We are all, at any given moment, about 5 seconds away from permanent disability.
I was driving my car to work. I am a good driver. I have no at-fault accidents in my history. I was hit by a drowsy driver that was later charged with DWI and I still ended up with permanent disability from this.
I stood up from a chair. I was sitting at a table in my work’s break room eating my lunch and stood to throw away my trash and clock in and my knee buckled underneath me and I spent three months completely non-weight-bearing on that leg and even still today there are things I can’t do anymore due to this.
It doesn’t matter if you eat right, sleep right, drive right, work right, only have sex with the right people, only purchase the right things.
Anything can happen to you. You are always 5 seconds away from becoming disabled for the rest of your life.
I have always been disabled. I haven’t always been this disabled.
If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn't sound so bad, until you're waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it's delayed. Then you're waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that's probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they're expecting it, it's baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.
The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.
Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.
Every 15 minutes, everywhere, all of the time.
it's just that sometimes you have to love a thing including the ways that it inconveniences you like i keep picking dog hair out of my clothes because he steals things from my laundry basket to lay on them while i'm gone and whenever i use my laptop i have to type with my arms in a parabola to make room for his head on my legs and yes it's kind of a far ride to my mom's house but she always remembers to have dairy-free options available just in case i stop at home and nick lives in another timezone so we have to plan our calls carefully to be sure he's available and i'm not in bed and i hate driving and looking for parking but it means i get to visit my friends and i hate doing dishes but i'll do a million if it means i get to throw a dinner party for everybody and i hate being cold but one time we stood outside in the snow for 5 hours waiting for a concert, bundled up and red-nosed
i always apologize about the ways i take up space even when they're medical like at a restaurant i usually have to take the moment to say i really am allergic, sorry, and feel like i am making everyone around me angry and i always apologize when i am too tired to be funny or when i actually really do need to take care of my human body because it feels like i'm making everything about-me and i always apologize for the ways that i become needy; how i get scared when we're high up (and no for real please get down it actually kind of stops being funny) or how i panic if i hear a loud noise i wasn't expecting or how it's been years but there are days when i'm still doing the same shit, still drowning
the trick about relaxing, i think. like the answer to why i couldn't trust the idea anyone actually likes me. was realizing that at some point i am going to be an inconvenience, which means that at some point i need to trust other people want me to take up space. and yes, some people have to take up a lot of space. but. i relish this little gratitude: making room for people and things in my life. i love picking the dog hairs out of my food - it means i get to have a dog. i love answering the phone at 3 in the morning - it means someone is on the other line, and i can help them weave through life. i love the little chores - it means i have something productive to do. so what if you take up space - it means this world gets to have you.
I'm a smiler. I admit it. A giggler. I'm a laughy guy. I laugh at my own jokes before I can finish them, I laugh at my friends' jokes, and I laugh at them too much and too loud. Can't help it! Sorry for being full of love and joy!
unlike all u ai-poisoned freaks i dont need character.ai to imagine my fave in situations
dr who doesn’t know what gravity is but he CAN read auras so watch out
Been thinking a lot about reminiscing about the past and how easy it is to get stuck fixating on when Everything Was Definitely Better. And when I think about why those kind of memories are so rosy, I think the trap lies in the fact that anything remembered in hindsight has been stripped of its uncertainty.
Any moment you're living in currently is gonna be weighed down by the things you're anticipating, which have no resolution yet and require your active attention to address and fix. There's a bill coming due that you need to think about paying. There's a test coming up you're worried about. There's a performance review. There's a weird tension with your friend who says everything's fine but you think that's a lie. There's a family event coming up you need to figure out how to say no to. And the good in your life right now, the fun and the joy, is trying to exist in parallel with all your ongoing uncertainty.
But for any time in your past you reflect on, those things are all resolved already. That bill from three years ago was paid, and you probably don't even remember specifically writing the check. The test happened and you maybe hardly remember it. The performance review, the family event, the whatever that occupies your headspace in the Now and the Ongoing, are all resolved. And this lets you reflect back on the good and fun you were having and see it in this rosy context secure in its complete lack of uncertainty. Nostalgic for college. Nostalgic for an old town. Nostalgic for a Then which maybe wasn't actually better than Now. There's a sense of security in a certain past, crystalized with its sharp edges swaddled away by the very passage of time that has distanced you from it.
Please don't fall for it. Don't mourn a past you never really experienced. Every Now will have thorns. Even the very good Nows.
Very strange 🤨 the way some of the user base of this site wants to treat random bloggers with some popular posts as like, microcelebrities or influencers. Oh you have a TUMBLR BLOG with 4-5 digits of followers well you're basically a household name like Mark of Plier I guess. So you're never allowed to screw up or be mildly irritating without being put on like "most irritating Tumblr users" polls or called out for whatever micro annoyance you caused for like 5 people. It's funny on the surface level but beneath that it's irritating and weird. I don't think some random blogger who makes funny posts should have to, like, deal with that. You're just being parasocial and it's scaring the hoes.
Too many people on here are too comfortable being mean and cruel to others, or calling out "popular bloggers" for the crime of "making me feel irritated with a post" and it's not cute of you at all, really.
Sorry last reblog. She evoked realness.
