Oh, hey, it's the ADHD and Autism branches of the Neurodivergence tree.

the human stress response seems so maladaptive!

To be fair 99% of our evolutionary stress response was meant to deal with far more immediately conclusive scenarios than the tedious bullshit we put up with these days.

very very slow tigers are chasing me

not to leave a serious comment on a silly post but one of the best pieces of advice I ever got about stress was to SLEEP but secondly, when overwhelmed, lay in a bed and intentionally hold all your muscles clenched. clench EVERYTHING. hold it for a few seconds, then let go. It tricks your animal fight-or-flight monkey brain into thinking it had, and won, a fight, and some of the stress response will leave you

#turn a slow tiger into a fast tiger with this fucked up trick

“Very very slow tigers are chasing me” is the most hysterical way I’ve ever heard my state of being described

Today’s proverb:

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Your final grade in Equestrian Mind Control is a C.

Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I'm always like "why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day."

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you're inside the car, inside the situation, it's easy not to notice all the extra work you're doing just to maintain the status quo.

There's all sorts of work that we think of as "free" that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged by sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

The next time you think you're tired from "nothing", consider instead that you're probably in situation where you're doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.

thinking about how in ancient times, at least people knew that the lives their children would lead would….vaguely resemble their own???

People have always fondly reminisced about The Good Old Days and complained about Kids These Days, of course. But—and I cannot stress this enough—when my mom was born the Internet did not exist.

like I’m thinking about how I am a college student and during the pandemic, work, education, and relationships have been almost totally dependent on a network of technology that literally did not exist when my parents were college students.

When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.

If you’re a Mesopotamian farmer, hitching his oxen to a plow, like…idk, man. I can’t picture myself at 40. I feel like a Mesopotamian farmer, trying to imagine his sons riding John Deeres.

It’s so persistently portrayed as this eternal, cyclical thing: Get a job, buy a house, get married and have kids, save for their college, send them off to college. This is the cycle of life. 2.5 kids, buy a house, have a steady career. Just as your father before you did, and his father before him.

Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!

I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well…what is “it?”

It’s like our generation’s dim memory of childhood before Internet, and the vast, panicky knowledge that our childhoods were mostly full of a quality best described as the absence of internet, and there is no way to transmit that idea to the kids of today or explain it. We remember it, so, so clearly. It was real. But it’s gone. Annihilated.

There’s a midrash that before he died, Moses was worried about what would become of the Israelite people after he was gone. God brought him forward in time to the schoolhouse of Rabbi Akiva. Moses listened to the discussion but could not understand a thing, and nearly despaired, until he heard a student ask Akiva, “how did you arrive at this conclusion?” Akiva responded, “it follows from what Moses taught.” Reassured, Moses returned to his own time and died.

I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?

The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.

When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn’t the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty “some people have it worse” kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. “Who are we learning about right this very minute?” I prompted.

One of them acted it out: Moses peering suspiciously at his iPad, then exclaiming, “They’re learning my Torah in there!” We are not unmoored, we are evolving. It is easier to see the changes than the things that remain constant, but I think there is value, whatever your cultural tradition, in asking “what would reassure my ancestors?”

“The children are using this vast, incomprehensible magical network to mock that damned Ea-Nasir and his terrible copper. Good.”

i love to think about how my ipad holds vastly more knowledge than was available to sumerians in 2000 bce, but if one of them saw me scribble away on it with my stylus, they would know what it is! from 4000 years across history, they would recognize this object if they saw me use it! and maybe they’d say ‘you know, we use something like this where i’m from’. and i’d say ‘i know. in school we learn that you invented them.’ and in a weird, convoluted, wonderful and very comforting sense, they invented my ipad too.

I asked nostalgebraist’s autobot about Johnlock. Here’s an AI’s take on the subject!

Reasons I like subtitles:

1. I can see how people’s names and the cities and the countries are spelled.

2. I don’t miss any words, so everything they say makes sense.

3. I get to know what background noises and conversations are.

4. The descriptions of the noises people make are freaking awesome. Ex: splutter, grunt, chuckles.

5. I can see who says what.

6. I don’t have to have the volume super loud so I can hear the dialogue, and I don’t blow my eardrums out because the ambient noises and music is SO FREAKING LOUD.

I freaking love subtitles.

look it’s in times like these that i lean heavily into my oppositional defiant disorder diagnosis and remember that what they want of me is either a) to conform to their agenda or b) die in a way where they can use me as a cautionary tale to help them intimidate others, and i’m not going to do any of that. Then i remember that in the meantime they want me to feel hopeless, cowed, powerless, afraid, impotent, and resourceless, and you know what i’m not going to do that either. The fact that I exist offends them, the fact that i exist and have times of joy and comfort and ragey rebellion and camaraderie with my fellow weirdoes and solace with my cats and enjoy laughing my ass off at ridiculous things–that gets them where they fucking live, and they can’t stand it. So i’m gonna do that.

Babby Jesus- World’s first metal-head?

Calvin’s snowmen are breathtaking achievements and I will accept no disputes

If he had drawn nothing else but Calvin’s snowmen for ten solid years, I would have been in Heaven.

We get snow like once a year but on that day, we recognize the great Creator by making unholy figures in his honor.

I honestly don’t think I could take God in a fair fight. 

Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, 1995.

hmmm

Honestly something that bothers me more than most things is having my compassion mistaken for naivety.

I know that another fish might eat this bullfrog right after I spend months rehabilitating it.

I know that turning a beetle back onto its legs won’t save it from falling over again when I walk away.

I know that there is no cosmic reward waiting for my soul based on how many worms I pick off a hot sidewalk to put into the mud, or how many times I’ve helped a a raccoon climb out of a too-deep trashcan. 

I know things suffer, and things struggle, and things die uselessly all day long. I’m young and idealistic, but I’m not literally a child. I would never judge another person for walking by an injured bird, for ignoring a worm, or for not really caring about the fate of a frog in a pond full of, y’know, plenty of other frogs.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But I cannot cannot cannot look at something struggling and ignore it if I may have the power to help.

There is so much bad stuff in this world so far beyond my control, that I take comfort in the smallest, most thankless tasks. It’s a relief to say “I can help you in this moment,” even though they don’t understand.

I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me another fish probably ate that frog when I let it go, or that the raccoon probably ended up trapped in another dumpster the next night.

I know!!!! I know!!!!!!! But today I had the power to help! So I did! And it made me happy!

So just leave me alone alright thank u!!!!

THIS.

I heard a story about this, a parable I guess.

There was a big storm and a ton of starfish were washed onto the beach, stranded much further up than they could get back and beginning to bake in the post-storm sunshine. A little girl was walking down the beach, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the sea. Some guy comes up and asks her what she’s doing. “Saving the starfish,” she says.

He looks around at the huge beach and the hundreds of starfish, and says “You can’t possibly save them all. I’m afraid you’re not gonna make much of a difference.”

She throws another starfish back into the ocean, and replies “It made a difference to that one.”

Yeah, I mean, we know we can’t change all the things. But have you ever noticed how much better life is when you’re around people who change things when they can?

Kindness is a choice. Even if it’s small, it’s worth it.

This is what I’m talking about, when I say that kindness and compassion do not equate with ignorance, stupidity, or naivety. Being cynical does not make someone more intelligent or more worldly. 

Kindness is not weakness.

Kindness is brave. Especially when you also know that your kindness might not be returned, may even be met with anger or cruelty. It’s reaching out with an open hand, knowing that it’s just as likely to be bitten as it is to be held. 

Kindness is hard. If you can’t find it in yourself to be kind, then fine. But don’t make it more difficult for those that can.

a gallon of milk but with this kind of cap:

quick suggestion

let me raise you an idea ive been keeping for years, just for this moment

The unholy trinity.

New today, a beautiful, supportive piece from Christina Elia for sexual assault survivors seeking pleasure and reconnection to their bodies and their sexual selves.

every time you leave the house w some aspect of your physical appearance challenging norms but honoring yourself, you get a little firmer in your conviction that you have the right to exist and be a body however tf you want