I'm a Consulting Defective

lazybookreviews:

We live in a country which is slowly clawing back our reproductive rights, under the guise of granting civil liberties to fetuses, when, currently, we guarantee the rights of DEAD PEOPLE to not give their life-saving organs to the living over the rights of…the living who need that organ.

Not the possibly-living. Not the soon-to-be-living. Not the probably-living-but-not-necessarily-worthy-of-full-personship.

Actual, child and adult humans.  With families and jobs and lives and community connections.

Humans who need hearts and livers and lungs and skin and corneas.

But, just as we would never dream of saying “hey, guy, you only need one kidney, and this other guy needs to have your extra one, so we’re taking it” we don’t even have an OPT-OUT system for organ donation from the dead.

Because, for some reason, we think it would be a violation of our rights as autonomous DEAD HUMAN BEINGS to have our organs taken and given to the living.

But, you know, a fourteen year old girl who gets knocked up? You should have to carry your baby in your body for nine months and then either keep it or give it to someone else to raise. Absolutely. There is literally zero conflict there.

Oh, sure, it’s not the responsibility of the dead to give organs to people who need them. But it’s not the responsibility of pregnant women to provide babies to people who want them, either.

You cannot be squishy about your physical autonomy, women of America. This is something to go to the barricades over.

Now I know how it feels to apply Early Admissions and get deferred but worse because its fucking Hogwarts. 

twicedailypoetry:

Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon

I

Not my best side, I’m afraid.
The artist didn’t give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn’t comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don’t mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

II

It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It’s nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon—
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.

III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.
I’m qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don’t
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don’t you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear-and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You’re in my way.

U.A. Fanthorpe

My mom and her husband flew out of San Francisco this morning for their NYC/Fire Island vacation. 

I should probably not find this as funny as I do, but I’m from the West Coast so I don’t understand extreme weather. And it is kind of hilarious. 

socialismartnature:

“They found a building in London full of looted goods. It’s called the British Museum.”

sugabutta:

This is a post borne out of an every day occurence in my city life, and likely in your life too. This is a post borne out of what seems ordinary and not worth the expenditure of so many words, but at the end of the day, may be meaningful exactly because it seems so ordinary. This is a post about public space, and how we live in it. 

I was riding the subway home the other night, and the man next to me was sitting with his legs spread extremely far out, to the extent that I was sitting pretty close to both him and the other man on my right. The man on the left had his feet at least 1.5 ft apart, and was leaning forward on his elbows playing some game where you flung things at things. His legs were so far apart that I had to work my muscles to keep my legs together so I wouldn’t be touching my seat neighbors all up and down their legs. He would occasionally look around him and at me, look at our legs, move his leg slightly because I was touching his, and generally signal that our legs touching was not really preferable. The entire time this was happening, I went through these thoughts:

• I’VE SEEN BALLS. THEY ARE NOT THAT BIG, UNLESS YOU ARE AFFLICTED WITH GIGANTISM OF THE BALLS. MOVE. YOUR. LEGS. WHY DO YOU NEED TO TAKE UP SO MUCH SPACE?
• Ugh we are just touching and I’m tired and I really don’t want to touch you anymore than you want to be touching me.
• I hope you say something to me, man, because I’d love to point out how you’re taking up so much unnecessary space right now and that’s why we’re touching. FUCKING COME AT ME BRO.
• I hope he doesn’t say anything to me right now, because what would I say? What if he gets confrontational? What if I get confrontational and everybody looks at me weird? What if he follows me home?”
• Seriously move your legs ugh this is the worst ugh why couldn’t I sit with my legs wide open like that if I wanted to I totally want to I just want to spread my goddamn legs move your legs asshole.

This is not a post about how I really thought he might follow me home, or how I really would like to yell at some random guy on the train because I thought I knew his ass to be a true misogynist (because I have no way of knowing either of those things, and neither is a fair thought on some random guy). This is about how we take up space. Because for all my yellingness on the Internet and in real life, for all my vocality about gender and how we talk about gender, I sit with my legs together on the train, and he sits with his apart. He never got told to put his legs together, or to act as if space was anything but his to own. Men Take Up Space, Women Do Not. That’s just how it is.

And then I had the same thought I’ve been having for years now.

• I wish I had that basic level of confidence that so many men have. Except the right word is not even “confidence”, because that implies something you develop, or something that’s given. They never had to be told, like we do, that the world is theirs for the taking. They just Know.

This is a post about how our behaviors shape the space around us and our attitudes. This is a post borne out of hundreds of tiny, microscopic moments of assertion and confidence and Statement that I will never own, but men are born holding in their hands. This is a post about confidence, and teaching girls they have it but never having to tell boys they don’t. This is a post about how these seemingly insignificant, tiny moments, actually do speak to something larger, and your discomfort in those moments does have its roots in something real.

yesyesyesyes