#my life

[mckitterick]

[ ID: screenshot of a post by "incredibly fitting" that reads, "Of course academia is not a cult. Cults offer a sense of belonging." /ID ]

I've worked in retail, food service, construction, tech, gaming, and lots more industries, but never in a more hostile environment than academia

don't get me wrong - I loved the awesome colleagues from all across campus I got to work with for our interdisciplinary think tank, and I loved the faculty affiliates of our old SF Center, and of course the students made the career worth the slow erosion of my soul for decades. but it wasn't until I got out of Big Academia and started our intimate little Ad Astra Institute for Science Fiction & the Speculative Imagination that I felt part of something without the constant assault of active interference and petty jealousy that arises from the unique form of privilege, elitism (the negative variety), and entitlement that's baked-in to the hierarchical system of tenure and the classist academic structure that sets so many against one another

when one fondly longs for jobs with low pay and physical danger over one's current career, it's time to strike out on your own

[e-vay]

I was just minding my business, making myself a Sprite with some cherries and the ₜₑₑₙₛᵢₑₛₜ splash of Cheritelli as a little treat, and Ryan sees and says “You’re drinking on a Monday? With 3 cherries? Your day must’ve been rough.” And all I could picture as he was saying that was:

[mckinleygirl98]

I Saw Assassins!!!

okay so,

the actors came and sat scattered about the crowd. The proprietor called them up.

OH MY GOD. The proprietor. His outfit? SO COOL IT WAS LIKE USA THEMED AMAZING HE LOOKED LIKE A CARNIE BUT LIKE AMERICA!!!

there were tvs all around the stage, like creepy old times tvs that showed creepy graphics. Weird core McKinley and Reagan anyone???

the woman playing Emma Goldman was SO good and SO beautiful I swear I fell right in love with her

booth actor was so tall and handsome, and had a singing voice so beautiful I nearly wept

Czolgosz gave me his autograph and I’ll love him forever and he apologized for shooting mckinley

My mom laughed EVERY TIME Sara Jane Moore was onstage. And she had no prior knowledge. Moore was hilarious and the lady playing her was just adorbs. Very endearing

Balladeer had some PIPES!

Assassins musical czolgosz I’ll love u forever

For context he pushed a child onstage (same child who played Billy)

funny, FUNNY bystanders in how I saved Roosevelt . Seriously hilarious. So cute and endearing.

locked eyes with guiteau and I winked. he grinned evilly at me.

On a similar note Czolgosz smiled at me. I almost died. He was SO cute I have a crush onb him. So cute

Guiteay was so crazy and funny and danced around the stage like a madman. The balladeer danced crazy with him.

David Herold had The Gay Voice (tm) and also glasses.

guiteau didn’t scream “I AM A TERRIFYING AND IMPOSING FIGURE” he just kinda said it. Same with “I SHALL BE REEEMEMBERED”

also the burning question: yes booth said the n word.

legs were shaking with amazement by the end of the play. Still are.

[weaselle]

there was a post about things you are pretentious and snobby about and i said science and nature stuff and someone else said dinosaurs and it's reminding me about the artist's rendition of a T-Rex used in the Sue exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Natural History, and it's still making me aggravated.

They gave the T-Rex vertical slit pupils.

Vertical slit pupils are an adaptation that maximizes movement capture through an aperture 42cm or less above ground level. Above that and vertical slit pupils stop having that advantage and it becomes a disadvantage to have them, which is why housecats and foxes have vertical pupils and tigers and wolves have round ones.

Which is how we can be relatively certain T-Rex did not have vertical slit pupils.

And i would let this go more easily but we're talking about a very large picture, featured in multiple locations around the Chicago Museum of Natural History. Like dude, out of everybody i would hope they of all people would get it right.

And yeah. Maybe i'm missing something extra science-y and i'm wrong. I hope i am, that would be better than the Chicago Museum of Natural History being wrong! Between the two of us, i am who should be wrong, if it's me who's wrong then all is right with the universe.

But i'm pretty sure it's not me on this one. And it makes me itchy on the inside

[aprillikesthings]

the problem when I watch literally any of She-Ra is the constant, constant urge to screenshot and yell about it. I suspect it's because that's what I did for my "every episode in order" one back in January-March, and then it just became a habit; but also the PROBLEM is that the show rewards rewatches, and I keep NOTICING shit, and I have a LOT OF FEELINGS and also sometimes shit is just FUNNY and then I want tO YELL ABOUT IT

Anyway this post brought to you by the moment in White Out when Adora says "Catra...*chuckles* ...she's mean," while "floppy" because she's smiling while she says it and also doesn't sound, uh, upset about it. She sounds the same way I would if I was drunk and talking how hot Catra is when she's a bitch lolol

But ALSO a bit before that Glimmer says "UGHHH Catra is the WORST" but when Catra starts fighting her she says, "Always great to see you, Sparkles, but we're a little busy here!" and yes she's being sarcastic but I'm just like aaahahaha the problem is that this show set up "fighting/taunting can also be flirting" and then had those two *also* do that.

I really wish I didn't get hungover the way I do now when I drink, or I'd think it would in fact be hilarious to get trashed and then record me talking about Catra. Tho the posts I make after edibles are bad enough!!

Anyway I am also just constantly rewinding and pausing the fucking show! Even without taking screenshots every episode takes twice as long to watch. The only time I don't do that is watching with other people!!

[not-terezi-pyrope]

I love being queer. I love being trans and kissing boys and girls. These facts about myself give me more joy than straight cis people can possibly imagine

[e-vay]

What anime character did you love and your aunt made you a costume that I still have? Also, do you rremember when you madebyour special announcement to the family (me)?

Sailor Jupiter, baby! I wish we had photos of me in that costume, that would have been fun to revisit!

My mom @vekat8 likes to ask me non-Sonic related questions here on tumblr to keep things interesting for you guys lol

Mom, I think you should tell the story of my announcement.

[thestuffedalligator]

My brother-in-law has a Thing where he gives me increasingly rare copies of The Bee Movie and it’s long since gone from “Goofy running gag” to “I don’t know how much money he’s willing to commit to this bit and it Scares Me.”

Where the fuck can we go from here

[dxmedstudent]

All of this.

Now, I've always been Team "as a whole, medicine should be diverse like the population it serves".

That comes with accepting that we are diverse and have our own strengths and weaknesses. Some of us are introverts. Some of us are neurodivergent. Some of us experience sensory overload. Some of us experience burnout. Some have PMS. Some have disabilities or chronic illnesses whose symptoms we regularly have to deal with. We are, fundamentally, beings who also have bad days - no less frequently than anyone else. Probably more frequently, given the subject matter we deal with.

We lose a pet or a family member, and a few days later we're back on the job dealing with something that can be triggering to a newly bereaved person. I was working in geriatrics when my last living grandparent died. You have to go back and do the very best you can for others. And sonetimes helping people was what made life worth it in the most difficult times - for many of us it genuinely makes us happy.

I'm often shocked when people outside medicine will on one hand complain that medicine is a toxic place for those of us who are different (very true) abd say they need more diverse clinicuans (also true)...whilst then also essentially saying "but I personally expect doctors to be perfect human beings 24/7 and there has to be some way to force them to be perfect 24/7" because they have very understandable frustrations with the system or their own care and hope that somehow making clinicians superhuman would fix that. It won't, and I can respect their frustration whilst finding the lack of empathy mildly ironic.

I saw one person on tumblr advocate that all clinicians should have mandatory regular psychiatric evaluation and forcibly removed from the workforce if they show any signs of burnout. As if this wasn't an incredibly ableist thing to advocate for that would have extreme repercussions if applied to any population. How would that even work? Where are you going to get replacements? Who will monitor the therapists and psychiatrists whose fill time job it will be to monitor everyone else? What do we do with all the extremely stressed people who have been forced to take sick leave, and how do we improve their mental health? Why not work on improving the conditions that make people burn out instead?

People's frustrations are valid, but sometimes the expectations or suggestions that come along with that are just not realistic. If you wabt to improve medicine, it helps to listen to those in medicine who can tell you what kind of support we may actually need to make the system better.

We, as a wider society, have to accept the uncomfortable fact that we are all human. We as clinicuans are fallible - just like everyone else. We need to accept that reality and work on making healthcare better despite the workforce being human beings who have their own lives and difficulties.

Learning how to make smalltalk is a tool to help your brain to give patients the best experience you can, when you as a person are having a truly shit time or struggle with those kinds of interactions. And we are all earning. The best clinicians never stop learning how to do better for their patients. Everyone can learn to communicate better and to support others better. Even those who are already good at it.

Not only that, but I would like to remind people that it is patently hard to offer the ideal experience to everyone because person A's best doctor is very different to person B's or person C's best doctor.

Even basic small talk is not "common sense" because depending on our own personality and cultural context, we will have learned different things as the most polite or friendly way to navigate the world.

Not only that, but we also experience other people's behaviour slightly differently through the context of our own mood and emotions. What I see as rude may not be identical to what you think it is. What I think of as friendly or over-friendly or standoffish my be very different to what you perceive as those things.

My patients who ask me to "tell it to me straight doc, I don't want no BS" want a very different experience to the patients who need reassurance, and the skill is in working out what each person needs to feel listened to and treated well.

I'm in family medicine/general practice. We have a whole branch of theory that deals with improving the medical consultation, exploring how a consultation should play out so that patients have a good experience and you get the information you need to help them, within a short time. Because stretching out the consultation can often feel frustrating to the patient and is simply not something the clinician can afford (they have other patients waiting angrily due to the delay).

There's so much to be said about making sure patients consistently get good care, ensuring they are listened to. So many people justifiably complain that they have received bad care or care that has left them with negative experiences, especially when systems are under pressure and mistakes happen. We experience this too, when we and our loved ones are patients. We want the system to be better, too.

Ensuring clinicians get appropriate training on professional behaviour and giving them tools for communication is part of reducing those kinds of experiences. You can't have good clinicians who give you a good experience if you ridicule the steps they take to try to give you a better experience and write off everyone who isn't already perfect in your eyes.

Because people are not naturally good at that. We just aren't - it's not inherent, it's behaviour we all learn as we navigate the world. Nobody is born with the inherent knowledge of how to respond most appropriately to a particular person when a particular person is hurting in complicated ways. That doesn't mean we don't have empathy. But empathy by itself doesn't stop us from saying something that isn't helpful or us hurtful if we aren't careful.

And, I could add that we really don't need to be stigmatising people who struggle to have or express empathy, but that's a discussion for another day.

(Full disclosure: slightly edited because I hit reblog a minute too soon)

Regarding the post about smalltalk in nursing and the dipshit reblogging it with “hurr durr medical professionals can’t have much empathy if they need a manual on smalltalk”, I just wanted to add that smalltalk, and communication in general, in a clinical setting is so different from the kind of talking you normally do. First of all, as a medical professional you meet people at their most vulnerable. Very often you’ll know details of their medical history and previous traumatic experience that they wouldn’t share with a stranger in any other context. Very often they’ll take the fact that you’re a medical professional as permission to talk about things they haven’t shared with anyone else. Very often you’ll see them naked, scared, angry, grieving. Often you’re the one giving them bad news when they’re already scared. Quite often you walk into someone’s room knowing that they’re going through hell, that they’re not going to get better, that a good number of the standard polite phrases you use when interacting with people in public are simply inadequate to the situation. How can you wish someone a good day when they’re dying of cancer, or when they’re in constant pain? Do you really think that’s going to be a good day for them.

So communication training in medical school (and presumably nursing school) aims to increase awareness of what words and phrases you use, how body language affects your message, how the sentence that’s just a filler phrase for you can undermine a patient’s confidence in the treatment they’re getting, how easily misunderstandings can happen when you simply rely on the kind of everyday, imprecise, communication you’re used to. And it aims to give you a toolkit for acknowledging someone’s pain in a way that communicates respect and empathy, for checking for misunderstandings and clearing them up, and for making patients feel seen and heard even on the days when you’re on a tight schedule and someone’s dying in the next room.

[trek-tracks]

When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense...

call that the Ship of Thesaurus

[foldingfittedsheets]

So that’s how my morning is going.

[weaselle]

i want to talk about real life villains

Not someone who mugs you, or kills someone while driving drunk, those are just criminals. I mean VILLAINS.

Not like trump or musk, who are... cartoonishly evil. And not sexy villains, not grandiose villains, not even satisfyingly two dimensional villains it is easy to hate unconditionally. The real villains.

I had a client who was a retired executive for one of the big oil companies, i think it was Shell or Chevron. Had a home just outside of San Francisco that was wall to wall floor to ceiling full of expensive art. Literally. I once accidentally knocked a painting off the wall because it was hanging at knee height at the corner of the stairs, and it had a little brass plaque on it, and i looked up the name of the artist and it was Monet's apprentice and son-in-law, who was apparently also a famous painter. He had an original Andy Warhol, which should have been a prize piece for anyone to showcase -- it was hanging in the bathroom. I swear to god this guy was using a Chihuly (famous glass sculptor) as a fruit bowl. And he was like, "idk my wife was the one who liked art"

I was intrigued by this guy, because in the circles i run this dude is The Enemy. right? Wealthy oil executive? But as my client, he was... like a sweet grandpa. A poor widower, a nice old man, anyone who knew him would have called him a sweetheart. He had a slightly bewildered air, a sort of gentle bumbling nature.

And the fact that he was both of these things, a Sweet Little Old Man and The Enemy, at the same time, seemed important and fascinating to me.

He reminded me of some antagonist from fiction, but i couldn't put my finger on who. And when i did it all made sense.

John Hammond.

probably one of the most realistic bad guys ever written.

If you've only ever seen the movie, this will need some explaining.

Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, and i read it shortly thereafter. In the movie, the dinosaurs are the antagonists, which imo erases 50% of the point of the story.

book spoilers below.

In the book, John Hammond is the villain but it takes the reader like half the book to figure that out. Just like my client, John is a sweet old man who wants lovely things for people. He's a very sympathetic character. But as the book progresses, you start to see something about him.

He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think anything of it. When other people turn out to care about that, he brings in experts to evaluate the safety of his idea, and when they quickly tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores his own experts that he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong, and he is sure he is right.

In his mind, he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision. He is surrounded by naysayers. Several things have proven too difficult to do the best and safest way, so he has cut corners and taken shortcuts so he can keep moving forward with his plans, but he's sure it's fine. He refuses to hear any word of caution, because he believes he is being cautious enough, and he knows best, even though he has no background in any of the sciences or professions involved. He sends his own grandchildren out into a life-threatening situation because he is willfully ignorant of the danger he is creating.

THIS is like the real villains of the world. He doesn't want anyone to die. Far from it, he only wants good things for people! He's a sweet old man who loves his grandchildren. But he has money and power and refuses to hear that what he is doing is dangerous for everyone, even his own family.

I think he's possibly one of the most important villains ever written in popular fiction.

In the book, he is killed by a pack of the smallest, cutest, "least dangerous" dinosaurs, because a big part of why we read fiction is to see the villains face thematic justice. But like a cigarette CEO dying of lung cancer, his death does not stop his creation from spreading out into the world to continue to endanger everyone else.

I think it is really important to see and understand this kind of villainy in fiction, so you can recognize it in real life.

Sweetheart of a grandfather. Wanted the best for everyone. Right up until what was best for everyone inconvenienced the pursuit of his own interests.

And my client was like that too. His wife had died, and his dog was now the love of his life, and she was this little old dog with silky hair in a hair cut that left long wispy bits on her lower legs. Certain plant materials were easily entangled in this hair and impossible to get out without pulling her hair which clearly hurt her. When i suggested he ask his groomer to trim her lower leg hair short to avoid this, he refused, saying he really liked her usual hair cut.

I emphasized that she was in pain after every walk due to the plant debris getting caught in her leg hair, and a simple trim could put an end to her daily painful removal of it, and he just frowned like i'd recommended he take a bath in pig shit and said "But she'll be ugly" and refused to talk about it anymore.

Sweet old man though. Everyone loved him.

[sweeetbonyu]

🌊

daSunrise 🌿

[artbyblastweave]

A few years ago, when Avengers: Endgame came out, I had a tutoring gig with elementary schoolers. And there was this one little girl who really, really wanted to spoil what happened in Avengers Endgame to me, but I hadn't made it out to see the movie yet, so, you know, I politely ask her not to, but she really wants to tell me what happened. So I tell her, tell you what, it's free time right now, so you draw me a picture of what it is you wanted to spoil for me so bad, and then after I see the movie I'll unfold it and look at it, is that a good compromise? And she's like, yeah, that'd work! So she draws a picture at and gives it to me. That weekend, I go see Endgame, and when I get back from the theatre, and true to my world I unfold the drawing, and it's a crayon, mommy-and-daddy-and-me-out-front-of-our-house-style depiction of Black Widow's lifeless corpse splayed out on the rocks of Vormir

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Today I discovered that "bro visited his friend/the visiterrrrrrr" isn't necessarily a widely known meme outside of tumblr after I referenced it irl and seemingly came across as a complete maniac, ironically exactly creating the circumstances of the original meme

[strangerthanfictionlife]

Went on vacation to San Francisco and had some fun at the beach