confused-sprout

[confused-sprout]

“I know I’ve told this story before, but my abusive ex refused to let me take birth control. I was on the pill until he found them in my purse. I went to the Student Health Center—they were completely unhelpful, choosing to lecture me about the importance of safe sex (recommending condoms) instead of actually listening to my problem. Then I went to Planned Parenthood. The Nurse Practitioner took one look at my fading bruises and stopped the exam. She called in the doctor. The doctor came in and simply asked me: “Are you ready to leave him?” When I denied that I was being abused, she didn’t argue with me. She just asked me what I needed. I said I need a birth control method that my boyfriend couldn’t detect. She recommended a few options and we decided on Depo. When I told her that my boyfriend read my emails and listened to my phone messages and was known to follow me, she suggested to do the Depo injections at off hours when the clinic was normally closed. She made a note in my chart and instructed the front desk never to leave messages for me—instead, she programmed her personal cell phone number into my phone under the name “Nora”. She told me she would call me to schedule my appointments; she wouldn’t leave a message, but I should call her back when I was able to. And that was it. No judgment. No lecture. She walked me to the door and told me to call her day or night if I needed anything. That she lived 5 blocks from campus and would come get me. That I wasn’t alone. That she just wanted me to be safe. I never called her to come to my rescue. But I have no doubt that she would have come if I had called. She kept me on Depo for a year, giving me those monthly injections in secret, helping me prevent a desperately unwanted pregnancy. I cannot thank Planned Parenthood enough for the work they do.”

—

Curious Georgiana (via grrrlstudies)

I know I’ve reblogged this before, but it bears re-reblogging (?).  This is how you respond to abuse, this is how you give people control over their bodies/uteruses, this is how you act as a generally non-judgmental and compassionate person.  I love this story so fucking much.

(via coffeewithants)

[confused-sprout]

That issue where you compulsively tell all of your friends about your new hyper fixation and can't post about it for fear that they find your blog.

[confused-sprout]

Come here, baby gays, and let me tell you the story about how James Somerton made me so fucking angry with a single line that I had to make this post.

As I now know, most of his audience is young queers and there are things we NEED you to know.

The fight for marriage equality was a massive fucking deal and I will tell you why with a very personal story.

My mom was a nurse during the AIDS crisis. And I mean she started working as a nurse out of school in 85. My mom was on the front lines. She worked with so many AIDS patients that it genuinely altered her brain chemistry. My mother was a homophobe before her nursing career. She was a massive supporter of gay rights until she died in July because of what she saw during her career.

And what did she see?

She saw people who had been abandoned by their families dying with their partners at their side.

And then suddenly…the family would materialize, ban the partner from the room, kick them out of their homes they had lived in with their dying partners for decades, and then watched them ban their partners from even attending the funerals or visiting the graves. Imagine being denied your right to grieve.

And why was this possible? Oh simple. They weren’t married. They weren’t legally bound, the partners weren’t considered next of kin because they weren’t fucking married.

I watched my mom pass. It was horrible and painful and traumatic and terrifying. But it was closure. And I wouldn’t have it any other way because I know…that who my mom wanted by her when she passed was my dad. Because she was scared, she wanted her partner by her side and she was terrified she was going to die. My dad couldn’t be there. He had to work, which sounds cold but understand he had been off work for a month by that point and he was the only one who had health insurance. He wanted to be there, we had made plans to take her off the life support when he came back (we were 4 hours from him) but there was a freak accident and she passed the night after he left to return to work.

Why am I telling you this? Because I need you to understand how important this is to some people. So you can understand how big a slap to the face it is to have people say “marriage equality isn’t that important”. You can understand why someone like James Somerton rolling his eyes at marriage equality and implying we weren’t focused on job equality and discrimination (information that is WHOLEY untrue) would make me see red.

It’s not trivial. It’s not meaningless. It wasn’t about “assimilating” or “appearing normal” (we’re already normal).

It’s about people who had their children taken from them because they weren’t the biological parent. It’s about people who never got to comfort their loved ones in their final days. It’s about people who weren’t able to comforted by their partners in their final days.

So the next time you think “why waste your time on something as trivial as marriage?” Remember my mother. Look up testimony from victims of the AIDS crisis. Remember the people who advocated for marriage equality were the survivors who were torn from the love of their life.

Remember that we advocated so damn hard to give you the right to grieve.

[confused-sprout]

Okay, you need to make sure you play this game at some point. Maybe not today or anything, because you’ll need about thirty minutes and a serious willingness to understand how it works, but - it’s so worth it. It’s basically an answer to our occasional frustration - why do assholes always come out on top? - and the beautiful thing about it is that not only does it explain how that happens, but also how we can change it.

“In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it’s us players who define the game.”

[confused-sprout]

"To think that a chess player has descended, thinking themselves a god, only to be attacked by the pieces."

#umineko

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military recruiter: so what got you guys interested in the marine corps

enormous horde of hagfish, ispods and bottom-feeding crustaceans: oh. uh. is that how you pronounce it

[confused-sprout]

recently i read Guards!Guards! by Pratchett and it brings me great joy to draw out the characters, i will now proceed to throw these at you

Colon!

Sybil,,, i love her, how can i not love a crazy dragon lady ((thats also a big lady))... I like the idea that her brows are tiny because they get burnt by dragons so often

Carrot i also love him

+Big woman Sybil with no wig

[confused-sprout]

opinions on bears, the gay men, not the animal

ANAGRAM GENERATED:

opinions on bears, the gay men, not the animal

→

phenomenal hot man breasts, aye, ignition on

[confused-sprout]

Thinking about how some quantity of this likely stems from the rise of parasocial relationships in online media. Because a lot of people grew up where the characters in their media WERE real people that they actually did like.

Watching a streamer and recommending them to your friends is inherently supporting that person's public persona and anything they say on stream. When your media literacy growing up comes from "what can watching [content creator] tell me about the people who watch them?" Then that's how you're going to approach other media later in life.

The paradigm in early media exposure is so tilted towards a very specific form of contemporary non-fiction that of course that lens is going to be the first one applied to other genres.

people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”

[confused-sprout]

Please vote and reblog to spread to a wider audience. I’m very curious about this.

#first person plural baybeee

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Do you ever just really think about what having Aylin and Isobel in camp must have been like though. Like. Just in general. On a daily basis.

#when they showed up at my camp aylin was covered in blood #our last conversation was about how she had to go get a century's worth of fucking out of the way #just damn girl #at least clean up after

[confused-sprout]

This is very important research so I can figure out how to arrange my books

#by how recently I finished reading the book #while being read books go on the night stand or in my backpack #once finished they are added to the shelf

[confused-sprout]

Oat milk is made by milking goats and then putting the milk through a fine filter to extract all the "G"s

[confused-sprout]

America i am in you

#where the hell are you that AC is colder than 20C #i can rarely find it under 24 #and I'm a sweaty thembo

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my girlfriend was watching me sleep once and she told me that, between snores, i mumbled "that's good game design". i will never live it down

[confused-sprout]

Regarding my last post on the subject:

ok at this point I'm mildly curious so i wanna ask

#officially it was a comet #functionally it was a giant blue ball #go blue balls

[confused-sprout]

i don't think people take me too serious when i say i'm legally blind. Like, guys I am legally never allowed to drive, I need assistance with a lot of stuff because I can't see. People both irl and online tend to be like "oh but you're not THAT BAD OFF" it's not a thing of whether my eyes are "that bad off" it doesn't matter, they're still blind. i still use magnifying and screen readers. i'm learning braille because my eyes are getting progressively worse and I'd like to be able to still read.

I may not be totally blind, but that's the thing, a lot of blind people AREN'T Totally blind. Blindness is a spectrum. and i don't think a lot of people realize that. And I'm just as valid in my blindness as someone on the spectrum with better eyesight than me, or someone with worse.

(This is OK to reblog. I hope that sighted people who might read this really get it into their heads that blindness is a spectrum...)