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This is so gay my heart might just burst

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I love you tragedy I love you corruption arcs I love you doomed relationships I love you character succumbing to their fatal flaw I love you codependency I love you characters doomed to die from the start I love you road to hell paved with good intentions

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I’m turning into a cartoon wolf and making train whistle noises

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The healthcare strike in Portland, Oregon is in its third week with no clear end in sight. Front-line caregivers with the Providence Healthcare System negotiating union contracts at multiple hospitals that would improve employee working conditions and protect legally-mandated nurse:patient ratios so nurses don't get assigned an unmanageable and unsafe number of patients per shift. There's been some progress with negotiations, and the governor of the state is putting pressure on both sides to end the strike soon, but Providence continues to hold out on key issues.

As a float pool nurse, every shift I go to whatever floor is understaffed. In nearly every unit I've been to, there have been patients who still be in the ICU, getting one to one care. But because we don't have enough critical care staff, we transfer them to lower levels of care so that even sicker patients can get beds. This is not safe for patients or staff. And it's not just medical safety. It takes time to talk out a problem instead of calling security, or to help someone with severe mobility issues go to the bathroom, or to sit with someone crying. The kind of care that makes you feel like a person, not just a patient, takes time. The more patients I have per shift, the less time I have for each of them.

A strike is our strongest negotiating tactic. And as long as we're on strike, we're not getting paid. The longer you don't get paid, the harder it is to not cross the picket line. We're already out two paychecks so far. A lot of people cannot afford to lose that much income. As the primary income earner for our household: GOD I would love to make money again. That is what Providence is banking on. They're losing a TON of money during this strike, but they've got deeper pockets than their workers. They are betting that they can survive the strike longer than the union can.

You can support the strike by donating to the Oregon Nurses Association's hardship fund which provides money to caregivers so they don't have to scab. (I'll put a link in a reblog I'll make right after posting this.) There's also a public petition you can sign that I'll also link. And if you're in the Portland area, we've got picket lines at like nine different places at any given point. Even just awareness is helpful. Providence wants people to be angry at the striking healthcare workers, not them.

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If you've seen that one screencap, you know what it's about.

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the pistachio food trend is soooo interesting because it's like. i've been following the californian pistachio water politics for years, as a californian with personal connections to agricultural workers but! basically there's been a big push in california agriculture over the last decade to pressure farmers to produce pistachios, because iran has dominated the global market in pistachios for decades, and the US government has been trying to weaken iran economically, so they want to make california pistachios a competitor. which is ridiculous, because california's agricultural infrastructure is suffering under a drought, and pistachios take insane amounts of water. so a ton of water is being redirected from the people in order to engage in a trade war with iran over fucking. pistachios.

anyway now that the US (i.e. california) is producing more pistachios than iran, the next step is to drive consumption of pistachios, so that the farmers who are producing these pistachios can continue to make money on them. ergo all the fancy pistachio coffees at starbucks and similar shit like suddenly being able to find pistachio butter in grocery stores when five years ago it was exclusively available at specialty stores and online, and the huge boom in pistachios foods in instagram and tiktok recipe content. like i watch a lot of instagram foodie reels (cooking/baking is one of my hobbies) and these get thrown onto everyone's feeds, to promote the purchasing of pistachios, so that the US can stick it to iran. it's. kind of incredible to watch this happen in real time, because it sounds like deranged conspiracy thought, but like. i've been watching this trend for the past decade and it's fucking real.

anyway one of the vegan recipe accounts i follow just posted like five pistachio-based recipes in a row and it makes me feel some kind of fucking way

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Anyway, I was queer before it was legal and I'm still queer now

I grew up not knowing a single trans person til I was in my twenties and I still turned out trans as shit

There's millions of us and we're everywhere and we're better than ever at connecting with each other.

join your local queer discord / signal / affinity space / community center wherever and whenever you can. as always link up with each other. c'mon out to OITO if you're local to us. go to that cheesy meetup for old gay fogeys if that's all you can find. whatever!!

that's how we've always survived. the joyful histories we have are of small groups loving each other closely. find you one.

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its just one of those days

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worlds beyond number is sooo good!

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extremely funny when there's a post on here explicitly or implicitly making the claim that like. the united states didn't have any fascist elements until trump became president the first time around. like have you never thought about anything before in your life or

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Reminder:

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"tumblr is the autism website" "tumblr is the gay website" wrong and wrong. tumblr is the undiagnosed OCD website

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Comet girl

acrylic and acrylagouache on 20 x 30 in. watercolor board

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Art by Jana Heidersdorf

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"Poem" by Langston Hughes