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.
So, rewind a little more than a year. I’d just started my new job, which is unimportant to the story apart from the basic nature: I get on the phone with people to help them open financial accounts, and I spend maybe 15-30 minutes helping them do so. It’s complex, the computer systems I have to use are finicky, and it’s laden down with a lot of bureaucratic red tape.
My very first day live on the job, I was a nervous wreck. There were so many things I needed to keep track of, and I was having to talk to people over the phone for the first time in years, which meant my voice dysphoria was at an all-time high.
Then I got this client. I don’t actually recall his name and I couldn’t tell it to you even if I did, so let’s call him Bob.
Bob was elderly and had lived a hard life. He was transferring the contents of his pitifully small 401k from Walmart into a more accessible account, and I was helping him set that up. He came on the line cranky and more than a little paranoid. He asked me repeatedly if we were going to tell the government about his money, grumbled at me about the information I had to collect to get the account opened, made a few political statements with which I heartily disagreed. It was not a bad call, but I was definitely on edge.
Then it came time to set up a beneficiary on his account – someone who would inherit the account if he passed away.
And he paused, and then he said, “My daughter.”
I asked for her name and date of birth for the listing, and Bob told me. But then he went on.
“I want to tell you about her,” he said. “She’s very special to me.
"You see, I didn’t always have her. Years ago I had a son. And my wife and I, we loved our son so much. He was our perfect boy. We watched him grow up, he made it into college, he got a job. I never went to college, you know? But he did. I was so proud of that.
"Then, one day, he disappeared. Stopped calling, stopped visiting, stopped everything. Six years, we didn’t know what had happened to him, if he was alive, if he was dead, nothing. It was…”
He paused there, his voice creaking like it was about to break. I could see where this was going, and I was rapt.
“Then we got a letter,” he went on. “From her. She told us everything, explained it all. That she was–” He paused, then said “transgender” as if it were a foreign word that he wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce. “That he’d – she’d – disappeared like that because she was afraid of what we’d say. What I’d say. Maybe what I’d do. But she missed us and she wanted us to get to know her as she really is.”
He paused there, pretty clearly waiting for my reaction. I said something – I barely remember what – about how scary it must have been for her, and how hard for Bob and his wife not to hear from their child for so long.
“It was,” he agreed. “But you gotta know this. I love my daughter.” He said it with his whole being, with every bit of power and meaning that his thin, aged voice could hold. “I love my daughter, and I’m so proud of her. She’s getting married next month, and I thank God for letting me live long enough to walk her down the aisle, just like every girl deserves. She is the light of my life.”
At the end of a long, intimidating, tiring day, his fierce love for his trans daughter took my breath away. I’m always going to remember Bob – remember how he wasn’t perfect, wasn’t progressive, didn’t really know the etiquette or the language, but how deep and intense his love for his daughter was. How he told this to me, a stranger, as though daring me to say even the slightest rude word about her.
There is love in this world. Sometimes, it comes from the people you would least expect. It might not look quite like you think it will. But it is out there.
“I love my daughter,” Bob said, intense and emphatic, and I will never forget the sound of his voice.
Shut up about your humans are inherently evil bullshit and look at this crowd of people losing their absolute shit because they were able to save a random stray cat
here’s a second angle of the video! you can see that the flag helps break the fall & the cat then falls into the hurricanes towel below. they successfully hold it up simba style at the end <3
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
All of these *chef’s kiss* but the Medea one is hands down the best
s/o to my classics professor who managed to get a tire changed on his rental car while doing research in Greece by telling them his chariot had broken down
I worked a cash register in a crappy grocery store on Friday the 13th, the day the schools got word that they were going remote because of the virus.
There were horrible people. I don’t need to go into details because we’ve all heard them or read about them or experienced them firsthand.
But most people were just scared and anxious and trying to take care of their families in spite of bad local and state and national leadership and terrible messaging and limited personal resources. They were intense, but understandably so.
My bosses weren’t great, not on any level, from CEO to shift managers, but that’s not news, most of us have been exploited and abused in our jobs before and during Covid.
We weren’t allowed to wear masks because the store thought it would freak out the customers. Some people quit on the spot, but precious few because it’s not the kind of job you work if you have a ton of options. A woman came through my line and she was wearing a cloth mask with a pretty botanical print. I complimented the design and we bonded over love of fabrics and crafts. She asked about the store mask situation, I explained store policy, she shook her head, left with her groceries, and I kept working the endless line. She was back four hours later with a mask for me. She’d gone home, put away her perishables, sat down at her sewing machine, made a mask for a stranger, and then gone back out into crazy traffic and crowds, just to find me and give it to me. She gave it to me in front of the floor manager, and explained to the manager that she was worried about the employees, and my boss had to let me wear it (out of a weird mental loophole of ‘customer is always right’ even though no other employees were allowed to wear one that day and for a few weeks afterward, which sounds insane, but it’s true).
Another woman had come through with a ton of cheese, really cool fancy stuff. I’m in the cheese fandom so we had a good time chatting. She left with her groceries and I kept working the line. About an hour later, she was back in my line again with more fancy cheeses. I rang her up, bagged her food, handed it to her, and she handed the bag to me and said “This is yours, I’m grateful for all the essential workers but I don’t know how to tell you guys or keep you safe, so I’m just doing this.” She’d put her groceries in her car, gone back into a madhouse, picked out cheese for an anonymous cashier, and WAITED IN LINE FOR AN HOUR so she could give it to me personally.
Toward the end of day, after credit card machines had gone down five times in as many hours (do you know what it’s like a for an entire grocery store to go cash-only for overlong periods of time on March 13 with a building full of scared customers? Do you know how funny or charming or lighthearted you have to be with that many intense people on the verge of freaking out? Sometimes being a cashier is like being a goddamm standup comedienne or therapist or surrogate mom I swear). Anyway, a guy came in toward the very end of my overtime and the card reader went down again and this customer didn’t freak out. He started SINGING. He stood there and sang to me until the computers came back online. I’ll never forget him or his sweet voice or that moment in time, ever.
I know things are bleak right now. I know they’re going to get worse. But I see acts of bravery and kindness all day, every day. Every. Day. People are channeling their despair into personal outreach that doesn’t get witnessed by many people because it’s usually one-on-one type stuff. I do a ton of climate & political stuff, as well as all my odd jobs, so I see a lot of different demographics in a lot of different situations, all of them stressful, and yes, there are sociopathic assholes in all of those settings, but there are ALWAYS always people being good and brave and looking for ways to connect or care for or support other people in a myriad of ways.
I don’t believe in very many things at this age but I will go to my grave defending the goodness of humanity. We may be isolated, we may be headfucked and heartbroken, but we are still fighting the good fight. That’s as real as all the bad stuff.
I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.
Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.”
She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”
And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”
She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea! The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn. I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did. So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”
My moms a sign language interpreter, and she’s signed with people from all over the US. According to her, when she signs with people from the south they sign with a “drawl.” They have slower hand movements and exaggerate certain parts of the sign. People from the Midwest sign very fast and people from the south sign very slow.
So we were at a restaurant once and my mom started interpreting for someone who was trying to order and she was like “oh you’re from the south!”
And they were like “how did you know that?”
And she said “you sign with a drawl.” And they were really surprised that it came through that much.
It’s really interesting that even when not speaking verbally accents and heritage come through.
“we’re all on tumblr and all cringe and pathetic” I can’t relate to such statements. yes, the site culture as a whole isn’t worth praise. yet many of the people i follow are marvels… electric and charming and endearing people i would never get to see glimpses and breadcrumbs and snippets of the inner headspace of otherwise. to have a place where i can experience all their presences together and be perceived by them in return has been a lucky type of occurrence for me. it’s a grounding and pleasing thing, this knowing that those i follow are out there in reality living their lives. so many of you do not even fully get just how great you are! when i see my dashboard full of people who write blocks of meta about books or make silly puns or post their poetry i think, yes, i like your spirit. keep up that passion! the world needs you!
people talk all the time about “primal instincts” and it’s usually about violence or sexual temptations or something, but your humanity comes with a lot of different stuff that we do without really thinking about, that we do without being told to or prompted to
your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:
Befriend
Tell story
Make Thing
Investigate
Share knowledge
Laugh
Sing
Dance
Empathize with
Create
we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands
your primal instincts are not bathed in blood- they are layered in people telling stories to each other around a fire over and over and putting devices together through trial and error over and over and reaching for someone and something every moment of the way
~“Your primal instincts are not bathed in blood.”
My god this is beautiful. Such a refreshing change of pace to the constant glorification of instinctual human violence.
Primal Human Instinct pack also includes bonus instincts such as:
imitating weird noises made by other animals
playing with water
the urge to eat anything brightly colored and jelly-like
touching things that look like they will move in a funny way
seeing faces in literally everything, including toast
jumping up to see if you can bap the top of that doorway
saying ‘ow’ when something unexpected happens, even if it doesn’t hurt
