Bernardino | Donate or adopt here

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being an adult is so weird

You ever have those days where you’re like ‘there is technically no one but yourself stopping you from randomly moving to a different country. or spending nearly three hundred bucks on a reproduction of a medieval tapestry. or learning the accordion’

and the other part of your brain is like ‘there’s also no one but yourself stopping you from doing the dishes. gotta do those first’

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sometimes i wish i could tell other women that you can just stop removing your body hair and in many cases the consequences will be way less severe than u expect. you can go to the beach with all your leg hair intact and nobody will stop you or say a thing. you can stop waxing your upper lip and people won’t stare at it the way u might be bracing yourself for. you can quit plucking your brows and eventually they will grow back into themselves and no one will even notice. like for sure women are punished for not participating in beauty rituals but i also feel like so much of it is like The Panopticon sometimes where you just convince yourself that if u stop that kind of gendered upkeep everyone will be mad and stop talking to u forever when in reality you just keep existing and nothing remarkable happens. it’s not always easy but you can kind of just stop for real

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with all due modesty this was a fucking banger of a text message for me to compose after 10 hours in the emergency room and 30 hours without sleep

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‘bread is bad for you’ ‘rice is bad for you’ sorry im not subscribing to the idea that staple grains that have been integral to cultures for centuries are evil. i love you carbs

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A few years ago a roommate abruptly decided to move out to live with her boyfriend, and I ended up spending half a year sharing an apartment with someone I had never met before: an Egyptian girl with very limited English.

She was confused by my appearance and asked me “boy or girl?” It took me a while to understand what she was saying, but eventually she got the point across, and I told her that I was a girl. She seemed unsatisfied, and I explained that I was transgender. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t know the word.

We ended communicating by typing our respective sentences into Google Translate. Unfortunately, whatever the Arabic word for “transgender” is, it wasn’t a word she knew either. Eventually I ended up typing in “I used to be a boy but it made me unhappy so I decided to be a girl.” She stared at it for a moment then asked “You are happy now?” I said yes, and she smiled and looked thoughtful.

A couple hours later she came up to me and said “You and me, we are sisters,” and gave me a hug. “You say you are girl, you are girl.”

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i know i am no body but i need 1 minute of fame as other so please please take my pic

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i think before you marry someone, you should sit down and go through the AITA subreddit with them and see what their take on those situations is

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man, I was having an existential crisis about my health, and then I look over and Belphie is doing whatever the fuck this is

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many cooking videos have those gimmicks like "$5 ramen vs $50 ramen" or "elevating your cooking" where the only thing they emphasize is using stupidly expensive ingredients. it's discouraging when you're an aspiring chef on a budget getting told the key is to just spend more money.

well my advice is that you look at some of the techniques they use on the "fancy" ingredients and literally just use them on your cheap ingredients. maybe you aren't deglazing your pan with fancy wine, but a splash of water will work. making a stew, cook the meat and onions first THEN add are the other ingredients. use both minced garlic and garlic powder together for a more complex garlic flavor. toast your dollar store spices. people have been making delicious cheap foods for thousands of years by understanding these tricks.

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Taste is the most important factor in nutrition.

Because you get the most nutrients from the foods you'll actually eat.

So add cheese, oil, spices, vinegar, sauces, etc. Try them roasted or sauteed or pureed, etc.

The actual secret to eating lots of fruits and veggies and other nutrient dense foods is:

Make them taste good. That's literally it.

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one thing I really like about my relationship with my boyfriend is that we can express negative feelings about each other's actions without assigning blame or requiring apology. I mean like for morally neutral things like "it drives me crazy when you leave a wet towel on the floor instead of hanging it up"

cause now like instead of "oh I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to drive you crazy, I'm terrible and unsocialized" or "um well that's dumb, who cares" it's like

"it does? I didn't know that. how come?"

"because it will mildew and I keep tripping over it and I don't know whether you intend to reuse that towel or whether it needs to go in the wash"

"okay so usually if I intend to reuse it I hang it up, and if it needs to go in the wash I drop it on the floor. I guess because I thought I shouldn't put it in the hamper because it would get all the other dirty clothes wet and then THEY might mildew before we do the laundry."

"that's valid. what if we have a specific place to hang wet towels that need to be washed? how about this one hook here"

"perfect!"

no hurt feelings, nobody being made to feel shitty and sloppy on one hand or uptight and bitchy in the other hand. just, we're partners right? let's workshop this

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look, it's easy, okay? High Fantasy has An Hero whose Destiny is Sword, and Low Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Job is Sword.

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i love characters who are like oysters emotionally

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do you ever have such a monumentally bad brain day that you just take away its mic?

like...... buddy, you are producing insanely bad thoughts today and believing them, I'll take it from here, get off the stage

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90s movies: Psychopharmacology is as good as a lobotomy. If you take pills to treat your mental illness it will literally murder your imaginary friends and you will become a boring, lotus-eating conformist drone.

Me after taking my meds: drives the scenic route home to see if there are any geese on the pond and does a little dance in line at the grocery store and comes home to throw everything​ in my fridge into a stew pot because I can finally taste food again while singing songs at my birds in which I replace all the instances of "she" with "Cheese" and doing a Dolly Parton impression on the phone to my sister