#life outside the internet

[bobcatmoran]

Despite the *gestures vaguely in the direction of the US presidential election* there is at least one good bit of news on my personal front. The results of my annual mammogram, which I started relatively early and do religiously because of family history, came up as, "We want to do a secondary mammogram and also an ultrasound, because we saw something suspicious."

Insta panic on my part. But! I went in for the second mammogram and also the ultrasound (and lemme tell ya, getting your breast lubed up and having a thing rubbing all around it, especially near your nipple is hella awkward), and thankfully, the result was non-cancerous cysts and also I just have dense breast tissue that mammograms aren't great at scanning.

Like, ideally I wouldn't have had to get my breasts squashed twice in the space of a few weeks, but it's a lot better than having undetected cancer.

All y'all fellow breast havers, please make sure to have your annual mammograms starting at age 40 and earlier if you have a family history of breast cancer. Do a self-exam monthly — it's how my mom found her cancer. Trans men, even those who've had top surgery, you're not exempt, and even cis men can get breast cancer.

[bobcatmoran]

I graduated high school in 2001. I met T my freshman year. Can't remember how, but they (you'll see why I'm using that pronoun in a moment) wound up joining our friend group at lunch.

T's gender was…ambiguous. They wore baggy clothes that were more in line with the style for guys at the time, but they also had a high-pitched voice. True, there were still some guys our age whose voices hadn't changed, but those were getting to be fewer and fewer as time passed. Plus, they were sitting at lunch with a bunch of girls, which no guy ever did unless they were A Boyfriend. Their haircut was short, but not so short that it couldn't be a girl's.

I didn't really care one way or the other — T was game for using the school's admin password ("nimda," or "admin" backwards) to put grainy cartoon jpegs on the desktops of the computers we were on in our horrendous "Computer Tech" glorified keyboarding class that we were both in because it was a prerequisite for all other technology classes. We were continuously doing things that drove the teacher crazy, mostly because she couldn't figure out how we were doing it (she said on the first day of class that she only knew how to use Windows/DOS and the class was taught on Macs). That, to me — a fellow in arms for antagonizing a horrible teacher — was way more important than whether they were a boy or a girl. T refused to confirm either way.

Some of my friends, however, decided that having someone of ambiguous gender was unacceptable — you had to be either a boy or a girl, you couldn't be both or neither. (I agreed that you had to be a boy or a girl because being non-binary wasn't a thing I'd learn about until years later, but I, again, didn't really think it was that important.) One of them, during sophomore year, somehow managed to get ahold of a childhood photo of T — in a dress. And during a field trip to a local water park, T showed up in the girl's locker room — in an orange, one-piece, women's bathing suit, and clearly very uncomfortable with the attention they were drawing.

So that was that. Except it wasn't.

T refused to be called a girl. They were clearly not ok with it, and when we learned about sex chromosomes in biology, they said that they had Klinefelter Syndrome, which we had all just learned about, and were trying to figure stuff out. That didn't seem to match a lot of what we knew (underneath the baggy clothes, T had a MUCH bigger cup size than expected, and they generally met zero of the syndrome's physical symptoms), but it shut up my friends about it, and we went back to doing the no-pronoun dance.

I still have zero idea exactly how T identified, or if they even quite knew themselves — this was the late '90s, after all, and the idea that there could be anything beyond the gender binary was not something that a bunch of 15 year olds in the suburban Midwest knew about. We didn't even have any out gay or lesbian students in our school of 3000 pupils.

I lost touch with T after sophomore year. Whether they dropped out, or their family moved, or they transferred schools I don't know, but they stopped going to my high school. I hope wherever they went that they did ok for themselves and that they found happiness.

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

[kosi-annec]

next school year I'm changing strands, i should've followed my passions more

[elisadoreyou]

defending brody and jason from weirdos on the internet isn’t enough i need to buy a gun

[alaskan-wallflower]

hot take but maybe people should stop harassing/stalking the outsiders cast.

[wis-art]

Women, so pretty, so shaped, i am so lesbian,,,

[jinstronaut]

some 5am thoughts bc my cat woke me up:

solo stan’s and solo behavior can kick rocks

there is no right or wrong way to use a tracked tag — ppl have lives and ppl are busy, don’t get mad bc someone isn’t reblogging something within 2 hrs of it being posted. some of us use a tag to catch up since we’re too busy to be here 24/7, that’s not a bad thing.

if you’ve never ever ever spoken to someone personally you don’t get to speak on who they are as a human being. if you’ve never actually reached out and had a convo with someone abt who they are you’re doing a disservice to them and yourself when you just assume things abt them based on perception instead of fact

most importantly HOBI IS HOME so let us celebrate 😌🎉✨💖

[bobcatmoran]

I had the worst vaccination experience of my life today at the local CVS, and that's counting childhood vaccinations that I can remember crying at. The goal: Getting a flu and Covid vaccine at 4:30 pm, which I had signed up for online earlier this week.

I had to wait an hour past my appointment and that wasn't nearly the worst part. Everyone I encountered was simultaneously clearly overworked and terrible at their job. I realize this is kind of par for the course at CVS nowadays, but I got my Covid booster there last year and it was fine. This was. Not. On just so many levels.

First off, I got an email two minutes before my appointment, reminding me to arrive five minutes before my appointment. The check-in link didn't work, and the first CVS pharmacy tech I talked to about it told me to go wait on the chairs by the consultation room where they were giving vaccines. Then she told me after 5 minutes of that, whoops, I was not checked in in any way, shape, or form by just going to sit in a chair and I needed to come up to the Consultation Window to talk to the one (1) pharmacist on duty. He was on a phone call with an insurance company. More waiting. He then couldn't find me in the system despite my having received an email from CVS for my appointment. Eventually, after much confusion, he declared me checked in and told me to go wait.

While I was waiting, the guy giving vaccines took like 15 minutes for one person, came out after another long pause, asked for someone who wasn’t there, then asked for the names of all 4 of us waiting, stared bewildered at his tablet, and then wandered off behind the counter. It was 1/2 hour past my appointment at this point.

Nearly an hour past my appointment, the guy finally came back, and first says that the lady sitting next to me will go first. Then she pointed out that I'd been there the longest and was supposed to be seen at 4:30.

Vaccine guy's solution to this is to maybe just bring us all in at once because he printed out all our paperwork. Mass vaccination, whee. He insists on me and the lady sitting next to me to going in together. We both acknowledge this is weird, but we've both been waiting so long we just want to get out of here. The vaccine room is a disaster. Honestly, I probably should have turned around and left at that point. There was an overflowing wastebasket, wrappers for alcohol wipes and bandaid backings and cottonballs on the floor. The desk was chaos.

He called me by a new, exciting mispronounciation of my name that I've somehow never heard before, misread my birth date as being in March, then held out the bag of cottonballs and told me to take the last one. Then he left to find more cottonballs. There were no more in the pharmacy stock. He declared that he would take a bag from the shelves and they can yell at him later. Then he realized he was out of gloves. A similar song and dance ensued.

He then opened up the contraband bag of cottonballs, told me to take two more, and handed me a set of two bandaids, telling me to open them. This was all interspersed with him describing how understaffed they were and when you are done with this you can have a good laugh. He was clearly very past his last possible fuck to give.

Eventually, I was vaccinated, but not before he took both bandaids from me, put one on top of a cottonball on my arm where I got the flu shot, then gave me the covid vax, was confused about where the second bandaid went, and fished another from the box. Meanwhile, the opened, unused bandaid was sitting on top of the paperwork, where he had put it.

He put cottonball-bandaid combo on the second vax site, and I and the remaining cottonball he gave me to hold left. Quickly. I mouthed to the other people waiting, (who could hear everything because there is zero soundproofing on their "consultation" room) "Good luck."

I am never going to that CVS again. What the actual fuck was any of that.

[quins-makeshift-menagerie]

You know. I’ve been debating this for weeks now but I’m kind of upset with your decision to have a baby. You were one of my favorite Mewtwo artist but now it feels like you’re just throwing your fans to the side like we’re trash. Don’t we matter to you at all? We’re the reason you can even make anything on Patreon but now you’re going to leave us with an unfinished story? Way to make us fee appreciated and loved…

Anon do you like

Need a hug??? /gen

[catboymoments]

tip: I am so fucking mad

[moomeecore]

im actually really good at admitting when i dont know things its just that people keep talking to me about things that i know a lot about and am objectively correct on

[miicycle]

One thing I find incredibly funny is how people deem Donnie as super smart in all fields, which he for sure acts like. He can identify species of animal, he can calculate at a quick notice, he knows ins and out of everything around him.

Everyone and himself is painting him like this when he the very first episode assumes Mayhem is a NUCLEAR SAINT BERNARD. WHAT EVEN IS THAT? AND incorrectly guessed what the hidden city was only for april to actually explain it and donnie replies "ah yes that was my second guess".

He's literally making shit up sometimes and people aren't giving that enough time of day. He's smart, but also refuses to be wrong, even when he doesn't know anything about the subject because hes the SMART one. He is literally the one that would edit a wiki article to be right in an argument. Not often, but he would.

Interpretations are fine and all but it's strange how obviously he's bullshitting sometimes and people portray him as super smart at all times because of this. He tricked you. You fell for his ruse.

[musical-chick-13]

Regarding the whole "Fandom Is An Escape, so why should I have to care this much about misogyny/racism/ableism/transphobia/etc." thing. Idk about the rest of you, but it gets kind of hard for me to "escape" when I keep seeing people say the same vile things about characters who share aspects of my identity that I hear all the time in real life.

[twilight-deviant]

A reminder the internet needs:

Telling someone to kill themselves is never acceptable.

There is no asterisk here. There is no "unless they're..." There is no "as a joke." There are no exceptions. Full stop.

[foreverxdaydreaming]

x

[sariphantom]

Hanahaki+2012 Raph+Flowers or comfort

I couldn't bring myself to do Hanahaki at the moment, so have some 2012 comfort with flower crowns while still getting things done with the upcoming Lonely Flowers of the Nile rewrite (now with a new name TBA)