polyamoroamer

[polyamoroamer]

Can't afford to buy things for your garden?

*Re-posting, with new information

A store-bought bag of topsoil, a roll of landscaping fabric, or a bag of cedar chips doesn’t go very far if you have a large garden or a very limited budget. Here are some ways to create the materials you need for a beautiful, organic, productive garden, by both re-directing household waste, and foraging in your local area. I use a lot of these tricks in my garden to make it almost completely free for me to continue growing new things, and expanding the workable area every year!

For soil

Save your food scraps to create a rich compost for growing veggies and amending your soil. There are numerous options for every size of dwelling and yard. Small space solutions such as Bokashi and vermicompost work indoors and don’t produce bad smells, so you can keep them underneath the sink.Worm towers, compost heaps, and outdoor compost bins are a great solution if you have more space. The more you add, the more rich, nutritious material you can make for your garden. I like composting because it means I don’t have gross smelly garbage bags to deal with, because food waste is diverted. It seems like a lot of work at first, but it actually saves time, money, and transportation.

Seaweed or kelp is one of the best things for your garden, with over 70 essential nutrients, and acting as a weed barrier and a moisture-retentive mulch. I collect seaweed nearby on the beach with my bike trailer, or, when I go for a walk I bring a little home with me each time. It’s an absolute miracle for your soil.

Worm tower

Fertiliser

There are three things that are essential for plant growth. These are nitrogen for leaves and vegetation (N), phosphorus for roots and shoots (P), and potassium for water movement, flowering, and fruiting (K). Commercial fertilisers will give the relative concentrations of each of these compounds with and “NPK” rating. Plants like tomatoes also need calcium to produce healthy fruit. You can create amendments for your garden and soil at home so that you do not have to purchase fertiliser.

For nitrogen

Grass clippings contain 4% nitrogen, 1% phosphorus, and 2% potassium (NPK = 4-1-2).

Human urine contains 12% nitrogen, and it’s sterile. Dilute before adding directly to plants.

Legumes such as beans, clover, peanuts, and alfalfa fix inorganic nitrogen into the soil with mycorrhizal organisms and nodules on their root systems. Plant these crops every few years in rotation with others to renew the soil organically.

For phosphorus

Human urine is also a great source of phosphorous and trace amounts of potassium.

Ground up bones or shells add a slow-release phosphorous to the soil

Had a baby recently? Bury the placenta in the garden.

For potassium

Hardwood ashes 

Composted banana peels

For calcium

Break down all of your eggshells, or seashells you have found, in a plastic bucket, using vinegar. This creates a soluble calcium solution you can add to a watering can. 

Soil Acidity/Alkalinity

Many plants are particular about what the soil pH should be.

To make soil more acidic: add oak leaves, pine needles, leaf mulch, urine, coffee grounds or sphagnum. 

To make soil more alkaline: add wood ash, shell, or bone.

Mulch

Mulch is decomposing organic matter that adds nutrition to the soil, while simultaneously keeping out weed growth and retaining moisture. It also attracts worms, fungi and other beneficial creatures to your soil. Free sources of mulch include:

Leaves

Garden waste

Grass clippings

Straw (often straw bales are given away after being used for decoration in the fall. You can also plant vegetables directly in straw bales using a technique called straw bale gardening).

Wood chips (if you can borrow a wood chipper after you’ve collected some wood you can have attractive wood mulch for free)

Straw bale garden

Landscaping fabric

When mulch isn’t enough to keep the weeds down, many people opt for landscaping fabric. It can be quite expensive and inorganic-looking. Free solutions that both attract worms and can be replaced in small segments as they break down include:

Newspaper*

Cardboard*

Egg cartons*

Printer paper, looseleaf, etc. in thick layers*

*try to make sure you are using paper that has vegetable-based dyes, so you aren’t leeching toxins into the soil.

Soil density/drainage

If your soil is compacted and you have plants that require low levels of water, or excellent drainage, add sand. I don’t recommend stealing it from the beach, but ask around and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to get for free. Sawdust also improves drainage. Adding organic matter and mulch encourages worms, who also till and aerate compacted soil.

If the area still needs drainage, dig a hole and fill it with bricks or rocks to create a “dry well”

For drainage in pots, add crushed bricks, terra cotta pot fragments, packing peanuts, small stones, marbles, orsand to the bottom under the soil layer. I find these in construction sites, on craigslist, or at flea markets.

Pots and growing containers

If you have space, raised beds are a great no-dig way to establish growing space. If you are pressed for space (like working on a balcony) there are many cheap or free options for container gardens.

Creating raised beds allows you to build up the soil without digging. Free ways to do this include using rocks or lumber (like my DIY “lasagna garden” made with the sheet composting technique), using the “wattle“ method with sticks and posts you have found, using discarded straw bales, old bricks,paving stones, cinder blocks or really anything else you have lying around.

Hugelkutur raised beds, which fix carbon and provide drainage, can be made by stacking sticks and untreated wood, and then piling soil or compost over it. (Thanks milos-garden)

Rubber tire gardens retain heat in the night and allow for great drainage. They can also be painted in fun ways.

Herb spirals (here is mine: 1, 2, 3) can be built with stones, bricks, and other found materials.

I often use old cooking pots, barbecues, teapots, or other found objects as planters.

Making wooden planters is easy, and scrap or salvaged wood is also easy to come by. I’m not a fan of using wooden pallets for DIY projects, but they are also a free source of lumber for things like planters.

If you can track down peat moss, cement, and vermiculite, you can make an easy Hypertufa planter in whatever shape you would like, provided you have a form in which it can dry.

I’ve made hanging gardens out of soda cans.

You can build a self-watering container with a 2L pop bottle.

Start seeds in eggshells

Make biodegradable pots out of newspapers.

Wattle raised beds

Rubber tire gardens

Hugelkultur

An herb spiral

Hanging gardens in cans (2)

Trellises and supports

Many plants need external support, such as stakes of trellises, to thrive.

Rebar can almost always be salvaged cheaply or free and makes a great trellis, arch, or purgola 

Build trellises and supports out of the pliable young stems of plants like willow

Rebar trellis/arch

Living willow arch/trellis

Paving

Paving often requires a foundation of sand or another stable and well-drained substrate, and a covering of stones, bricks, or other weatherproof elements. Slowly collect stones over time, or free paving stone fragments to create a mosaic-type walkway. Often people give these things away on craigslist. I made a patio and fireplace out of free salvaged bricks, for example.

Salvaged garden walkway

Greenhouses and cold frames

Here is a gallery of greenhouses made out of salvaged windows and doors

A cold frame is easy to make with salvaged lumber, and plastic sheeting.

Window greenhouse

Palet cold-frame

Seeds and plants

Swap seeds with other gardeners

If you see a plant you like at someone’s house, ask for seeds or cuttings

Save seeds every year and build a library of options. Here is a great guide to seed saving.

Save seeds from foods you like from the grocery store: consider growing peanuts, ginger, garlic, peppers, or a walnut tree: all of these and more can be planted from store-bought produce.

Learn to take cuttings. There is a tonne of info on the web about basic cutting propagation, layering, (like I do with rhododendrons) air layering, and numerous other techniques to take clones of plants you like. This saves going to a nursery and shelling out big bucks for all the variety you want.

For cuttings, willow tea and honey are great rooting hormones/antiseptics/anti-fungal agents, which can save you $40 if you were thinking of buying commercial rooting hormone.

You can root cuttings in a potato! (See my methods for rooting “borrowed” plants here)

Air layering

Rooting cuttings in potatoes

—-

I hope this helps you build your garden outside of the usual capitalist channels! It can be a cheap or free hobby if you are willing to think outside the box, and maybe put up with things that don’t look as clean or crisp as a hardware store catalogue. If you have any further ideas, please add them! The more information the better.

#Gardening #Solarpunk #Useful info

[polyamoroamer]

I'm not sure if I reblogged this already or not but whatever.

This post changed the way I think about my burden-guilt and my response to others' burden-guilt. One post has accelerated my mental work so vastly it's kind of mindblowing.

I personally wanna see less 'you are not a burden/it's not work to love you' and more 'you are worth the work it takes to love you.' I KNOW I'm a burden sometimes. that isn't such a terrible thing! humans are strong. we can carry burdens. and it is work for me to be there for my friends, but it's work I'm willing to do.

we need to acknowledge this because pretending love isn't work will never make people like me feel less guilty for accepting love. we need to talk about it so people don't feel bad for having boundaries and not always being up to do the work. we need to accept it so we can properly appreciate what others do for us and what we're doing for them.

yes it does take work to love you. but guess what? you still deserve love, and you deserve people who are willing to do the work to love you. it doesn't make you bad. all love take work. and everyone is worth it.

#polyamory #polyamoroamer #polyamorous #polyamoroaming #Burdens #We are all burdens sometimes #It's OK #We are strong enough to hold you while you heal #That's why we have arms #Right? #As well as the whole climbing and everything else thing

[polyamoroamer]

As a lesbian i will always relate more to trans women than cishet women. Made to feel disgusting and predatory in women's spaces? Check. Berated and mocked for our relation to sexuality and womanhood? Check. Hated for our "deviancy from the norm"? Check. Every single essay about womanhood by a trans woman--and especially, especially by trans wlw--has spoken more to me than anything written by a cis straight woman ever could. T*rfs can take that to the bank.

[polyamoroamer]

How to Grow a Community Food Forest - a super extensive guide by the Food Forest Network on twitter

#Food forest #Useful info

[polyamoroamer]

Absolute madwoman that I am I went and gone and done did it

[state-communist solarpunk banner by Surnem]

The Watermelon Manifesto (solarpunk and a future worth fighting for)

The culture around us, most especially the worlds of speculative fiction and independent music, is replete with trends ending in -punk, representing alternative visions of the world, and one of the newest, having entered the public discourse only about five years ago, is solarpunk. But aren’t there enough of these punks floating around already? What is it that makes solarpunk so special?

Put simply, solarpunk is a rupture with these other subcultural trends because it presents an alternative vision of the world which is both desirable and achievable, unlike its predecessors. For example, steampunk presents a Romantic vision of an alternative present based on a retrofuturist reimagining of the development of industry, while cyberpunk presents people moving through and surviving within a grim and dystopic vision of the future. The former is pure fantasy, whereas the latter, though imminently possible and becoming ever more relevant in these the waning days capitalism in decay, is deeply undesirable.

The world envisioned by solarpunk is imminently achievable, reliant on technological and social developments that are not only well within our reach but that, in many places, are already in use today. And from these building blocks, it presents to us a vision of the world that’s based in the most radical, most revolutionary of all human emotions: Hope.

Solarpunk is a rejection of the crawling chaos of Silicon Valley’s third-positionist technocracy as well as the liberal and settler-colonialist nature of mainstream environmentalism and the toxic and hopeless nihilism and creeping ecofascism and natioanl-anarchism of primitivism or so-called “post-civ” anarchism. Fictioneers dream of a world where technology is neither abused for profit and excess nor abandoned, but serves human need; where goods and services are produced not in service of profit, but rationally, in service of the needs of our communities; a world where we are no longer alienated, no longer have to live our lives alone, but can exist genuinely as a part of our community, free and equal, a world decolonized and repatriated where we no longer oppress one another on bases of race or gender or ability. And it’s a green new world, a world of social ecology, where we recognize that human beings with all of our constructs and our technology are not stewards of the natural world nor need be its expropriators, but are a part of it, blood and bone, as much as we’re a part of any human community.

And this can be more than idle speculative fiction. As I said above, solarpunk’s alternative vision of the world is based on futurist speculation of technology that has been developed, of sociopolitical structures that are already extant in miniature. For the movement to become a reality, to become a real force in the world, requires rational implementation. But, sadly, implementation will require a radical change in the economic base.

Our present mode of production will never allow this future to come into being so long as it stands, ever lumbering ahead under the oppressive weight of its own failure. All of the carbon taxes and Green New Deals the bourgeois state can dream up will not save us, for the rough beast of capitalism, ever-hungry to generate more capital and concentrate that capital into fewer and fewer hands, will ever lurch knowingly towards its own destruction so long as more profit can be squeezed out of our dying planet, so long as the bourgeoisie remain convinced they can weather the storm they are dragging us all into the heart of. It is incumbent upon us, the people, to save ourselves. As the coming crisis deepens, extreme weather ravages the land, populations are displaced, moribund empires shake at their foundations, it is incumbent upon us to learn how to weather the storm. 

And misanthropic nihilism gives us no liberatory solution. The retreat of the bourgeois state as crisis deepens will highten capitalism’s contradictions, will reveal more cracks in the armor, presenting ever more opportunities for us to assert ourselves. The rank defeatism of the post-left will pass these opportunities by, leaving capitalism unchallenged to adapt to the new conditions as it has done so many times in the past; is it not the great failure of Marx, that he failed to anticipate how well and quickly capitalism might adapt? Moreover, the crises of capitalism in decay will cause, are already causing, mass displacements of human life, and the deep misanthropy of primitivism as well as primitivism’s wholly wrong and unscientific Malthusian ideological base provides a ready breeding ground for reaction; primitivism is merely the boneless cousin of national-anarchism and ecofascism.

Our revolutionary watchword is hope, hope based in the knowledge that we have to tools to save ourselves at our fingertips. We must dare to invent the future. Our job is first to dare to imagine a future that’s worth fighting for, and to then fight for it. The path forward, the road out of the darkness and into this new world, is simple enough to say: Organize.

This isn’t going to be an easy journey, not by any means. We are in for the fight of our lives. The place where decaying capitalism is leading us is not a good place. We will have to walk through wire and fire to make it through this, and we’re gonna bury friends along the way. But we will make it.

We can make it through together. All we have to do is organize, and we can fight, and when we fight, we win.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the union makes us strong

The best time for neighbors and co-workers to become friends, for friends to become better friends, for communities to come together, was yesterday. The second-best time is today. Soon, nothing else will matter.

But that’s not a message of despair. It’s a message of hope. Because when we fight, we win.

And we will win.  And someday the fight will be over.  And someday a new generation of babies will be born, and they’ll grow up knowing nothing but freedom.

Somewhere outside right now is a sapling growing up through a crack in the pavement. Someday it will be a tree, towering over the street, its branches kissing the balconies of the buildings nearby, with the pavement that once tried to restrain it shattered and thrown up in slabs to either side, crumbling in its shade.

But for now, it’s just a little sapling, just an acorn that happened to roll into a little crack, just a little bit of green barely visible in the smoke and smog. But every day, our little sapling gets just a bit taller, and the crack just a bit wider.

It knows hope, and it’s not afraid to dream.

“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place, and better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their own world before they leave the stage of history. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.” –Durruti

LINKS:

Get organized, get involved!

Socialist Alternative Committee For A Workers’ International Industrial Workers of the World IWW General Defense Committee Food Not Bombs Food Not Lawns

More about solarpunk

Solarpunk: A reference guide What Is Solarpunk? Sunbeam City wiki Appropedia: Solarpunk On The Political Dimensions of Solarpunk

The ideological base

Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital (text) (audio) Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (text) (audio) Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Trotsky, The ABCs of Materialist Dialectics Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (text) (audio) Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor In Evolution (text) (audio) Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

How to invent the future

Guides to DIY hydroponic gardening Guides to DIY homesteading and backyard gardening basics Indoor herb gardening (x) (x) (x) Lifehacker Instructables Rebel Steps podcast How to organize a tenants’ union (x) (x) How to form an affinity group How do we fight gentrification?

Making Stuff and Doing Things: DIY Guides To Just About Everything

#Useful info

[polyamoroamer]

Elderflower champagne! :D easy enough to Google a recipe or I'll happily send you mine if you want :)

Its such a rip off that flowers don’t taste good

#Foraging #Useful info #Wild food #Elderflower champagne

[polyamoroamer]

you know what they say

when life gives you mutuals, make mutual aid

#This KILLED me #Mutual aid

[polyamoroamer]

Build an affinity group. An affinity group is a small group of 5 to 20 people who work together autonomously on direct actions or other projects. Affinity groups generally consist of like minded people who come together to get something done. If you already have an affinity group, link and cluster those groups!

Skill up. Delinking from capitalism and colonial apparatuses requires us to learn how to do things for ourselves and each other beyond buying, selling, working, or asking the state to help us. From self and collective defense, to gardening, building bikes, unschooling, and caring for each other- we can learn a skill and share a skill. We can change how we value skills and dismantle hierarchies of class and ableism.

Establish and practice good security culture. Security culture is necessary to survive state repression. We can stop a lot of infiltration and disinformation in its tracks by improving our ways of communicating and navigating conflict. We can still be horizontal and transparent without sacrificing security and safety.

Practice transformative and restorative justice. Strong communities make police and prisons obsolete. We can change our culture to prevent violence and abuse. We can build up our capacities to confront and resolve conflicts. We can strengthen our ties and detoxify our relationships so harm has no space to grow in our communities.

Mutual Aid. Start a mutual aid group and provide necessary support to those who are in need. Mutual aid organizing can ensure our communities are not dependent on corporations and the state. Shift your use of resources to things you can grow and make or procure from others in resistance. Build networks of aid and resources beyond capitalism.

Mutual defense. From arms training to street tactics to bystander interventions and safety teams, we need to have the skills and resources to defend our communities from fascist attacks on our people, non-human beings, and lands.

Build and sustain conflict infrastructure. Conflict Infrastructure is any structure we organize helps us be more effective in our fights. This is infrastructure that goes beyond solely providing awareness and services and instead builds our capacity to wage actual resistance. From community gardens and collectively coordinated farms to infoshops and independent media/communications.

Open squats for unsheltered folx. Rent is theft. Private property is colonial violence upon the land. Abolish rent and private property. Rematriate lands to original caretakers. Create spaces to live beyond landlords.

Defend and reclaim ancestral lands. Because #landback means ending colonial occupation and restoring Indigenous stewardship of our ancestral lands. Regenerate our sacred relations, and all that entails spiritually and materially, with our original homelands. Liberate the sacred.

Reparations. Seize what has been stolen from Black and Indigenous Peoples and liberate it back.  Radical redistribution is necessary.

Shut shit down. Intervene in critical infrastructure at the points where capitalism and colonialism are at their most vulnerable. Seize the streets, factories, ports, fracking pads, pipelines, power stations, smash the borders, be smart and be creative! It’s also an effective way to target those industries perpetuating climate change.

Be fiercely intersectional. ‘Cause we’re not taking those old shitty behaviors with us. Fuck anti-blackness, fuck orientalism, fuck islamaphobia, fuck anti-semitism, fuck transphobia, fuck heteropatriarchy, fuck white supremacy, fuck imperialism, fuck ableism, fuck hierarchy, fuck racism, fuck citizenship, fuck privilege, fuck everything fucked up!

Practice Radical Self & Collective Care. To remain dangerous to power we must care for ourselves and each other. Learn common triggers and how to communicate without being fucked up. Learn to communicate your needs, boundaries, and wants effectively and nontoxicly – remember that folks in the struggle and resistance have the hardest time accessing resources for mental and spiritual care. Movement work can be unsustainable to those with many experiences of settler policing and violence triggers – find ways to communicate and negotiate group norms and boundaries that accommodate peoples’ needs if reasonable. Identify toxic communication patterns and learn / create ways to dismantle them and communicate in more healthy and less harmful ways.Be honest about your limitations and care for yourself and each other. The christianized, capitalized colonial state has taught us to never rest or heal. Reject any attempts at coercing people to go beyond their limits. Radical self-care keeps us safe and invulnerable when consistently engaging in agitating governability by the state.

Make everything accessible for everyone. Reject ableism and objectification of our bodies and lives, establish community care networks with people equipped to provide first aid and care support to a full spectrum of needs. Challenge ableism in our language, how we organize, and how we value each other. We are all enough.

Abolish Rape Culture. Study rape and rape culture and how it relates to the desecration of sacred lands. Transform our culture and practices around dating, humor, relationships, sexuality, consent, parties, sex labor, and play to abolish rape culture. Hold mactivists, rapists, abusers, opportunists, and creeps accountable. Center consent and healthy relationships in everything we do everywhere.

Spread radical and militant joy. We can fuck shit up while we dance, sing, party, laugh, play, wonder, have deep conversations, tell stories, make art, make love, make magic, make brilliance, make awesomeness, and have fun.

[polyamoroamer]

Resources for Mending Clothes

We toss out over 80 pounds of textiles each year. These textiles are often made of plastic materials (polyester, nylon), made in unethical conditions, dyed with harsh dyes that often get put into the rivers, etc. Even a single cotton shirt releases carbon emissions and uses tons of water. 

So the best thing to prevent the unsustainable growth of the fashion industry is to make sure that your clothing lasts as long as possible. To do so, mending clothing is a must. So here are some resources to help you learn how to do various things, such as sewing a button, to tailoring clothes, or even upcycling old clothing into new styles. 

* How to sew on three different types of button

* How to hand sew on a patch on a torn pair of jeans

* How to sew up a hole in an old shirt

* How to sew a simple T-shirt

* How to upcycle old clothing into new clothing

* More upcycle and sewing techniques

* How to repair a damaged sock

* How to do an invisible stitch

* 3 different stitches to work with for different results

* How to make a T-shirt smaller so it fits you better

* How to make repairs to your shoes

These are just a few of the things that you can do in order to make sure that your clothing lasts for a long time. Nobody wants to keep buying new clothing, as it is expensive and wasteful. 

So making alterations to your clothing, or fixing small holes hen you see them can be hugely beneficial to your wallet, to garment workers, and to the environment in the long term. 

#Useful info #Repair #Mend

[polyamoroamer]

Queer is not a slur.

Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.

See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.

Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.

What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride - yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.

Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table - taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”

(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)

In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.

I’m queer, and you will never take that away from me.

[polyamoroamer]

here is a compilation of some of my favorite resources, workbooks & apps for people who cannot afford going to therapy, but would like to improve themselves in any way:

therapistaid has many, many worksheets for skills from dbt and even a self care assesment!

cbt worksheets from psychologytools.

coping skills for anger, managing difficult thoughts, getting better sleeping habits, etc.

mental health resources for kids & teens.

DBT skills training (pdf)

DBT skills workbook (pdf)

wysa app offers a wide range of skills, from a personalized AI chat where you can vent to a compilation of your emergency contacts. (only available on google play as of feb 2021)

sanvello app (google play + app store) allows you to track your progress, identify which self care habits you need to improve and guives you monthly reports of your overall state.

feel free to add more!

#Resources #Recovery #Therapy #Therapeutic resources #Useful info

[polyamoroamer]

We did it centuries ago, we just bottled it...

Time to turn the world upside down again.

We might even get some more bangers like this woodcut out of it!

when are the british going to kill their royals like a properly civilized country

#English Civil war #Monarchy #1647 #World turned upside down

[polyamoroamer]

Once upon a time in England, where we do not do cute and nice and sweet things like the Valentine's Day boxes, my two best friends and I decided that enough was enough.

Aged 16, we went to school very early one Valentine's Day and wandered the sleepy corridors, sheafs of heart shaped post it notes clutched in our sweaty little hands. We knew we would get in a lot of trouble for this.

So we ran through the halls, feet slapping on those weird tiled floors only laid in schools and hospitals, sticking hearts with little notes on every single locker we could find. We wrote on every single one, things like 'you're so beautiful!' and 'I love you!' and 'what a gorgeous smile you have!'

When everyone arrived at school, it was chaos. Love notes, love notes everywhere! We were (allegedly) an all-girls school, so for most of the students romance was not expected at all.

People were laughing and smiling and comparing their notes, and for half an hour or so it was really lovely.

Unfortunately, they tracked us down eventually and a stop was put to it. As they confiscated our love notes, we were told we were making a mess for the cleaners, we were causing a ruckus. We were being irresponsible. We'd 'made our point'.

We, of course, offered to stay late after school to clean up so we could finish papering the lockers in the classrooms we had yet to reach, but That's Not How Grownups Work.

Lots of girls who were normally mean or unfriendly to us came up to us smiling and happy and being so nice that day. I don't know how to end this beyond it felt really, really nice to do something sweet for people we didn't like just the same as people we did and people we didn't know. Every locker we found got a love note, even if they were normally 'the enemy'. And seeing those people happy felt nice too.

And it felt damn good to get in trouble for doing something harmless and kind and silly. It helped to drive home how useless the concept of authority is, because those who wield it can be fucking idiots and still think they're in charge 😂

Anyhow, this is the very lowkey, non-rebellious story of how we finally earned our childhood 'You Have A Problem With Authority' lectures. Self fulfilling prophecies sure are something. Anyway, Valentine's Day is great because it's a day to celebrate love. Ignore the commercialised romance crap, just show people you love them, or put some love out there.

I'm single this year, currently uninterested in romance entirely, and I'm actually excited for V Day for once. I'm going to message SO MANY people. If I can find addresses I might even send love letters this year!

I miss being 7 and designing a Valentine's Day shoebox and buying 25 little paper valentines with whatever I loved on them and writing them to each of my classmates and adding a little piece of candy to each valentine and dropping them in all my classmate's boxes and then opening my own box at the end of the day to discover 25 little valentines from the rest of my class showing what they all loved.... Oh to be a 7-year-old on February 14th

#polyamory #polyamoroamer #polyamorous #polyamoroaming #love #Romance #Valentine's Day #Acts of kindness #Raok

[polyamoroamer]

You know, there's a funny feeling about this as an autistic person who never really experienced 'being a teenager' in the 'music, crap house parties and cheap booze' sense that most people I know now seem to have. During the 00s I didn't want anything to do with the people like that because they were the people who were cruel to me, but I fantasised about having a friendship group and doing stupid shit with them like drinking in the park, smoking weed, learning to skate, having shitty house parties with regrets in the morning. I thought about the then-present in the same way I thought about the 80s or 70s etc. I romanticised it and thought 'it would be fun to be a teenager at that time' whilst acknowledging that my experience of it was vastly different because of what turned out to be undiagnosed autism.

So I look at people's emo hair and scene phases and crappy winged eyeliner and hungover panda eyes and go 'wow, you were a real teenager, that's so cool'. I mean, I was a goth so I was very out of step with the local emos (in my area that was a big distinction and there were approximately five goths including myself, two of whom were in their 50s and two of whom left for uni as soon as I hit the scene) but I always thought they looked really cool and had interesting lives because they went out and did stuff with people.

Am I basically saying that the emo/scene look should come back? Probably yes, because my town used to be crawling with them (the grownups even wrote articles in the newspaper about the 'colony of black ants' taking over the town) and it just doesn't look right without big groups of emos crowded everywhere.

And there's no denying: it is pretty cute.

I'm gonna kill myself

#Emo #Scene #Bygone times

[polyamoroamer]

Ten years ago I never thought we'd be having to use 'we're here, we're queer, get used to it' against exclusionist gays rather than just homophobes. But we are and there we have it.

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

[polyamoroamer]

As if pride season wasn’t already terrible, 

we now have to deal with puritan gay-conservative shits who don’t want queers to wear their leather and kink outfits to pride anymore, because “that’s not about sexual orientation, it’s about sex and doesn’t belong in public”. What the fuck. 

LGBT and queer struggle has always been deeply intertwined with the struggle for sexual liberation. Being visibly queer and visibly sexually deviant has always been two parts of the same same ‘fuck you I’m queer’ to homphobes. Celebrating our sex lives and celebrating our existence has always been inseperable. The leather scene is a highly visible bit of queer culture and queer history. So much of the movement was build by these communities. So many of our heroes and queer elders wear leather. You do not get to take that away.  

No minor at pride is gonna be scarred because they see a gay guy in chaps dancing on a float. Get real. Everyone has seen naked buttcheeks on tv a thousand times before their 12th birthday.  

Your desire to desexualize our identities has nothing to do with protecting anyone. It’s just internalized homophobia. 

[polyamoroamer]

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