Just a reminder, but you do not need to “earn” being tired.
You’re allowed to be tired, even if you haven’t “done” anything and you’re allowed to be tired even if you did less than someone else.
Being tired is a normal thing your body does for a whole plethora of reasons, and is a basic bodily function. You don’t need to “earn” basic bodily functions, no matter what anyone else tells you.
hey hey hey this is really important, especially as a reminder to people with disorders that cause chronic exhaustion.
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Also, the custard pie has gravity on its side. Something falling from six feet up plus the height of the person dropping it (assuming they’re at the top of the stepladder), has a hell of a lot more force behind it than one that just sits there and does nothing.
The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison.
…is that Rachael Leigh Cook, the same actress who did the original anti-drug ad when she was a teenager?
I feel like we have a bad habit of dehumanizing ‘badass’ female characters.
Take the mcu fandom for example; 90% of fics and headcanons I see about Natasha Romanoff and Peggy Carter depict them as these flawless, terrifying, perfect human beings.
But why?
The thing that makes these characters so interesting and awesome is the fact that they aren’t perfect. That this facade they put on for the rest of the world is a facade, and that only after getting to know them do we really get to see their flaws, their quirks – the things about them that make them human.
So why do we erase that?
Why do we ignore the fact that they screw up sometimes, that they don’t always have the right thing to say, and sometimes they need to lean on people for support?
There’s no shame in being imperfect. There’s no shame in having emotions and feeling things deeply and making mistakes and needing help. These aren’t bad things.
But we never seem to let these strong, female characters be broken or imperfect.
Where’s the fic of Peggy pushing down anxiety after anxiety day after day, and one day snapping over spilled nail polish? Where’s the fic of Natasha Romanoff handcuffing herself to her bed, crying and drowning in self-loathing?
Or, hell, where’s the fic of them not looking like they just walked off a photoshoot? Where’s the fic of Nat with frizzy hair and sweat pants?
Why do we dehumanize badass female characters?
I don’t know, I guess I just don’t want little girls – and hell, grown up girls – thinking they have to be this flawless, emotionally cut-off, physically impeccable human in order to be respected.
You don’t have to give up your flaws in order to be worthwhile.
Your Faves™ aren’t perfect. They’re not. And that’s okay. That’s more than okay.
