#really it's just my meds are working again

[ladybug]

i'm really sorry I have to make one of these again, but even now that we have a stable source of income we are still struggling. the paychecks are about $300/w and most, if not all of it, goes to paying off debts that we couldn't pay before as well as rent. I'm aware that's just how life is but if we could get some help it would be appreciated. I am disabled and cannot work proper jobs myself, not to mention my bf works 8 hour days 5 days a week and we only have one car.

im gonna set a more longterm goal of $300, just as a general amount that will hopefully help get us meds and groceries and stuff. thank you so much in advance.

$6/$300

pp / ca

[lone-starlight]

[God, I wish I was there when their parents showed their ugly mugs so I could punch them both... or at least threaten them, one way or another]

[Star notices Diamond's distress and, without a word, reaches out to rest a hand over theirs, squeezing gently]

... that's a good point with Sneeg... but maybe he'd have tried to keep in contact with you. You're his baby sibling after all, and have you seen how he is with his siblings? I think he would have done his damndest to at least try to make your shitty situation a bit better.

But... if I was there at that school with you and Addy... I'd have probably been weird with you two... I was never very good at school - I was smart but the whole thing just didn't work for me. It... well, it didn't give me the best social status, with or without the chronic pain and mobility aids and meds... And even without a that shit, I still have horrible ADHD and... possibly autism? I'm still not sure on that one

[They focus on their hand over Diamond's, thinking back to those years, those kids and all those awful names they got called, the times they started fights... and the times they didn't but still got hit. It always pissed Mama and later Nick off to no end. And they did try to stop it, and it worked sometimes... but sometimes it only made things worse]

[Eventually they just learned it was best to keep quiet, let the little pricks have their fun so they could go away. It's what got them injured the least]

[... That doesn't mean it worked. It made them feel terrible... sometimes it felt better to get hit, to bleed, than to be hurt verbally, to be hit where it really counted...]

[Star doesn't want anyone they care about to feel like that. They close their eyes to hide their own tears as they squeezed Diamond's hand again, wanting a hug but afraid to ask]

It would've been nice to have some other kids in my corner. I fought a lot, mostly over stupid shit, but I think it would've done me some good to fight for someone, ya know? Get a kickstart on my protective streak, heh.

[Someone knocks on the door]

D? It's- it's Star. I saw what happened and I...

Can I come in?

-💫

[The knock came as they were still hiding the bible. The dread that they had just gotten rid of filled their body again.]

[Shit. They were going to get caught. Someone was going too know.]

[For a brief moment, even though Star said their name, Diamond's mind raced to believing it was HETCH at the door here to scold them for everything. For all their attention seeking behavior. For not fucking dropping it. For not knowing better. For egging trackball on.]

[They gave Star no response. Just stood there frozen.]

[grison-in-space]

Hey hey! Wyrd told me you trained your dog to help with executive dysfunction stickyness/ repetitive action and I would LOVE to know how you trained this. I am training my pet to do a few in-home things before I get my prospect in hopefully this year

Oh, hi! There's a longer post about this topic elsewhere in my Matilda tag you might want to check out.

A lot of my training approach is informed by the experimenting I did with alarms that interact with other senses besides acoustics during COVID. I got completely nonresponsive to phone alarms and things, and I was under a truly catastrophic amount of stress related to my PhD at the time, so my general functioning wasn't great and I really NEEDED external cues to trigger basic daily tasks. Unfortunately I have a pretty impressive ability to hyperfocus right past obnoxious alarms, and worse, I am very very good at absently turning alarms off or mimicking paying attention without actually pulling my focus away from the subject of my attention. You get a 5-30sec buffer of retained information for the purposes of holding up a conversation which I am continuously dumping. I am not necessarily doing it consciously, but that doesn't make it not frustrating. Especially because if a human does get my attention, many years of RSD tends to set me at hyper defensive right out of the gate. That's not ideal for a bunch of reasons.

Anyway, I found that vibration or tactile stimuli, as well as visual stimuli (I rigged a disco lamp to turn on at hourly intervals in a desperate attempt to track the passage of time), worked quite well to capture my attention and let me step out of hyperfocus enough to do the next thing. I figured eventually I would have to see humans in their meat suits again and people get weird about shit like this, so I needed something relatively discreet and quiet that shouldn't be disruptive to anyone else. I started thinking about building myself aids.

So the first idea I had was to just program a series of alarms into a smartwatch that could automatically attach them to alerts from my gcal, but it turns out that they don't have an api function that hooks up to stuff like "make watch buzz" and I ran out of bandwidth to deal with it. It eventually just seemed easier to train an entire dog to respond to a quiet alarm than to fight with the hardware and software to make a really good buzzwatch. I use a couple of different alarm ring tones to cue different actions just as you might train any dog to a word: this one means we go to the bedroom, that one means that if you take meds I get candy, and so forth. The actual sound of the alarm is a cue in its own right. I have some discussion in that other post about how I encouraged my dog to essentially play a game with me where she had to figure out how to get my attention without hurting (aka NO SCREAMING WITH YOUR VERY LOUD HIGH PITCHED BARK). Essentially, I'm shaping that out of whatever behaviors she offers me that successfully catch my attention, defined operationally to her as "standing up + sustained eye contact."

In terms of catching me when I'm tending to get stuck on something or stationary without moving, that one is less "Yes I and my dog are amazing and I've trained her to read my mind" and more "I don't make eye contact when I'm dissociating and I almost always am staring into my phone." So if Matilda catches me drifting across the kitchen glued to phone, she knows that if she rockets up and nudges me into paying attention to my body, she'll get a reward. Consequentially, she's a bit enthusiastic about this one and will sometimes ram passersby with her nose, so definitely figure out your failure modes before you teach the dogs anything.

[cal-daisies-and-briars]

🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩 🪩

117 for 🪩:

---

“So we have to figure it out, Dad!” Chris presses. “We have to! I can’t let her down!” 

“You’re putting a lot of pressure on the prom, Christopher,” Eddie says. “You know, it’s okay, right? You already got into a great college! That’s the big thing.”

Chris glares at him. 

Okay, that logic is not going over well, then. 

Buck walks back into the living room and hands Eddie his glass of water.

“Thank you,” Eddie says.

Buck bends to kiss the top of Eddie’s head by way of response. 

“Listen, Chris,” he says when he straightens out again. “I have a lot of wedding errands to run tomorrow, but if you and Ainslee can be flexible, I can try to fit your thing in.”

“Hon-” Eddie starts to protest. 

“It’s really fine,��� Buck waves a dismissive hand. 

“Thank you, Buck!” Chris gushes. “You’re the best!”

Okay, it’s not like Eddie doesn’t want to do it. Jeez. He literally cannot. 

“Hey, you know, if Mom can jet off to Cabo, and Dad is a hotshot at work, why can’t Ainslee drive herself?” Eddie asks. “Out of curiosity.”

If he made money like that, he’d be buying his son the 

“Ugh, Dad,” Chris rolls her eyes. “She hates Los Angeles traffic.”

“Does anyone not?” Buck asks.

“She lives in Los Angeles,” Eddie says. “But yeah. Okay.”

“Dad!” Chris protests. “Come on. She has anxiety.”

“Hey, Chris,” Buck says. “Your dad has had a long, crappy day. I know Prom is super important, but maybe we can just keep that in perspective.”

Says the guy who was worried earlier that Eddie’s air boot might clash with his wedding tux. Right. But, you know what, Eddie will take it. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles. 

Chris sighs. “Yeah. You’re probably on all kinds of pain medication making you foggy.”

“Uh…” Eddie frowns. He is not, in fact, high on pain meds. 

“Sorry, Dad. I’m going to go back to my game,” Chris says. 

“By all means, my most darling child,” Eddie says with a forced smile. 

“Oh, yeah. I see what you mean, Buck,” Chris winces. 

Chris walks back to his room, leaving Eddie gaping. Buck laughs and flops down next to Eddie on the couch. 

“Is my son a monster?” Eddie asks. “He’s like a bridezilla and he’s not even the one getting married.”

Buck sort of snickers. “He really is.”

Eddie moans, defeated.

“Relax,” Buck says. “He’s just trying to impress this girl.”

Ainslee? The kid who complained for fifteen minutes that their classmate accidentally ordered votive faux-candles instead of tealights. That’s… Well, okay. Chris is the kid who still insists on a specific cranberry to popcorn ratio on garlands for Christmas… Maybe it does make sense. 

“You think so?” Eddie asks.

“Oh, yeah,” Buck nods. 

“He can’t be with her,” Eddie whispers. “Think of how insane they’d be together? That wedding? No thanks.”

Buck laughs. “Not everyone marries their high school girlfriend.”

“He’s a Diaz. We all do!” 

“Listen, Eddie. He likes her, he wants to dance with her at Prom, maybe-”

“Don’t,” Eddie cuts him off. 

“I’m just saying,” Buck continues. “He’s not really this crazy about a dance. He just has a fantasy in his head about Ainslee.”

Eddie sighs. “Guess that makes sense. When I was his age, my dad breaking a foot would not have kept me from going after what I wanted.”

“Mmm,” Buck nods. “I might have broken my dad’s foot.”

“I really hope it’s not a comparable scenario,” Eddie says.

Buck chuckles and squeezes his hand. “Obviously not. Just, relax, okay? Focus on healing that foot, and I will make sure Chris and Prom and the wedding are handled.”

Eddie sighs. “Thank you, hon.”

“And killing the probie.”

“Oh my god.”

[weezly14]

dust to dust

PeterMJ | E | 18 chapters

“Why are you here, Peter? What are you hoping to get from marriage counseling?”

Peter shrugs then, looks at MJ all shy, then looks away.

“I miss her,” he says quietly. The admission makes her stomach flutter.

“What about you, Michelle?”

“I miss him, too.”

She looks down at their joined hands, her wedding ring glinting in the light. He squeezes her hand and it feels like he’s squeezing her heart, like he’s saying I’m here, I hear you.

For all that it’s crossed her mind to leave, she’s never been able to give up on Peter Parker. She isn’t about to start now."

Or, Peter and MJ and marriage counseling.

fourteen.

[deoidesign]

I'll either succeed or I'll learn trying

[ohitslen]

College (uni??) AU catering to my own interests as it should always be hehe :)

[tj-crochets]

So it turns out there's a big craft guild organization thing only a few hours from where I live (I saw an ad for their craft fair), and I got like half my holiday shopping done on their website, and the box arrived today! The thing I was most excited to see in person is fragile, though, and it's really well wrapped in bubble wrap and I don't want it to break when I mail it to the friend it's for, so I am not unwrapping it, but oh man the temptation is there lol I also got myself a little metal bug made of a bottle cap and some wire. It lives on my little corkboard where I put postcards and thank you cards now

[wis-art]

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

[batfossil-fr]

I’ve been really thinking of reopening my art shop soon… I’ve been taking some practice doodles (hence all the posting lately) while I shake off my rust and I’m finding things I enjoy working on again. I miss trying my hand at more dragons/OCs and colors. my shop’s so broken rn lmao but that’s a problem for a later date it’s just nice getting back into art

[b4kuch1n]

tdov was like a week ago already but I just wanna say when I came over to vacation slash help my sworn brother move flat he told me, "ever since you said you wanted to get top surgery I've been thinking about it. it's straight up number two on my bucket list"

[trans-leek-cookie]

its past midnight and time to yap about Mouthwashing. Anyway obviously we don't see the Specific Events only how the characters react but with Anya... Okay I'm going to talk about the Sexual Assault not with Specific Details but that's what the post is about so

Anyways she reads to me as very like... trying to downplay the severity to herself. Like thinking through it (not having the exact quotes but) I feel like it'd be an unfortunately natural reaction- if you were stuck with 4 guys and the guy with the second highest position on the ship assaulted you depending on the situation. I feel like its not hard to imagine you'd try and reframe it as Less Bad to cope because let me be honest if I had to confront the implications of that, mainly the fact he could do it again and I wouldn't have any real way of dealing with it without complicating things even further bc he doesn't just have a close relationship with the guy with the Most Power on the ship, he also is in charge of keeping Me and The Other People On The Ship Safe, i would be in deep denial just to not lose my god damn mind like thats so fucking scary. And then the implication you tried to talk to the captain and even if he wasn't cruel he didn't Understand the Severity of what you were suggesting is like. Besides feeling afraid it could genuinely really fuck with my own perception bc like "if this guy who I trust says he's not a bad person maybe I'm just overreacting?" is. Again unfortunately understandable.

And again I'll say that Anya fully breaks down when the news breaks that pony express is fucked and like. 1. I think that's related to her own finances (and also. Literally just realized the way an abortion could interact badly with "no savings" like I Just Processed that fact. Like I knew "oh if she couldn't abort having to support a child wouldn't just be traumatic but also fucking nightmarish finance wise" but even having an abortion could make things so much harder.) 2. Jimmy LASHES OUT at Curly OPENLY. again based on my interpretation of Mildly In Denial To Cope this would. Like. Really fuck with that because it goes from "I trust the captain and I don't want to be afraid of my crewmate for a year" to "oh he is willing to verbally abuse the captain, who is his friend" and realizing I wasn't overreacting.

I also wanna point to the dead pixel conversation and obv it's symbolic but idk if it's meant as "there's a dead pixel that Anya noticed and she's using the topic to like test the waters" or if it's "anya is literally just trying to figure out Curly's thought process" which isn't like super important but like. Focusing on the way she starts the conversation by saying that she "Likes the illusion the screen has". (I don't remember the exact words sorry) But that's really interesting to me bc obviously you can read into Curly not seeing the dead pixel and instead focusing on the bigger picture (and how the dead pixel "doesn't ruin the illusion") but I think it's really interesting that Anya starts by talking Positively about the screen even though the dead pixel is there (and she can't stop thinking about it)

Like thinking through implications option 1: she's talking about the screen and uses the dead pixel to get a feel for how Curly responds to her bringing up issues

2: she's being entirely metaphorical and still trying to sort of self soothe- seeking external validation that the dead pixel Isn't Actually That Big A Deal (and therefore she's just overthinking)

3: idk how to phrase this exactly but ppl have talked Abt the way she talks to Jimmy, how it indicates a sort of "Fawn" response where she tries to keep him calm with compliments and stuff, and her talking about "enjoying the illusion" is her trying to do something similar with Curly- essentially starting the metaphor by downplaying the issue

Anyway. I don't know if I have a full conclusion but another thing is I think ppl need to acknowledge that while Curly fucked up and harmed Anya (mainly thru inaction). He's not uniquely shitty. Most people will be in a situation where they act similarly, and that DOES NOT JUSTIFY HIS ACTIONS. I AM NOT SAYING CURLY IS ANY BETTER. I am saying that you need to be able to recognize your capacity for harm thru inaction and understand that like. He's not uniquely terrible he's just Normal Levels Of Unhelpful, which in a situation like Anya's is Dangerous

Like. Basically you can say "fuck jimmy fuck curly" all you want but you need to be able to understand that everyone including yourself has the same capacity for harm

[psielapki]

the horrors persist but so do i

[felis-insomnis]

I very much enjoy booping, but tumblr is running like ass today and I'm already low on spoons so I'm not returning boops as well as I'd like :(

[wiltking]

mfw my chronic illness actually deeply affects my quality of life and ability to interact with people and participate in society

[cinnaminsvga]

actual conversation i had with my dental hygienist

hygienist: so what did you study at university?

me: chemistry...

hygienist: damn, no wonder you look so sad!