Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
don’t let birding become a wealthy people thing. you don’t need to complete a list of 500+ birds, you don’t need to travel around the world, you don’t need to have seen a species only seen by a handful of people in the wild. it’s OK to just watch the birds in your area, with or without binoculars; gatekeeping birdwatching is ridiculous and i hate to see it
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.
im 100% of the opinion that once your service or product becomes something you cannot reasonably go through life without, it should be free.
if you have to make people work, and they need a computer and a cellphone with internet to even get a job, then those should be free and it shouldn’t be shitty ones either.
people have to have shelter. housing, heat, water, and electricity are all needed for daily life here, it should be fucking free because there’s no reason to have people die to exposure in a ‘developed’ country.
food should be free. why do we not provide food to the hungry? we throw out hundreds of thousands of pounds of it every year.
This applies to the unique needs of disabled people as well.
If you need glasses, or a wheelchair, or medication, or therapy for mental health, or support from a caregiver, or renovations to make your home accessible, or any other number of things that you as a disabled person need to function, they should be free, no questions asked.
i don’t know what younger person needs to hear this, but it is so valid to not want to drink alcohol at all, or to only want to drink very rarely. don’t let others pressure you into joining in with those societal rituals. it is an outrage how normalized drinking alcohol is, to the point that those who choose to abstain are constantly forced to justify their private choices, be publicly questioned about what led to these choices or excluded from activities altogether. you do not ever need to justify your reasons for this. there are absolutely valid and important reasons to not drink, and nobody has a right to know your personal reasonings.
One of my big executive function struggles is feeding myself.
I live alone (apart from the cat). I lose track of time when I’m involved in a project, and I don’t feel hungry so much as tired a lot of the time, which tends to lead to the wrong solution.
I hate taking five minutes to make myself food. If I have energy, it feels like I’m wasting time that could be spent writing or researching or whatever. And if I don’t have energy… FUCK. Even peeling a banana is beyond me.
When I drove to work, pre-pandemic, this often meant Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast, Burger King for dinner, maybe head over to the bakery for a sandwich at lunch. I’d try not to do all three on the same day, but… I never had the patience to make food.
But now I work from home in the suburbs. There’s not a lot of places in easy driving distance, and only a few of them deliver. Food I get through Uber Eats or Grub Hub arrives cold. Always. I’m signed up to one of those weekly meal delivery services but they keep raising the prices and now I’m down to 4 meals a week.
I’m not asking for money, btw. I can afford to feed myself, I just don’t have the energy.
Now, in today’s society, this is considered lazy. Inefficient. How many times have we seen people saying working class people waste their money on fast food, and don’t they realize it’s cheaper to buy and cook healthy fresh foods? And you can say over and over again about the cost of exhaustion, but there’s still this sense of “no, you should be able to do this, just like everyone always has, this generation is just lazy…”
Not just from other people. Got that voice in my head, too.
And whenever it starts to get abusively loud, I just remind myself:
Working class apartments in Ancient Rome didn’t have kitchens. Apartment blocks (insulae) had shops on the ground floor, especially bakeries and places that sold quick hot food you could eat on your way to work, maybe with a few seats along a bar where you could rest for five minutes on your break.
Not just a few. These were goddamn EVERYWHERE.
We’ve known for two thousand years that people who work all day don’t have the energy or resources to cook for themselves. Longer, because Rome didn’t invent this, it’s just well-known there cuz Rome.
Anyway. I think if as a society we just accepted that “people don’t have the energy to cook but still need healthy food” is a real and valid issue, we could find some affordable fucking solutions. And step one is to stop blaming people (and ourselves) for not having that energy.
I am going to start off with:
This is not a “society was better when women stayed and did domestic stuff,” because it’s not one single type of person’s responsibility, calling, or “role.”
But just think of even recent Western households.
There were one - maybe more! - individuals who were dedicated to the “domestics”: keeping the house clean, laundry done, food made.
In small households, this might be the responsibility of a wife or other internal relative.
In larger households - where both adults were expected to fulfill “roles,” including “lady who maintains family connections which are essential for the household to function” - staff where brought in to cover these duties.
Keeping the house safe, everything clean, and food happening was considered a full time job.
If you are already doing a full time job - either traditional paid work or maintaining a chronic illness (mental or physical) - how “lazy” are you for not being able to handle a second full time job??
Really??
People for centuries paid other people to make food, keep the house clean, and even care for their children while they had “noble people” jobs to do.
Because those jobs take effort, concentration, and time.
Don’t kill yourself over not being able to commit a full time job amount of effort into them when you’re spending the effort, concentration, and time elsewhere.
I post a lot about recovery and working on ourselves, and those are good things! But I just want to take a moment to say that you have value as you are right now. No matter where you are in your recovery journey. Even if you haven’t started. You are valuable as you are now.
