So, after thinking about this over night, I’ve decided to share something that happened at the WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL yesterday afternoon in NYC that changed me. Or rather made me step into who I am in a larger way.
As some on my feed have seen, I was live-feeding the beginning of the panel discussion on FB. That panel was made up of some of the greatest and most famous minds in the world in Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Cosmology and Physics based Philosophy. The panel was made up of 5 men and 1 woman. And the moderator was a science writer and journalist for The New Yorker.
In the first hour of the panel discussion you can see clearly, if watching the video, that Veronika Hubeny, the only woman on the panel is barely given any opportunity to speak. And the Moderator, Jim Holt even acknowledges this.
In the last 20-30 minutes of the 90 minute discussion Jim Holt finally pushes the conversation to Hubeny’s field of expertise, string theory, and this is what ensued:
He asked her to describe her two theories of string theory that seem to contradict one another.
And THEN, without letting her answer, proceeded to answer for her and describe HER theories in detail without letting her speak for herself.
We could clearly see that she was trying to speak up. But he continued to talk over her and dominate the space for several minutes.
I should say that this panel was taking place in a large auditorium as it is an extremely high-profile and always sold-out event. And the panel discussion was being live-streamed across the world and they say that millions of people watch these videos after they are made public. (Which they already are).
So at this point, after seeing very clearly that she was not going to be given space to speak and in fact having her own theories described to the audience by the moderator, I am in full outrage. My body is actually beginning to shake. The sexism is beyond blatant. It is happening on stage and NO ONE, not a single other physicist or panelist is stepping in to say anything about it. And I can hear other audience members around me, both men and women becoming more and more agitated with what is happening. Jim Holt, even at one point, asks Veronica a question and she laughs because he has been answering his own questions about her work…and he makes fun of her for ‘giggling’.
So at some point while he is Still talking about Her theories, I just can’t handle it any longer.
With my hands shaking,
I finally say from my seat in the 2nd row of the audience, as clearly, directly and loudly as possible;
“Let. Her. Speak. Please!”
The moderator stops.
They all stop.
The auditorium drops into silence.
You could hear a pin drop.
And then the audience explodes with applause and screams.
Jim Holt eventually sat back, only after saying I was heckling him And he let her speak. And of course, she was brilliant.
———————–
So, the panel discussion ends.
My hands are still shaking. I’m still upset by the incredible sexism that has been demonstrated this afternoon. But I also realize that I just spoke up in an auditorium full of people that are listening to people that are considered gods in the international science world. I was just overwhelmed by it all
We get up to leave.
And then it happens.
Person after person come up to me. Both men and women.
The first woman, right behind me, reaches over and embraces me and says, “Oh my god. what you said was the most important thing that was said all day. Thank you. Thank you.”
And then people start filing out of their aisles and wind their way over to me:
“Was that you? Thank you so much for speaking up. Thank you.”
“Was that you? Oh god, what he was doing was horrific. Thank you. I wanted to do something but didn’t know how”
“Was that you? I wish I had the courage to say something, thank you! Thank you so much”
“Was that you? You said what everyone here was thinking. Look I had even been writing in my notebook what you eventually said (shows me his notebook with ‘let her speak’ written over and over.) But you said it. You said it. Thank you.”
“Was that you? Thank you! I felt so powerless to do anything.”
And on.
So we were all thinking this.
—- So I walked out. And my friend who was sitting about 8 rows behind me, came up to me with a huge grin and said “That was you, wasn’t it? Of course it was. YES!!!!! I will be telling this story for years.”
And the whole time, my hands are still shaking. And I’m felling light-headed. And I just want to scream out into the lobby “WHY IS THIS SEXISM STILL HAPPENING? WHY, does someone like me, with No status in that room, have to be so extraordinarily bold and speak up? And why was it so frightening to do so?”
And I’m thinking. “God, please god let this be an opening for those that were here today and the tens of thousands that watched the live-streaming of the panel yesterday and the hundreds of thousands that will watch the video this year- to speak up when we see this happening. And please let me not be afraid to do this again …and again …and again” Because it was scary.
A story for all you Jurassic Park loving peeps out there. I learned about
this in my Disaster Response and Emergency Preparedness course that I
just started. In 1992, Jurassic Park was finishing filming on the
island of Kaua’i in Hawai’i. The final day was scheduled for September
11. However, brewing out in the Pacific and headed straight for Hawai’i
was Category 4 Hurricane Iniki. The crew had been keeping an eye on it,
but it was expected that Iniki would turn its course slightly. The
afternoon of September 10, however they were informed that it was going
to make landfall in a few hours, impacting Kaua’i with the main brunt of
it. The crew of hundreds was ordered into the basement of the hotel
they were staying in, and they waited it out that night. (Rather
hilariously, Richard Attenborough slept through the whole ordeal where
others were awake, huddled together and fearing for their lives. When
Spielberg asked him about it, he answered, “My dear boy, I survived the
blitz!” I guess after that, a little hurricane is just pleasant white
noise.) The next day, after the storm had passed, the whole island
was in shambles. Infrastructure was totally destroyed, electricity was
entirely knocked out, and radio service was down. The crew had escaped
harm, luckily, though the sets were totally destroyed. That’s actually
why we don’t see any of Ray Arnold’s journey to the power shed, because
that set was ruined during the storm. Anyway, I digress. The crew
comes out of their basement shelter to find total devastation and a city
in disarray. Even though help would be arriving soon, since the
National Weather Service had been monitoring the storm and knew the
island was hit, there would be no way for the relief efforts to begin
with the infrastructure so heavily damaged. Airstrips and landing pads
had also been demolished in the storm, and hospitals were without power.
There was also no (rather, just severely limited) way to move the
debris that was keeping citizens from aid. EXCEPT a gigantic, highly
skilled and intelligent film crew with lots of industrial equipment and
literally nothing better to do. Within hours of the storm’s
passing, the film crew personnel had dug out their bulldozers and
cranes, jury rigged up whatever else they needed from the animatronics,
and began blazing a path through the wreckage to the air strip where
they cleared the whole landing site, then began working on major city
streets. They also used their set generators to help restore power to
critical city functions, and their satellite phones to call for extra
assistance from the mainland (after they had evacuated their cast, of
course). Even though the ships and helicopters arrived to take the
crew home that day, as planned, many (if not most) of the crew stayed on
Kaua’i to assist in cleanup and relief efforts. It’s estimated by
Emergency Management officials and experts that if the crew had not been
there, the recovery efforts would have been delayed by as much as 3
weeks, as little as 3 days, and several hundred people would have died
in the aftermath of Hurricane Iniki.
Hollywood gets a bad rep for being selfish, but they can save lives and I think that’s really cool.
Crew guys are awesome.
the folks in a tv/movie crew are probably the most creative, innovative and resourceful people you’ll find – they can make miracles happen with a roll of duct tape, a bit of wire, and a 9-volt battery.
Customer (calling from Ireland): “Yes hello, I would like to -”
Sheep in the background: *gentle baa*
Customer: “Uh, sorry, what I want to do is -”
Sheep: *slightly more insistent baa*
Customer: “No, not now! -cough- Excuse me. I have a reservation and -”
Sheep: *VERY LOUD ACCUSATORY BAA*
Customer:“Arnulf! Please be quiet, I am on the phone! … Sorry, I sincerely apologize on behalf of Arnulf.”
me: “I love and forgive him.”
Customer: “Don’t, he doesn’t deserve it. Anyway, I’m calling about -”
Arnulf: *small, very self-satisfied baa*
I once took my kids to a local farm and we found a lil goat with its horns stuck in a fence, just sitting there kinda mournfully on the grass. We tried to help it get free but it was stuck tight. We petted it for a while and fed it some grass (as it had lawnmowered a circle around itself as far as it could reach), and then went back to the ticket office to tell them it needed help, but before I’d said more than: “There’s a goat-” the guy cut me off with a weary wave and said, “Yeah, we know. Stuck in the fence. That’s Brenda. She can get herself out whenever she wants. She just likes the attention.”
ok so i was in physics class my freshman year and my prof was trying to do a fun start to the lecture and she was like “who here knows what the secret to a perfect slap shot is?” and she obviously expected no one to know and someone from like the back of the lecture hall shouted out “swinging the stick fast!” and before she could even respond i blurted out “you make sure your stick hits the ice just behind the puck so your stick torques back and snaps forward just as you’re hitting the puck” and my prof was like “oh. yeah. how do you know that?” and i was too busy burying my face in my book to answer that my high school science fair project was “Taking the Perfect Clapper”
the project was so extensive and i literally made my brothers blow their arms out taking clappers as i sat and clocked them like,,,, i did one trial where put a camera above them and studied the distance between where their sticks hit the ice and the puck and what the perfect distance is and whether a slower swing from a more precise distance is more powerful than a faster swing from a worse distance i also studied stick height vs the “perfect distance”,,, by the end of it my brothers both wanted to die but the next year in bantams my baby brother lead his league in scoring, and like half of them were clappers sooooooo
So ,I’m a music teacher and every year we have what are called “walk through observations”. Basically, this means that 4 times a year the principal or vice principal comes into my class to assess my teaching. Fine. Sure. No problem.
Well, today I was doing an activity with my 1st graders called “Musical Groceries”. Basically, they make up a fake shopping list and then together we figure out what the rhythm of the words on the list is. To do that, a small group of students plays the beat on the conga drum while the rest of the students move around the room while chanting the word. It sounds weird but it’s a great way for the kids to figure out the relationship between syllables and rhythm.
They quickly get bored of walking the rhythm so I let them come up with their own ways of moving around the room.( skipping, hopping, etc) One student suggested they hop around the room like frogs, way down low to the ground. Okay fine.
Or it was fine until my vice principal walked in to do my observation only to find 20 seven year olds hopping around the room like a hoard of little hob-goblins, rhythmically chanting “BREAD! BREAD! BREAD!” while five other kids played ominous beats in a drum circle.
I have never seen anyone look so confused in my life and I really don’t want to know the rating I got on my observation.
Wheelchairs are used for many disabilities; it could be very painful to walk, one may lack the strength to walk, have hyperflexibility, shortness of lung capacity, fragility of joints, muscles, skin etc.
REBLOG so people STOP harassing wheelchair users when they stand up and even WALK out their chairs in public.
I hardly ever add comments to posts but i feel the need to add on. A couple years ago i was in a wheel chair because of my chronic illness. I went to an amusement park with my school and each time we’d go on a ride the people who work there must ask if i was able to walk onto the ride. A lot of people found this offensive (my sister is working at disney world and she told me that whenever there is a wheel chair the cast members must ask if they are able to walk.) I of course told them i was able to walk and when i got out of my wheel chair i got so many bad glares. After that field trip i was bullied the rest of my highschool life because people thought i was faking it. It got to the point where these girls from church ended up breaking my wheel chair. Please please stop harassing people who use wheelchairs.
There are many times when due to breathing difficulities I’ve had to use a wheelchair or motor cart in the store or other places. That doesn’t mean I can’t walk or others can’t walk but it does mean we can’t go far and we do need the assistance. It’s no ones business judging people who need the help. No one should feel bad for using what the need when they need it.
I grew up with a bone deformity in my feet in ankles that was not visible to the eye and I was still able to walk. After walling for any more than about 30 ft my feet would begin to hurt so bad I could barely function. My family took a trip to disney world when I was 9 and I needed to use a wheel chair. I specifically remember hearing a woman scoff and growl about how lazy and disgraceful I was but also my family for raising such a lazy child. And this was just because I got out of my chair to go hug Tinker Bell. Please stop harassing wheelchair users who can still walk. You made an 8 year olds first trip to disney a lot worse than it should have been.
Keep telling your stories ❤
I remember a trip to the museum back when I was 10 and my Complex Regional Pain Syndrome was just starting to spread. I hadn’t been able to be in school much, so I was so excited to finally be able to be a part of a normal, exciting day with all of my friends. I hesitantly borrowed a museum wheelchair in lieu of using crutches; I felt very vulnerable and sort of embarrassed needing to be pushed around, but I wanted so so badly to be a part of the big day. After a couple hours, I set the wheelchair aside to go to the bathroom, and then lowered myself into it when I got back out. A museum guard went fucking ham, telling me I was lazy and entitled. I hadn’t fully explained my disability to a lot of my classmates, so when they gathered around to watch the shit show, I was so crushed and embarrassed. Because of that one incident, for years, I was hesitant to ask for extra help when I needed it and I ended up worsening my condition long-term. Respect ALL wheelchair users. Treat everyone you come across with respect. You are not always entitled to an explanation.
Gonna reblog this every time I see some foolishness on or offline about someone thinking a wheelchair user is “faking” because they stood up and walked some. This time it was a YouTube video and the comment section, a curse on both their houses!!!!
Dear folks who think these sorts of posts don’t do anything: A few years back, one of these kinds of posts was circulating in response to a that meme about “fakers” with the woman standing from her wheelchair. The folks talking there really opened my eyes to how common it is for a wheelchair user to still be able to walk (this despite the fact that I’d used one temporarily when flying with a bad knee injury and that my gran needs one occasionally when her arthritis is bad). Before that, it wasn’t really something I’d thought about much, and I admit I’d made those jokes and shared those memes out of ignorance and societal ableism/fatphobia.
A few months later, I happened to be with someone in the store and we saw a guy in a wheelchair get up to reach something. The person I was with was really offended and started making some fatphobic comment about how he was probably “just too lazy” to walk. I relied, “How do you know? There’s a lot of things that can make you need a wheelchair that aren’t paralysis. Heck, I used one when I was fifteen and had a really bad sprained knee because the airport wouldn’t let crutches past security and I couldn’t walk.”
“Oh. I didn’t really think of it that way.”
“It’s ok, just… do think of it that way next time. I can tell you from experience using one of those is a total pain in the ass. Trust me, he wouldn’t use it unless he needs it.”
Telling your story and how that shit affects you in real life has real-world consequences. So keep telling your stories. You make the world a better place because at least some of the folks reading them take it to heart.
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
This is the Coffee Shop AU we deserve.
Oh my god this is so accurate. My coffee shop’s regular drug dealer is named Caramel Chris; a name given to him by our baristi but that he has run with and now exclusively goes by.
This morning a woman high on (I think) meth sternly lectured me about it wasn’t cool that I took her stuff (I did not), put a crowbar on the counter, knocked over some trash cans, and left. We’re keeping the crowbar. It’s the company’s crowbar now. So I guess I kind of did take her stuff after all.
Working as a veterinarian means you end up doing a lot of work with people. This gives you a lot of opportunity for people watching, and you notice patterns of behaviour. This is useful because it helps you realise what these clients need, but don’t want to ask you.
I’ve noticed that when people start to tell you about their pet’s life story, particularly their origin story, they’re already grappling with the idea that they’re about to lose their pet, even if they don’t know it yet. It’s like they know they’re about to be devastated, it’s a fast attempt to make me, the veterinarian, understand why their pet in particular is so very special to them. It’s a cry for validation that the grief that is about to wash over them is valid and justified.
I already know their grief is real and justified, even if it’s the first time I’ve met the animal and family. You can see it. It might be the family pet, but most of the time that pet has one special human that is their favourite, one human that loves them just a little bit more than the others, and I can see it on their faces.
The origin stories are all the same, and all unique.
“He was the runt of the litter and had to be put on a table so the other pups would stop bullying him while I was there. I went back and had to have him.”
“She was my daughter’s dog, but we started dog sitting when she had her first baby and then she just never left.”
“I’ve had him since he was three weeks old, a tiny scrap of fluff we found under the tomato bush and bottle fed.”
“The cat just walked into our new house like she owned the place, terrorised the dog and never wanted to leave.”
“She had kittens under the chair on my veranda, so I took her inside to make her comfortable.”
They’re all heartfelt stories of beautiful, ordinary moments that make life special, but they’re always told around the time of euthanasia. Some tell them before they’ve accepted the fact that they need to say goodbye, some say it afterwards as they’re composing themselves.
I was working emergency yesterday, a gruelling twelve hour shift on a public holiday. I had several palliative care and complex medical cases on the go from the previous weeks, and because I hate to leave my clients and patients without a plan I had told them which emergency clinic I would be working at so they could contact me if they were unsure about anything. It’s better for your long term sanity than handing out your mobile number to clients, which I can’t answer in work hours anyway.
When I arrive at my emergency shift at midday I find one of my patients waiting for me in a cage, hooked up to pain relief and looking miserable. The hospital vet hands over responsibility for her to me, and I go through her blood results. Pancreatitis and massive inflammation, in addition to everything else she has going on.
The day goes on, crazy busy, and ten hours later she’s starting to look worse. Puffing, ventral oedema and a subtle bruise colour developing on her shaved abdomen.
At shift handover I explain the dog’s story to the night vet at the start of her shift.
“Her owner died a few months ago, and the day of his funeral the patient had her first seizure. Subsequently also diagnosed with heart disease. At 1 month recheck noted weight loss and identified abdominal mass. Wife wasn’t going to put her through surgery, then got an attack of the guilts because her husband would have done anything for this dog. Mass is single lobe of liver, hugely distended, while rest of liver appears normal. Results are most likely liver tumour at base of lobe, undefined. Patient nearly died under anaesthetic but has been recovering well these last ten days until presentation. She’s anxious in hospital and wont eat without her humans around, her favourite is chicken.”
I told her origin story. I really knew, but didn’t want to accept, that my patient wouldn’t be leaving ICU and I put her to sleep a few hours later. Since her owner’s death it seems like she’d been trying very hard to join him, between the seizures, heart disease, liver tumour, pancreatitis and DIC.
I don’t cry over many patients, but I did for her.
And I told her origin story.
Very few things will make me tear up, but this did.
A couple years ago, I ran across this quote in a book called The Thirteenth Tale that has always stuck with me: “All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born.”
We all write our the histories of our lives in the stories we tell. We frame our experiences, our important moments, our lessons, in the ways we communicate them, until those words become our reality. And for our pets, who can’t tell their own stories, we do it for them.
When people tell your the origin stories of their pets, they’re telling you who the animal is, and who it is to them. They’re telling you about the birth of a family.
Steel Phoenix Studios 