Laurel Tree

your month, your mini creature!

Oh my god

one of my core life philosophies is the seasonal side quest. last winter? chess club. last summer? local radio producer. this fall? film festival bts. the reason why is that you meet people in person (shyness-approved exposure therapy), you find yourself in unfamiliar fields (good for the learning ego) and you come out of it with such a beautiful and inexplicable deck of cards up your sleeve (work in progress lore)! strongly recommend and the more unlike you the better. who knows maybe you come out of it with a lover, a career, or even just stories about a chapter in this adventure called life.

That tiny Human spirit has shat himself 4 times today if you’d shat yourself 4 times by noon you’d be in hysterics too

He fell asleep in his bed, at home, and woke up at the goddamn grocery store with an overhead light in his face if that happened to you you’d become The Joker

Poor guy’s only been here for like a dozen weeks he doesn’t even have a favorite show to distract him yet he’s just raw-dogging reality unfiltered with no goddamn Blorbos to rotate whatsoever

Baby's first rotating blorbos

Y’all are great I love y’all

Everyone say “thank you crying baby”

have I mentioned on here before that as a child I thought that "dyke" meant "badass" because I was trying to use context clues based on who I heard my parents friends call dykes

the way I learned that it was actually a word people use for lesbians, and many people find it offensive, was when my teacher was wearing a leather jacket that I thought looked really cool, and you'll never guess what I said.

image description: tweet by Matt Kramer in NYC 🍎 @/kramerposts, reading: It's not my circus, but... I am a man with a sense of obligation and duty. Very well. I will care for these monkeys. I will raise them as if they were my own. /end description

In light of the United States government shutdown impacting SNAP benefits, I've seen a lot of posts giving advice about how to find food banks, and reminders that it's not shameful to use them. That's good, I'm glad to see it. But as someone who has experience having to get things from food charities, a few reminders:

this is so fucking funny dude

cornflwer on instagram

a lot of jewish tradition is just good life advice tbh. like praying daily or multiple times a day is a genuinely good way of remembering to stop and think for a little bit on a regular basis. going to shul regularly means you're getting out of the house and seeing people. keeping kosher in some way means, at the very least, you're being mindful of what and how you eat, not to mention that in a time before modern food safety, properly prepared kosher food would prevent cross-contamination and thus limit the spread of disease. shabbat is the foundation of the modern concept of the weekend, culturally instituting regular rest. there's a very balanced and regular rhythm to an observant jewish life that our ancestors took great pains to pass down to us so that when we, their descendants, are faced with times when we don't know what to do, we could turn to them. the entirety of jewish history rests on parents teaching children how to live and i am never more grateful for that than when i have absolutely no idea how to live.

i bet it feels so good if you're a little cat to put your head upside down like that

you know how they do it like this

in elementary school i figured out how to customize the classroom desktop's autocorrect to make Word change whole sentences. this made it appear almost like the computer was responding to you. you could, for example, type in "where did i put my keys", hit enter, and watch it switch to "you put them under the couch". this was before chatbots, and we were all 9 so i considered it closer to a magic trick than a tech one.

i immediately scripted out a dialogue exchange between me and a girl who had died by the swings (classic). i invited another student over and told them i had found a ghost, then proceeded to type out the pre-scripted exchange. i was immediately pulled into the counselors office. the kicker was that none of the adults could figure out how i did it. i had to show them the menu and everything.

I think maybe the first part of keeping others safe and making them feel safe is recognizing the ways in which you are capable of harming them, especially without even realizing it

If you imagine yourself as an innocent and pure thing incapable of harming anyone, I'm not sure I'll ever feel safe around you. Sorry. Because when you define your entire personality in being harmless, you will respond poorly when you do, inevitably, cause harm.

autumn/winter affirmations:

Cooking Jam  -  Teija Lehto, 2016

Finnish,b.1965-

Woodcut,61 x 77 cm.

Source

Epstein files discourse has me more convinced than ever that we need to be talking a lot less about "pedophiles" and talking a lot more about child sexual abuse.

I talked about how conservative authoritarians define "pedophilia" as "youth autonomy," but even among less overtly authoritarian communities, the spectre of The Pedophile is, at best, a distraction from the reality of CSA.

"Pedophiles" are a distinct, discrete type of person. They're Not Like Us, but also, they Could Be Anywhere. They're hiding in plain sight among us, lurking and sabotaging. Anyone could secretly one of them. They're queer, they're Jewish, they're vaguely foreign. They conspire. They're a cabal. They have secret signals. They're rich and powerful and secretly control governments, but they're also poor and dirty and hide in alleyways. They're sexually deviant. They're everywhere and nowhere, and you should constantly be on guard against anyone who might be one.

Child sexual abuse, on the other hand, is abuse. It's an action, not a type of person. Anyone can commit it, because it's an abuse of power, and all adults and many other children have power over all children. Any adult has the ability to sexually abuse a child, because every adult has the ability to wield power over any child. Child sexual abuse is part of the continuum of child abuse, which in turn is part of the continuum of abuse, which can be committed by anyone who has the power to commit it.

The Epstein clients are the most prosaic phenomenon in the world. Rich, powerful people trafficked powerless people to force the powerless people to serve them. Rich, powerful people got away with breaking laws. Rich, powerful people uses people as objects -- in this case, as sex objects, but by the same structural mechanisms by which they use people to clean their houses, pick their crops, and assemble widgets in their factories.

It's not A Secret Cabal Of Pedophiles Conspiratorially Running The Government. It's just kyriarchy working as intended. Absolutely, keep up the pressure to release the Epstein files and prove what we already know, but if you're using "pedophiles" in a sentence where "illuminati" would make sense, put down the conspiracy juice and pick up the youthlib juice instead.

Something like 40% of child sex abuse images are literally created by the kids' parents. Children deserve the rights of other humans. This is the problem. Yes they are inherently more vulnerable with the whole not fully grown aspect. But what we've done as a society where we've given other people absolute authority over others makes it worse. We've made them a vulnerable population. Children should be able to part from parents, no questions asked. They should be given basic choices about how they live. And yes, they should be educated. But most of all... they need to be treated as people with their own thoughts and feelings and body autonomy. We've made some good strides, with making it more acceptable for a kid to say no to hugs from relatives... but there is so much more work to do. And at least in the U.S. we need to make sure kids have more rights, even to their own body.

parents please check your kids' halloween candy. just found hieronymus bosch’s garden of earthly delights inside of a peanut butter cup.

Say what you will, but the “O.K., dyke” method does work