Bocmarkhord - Somewhat Less Subject To The Vagaries Of Fate

I am needlessly riled by all the posts and humans' inherent goodness.

Humans are *neutral*, man. That's why improving society really needs to look like making doing the right thing the path of least resistance.

A majority of people sit right around the tall bit of some sort of bell curve with "does selfish shit that could hurt others by default, is generous under the right circumstance" is one side of the peak and "is generous by default, will do selfish shit that could hurt others under the right circumstances" on the other.

You can observe it any day by observing people under stress (eg: bad traffic, busy supermarket, an unexpectedly un/pleasant interaction with a stranger who is very different to you) - and in yourself in circumstances you find particularly stressful.

Hey kid, look at me.

I want you to T-pose. Turn your right thumb up and your left thumb doen and look at your right thumb. Move your arms up and down a bit until you feel a nerve running from your armpit to your palm. Now turn your right thumb down and your left thumb up, and look at your left thumb. Keep your chest facing forward and your shoulders back. Move your arms again until you feel that nerve again. Keep alternating between these two for a minute, or look at each thumb thirty times each.

Now sit down. Put your left hand firmly under your left buttock, palm down. Keep your shoulders back and put your right hand over the crown of your head, very gently pulling it to the right. Do this for thirty seconds, then do it again but with your right hand under your right buttock.

These are stretches for the nerves in your arms, and are very good for people who sit behind a computer a lot, or fibre artists, or you name it. Do them daily. They will hurt in the beginning, but keep doing them, even after the pain has gone, or it will return and you'll have to start all over.

Patron Saint Bluebell

Hey, listen. I know the world’s on fire. But listen. I’ll tell you a thing. On the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most comfort? It wasn’t the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya Angelou, it wasn’t Psalms or poetry, it wasn’t my grandmother, it wasn’t contemplating the long arc of history. It wasn’t even hugging the dog. It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman. This is a joke account. It’s somebody who narrates as if Conan was working in an office. Tweets usually sound like “By Crom!” roared Conan. “You jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and cackling?!” or “Conan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.” I followed it awhile back and have found it funny. (I’m not a huge Robert Howard fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all. Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character, telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those unable to fend for themselves. (“Though by Crom! We must hammer ourselves into a support network, not an army!”) I have no idea who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a lot of people. If only a tiny bit–well, tiny bits help. I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down. There’s absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there weren’t any other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a result. Ahem. Bluebell is a minor character. He’s Captain Holly’s friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving, hallucinating, and screaming “O zorn!” meaning “all is destroyed” and about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid jokes. And they make it the whole way because of Bluebell’s jokes. “Jokes one end, hraka the other,” he says. “I’d roll a joke along the ground and we’d both follow it.” When Holly can’t move, Bluebell tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him, Holly says no, that “we wouldn’t be here without his blue-tit’s chatter.” I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell. I am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea. (What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous Breakdown of ‘07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed, because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I wasn’t that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.) But I can roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to. And increasingly, I think that’s what I’m for in this life. Things are bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the news is a gibbering horror–but I actually do know why a raven is like a writing desk. So. First Church of Bluebell. Patron Saint. Keep holding the line.

spaci1701 replied to your post “Just in case you’re ever embarrassed about doing something silly or…”

So nice that he’s willing to offer his professional opinion of your husband’s teeth for free. Did he have some good news for you? Does it involve pliers?

So I had a CT scan, and lots of other stuff done, and they “couldn’t find anything immediately wrong” on film, which he very quickly assured me, didn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.

He thinks the pain coming from one particular tooth (the one making me want to rip my face off) is a filling I might be allergic to which is causing the tooth to self destruct, so before he takes the whole tooth out he wants to see if he can fix the filling and pack it with something I wont be allergic to and just try to save me from any more surgery. So that’s what I will be doing next week to try and get me out of pain. (We need to wait for some testing to come back before he feels happy putting things into my jaw)

He’s also willing to extract my root canal teeth because in his own words “there’s no way they should hurt like that”, but first he wants to send me to an orthodontist, to evaluate my bite because my jaw muscles are a mess, and it’s because my teeth have been ground so far down by the previous dentist none of them touch, so I’m performing gymnastics just to be able to chew and eat. And braces would help with that.

We also discovered that I also have a cluster of excess of nerve bundles, all on the lower left side of my jaw, which is why I can get drilled on the right side of my face and not flinch, but the left side never goes numb. Which is why no matter what they are doing, they are not able to get me numb for procedures.

Which is why the root canals on the left side of my face all feel like they are failing, despite appearing fine on film and upon re-opening. It’s my face recovering from the trauma of being fully “live” while having the roots stripped out. When I described my root canal experiences he sat with his eyes closed gripping his head in his hands. He also doesn’t think with my inflammation issues I am a candidate for root canal or implants, he thinks my body will reject them based purely on the fact that my root canal teeth just won’t heal, like my jaw is trying to push them out.

He also thinks one of those nerve bundles might have got hit by a needle when they were trying to get me numb—based on some residual bruising I have inside my mouth. So now my nerves are all freaking out and healing from being quite literally stabbed multiple times, which explains why NONE of my pain killers are working either.

He was very much “why are you not screaming from pain right now” and I was very “I am too tired to scream, just help me, please help me”. He promised me he’d find a way or find someone else who could.

I cried.

Several times.

Because someone believes me.

And they think they might know what to do. Also they made me a cup of tea when I started crying and held my hand.

They seem like good people who care. So I’m hopeful.

I’m still in a LOT of pain, but I’m really hopeful.

I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.

When I was a child, I knew that boys grew up and married girls, and vice versa. And this was simply the way the universe worked. 

By the time I was six I knew the basic mechanics of sex, the progression of pregnancy. The former sounded uncomfortable, messy and embarrassing, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would do it, except that it was apparently necessary for the second. And the second was fascinating and magical, so I supposed that made sense. 

(When I was ten, I was probably in love with my “best” friend, inasmuch as a ten year old can be in love with anyone. I worshipped the ground she walked on; her attention or lack thereof devastated me. In every cute little kid “so in love” story you’ve ever heard of, I was in the role given to the little boy, hearts-in-eyes, blindly devoted, absolutely in love.) 

When I was eleven, I encountered the idea that men could marry men, and women could marry women, and it seemed entirely pointless to me, and also I couldn’t figure out how two women could have sex. How did that even work? Men I could sort of figure out although it seemed even more uncomfortable and messy than men-and-women. It was weird. But I supposed if that was what people wanted, that’s what they wanted. 

(When I was thirteen I fell in love with one of the ladies in my father’s community choir. It was full on courtly love, and I languished silently. I wanted to sit near her and I wanted her to talk to me and I wanted to carry her bag and I wanted to help her do things and I wanted to beat up her good-for-nothing husband who made her sad and insisted they get the cat she loved declawed as the only way to not get rid of it at all, and I wanted to find some way to show her that the expectations that their Mormonism were heaping on her were so unfair and so messed up and so keeping her from realizing how amazing and smart and pretty and funny and clever she was. I would have gone on quests against dragons for that woman.) 

Keep reading

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.

what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.