They/them. Disabled queer non-binary feminist. Mid 30s. Autistic, agender, bi, polyam, chronically ill. Striving to be intersectional in my feminism.
Feminism, mental health, fandom, body positivity, occasionally poiltics, sometimes random funny stuff. No TERFs/radfems.
The /gardening subreddit is actually full of hippie anti-plastic anti-lawn freaks (affectionate) and I find it enjoyable and I saw a nine-word horror story I thought tumblr would enjoy
The emotion in this photo
IF YOU NEED TO GET RID OF MINT, USE OTHER PLANTS IN THE MINT FAMILY!!!
Related plants like lavender, sage, and thyme are immune to mint’s phytotoxins and will crowd out the mint. Rosemary is my favorite mint-killer since it grows fast and wide (regular pruning helps it cover more area).
These plants are perennials, but they are likely to die after a season since mint can harbor root rot that will affect other Lamiaceae but not mint (or plants outside the family). Leave the plant waste to provide soil cover, the mint rhizomes may still be dormant (but will die out soon). The spring after your mint-killers die, you should get some colonizing vegetation. Once those plants fully take root, you’re good to plant whatever your heart desires in the soil!
IF YOU NEED TO GET
RID OF MINT, USE OTHER PLANTS
IN THE MINT FAMILY!!!
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
A little over a year ago, my cousin died. It was sudden and horrible and deeply traumatizing for his father and brothers, who were the ones who found him.
For weeks after his death, between the bouts of sudden crying and melancholy, I was completely overwhelmed with guilt every time I was happy. I felt like if I kept living my life, then I was betraying his memory, that I was mocking the grief his parents and brothers were going through. That while I was playing video games or laughing with friends, my uncle and aunt and cousins were somewhere out there, completely wrecked by this horrific loss.
It’s a ridiculous mindset to have, making myself miserable wouldn’t be any comfort to my family or lessen their grief at all, but I think it’s something a lot of people experience when a distant loved one dies. You’re heartbroken, of course, but you weren’t close enough to them for your whole life to stop and you feel terrible about that.
And I feel like we’re seeing that a lot with global tragedies too. People learn about all these horrific things happening all over the world, things we can’t control or fix, amd we get overwhelmed by the guilt of continuing to live and be happy when others aren’t able to do the same. We’re paralyzed by our own self-induced misery, unable to find joy in the world and in our lives without feeling like we’re stealing it from someone else.
It’s just… not helpful. It’s not helpful to the people who are suffering, it’s not helpful to the people around us, and it’s not helpful to ourselves. And this isn’t me saying that people need to stop feeling those things or that they’re bad for it, because emotions aren’t logical. I’m just saying that you’re allowed to be happy. You’re allowed to keep living.
I saw the Welsh restaurant post, listened to two of the songs so far (Sebona Fi and Ben Rhys), and now I'm curious. What makes Sebona Fi faerie music? Is it bc Ywain Gwynedd sounds like a fae prince, or is it smth else, or a combination? I tried searching it and like half the results just linked to your post XD
Sebona Fi is an absolute cultural phenomenon. It’s absolutely absurdly popular among Welsh speakers, to a rabid extent. People who don’t like modern Welsh music like it; people who only like heavy metal like it; people who don’t speak a lick of Welsh hear it and like it. It’s faerie music because it makes you smile and want to dance, regardless of how you feel that day or whether you even understand it.
Yws Gwynedd played the main stage on the last Saturday of the Eisteddfod last year. I went up for it. Great concert throughout, but the last song they did was, of course, Sebona Fi, and you cannot imagine the crowd response. People went feral. There were little old ladies dancing like nutters. A hundred years could have passed in three minutes, we wouldn’t have known. No one asked for an encore, because they couldn’t have beaten it. We all understood that was the end of the night. Every band that’s lucky has one song that goes down in history, and for Yws Gwynedd it’s Sebona Fi
The translated lyrics, btw:
Go walking right across the sea
Catch your breath, you will faster feel the warm air
Like a kiss on your bare white skin.
Listen to nothing to open your world.
Sit down now, lay down your head,
every little thing will be all right if you sleep through the afternoon.
Because we’re all running like so many rats;
If you have half an hour,
Flatter me.
But remember the same old things are worrying everyone,
But in the end, we’re all dirt
Oh, life is so fine.
The taste of the grape is strong in the wine,
And the company is good.
Sing the song that kept us up,
Hold tightly - cats and dogs* are falling around your head,
But remember there is value to your smile.
Because we’re all running like so many rats;
If you have half an hour,
Flatter me.
But remember the same old things are worrying everyone,
But we’re all dirt in the end.
Oh, life is so fine.
The taste of the grape is strong in the wine,
And the company is good
*as in, it’s raining cats and dogs. The actual Welsh is ‘old ladies and sticks’, and that’s what he sings.
And here it is for anyone wondering what all the fuss is about:
When I realized pre-packaged food was for me, my entire outlook on life changed.
Let me explain.
I remember walking through the grocery store with my mother as a teen and her making a bitter comment about how everything had more packaging now. De-shelled hard boiled eggs in plastic, cut fruit, pre-portioned salads, all of it was “laziness” to her. She insisted people were getting lazier to the point where if my brother ate pizza from the fridge, she would chastise him for not heating it. She would say “you deserve warm pizza” as a way of saying you should do something the “right way” because it’s worth doing.
This isn’t because my mother had no concept of people with disabilities, she is disabled herself. However, in raising me, she taught me to hide that disability, to try to be on everyone else’s level so we aren’t seen as weaker. That laziness is worse than being disabled and there’s simply no excuse for taking shortcuts. I don’t think she intended to teach me this, but her own internalized ableism was so loud.
When I became an adult, I realized I hated cooking. The prep was tedious, I almost always have dishes in the sink, there’s cleanup after, my back hurts, my eyes burn, it’s too hot and in the beginning, I got overwhelmed to the point of crying. Leftovers were almost never eaten becuase heating them up (the “correct” way to eat them) was an extra step that made me not want to put the effort in. I thought I was lazy and felt ashamed when I wanted something to eat but couldn’t bring myself to make it.
At some point, I finally said “I’m tired. I don’t care how much packaging it is, I don’t care how lazy it is, I’m going to get meal kits.”
It was life-changing. Dinner takes 30 minutes to make. Everything is portioned. The directions are clear. I don’t hate it anymore. I want salads in bags. I want eggs that don’t take three steps to eat. It’s not laziness, it’s accessible! I don’t have to make a meal, I can eat the raw vegetables, have pasta with butter, eat a granola bar! There’s no right way to feed myself!
I made things SO HARD on myself because I wasn’t acknowledging my disability or my depression and they didn’t need to be hard! I didn’t need to go around the store saying “is that really necessary?” Because it IS necessary for me! It’s brilliant! It’s so helpful!
Accessibility takes so many forms and overcoming internalized guilt for not being able-bodied or mentally well enough to handle tasks other handle easily is incredibly freeing. Obviously I’m lucky to be in the position to have this option avaliable to me, but I kept myself from it for far too long.
I do deserve warm pizza. I can have it delivered.
A lifehack I recently figured out for myself on this exact vein: I love wraps. No place around me has gluten free wraps for takeout. Buying all the separate ingredients to make wraps ensures a lot of it will go to waste+some days just *assembling* ingredients is too much.
Enter:
The amount of stuff in the bowl is perfect for a nice wrap sandwich
Did I have to get over the “don’t be lazy/waste money” hump? You betcha.
Do I love being able to have wraps for lunch again at work? Oh yes.
[Image ID: Mission gluten free original tortillas, and a plastic container of Santa Fe Style salad with chicken]
I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.
I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”
And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”
“Do you now.”
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”
“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”
Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.
I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.
Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”
Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”
Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”
The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list
And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.
Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!
Big fan of the new Obvious Plant for obvious (plant) reasons
[ID: An Obvious Plant branded toy package in pink, orange and white with a realistic plastic prawn in the blister pack. Text reads “Fuck it, let’s PRAY TO THE PRAWN GOD. Benevolent! No church! Visibly patrols the sky in exchange for small fish and invertebrates! Bad stuff continues to happen, maybe try worship the Prawn instead? WARNING: VENGEFUL. do not cross the prawn” end ID]
[ID: The reverse of the package, with a prawn drawing at the bottom. Text reads “THE 8 TENETS OF PRAWN GOD. 1. Nature is sacred. 2. Do no harm. 3. Ingest of the BRINE. 4. Cleanliness is prawnliness. 5. Greed corrupts. 7. The number [REDACTED] is forbidden. 8. Devoutness shall be rewarded with: (1) A RIDE ON THE PRAWN. This prawnduct is not real. Nothing is real.” End ID]
