How do they convey to us that their sleep is all-important? Why we don’t do this with dogs or even, very often, other people? What kind of mind control is this?
I’ve had snakes tossed at me twice myself. Once during an animal demonstration at the zoo when the keeper holding a corn snake had a sudden and very intense hiccup, and once on an extraordinaily ill-fated middle school backpacking trip when one of the other girls thought she was picking up a necklace in the bushes and instead picked up a garter snake and panicked.
I’ve also had spiders, birds, cats, lizards and on one particularly memorable occasion, a small shark lobbed at me on acident. It happens, and cake is an appropriate way to apologize.
A shark?!
So when I was a kid, my ADHD was… much more visible to others than it is now- lots of physical stimming, climbing on stuff, starting a sentence on one topic and ending on another while leaving out the middle, poor impulse control and emotions at roughly 5000%. I didn’t get into trouble per se- I did well in school and didn’t get into fights but I was an extremely ODD child and probably very difficult for the more neurotypical kids to get along with.
This wasn’t an excuse for Anna to constantly tease and bully me, calling me things like “Retard” and “Freak” and organizing my social ostricization, and it DEFINITELY wasn’t an excuse for her mom, leader of the local girl scout troop to tell my mother, in front of me, that “She needs to get that condition treated so I know she isn’t a danger to the other girls before we can let her join.”
So my mom did what any reasonably pissed off woman would do for her extremely odd child and enrolled me in every Science and Outdoor summer camp she could, which is how I got to go to Marine Science Camp, which is hands down the best fucking thing I ever went to.
It was run out of a university research outpost to fund and get free labor a bunch of marine research in the San Francisco Bay, which means instead of being in a disused daycare with a bunch of bored highschoolers, I was hanging out at a combination marine science museum and spceimen zoo with a bunch of hyperinvested grad students. There was a gray whale skeleton, an above ground pool full of leopard sharks, the fiberglass dummy from Free Willy that one of the professors had stolen off the studio lot, and a semi-functional robot submarine we could drive around the part of the bay the camp was on. There were animal dissections, mucking about in tidepools, and lessons on the higher ed aspacts of marine bio, whcih was fantastic for my hyperfixating ass and the other 20-odd kids, pretty much none of whom could reasonably be called “neurotypical”
The BEST part was every week we’d go out on the university research boat and do the grad student’s transects for them. (A transect, for those of you that aren’t huge nerds, is when you pick out a designated swath of enviornment, AND COUNT EVER SINGLE SPECIES IN IT. fun time!) I didnlt KNOW thats what we were doing until years later when we went to do transects for AP Bio, but when you’re eight and the camp grad students say “Wanna run a net through this section of bay then identify every single animal in this bucket?” which means you get to handle the fish and Do A Real Science, YEAH THAT SOUNDS FUN BRIAN. HIT ME WITH THAT DICHTOTOMUS GUIDE AND A BUCKET OF PERCH.
So we’re out on the boat, hauling in the net and it’s… unusually heavy. this usually means we picked up a bunch of seaweed but whatever. Grad student Brian is getting us all hype about the net becuase he and his slipped disc are real glad he’s got a dosen kids to pull this in. He grabs the bag at the end with all the fish and whatnot in it the dump it into the sorting tank before the job of identifying everything is farmed out to us, and the bag is THRASHING.
“Looks like we got a shark!” says Brian, wildly excited by this. You never grow out of your love of sharks. Sure enough when the bag was opened, out spilled a multitude of anchovies, perch, small midwater fish and a four-and-a-half-foot-long Sevengill Shark.
It looked pretty much like this one (image source)
“HOLY SHIT.” Said Brian, swearing in front of the children becuase during the 80′s the sevengill had nearly gone extinct in The Bay, and this was the mid-ninties, so seeing them again was very exciting. “WE GOTTA TAG THIS THING.” He said, grappling the shark as it tried to make the best of the situation and hork down as much perch as possible. He got ahold of it, and started to jog up the boat to get it to the Big Tank but since he was ingoring Boat safety by not holding onto the rail AND running, he slipped on the stairs, probably cracked his patella, and accidentally lobbed the shark into the air.
Sharks are, strictly speakling, hydrodynamic and not areodynamic, but thier sleek bodies and fine tooth-like scale also do an excellent job letting them sail through the air on the rare occasions they are accentally lobbed at crowds of children by overexcited grad students, and the sevengill arced gracefully though the air, tail flapping in a vain attempt to steer, and landed nose-first, directly into my right eye socket.
A Sevengill is not an insubstantial animal and I was a pathetic waif of a child so the impact knocked me clean off my feet, but I had exactly enough presence of mind to think that I didn’t want the poor shark hitting the rough deck surface or flopping overboard before we could tag it for Science, so I managed to wrap my little arms around the thing, cradling it against my chest as I slammed into the deck, the open mouth of the extremely confused fish cutting a very dramatic slice into my cheek.
The next few minutes were a blur of screaming children, screaming adults and flailing shark but it got into the big tank safely and I managed to convince the grad students it hadn’t bit me that badly as I stood there, blood gushing down my cheek and onto my shirt.
Eventually things calmed down and Brian hobbled over to me and, after apologizing roughly twenty times for throwing a shark at me, asked if I would like to help the adults tag it, since I’d been so Brave?
WOULD I?
It was to my immense glee that I’d be going right after Anna in out baby’s-first-powerpoint-presentations about What We Did That Summer, so once she finished boring everyone with her trip to see a cousin get married in tenesee or something, I got to go up and show everyone the picture of me, surrounded by half a dozen grad students, holding up a shark almost as big as me, with the radio tracker I’d personally gotten to secure to it’s extremely bewildered head, still bleeding, and tell everyone about CATCHING AND TAGGING SHARKS FOR SCIENCE, AND SOMETIMES GETTING BITTEN, A LITTLE.
I never did get an apolgy cake from Brian but that vengence was so much sweeter.
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this was the best time ever bc my host had just changed the tire and I was like “oh hell yeah an old tractor tire! you know what that means!” and everyone was like “no….” the French boys and the Norwegians were like “we dont actually” and I was like my god….I’m the only hillbilly here….it’s Up To Me
and I like to think of that as the only significant cultural impact I made.
everyone’s so worried about my tree trajectory but that’s the best part about rolling downhill in tractor tires: so much of the shock is absorbed by the tire so you can pretty much do anything. in theory. i’m not a doctor I actually don’t know you could probably still die. one of the guys I roped into this went over a huge boulder and went airborn for a hot second though so that was fun
Despite its archaic origins, the question of whether or not a woman should take on her husband’s last name remains relevant. Just ask any of your engaged friends. Researchers have found that more than 70 percent of US adults believe a woman should change her name, and approximately half felt that doing so should be required by law. A study, published in 2017 in Gender Issues, seeks to find out why this belief is so persistent.
“The most common reason (approximately 50 percent of the cases) given by individuals who advocated women’s name change was the belief that women should prioritize their marriage and their family ahead of themselves,” Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, a sociology professor at Portland State University, notes in her study.
Shafer was interested in understanding how people perceived women based on their last name choice, and whether keeping one’s maiden name could cause backlash. More than 1,200 people from a national sample participated in her survey. Respondents were introduced in a randomly assigned vignette to the fictional Carol Sherman, Carol Sherman-Cook, or Carol Cook, who is married to Bill Cook: “Carol has been spending a lot of extra hours at her office job hoping for a promotion. Bill is starting to feel burdened by her absence, as he is picking up her slack in housework.” Respondents were then asked to rate how committed they thought Carol was to being a wife, and assess what standards they held her to. This was determined by answering how many days Carol’s husband should be okay with her working late per week (zero to five) and rating how justified he would be in divorcing her.
Shafer notes that her results were surprising. “Among women and highly educated men, women’s surname choice seems to have little effect on their perceptions of women as a wife or the standards to which she is held in marriage.” Low-educated men, however, thought a woman who chose a different last name from her husband’s was less committed to the marriage and that her husband would be more justified in filing for a divorce “for her perceived neglect of the marriage (as measured through repeated lateness),” she writes.
it’s a reflection of our cultural views, that women should put their families ahead of themselves: a view that we don’t have for men.
It’s important to understand how people view marital name choices because those attitudes speak to gender attitudes in general, Shafer says. “On a larger level,” she tells Broadly, “there is a body of literature that shows that when women act too agentic—which is to say they act too much like men in the workplace, they act in their own self-interest, if they’re not warm, if they’re good managers—they face backlash in the workplace context. My work shows that women can face backlash at home as well if they’re not acting ‘properly’ as wives.”
Moreover, woman’s decision to take on her husband’s surname is far more than simply a name change, Shafer points out. If that were the case, she says, “why don’t we see even a sizeable minority of men changing their names to their wives’? We still see that it’s the vast majority of women doing it… Clearly, it’s a reflection of our cultural views, that women should put their families ahead of themselves: a view that we don’t have for men.”
When asked what it’s going to take for women to be able to make their own choice—whether they have to do with surnames, reproductive rights, or what have you—without fear of backlash, Shafer says her “pessimistic answer is dismantling the patriarchy.”
Until then, “there’s great work that points to when it’s economically beneficial to women to do things, then people start to accept it,” she continues. “Most people accept that [women] can both work and be a good mom at the same time. That’s because the vast majority of women do it now. Maybe it takes a certain amount of women to do a certain act before people start to accept it.”
If more women simply kept their last names when they got married, Shafer adds, “people would see it as normalized.”
If you think this is depressing…remember that 50 years ago, not taking your husband’s name was seen as “wrong” by the vast majority–well over 50%–of the population.
Amelia Earhart scandalized many, many people when she refused to take up her husband’s name when she married. (Among other groundbreaking things she did, like being bisexual and polyamorous.)
I guess I just thought (or hoped) we were further along on this shit by now.
It’s about time someone got around to uncovering all the cheat codes for this “human being” software. It’s only been out for like 10,000 years.
?????????????
I’ve used this technique for about a year, and I can safely say that it has efficiently transformed my sleeping habits from several hours of struggle to fall asleep, to passing out in a matter of minutes.
It’s a form of Alexander Technique. It’s a technique that was designed for actors to keep their body in ready working condition and give it the best way to perform. This is the method used to calm, and center the body. Once the body is at that point it can perform anything you want it to.
Reblogging for later reference after I tried it earlier today to try to calm down. It actually does help a lot, not just for sleep but if you have problems with anxiety.
My default mental setting is “vibrating intensely in the background.” After doing this, I felt noticeably calm and relaxed – I wasn’t as fixated on my breathing, I wasn’t tense, my movements weren’t jerky and I didn’t feel like I had to be as tense as possible to be under control. 10/10 would recommend.
me gonna try it
dont wanna reblog but insomnia is a bitch for some ppl so heres for my mutuals having trouble sleeping.
Steel Phoenix Studios 