LGBT activists have been vocal about intersex issues for several decades, because establishing the legal right to bodily autonomy for intersex persons is basically inseparable from establishing the right of trans persons to that same legal autonomy over their own bodies. many intersex persons prefer not to be grouped together with LGBT causes; however, the vast majority of LGBT activists would agree that performing “corrective” surgery on intersex infants - to force them to adhere to a largely fictional gender binary - is pretty fucking evil.
going through my microsoft word archives is great fun because i always find the wildest shit in there and by “the wildest shit” i mean the time i tried to rewrite the entire bible from scratch at the age of eleven and a half
“And so Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, and Eve turned to Adam and said, 'Nice going, loser.‘”
iconic
whilst you were listening to avril lavigne, i learned the way of the Lord
Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.
I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.
This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.
So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.
Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.
“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.
“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”
“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.
I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.
Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.
I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.
So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.
While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.
After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.
“I saw your snake,” I told him.
“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”
“He was sleeping.”
“Yes, he enjoys that.”
“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”
He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”
Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.
Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.
“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”
He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”
When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.
All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.
He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”
Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.
In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.
But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.
He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.
By hand.
With a fountain pen.
And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.
please raise your children to wash their hands after they use the restroom I’ve watched too many men walk straight out of the bathroom from the stall without a second thought and it’s keeping me up at night
I mean if you taking a piss who cares if you don’t wash your hands, unless you just like go full power and spray yourself like a out of control fire hose
stay the fuck away from me
people who wash their hands after peeing are weak and must be culled
The only excuse for not washing your hands after you piss is mastering the art of pissing without touching your genitals.
You wash your hands every time you touch your dick? How grimy is your dick?
I’m literally never shaking a man’s hand ever again in my life y'all need jesus
remember how i told y'all?
(they don’t wash their hands after shitting either)
What I’m learning is that men are the reason for “employees must wash their hands” signs and why I never put 2 and 2 together is beyond me
Just out of curiosity, do yall wash your hands every time you touch your arm or the back of your hand or any other part if your body?
“According to epidemiologist Richard T. Ellison III, it doesn’t matter what you do in the bathroom when it comes to keeping your hands clean. ‘The rationale is that when toileting, it’s possible to have fecal material and fecal bacteria get onto your hands … So it’s wisest to always wash with soap and water even after urinating. Neither plain water nor alcohol hand sanitizers are effective at removing fecal material or killing bacteria in fecal material.’
“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, handwashing can prevent various illnesses and infections. Ellison added that it can also keep us from coming in contact with E. Coli and hepatitis.This is especially important for men to bear in mind because of perianal sweat. This type of sweat forms around the perianal area, which is the patch of skin outside the rectum. It can then spread to one’s underwear and to other parts of the body like the penis. Biology professor Pat Fidopiastis explained, ‘The point is that simply touching the penis in an effort to direct your urine flow can be more than enough to transfer harmful microbes to your hands, and then on to the pretzels sitting in bowl on the bar.’“
WASH.
YOUR.
HANDS.
I reblog this every time I see it. Don’t be disgusting, wash your fucking HANDS.
The bar is so low for men, holy shit.
the bar is on the ground and these chucklefucks have brought shovels
I get really confused when americans, when talking about universal health care are like ‘yeh but it’s not free sweaty :) :) you have to pay it through taxes :) so gotcha!!’
and I’m like ….???? That’s the whole point??? Everyone pays their fair share so that no one has to be turned away because they don’t have insurance??? And no one has to set up a Fundraiser page just so that they DONT DIE???? So people don’t put off going to the doctor because they’re scared of going bankrupt?? Because healthcare is a RIGHT and should be free at the point of access?!?
“So no one has to be turned away” she says hahaha go to a universal health care country and get a necessary operation in less than a few years and come back and talk shit.
Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.
Tear your ACL in a universal health care country and see what the people say if you should go to their hospitals or go to an American hospital, then talk shit.
2010. I’d been feeling a bit ill. Work was going nuts, so I figured it was stress. Pretty good call considering a week later work fired their entire IT department (of which I was part).
But then I got sicker. And it turned out I had cancer.
Burkitt’s lymphoma, stage 4a. It had spread into my brain and spinal column. 90% cure rate, but I needed nine months of chemo - and not the outpatient chemo, nope, talking multiple week stays per round of the magrath protocol. Drugs were about 10k an IV bag. I was unemployed. And there were complications.
Thankfully I live in a country with universal healthcare. And it didn’t cost me a goddamn cent to save my life. I’m now officially past the five year mark to move me from “remission” to “Cured”.
I’ve lived in a universal healthcare country my entire life. And I’ve seen the US system in action. Your system is fucked. Straight up fucked. You’ve got fucking Dickensian shit going on there, people dying on streets from preventable causes or ending up broke for breaking a hip. Your health insurance companies have you by the balls and people like you are begging them to squeeze harder. What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
“But but but TAXESSSSSSSSS”
yeah no shit. That story above? Happened when I was 32. I’d spent 14 years of my life paying those fucking taxes that funded the system that saved my life. And guess what? Now I’m cured, I’m…Back..at work..And have been for several years…earning waaaay more money and paying back into the system.
This shit doesn’t exist in a vacuum, dickhead. You’re not feeding some imaginary pack of leeches, you’re paying forward on your own damned healthcare so you don’t have to argue with an insurance company while trying to heal.
i also don’t get why americans can’t wrap their heads around the fact that universal healthcare is actually cheaper
like yeah your taxes might go up (hell, take a chunk out of the military budget, they might not even change) but you won’t have to pay ridiculous health insurance premiums. it’s a net saving, dumbasses.
Also I care about people that aren’t me
Also I care about people that aren’t me
the only people I have ever known who voluntarily went to an American hospital instead of a Scandinavian one (Scandinavian hospitals being all universal healthcare), was my big brother’s family who have a son with a heart condition. They’re Icelandic. Iceland, with a population of about 300.000 people, does not have a specialised children’s hospital so the surgery they needed for their child just wasn’t available in the country - not uncommon, so what the Icelandic health care system does in those cases is pay for the surgery to take place abroad in a hospital with doctors who can perform the surgery. So they decided to go to America (Iceland paid) to some hotshot children’s hospital to get surgery for their baby, and they had to wait 4 months for this vital and urgent surgery even though it was paid for up front. In your so-called amazing American hospital. For comparison, the same kind of surgery here in Denmark is actually urgent, so the child has to wait 2 days tops to get the damn surgery.
So miss me with that “waiting time of a couple of years” bullshit. That’s not a thing.
“But you’ll have to wait” – we still have to wait if we’re not rich. At least I won’t be bankrupt by the end of it.
