what i miss most about being a chocolatier (besides the honor of gayest job title imaginable) is we had these massive bars of chocolate for tempering that were 10lbs and we had to break them into smaller chunks. by using a sledgehammer of course. i LIVED for that shit
all the other people in production HATED busting them especially at the end of the shift but i fucking loved it. give me the hammer. i can be trusted with the hammer. And everyone did in fact trust me with the hammer because again they all thought it was tedious and painful. me? i was having the time of my life. even if i had to pick up the slack for other people i would be annoyed for all of five seconds before the euphoria of getting to smash things set in. and the production areas had windows too so customers often just got to watch me beat the shit out of a massive chocolate bar. with a hammer. like a zoo animal. i was getting paid to do that. every day i miss it.
I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.
About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.
The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.
It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.
Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.
They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”
“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”
It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone.
And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”
The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”
When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.
They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.
When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”
After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.
It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.
We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.
She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”
Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.
“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”
And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.
people are the most interesting thing in the world im obsessed w everyones weird habits and funny stories. the average person is so fucked up that its funny. like no one on earth is normal n u should make it ur job to see why
terfs keep mentioning the % of autistics who are trans/nb and that we're 'brainwashed'
and because i'm an asshole, i decided to look into why so many autistic folks are trans/nb. it's not an inaccurate statement, at least the first half, but terfs lie through their teeth so i decided to get to the scientific root of it.
the answer blew my fucking mind.
the study on gender and autism i found said two very specific things about autistic people: we are more mentally resistant to things like social conditioning and binarism. we like our secret third things, y'know.
an excerpt:
“The finding that non-binary identities are most elevated seems to support hypotheses focussed on autistic resistance to social conditioning, which are consistent with existing evidence of the same effect with respect to self-description of sexual orientation. Perhaps elevated rates of trans identity in autism might result from a rejection of the binary cisgenderist norm, which combined with a below-typical concern for social norms could promote the disclosure of the identity.”
94% of autistics surveyed for that paper identified themselves as non-binary.
other studies have found autistic people have higher levels of critical thinking, and require more evidence to maintain or convert to a belief system (hence why many of us eventually fall away from religion) than allistic people.
which means, at least from my perspective, that:
a) the 'brainwashing' terfs are accusing the trans community of inflicting on autistic folks would likely not even work if they tried.
b) the current binary definition of gender flies directly against embedded autistic modes of thinking to begin with.
you cannot brainwash someone into thinking something they already believe.
great news! that just straight-up doesn’t happen.
tarantulas can live for well over a decade, and female tarantulas can expect to breed multiple times before they finally kick it! and since there’s always the expectation of there going to be a new clutch of eggs in the nest every year, there’s no benefit in getting rid of the frogs that will keep those eggs safe.
a female columbian lesserblack tarantula will treasure and protect her frogs until the day she dies, and then those frogs will go into the care of whichever of her daughters inherits her burrow! it’s an eternal cycle. a cycle of frog.
This is the contact support form which is also the giving feedback form. I imagine this is more likely to get listened to than replying to staff posts with incoherent rage so I recommend just telling them the layout change is really bad before they get a chance to commit to it:
Please be more eloquent than this example. Also to the users with unchecked anger issues that you think makes you cool: no violently threatening the support team please that will help nothing and probably just be counterintuitive Just say the layout is bad and you don't like it. I believe in my heart that we can perform a #ThisNewLayoutSucksAssSweep
Fact #1: laser sights don’t help your aim; they’re highly inaccurate at any range longer than a couple dozen yards and only good for rapid target acquisition
Fact #2: absolutely every precision shooter knows this
Fact #3: almost nobody else knows this because movies have erroneously taught people that snipers paint a red dot on the target’s chest before they shoot them
Fact #4: any nazi who notices a red dot on their chest while giving a speech is going to immediately stop talking and get off the stage, probably while shitting themself
Fact #5: laser pointers are cheap, legal, and easy to conceal, and unless there’s smoke or dust or something in the air, theres no way to know where it’s coming from
Cats ‘technically’ become seniors at 7 years old. In reality, most indoor cats I’ve seen as a vet tech have typically lived to be between 14 and 18 years of age so I personally don’t consider a cat to really really be a senior until they’re 10, but I do recommend yearly bloodwork starting at 7 or 8 because I have seen both kidney disease and hyperthyroidism in cats that young. I’d call 13+ elderly.
We had a cat that lived to be 23 when I was a child, but my previous cat passed from kidney disease when he was I think around 13? It's a total roll of the dice with cats. Imagine if humans had lifespans that variable...most people would still live to 70-80 but sometimes someone would just forget about that and live to be 150+ for no real reason.
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