All the Little Things in Life

Parts of the country where self-service gas pumping is illegal.

I didn’t know about New Jersey’s law so imagine my shock when a pump jockey sprinted at my car and kicked my door shut when I tried to get out to get gas. I rolled down my window and asked him “Is there a law against pumping your own gas or something?” And he looked at me like I’M nuts and just said “…yes?”

okay but imagine this in the reverse. when i left new jersey as a driver for the first time and sat in my car for about ten minutes wondering where the attendant was until a nice man tapped on my window and just said the words “New Jersey?” and when I nodded he told me to get out of the car so he could teach me how to pump gas (and nicely didn’t laugh at me when I shot gas out of the nozzle across the side of my car).

me and the boys (all from new jersey) went on a road trip out of state and had to get gas and it ended up being sort of a Group Puzzle for the gang as we huddled around the gas pump and nozzle and tank and whatnot. just picture five people standing around the gas tank opening like its part of an escape room. it was very silly.

2 genres of fanfiction:

1) put that guy into situations

2) take that guy OUT of situations for the love of GOD let them REST 

idk why but i feel like being a punk is for he/hims and doing ballet is for she/hers

Bibliography

Tolstoy was right

One of my favorite apocryphal stories of the American Revolution that I love so much is that on the morning the war started, Anna Munroe, wife of one of the soldiers, said that she kneaded her bread while crying, because she was convinced that her husband would be dead before she would have to knead it a second time.

It's poignant but easy to overlook, I think, what she's really saying there. Anna's husband walked out the door the night before, leaving her with no certainty that he would ever walk back in again. Soldiers were marching through the streets. She could hear gunshots. And through all of it, she was at home alone with three small children, with no choice but to go through the motions of a normal day. Bake the bread. Feed the baby. Milk the cow. She couldn't just curl up in a corner with her head in her hands, because despite the battle, life was still going on around her, other people depended on her, and she had to keep on living.

im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids

oh brother 😔 I had this date a few years back with an autistic guy, where he was like “by the way, you’re autistic too,” and I was like “oh, haha, no I’m not!” and then he went through this listing of every diagnostic trait he’d noticed ending with “and you haven’t made eye contact with me ONCE!” while I sat there getting more and more furious.

in retrospect I think it was very funny, and I hope he’s doing well

Spending time with kids always reminds me how much I love the way they play. I’ll be like “hey kid look, this little bug is called an isopod it’s related to crabs and it eats dead plants” and they’ll immediately respond with something like “cool let’s play isopods we have to collect dead leaves as fast as we can and if we don’t get enough we die of starvation and have a bug funeral”

What an amazing way to process new information or explore an idea! It’s important to remember these kinds of games are not random or pointless; playing is how kids learn.

nobody gets me like they get me

listen i am more than aware that hormonal birth control can do fucky things to your brain and body. i have been there and i have dealt with it and i don't take that lightly. but i do want to say that if you're sexually active and can get pregnant, the last people online you should be listening to are the "divine femininity" cryptofash tradgirl influencers who are spouting leftist-sounding rhetoric while telling you to throw out your birth control and "just track your cycles naturally" at a time when it's functionally impossible to get an abortion in many states. i cannot stress this enough. these people are white supremacists who have learned to cloak their right-wing, reject-modernity beliefs in language that sounds appealing to the left, and they are winning, and you need to be really vigilant about the influencers and messaging you are following and consuming and helping give more of a platform. because this shit is everywhere and women are going to die because of it.