and first off, I’m 5’7, 5’11 in dance shoes, 170 pounds, broad shoulders and big hips and not small in any dimension. For a ballroom dancer, this means a lot of time spent learning the men’s parts. Especially in lifts.
I’ve had years now of guys kinda just going “lol heck naw” when told to lift me. I don’t admit this part much, but it makes me want to sink into the ground and die when every other girl can be lifted, but I’m just too big.
So this guy, smaller than me and really cute, shows up at auditions and I see this girl across the room getting tossed about like the beautiful pixie she is, and apparently I looked a little wistful because this boy asked me if I liked lifts.
“Oh. I… Uh… I’ve never really done the girls part. I’m a little big, haha…” (laugh it off, as usual.)
He looked me dead in the eye and then picked me up like a movie princess, bounced me in the air a few times, and set me down effortlessly while telling me whoever refused to lift me before was just being a lazy wimp.
I seriously doubt this boy will ever really get how much that meant to me. But, holy cow. Some faith in humanity just got restored.
so im at work and bagging for this lady and her little kid and the kids askin me about what its like being a big kid and all that so he goes “do you have a girlfriend? is she pretty?” and i live in a pretty liberal area and it was pretty quiet in the store so i just calmly responded “actually i have a boyfriend, but he’s fairly pretty” and the mom just kinda pauses on her phone and looks down at her son like please dont say anything bad please dont embarrass me but he just gets so fuckin excited and is like “you can do that ???? i didnt know boys were allowed to have boyfriends!!” and hes turns to his mom and is pulling at her phone trying to get her attention and is just really excited like “mom did you know that ? can i have a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend ??” and she just started laughing and was like “if you want sure” and they took their groceries and left and im just standing there like
DID THAT JUST HAPPEN
THAT WAS SO CUTE
The purest post.
OMG
That is so cute and that mother!!!!! Good job mom.
Today, my 84 year old neighbour said to me, “I quite like mushrooms. They have a good outlook on life.” She then admitted she felt a bit silly to have said that and suggested not many people would understand what she meant.
Please reblog for Ann so I can show her how many people appreciate her wholesome perspective on mushies.
Wow! Thank you so much for all your kind validation of Ann and her mushrooms! Ann and I are completely blown away by the response to this post. She doesn’t have a computer, so I printed off a selection of your messages for her to read. Needless to say, she was more than a little surprised.
Ann is doing well and still enjoying her positive mushrooms. I visited her yesterday and we shared a bit of disgruntled pizza. She keeps telling me how amazed she is by all of you. Your messages are now in an envelope which Ann keeps in a special place so she can look at them whenever she likes.
Thanks for helping me show Ann that her unique thoughts and perspectives are valuable and treasured.
“if you want to adopt kids at an older age, that’s just lazy and you’ll miss the important developmental years. you won’t be able to connect.” okay but consider this:
1. I will not be able to handle a baby, but I will definitely be able to manage and guide an older child
2. no diapers. hallelujah
3. As a foster child gets older, their chance of adoption plummets. Adopting an older child gives a late break to someone who would have otherwise had to age out of the system
4. my plans for adoption are none of your concern
Holy shit people actually say that? Inviting a kid in need to be part of your family is ‘lazy’?
Being there for the ‘developmental years’ is so important not having it is a dealbreaker?
‘You won’t be able to connect’ with another human being unless you’re there for their formative years, imprinting on them?
…people who make that argument should probably do a LOT of soulsearching before they consider getting a toy baby adopting a younger child.
I had a sociology professor once and both he and his wife were registered social workers (in addition to him teaching), and after a couple of years married, they started talking about adopting a child. They’d seen the system up close, they knew how hard it was for some kids to get adopted. So when they sat down to start the fostering process, they told the agency to give them their toughest, most difficult case. If anyone could handle a kid who’d been labeled a “problem child”, it was these two people.
The agency paired them up with a 12 year old girl – the oldest they had, far, far too old to be considered for adoption typically. This girl’s birth parents had had drug problems, she’d been in and out of a couple dozen foster homes, no one able to handle her, she ran away frequently and had diagnosed behavioral problems, she was surly and defiant. When she first met them, she was clammed up tight, snarky, unwilling to trust them or anyone – and really, who could blame her?
But these two adults poured every bit of their compassion and training into this one child, into getting to know her, earning her trust by listening to her and treating her like a person who mattered. And slowly, slowly, she came around. Slowly, they built a relationship with her, and she came out of her shell. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but having these two adults who were utterly unwilling to give up on her, or see her as the problem, let them work through each issue as it arose, and slowly they started to see this other side of her personality emerge. She joked around, she grinned often, she got excited about sports games and yelled at the tv with her foster father, she was making friends at her new school and doing better in her studies.
One day they sat her down and told her they loved her and they wanted her to legally, officially be part of their family. But they thought she deserved a say, too. If she just wanted to be fostered for the next five, six years, they could do that too. But they wanted to adopt her, they wanted to keep her for always. Did she want them? Yes, she said. Yes, I want to keep you, too.
My professor came into class one day with a grin that just would not go away, bouncing on his toes. We all wanted to know what was up. The adoption was finalized today, he told us. Today I have a daughter! And he showed us pictures of his brand new 12 year old daughter hugged between he and his wife, the three of them grinning at the camera. I’ve been her dad for awhile, he told us, but today it’s official, today we’re finally really a family.
I heard that story in the spring of 2001, when I was 20. This girl just 8 years younger than me, the age of my younger siblings, this girl who everyone had given up on. But these two people, they knew they had enough love and training to handle whatever was thrown their way, these people stayed true to the commitment of being parents, didn’t give up when the going got tough, proved slowly and methodically that they loved her, that she could trust them.
That girl must be in her late 20s now. She’s had parents for more than a decade and a half. She hasn’t had to face this scary century alone. She has parents who went with her to her freshman orientation for college, I’m certain of it. If she’s gotten married, I know her father walked her down the aisle, that same grin splitting his face, the same grin as when he announced that he had a daughter, the same grin he wore every time he talked about her. If she’s had kids, her kids have the best grandparents.
They are a family of choice built on commitment and trust and love. You can’t tell me that isn’t bonding, you cannot tell me that it’s lazy, that that was somehow easier or less worthwhile than diapers.
My wife, Zoe, is transgender. She came out to us — the kids and me — last summer and then slowly spread her beautiful feminine wings with extended family, friends, and neighbors.
A little coming out here, a little coming out there — you know how it is.
It’s been a slow, often challenging process of telling people something so personal and scary, but pretty much everyone has been amazing.
However, she dreaded coming out at the office.
She works at a large technology company, managing a team of software developers in a predominantly male office environment. She’s known many of her co-workers and employees for 15 or so years. They have called her “he” and “him” and “Mr.” for a very long time. How would they handle the change?
While we have laws in place in Ontario, Canada, to protect the rights of transgender employees, it does not shield them from awkwardness, quiet judgment, or loss of workplace friendships. Your workplace may not become outright hostile, but it can sometimes become a difficult place to go to every day because people only tolerate you rather than fully accept you.
But this transition needed to happen, and so Zoe carefully crafted a coming out email and sent it to everyone she works with.
The support was immediately apparent; she received about 75 incredibly kind responses from coworkers, both local and international.
She then took one week off, followed by a week where she worked solely from home. It was only last Monday when she finally went back to the office.
Despite knowing how nice her colleagues are and having read so many positive responses to her email, she was understandably still nervous.
Hell, I was nervous. I made her promise to text me 80 billion times with updates and was more than prepared to go down there with my advocacy pants on if I needed to (I might be a tad overprotective).
And that’s when her office pals decided to show the rest of us how to do it right.
She got in and found that a couple of them had decorated her cubicle to surprise her:
And made sure her new name was prominently displayed in a few locations:
They got her a beautiful lily with a “Welcome, Zoe!” card:
And this tearjerker quote was waiting for her on her desk:
To top it all off, a 10 a.m. “meeting” she was scheduled to attend was actually a coming out party to welcome her back to work as her true self — complete with coffee and cupcakes and handshakes and hugs.
NO, I’M NOT CRYING. YOU’RE CRYING.
I did go to my wife’s office that day. But instead of having my advocacy pants on, I had my hugging arms ready and some mascara in my purse in case I cried it off while thanking everyone.
I wish we lived in a world where it was no big deal to come out.
Sadly, that is not the case for many LGBTQ people. We live in a world of bathroom bills and “religious freedom” laws that directly target the members of our community. We live in a world where my family gets threats for daring to speak out for trans rights. We live in a world where we can’t travel to certain locations for fear of discrimination — or worse.
So when I see good stuff happening — especially when it takes place right on our doorstep — I’m going to share it far and wide. Let’s normalize this stuff. Let’s make celebrating diversity our everyday thing rather than hating or fearing it.
Chill out, haters. Take a load off with us.
It’s a lot of energy to judge people, you know. It’s way more fun to celebrate and support them for who they are.
Besides, we have cupcakes.
Thank you. I needed this story today.
What a lovely story.
First happy tears of the day. Read it, let it soothe a little of the ugliness of today’s news.
If you ever feel bad about taking a longer time than someone else to accomplish the same things, just remember that during the 1912 Stockholm Olympics Japanese marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri passed out in a garden party along the marathon route and, instead of notifying race officials of his inability to finish the race, he went back to Japan without telling anyone and was considered a missing person by the Swedish authorities for 50 years.
He didn’t finish the race until 1967 when a Swedish television station offered to help him complete the run, and he finished with a final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.379 seconds.
This post needs the picture of the man finally crossing the finish line.
do you ever look back at a childhood memory and think that it should have by all rights become a significant theme in your life and you wonder why the fuck those things/people haven’t come back around yet and then remember that your life isn’t a perfectly plotted out novel?
Aww shucks. It’s almost like I asked for this opportunity. (I did. Thank you for indulging me, @laughingthelaughiest) General warnings for the description of things involved with terrible car accidents – aka screeching metal and lots of blood. Happy ending though, I promise! Nobody died.
I am six years old. My father plows snow in the winter months, which means that bolted onto the front of his work truck is a very heavy snow plow that – when not in use – rests primly about a foot above the ground like a lady lifting up her skirts as she steps over a puddle.
“Hey kiddo, do you want to come to work with me?” my dad asks one day during a relatively minor* snowstorm.
(* minor my ass)
Because there was nothing more exciting to me at this time in my life than sitting in a warm truck and watching what is essentially a large metal trough push tons of snow from one end of a parking lot to the other, I practically yell, “WHY YES DAD, THAT SOUNDS GREAT!!!” and we get in the truck.
Only instead of arriving at our intended destination, we encounter a car coming from the opposite direction that spins out on a patch of black ice and manages to hurtle broadside at full speed into the plow.
I am pretty much just flung forwards, and terrible things happen to my face when my body continues on its general trajectory towards the windshield. Thanks, momentum!
Luckily (and novel-like), there was a nurse a couple of cars behind us who stopped to see if everyone was okay. She opened my door to find that I was very clearly not okay, and while my father did his best to staunch the blood that was streaming down my face, she tasked herself with keeping me conscious until the paramedics arrived.
Being six and probably concussed, she didn’t talk to me about anything complicated. I did not know who the president was. I sure as heck couldn’t have told you the date. But my favorite subject in school? I know that! Reading! My favorite color? Yellow! My favorite animal? GIRAFFES.
It’s important at this stage to mention that this car accident occurred on a street where people lived, and there had been a group of boys playing in the snow two houses up from where the truck stopped. Boys + crushed cars + blood = apparently just riveting, because a couple of them were staring at me/the vehicles from a couple yards away.
At my presumably slurred but very enthusiastic response of “GIRAFFES!” one of these boys split off from the rest and hoofed it through the snow towards his house. I was too focused on wanting to sleep and the nurse not letting me to notice this, but it for sure happened. As you will see.
Several sirens later, I am loaded into the ambulance wearing a neck brace and what feels like all of the gauze on planet Earth. My dad climbs in next to me, and the paramedic is just about to shut the doors when there’s a very small voice from outside.
We are all as so:
My father: probably still terrified that I’m going to die, literally could not care less what this other tiny child who is not his has to say, wants to get to the hospital, still has to call and tell my mom that I’m injured
The paramedic: good at his job, knows I’m stable, has a moment to spare, leans back out of the ambulance.
Myself: still in shock, staring up at the rows of medical supplies and disgustingly bright lighting, more concerned that my dad will crush my fingers than anything else going on in, say, the bleeding face area. (Severe head injury? Who’s she? DAD I KNOW YOU LOVE ME BUT PLEASE LET GO OF MY HAND THAT HURTS.)
The boy who had hoofed it home and then evidently hoofed it right back: “Would you please give this to the little girl who got hurt?”
Me now in the year 2018: wanting to cry because I still can’t believe this is a real thing that happened to me in real life and it wasn’t a dream it was real
So the paramedic says “Yes, of course. She’ll love it!” or something equally as efficient because I am still technically quite injured and they really do need to get to the hospital at some point. The boy leaves, the door is shut, the paramedic sets something on the stretcher next to me.
[pause for dramatic effect]
We tried to find the kid who gave him to me, but nothing ever came of it. In the back of my fully healed head I’m still waiting for the novel that must be my life to shoehorn that boy back into the plot. Where are you, giraffe man? I have to thank you for the best gift I’ve ever been given.
Steel Phoenix Studios 