#they had done NOTHING the entire year

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I'm having a lot of feelings in the wake of my trip to the ER again this week and like. I don't really have the capacity yet to fully flesh it out but at least part of it is: I have watched national stage trans rights orgs categorize my home state as increasingly dangerous and hostile to my trans existence and while I don't doubt the metrics they're using to assert this, it also doesn't escape me that my life here has been the safest amd most accepting (of ALL of me, not just of my gender) I've ever experienced despite a lifetime of living in "Blue" states.

It was a hospital in "Blue" Portland, Oregon thaf barred my step mother from my room on the ward even with my mother's and my explicit consent because Oregon refused to recognize my parents' marriage license and so they didn't consider her family.

It was a "Blue" district in "Blue" Northern California where my mother used to wake me in the middle of the night and crawl with me to the bathroom to tuck me into the porcelain and cast iron tub there because it was a room at the center of our house with no windows or external walls and there were armed skinheads outside again.

It was a "Blue" township in "Blue" Massachusetts where cops near on broke down our living room door and hauled my wife to jail in handcuffs at 9pm on a Saturday night because of a missed traffic court date, leaving us both traumatized and fleeing a home we'd lived in for two years because of the legal consequences and continued frightening encounters with the arresting officers who worked at the police station a block away.

It was in the heart of Smith College territory where my wife had to sleep with a an automotive wrench near our bed for six months because of domestic disputes with roommates the police literally told her they would arrest her for defending herself within, where near on every person we met would look at me while talking to my wife because they LITERALLY COULDN'T LOOK A BLACK TRANS WOMAN IN THE EYE

Meanwhile, my time in a "Red" state has been filled with people who remember my wife and chat with her at the local coffee shop, where my transition and hers have been fully supported and accommodated by our care teams. Where people have welcomed us and treated us like community and visibly stood quiet watch over us whenever they knew someone was in the vicinity who might wish us harm. The racists here who harass my wife do it in the shadows where they think no one else will see because they are more afraid of the judgement and reaction of our neighbors than they are motivated to humiliate or harm her. The transphobes who give me shit here won't do it unless they think no one will overhear because they know that I have family in the area and that makes them TERRIFIED of angering community members they respect. I have never experienced this kind of safety in any of the so-called progressive spaces I spent my life in.

I have continued to experience safety and welcome and coexistence here in ways I simply do not and have not in places that prided themselves on being on the right side of history. It is therefore difficult for me to watch the world I just left, a world that has ALWAYS failed me, a world that fundamentally prefers prescriptivist morality to practical or functional morality, demonize this genuinely very loving place.

Some conversations happened among us ER waiting room patients, every one of us poor, every one of us desperate for ourselves or someone we loved, every one of us exhausted from having literally waited until after business hours on a Friday night to get medical care because we all instinctively knew we could not afford to be hospitalized during the work week. They were.......sensitive and vulnerable, and were had with full throats and no fear, nothing but a shared solidarity and desire to understand our own community through the people that make it up. We were clearly all of us at different points on the political spectrum, and whenever someone dipped into dogwhistle that rankled someone else, we would all pull back, rephrase with our own words, and immediately the tone of the conversation would settle and shift and continue. We moved through so many different topics, all of them "politically controversial" from homelessness, to public health policy, to the economy, to education. And in the end, we.....we all agreed. Not just on what we wanted, but on HOW we wanted it to happen. It turns out that if you put a dozen people who are in community with each other alone in a room where they are waiting to have their needs met, they will talk about those needs, and it turns out that most of them all need the same things in the same ways and KNOW that they need those things but have learned others DON'T. The reminder, human and staring them in the face, that every human being needs those things, is often enough.

Like I said, none of this is coherent right now, and I definitely don't have a point. But there's something in the experience of it all for me that matters.

[chickenmcnuggies]

Hi! Sorry to post about asking for money, but my dog Squirt's developed a mass on his eyelid that's impacting his quality of life. It's grown to the point it's scratching into his eye and causing lots of liquid to leak out, and caused enough discomfort to him to scratch it up to the point of bleeding on several occasions.

His surgery to remove it is $900, if you're financially able to assist, I would deeply appreciate anything you can give, even if it's just sharing this around!

[leviiackrman]

I am fighting for my life to be mentally stable and it’s not working

[why-the-heck-not]

29.06.23, thursday

I had a presentation today, and there's nothing (and I mean nothing) I hate more than those, so as a treat I made the rest of the day real cozy. Baked bread & listened to podcast while cleaning my apartment; good chill times

[isa-ah]

Uh...hey...I know things are really fucking awful with the election and everything but I saw your kms post and i cannot bring myself to just...scroll past that without checking in....'are you okay?' seems like such a silly question to ask right now but....are you okay?

i wont actually kms no. shits about to be really hard and really scary but i cried a bunch and now im putting in job applications so we can try to save up and leave before That Fucking Happens

[etchedstars]

watching ppl blatantly lie on the internet. if youre gonna make up a fake backstory and ethnicities to be at least make them CONSISTENT

[the-casbah-way]

not to beat a dead horse but jesus christ can you just leave people alone in public bathrooms i just want to fucking piss girl i'm so tired of feeling anxious and trying to avoid using public bathrooms because of how fucking weird cis people are about it. i tried to go into the bathroom at work today (i have worked here for years) and this woman who has worked here for two weeks and doesn't know me laughed and tried to like. steer me in the direction of the men's toilet instead and was like "wrong way!" are you fucking kidding me fuck off

[jinstronaut]

this is also why i stopped using my tracked tag for a while tbh

[orcelito]

Man actually the fact that time will keep passing and I will keep experiencing life and earning new memories over and over and over again until my dad is in the past wholly and entirely is so fucked up Actually. It's been half a year but it feels so fresh. But things will keep happening. I will keep growing. Life goes on. Maybe someday I'll adopt children. My dad will never know them. I can tell them about him but they'll never Know. I don't care about my grandpa who died before I was born at all. Granted he was an abusive alcoholic who drank himself to death. But guess who else drank himself to death? It'd be up to me to carry on his memory and like that's just so much pressure. I wish he was just fucking here himself to carry on his own memory. What the fuck.

[catboygirljoker]

of all the times for the "art feels like pulling teeth" feeling to rear its head again T_T

[eggmeralda]

I need a massive sudden hyperfixation shock to happen again

[north-wilkesboro-moonshine-cave]

not to be a colossal fucking cowabummer about everything but it really does suck that like. my really chill and like. supposedly more realistic type of career goal feels about as unattainable as like a kid saying he wants to be a singer or something

[poorlittlevampire]

once again i love my friends but long distance sucks so much. i wanna go thrifting with them i wanna go to michaels and then make arts and crafts together after i wanna bake them cookies and cook them dinner and i CANT its so dumbo

[silverislander]

people smarter than me have said this before but jesus christ why does every job seem to require at least a year of experience and a degree in some hyperspecific field. where did the entry level positions go? how am i even supposed to get experience if none of yall will give me a job without it?

[greyias]

Finally updated and launched the latest version of After Effects... and am so enraged I now want to go hunt down the devs and shake them until they stop stripping out the basic functions I've used for decades.

Like what the hell. I don't care if you ADD things, but don't fuck with my decade+ muscle memory and not give me the option to return to the way the software has always worked for the most basic functions!

[faggling]

my partner/friend+ is putting their dog down tomorrow and I'm so angry and sad. She just deserved a lot more than the world gave her and she deserves so much more time in the world being happy and knowing she's safe.

Her body is just going to get worse though and you can see how much more pain she's in. It's hard to know how much longer she'd be able to walk and she already has been more aggressive due to the pain and if it gets worse there's no way she'd let anyone touch her, much less carry her. It's the right decision but fuck man