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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 3rd, 2023

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  • My grandpa passed a year ago now, COPD. Likely honestly a heart attack after all the steroid meds for his lungs created heart problems including a heart aneurysm. When he was diagnosed way back in 2006 they told us he had 5 years if he was lucky, I didn’t think he’d see me graduate HS. Well he had a lot more than 5 years in him but after about 2014 it was all shit. He started telling my grandma that he was ready to die, wanted to die, in 2018, he begged for it on hard nights. He tried to kill himself in 2021 and 2022. Both attempts left him strapped to a hospital bed “for his safety” as he struggled to breathe, he hadn’t been able to reliably breathe laying on his back for several years by then but they didn’t care as long as he lived.

    I never felt anything but sympathy for him after those attempts. As someone with chronic lifelong asthma, I know how my end will go. I know what it’s like to suffocate and struggle to breathe and in case anyone wonders, it fucking sucks. It’s terrifying, it’s slow, and you know it’s coming. Panic is inevitable. He felt like that for nearly 10 fucking years. He told me once after it had gotten bad that he’d always felt so bad for me as a kid to have asthma but now he finally understood, he said I was so brave to have dealt with it for so long but in that moment I didn’t feel brave I felt lucky. When I use my inhaler I can breathe again, for him it just made him struggle less. For a long time I wished he would die, my absolute favorite person on the planet, and I wanted them dead. It destroyed me mentally for years. When he finally did die it was horribly sad and also such a massive relief for everyone to know that at least he wasn’t suffering anymore.

    I say all this, partially to get it off my chest but mostly to say, if we are going to prolong life we need to also give people the option to check out. Life isn’t life without quality of health, it’s just suffering. Prolonging suffering makes use torturers, it’s not a saving grace. If we have the capacity to do this for our pets then people deserve the same mercy.




  • Fuck the CDC and late stage capitalism. One of my best friends is in a wheelchair for the rest of her life because of Long COVID, she can’t walk a few feet without being so out of breath she passes out. My mom got Long COVID the first and now the second time she’s been infected. She still coughs every time she walked around or does any activities. She has to carry an inhaler now but she doesn’t have asthma, just Long COVID. She got COVID only a few weeks ago and it’s was most definitely NOT like the flu for her or anyone I’ve known that’s gotten it.


  • I think what they are trying to get at is, it’s important to instill in the younger generation that the big picture is that there are owners and there are workers. All the rest are just manufactured microcosms of the bigger picture that we can’t even begin to tackle without understanding why these microcosms exist in the first place and dismantalling the structure that keeps them in place.

    This helps them understand our current class structure for what it is, fake. This can help kids feel not so alone in the daily struggle, they have lots of allies! This may even drive this youngster to start an ethical charity or run for office to help enact change. This bigger picture is often whats missing when kids learn these things in school or life and why so so many kids grow up thinking they can make it big only to burn out young when they are struggling to just get by even though they played by the rules, here we are teaching to not blame yourself you did your best! It’s not about dismissing the vast wealth differences we have as the working class so much as teaching that those differences are subject to change at the whim of the ownership class, teaching solidarity and empathy along the way. Imo it’s a good teaching moment and it’s the same one I got as a kid, I like to think I turned out okay if not a tad jaded a bit too young haha.



  • I’m neridivergent and have issues with misophonia. Your description of listening to people eat was spot on. Hearing people chew food or smack gum makes me want to smack the gum the fuck up out of their mouth. I like these people but the reaction that misophonia causes in me feels barely containable. I’ve had to walk away from people to collect myself or have someone else help customers because of the physical and psychological reaction it causes. It feels violent and torturous. I also have this same reaction to kids and babies being loud or crying. Yes, your crotch goblin is cute. Yes, I recognize that they are kids and these things aren’t controllable. But that doesn’t stop me from having serious sound stimulation overloads that bring me to the brink of sanity, that’s not controllable either no matter how much I wish it was. .

    OP, best way to deal with it if it is a misophonia issue is to carry around ear plugs or do what I do and get some nice noise cancelling earbuds. If you’re in a situation that you cant use these things, like a family gathering of people who won’t understand what you’re going through, take frequent breaks. Go outside, go take a breather on the bathroom, talk with someone you trust and see if they will step aside with you for a bit because I’m 100% sure there are others there that don’t want to hear the kids being loud.




  • I obviously I can’t speak for the OP you are questioning but I’m also on that demi spectrum, if you want my two cents.

    It’s not that I can’t see that someone is attractive, it’s just that I don’t find them sexually attractive. I’m sure there are a lot of het men that would agree that Timothée Chalamet or Chris Evans are very attractive and handsome men but that doesn’t mean that they want to have sex with them. It’s not like people go around looking at beautiful art or gorgeous sunsets and think “man, I’d really like to fuck that” lol

    I believe they also mentioned that they didn’t find them interesting, not that they found them unattractive. I have the same issue. When these apps are set up for looks first no one really bothers to sound overly interesting, they just want to come off as fuckable and not a murder.





  • Yes and no, it’s not a black and white issue. I didn’t really want to go all in on the topic because it’s Googleable. My grandpa recently passed and it’s very expensive, we were looking for alternatives. On a federal level natural burial is allowed. The states take matters into their own hands. Some require burial vaults, some require embalming, some require that natural burials only happen in very specific places, and some require a mix of those things. It’s doable but if they can squeeze money out of you through laws or extreme inconvenience, they will. It’s not as easy and just picking a spot and burying a loved one, in a lot of cases.




  • Minorities in these places are typically facing poverty levels that most people in the US can’t imagine. How are they supposed to move when they can barely afford rent? As for the other women, the white women in these places genuinely don’t believe that these laws will affect them. There is this sense that they think that their adjacency to white men will prevent them from being treated the same as others, that somehow it will make them immune. They are getting a massive wakeup call that white men in power only care about other white men. It’s a tale as old as time. White women are and have always been our barrer to equality. Once things get bad enough for them they will jump on the side of minorities and equality again. They just don’t usually view themselves as one of us, they always think that this time will be different.



  • There’s not a clear and conscience alternative to “American.” If you’re trying to differentiate us from other people from the Americas you’d just say US Citizen. And while yes the entirety of this hemisphere is some variation of America be it North, Central, or South the other countries here have distinct names and we really don’t.

    At the risk of sounding like a typical US asshole, here goes nothing. This is how I’ve explained it to friends from Europe and it seemed to help.

    If Brazil had decided to go by the name “United States of Brazil” we would still call them Brazilians because there is another country with the title “United States” that also exists. Similar to how we call people from the Peoples Republic of China, Chinese. We don’t call them “People’s Republicans” because that’s a title not a unique identifier or name. What if that same country decided to go by the name the Peoples Republic of Asia instead, would we call them Peoples Republicans or would we call them Asians?

    The title “United States” is telling you that this area is united together and the borders represent states, not country’s. “America” tells you where those united states are, the continent of America. The term “American” is generalized and honestly doesn’t accurately represent the vast cultural differences within the United States. The states often have their own rights and laws separate from the US government and also unique cultures. Ideally we would be called by our states name for its citizens like Californian or New Yorker, for example. Similar to how you would refer to people from Europe as European unless you wanted to be specific to Italy, then you’d say Italian. But sometimes you need a general term, hence “American.”

    All that being said, it is problematic and a massive reminder of this country’s bloodthirsty and genocidal colonization of a large part of North America. Looking at the country’s past shows that they were very much trying to also get central and south America as part of the United States. What better way to propagandize and make it look like they had every right to the rest of the Americas than to make it appear as though this country or that country already was America and therefore should be part of these United States? But however problematic it is this is the name we have now, for better or worse.

    As an addendum of sorts. We Indigenous Americans would often much rather be called by the names of our sovereign Nations yet everyone calls us Native American. Why is that? Food for thought that might help with understanding the problematic struggle we have here. It’s not simply us as citizens that perpetuate the issue, it’s a global colonization effort whether the others realize they are participating or not. (Spoiler: they realize)

    tldr: because colonization + United States is a title not a name