I sat with a crying second grader today. (The age range is outside my wheelhouse but I was the most convenient adult.) He was crying, the other adults said, because his brother took a phone he was playing on. “Phone addicted,” everybody said. “If he would get up and play games with the other kids he wouldn’t be crying.”

He told me everyone lets his brother take things from him because his brother is younger, and doesn’t know better. He told me he doesn’t want to play because he’s tired, he has too many extracurriculars this summer and can’t get good sleep because “everyone in my camper is so loud when I’m trying to sleep.” He’s exhausted and only eight. His mom’s an acquaintance and told me she and the kid’s father are going through a separation — mom and four kids left the house to stay in a camper.

But people will seriously not listen to kids crying over seemingly minor things because on the surface it looks like a tantrum. If kids are given the space to articulate themselves they often will.

Not to keep reliving trauma on main, but I'm getting weird deja vu from where my health was a few years ago and where it's at now. And most of it is revolving around Good Omens.

In May of 2019, we genuinely thought I was dying because I was dying. My organs were in the process of shutting down because my red blood cells were prematurely self-destructing and damaging my kidneys in the process, and I was rapidly coming to terms with the fact that I might not survive much longer. I'd fought the good fight, and I'd lost. Mostly due to medical neglect. And I was mad about a lot of things, but do you know what I remember from the traumatic blur I'm left with?

"I'm going to be so pissed if I die before Good Omens comes out."

I'd waited 20+ years at that point for something like a tv adaptation of Good Omens. Ever since I was a child and my dad read the book to me, and I fell in love with it. And here I was, mere weeks away from the TV release and on the verge of death.

Then like a miracle, a miracle that hinged on human compassion and a doctor being willing to listen to me, I was saved. Dragged back from the jaws of death by a relentless hematology department that refused to give up on me and ultimately saved my life. And a week later, I got to watch Good Omens propped up in my own bed, still weak, still ill, with my heart stuttering in my chest every time I laughed. And I remember thinking, "I did it. I got to see it."

That it's now it's 2023 and my health has tanked again. My organs are rebelling against me and no one seems to know why. But yet again, a few weeks before Good Omens is set to release, I find a doctor who listens to me and is doing all he can to help. Striving with the grim kind of determination that can only come from a place of compassion and care. Like my world is worth saving, and not just his.

Which is rather fitting, I think.

nervous girl nightmare: the grocery store 🛒😫🛒

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

Random question for the coding folks...

If I were to just straight up like... offer free programming tutoring, are there folks out on Tumblr who would be interested?

Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.

Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.

Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.

You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.

As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.

Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.

This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.

A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.

i WILL continue to post my own tiktoks because i am very funny