Look at these sad plants. Day 30.
(via golden-renegades)
This is when my dad said I looked like a synchronized swimmer and I don’t act like this.
Perplex
My dad’s brother, who is living on a farm in Devon, England, recently sent my dad an email sharing a phenomenon that has been occurring with one of his cows. This cow was born on April 9th, the same date that my Dutch grandmother/Oma passed away. Due to this, they named the beautiful little calf Bertha after my Omie, for her love of animals was great. The following year, also on April 9th, Bertha produced her first offspring, a boy they named Berthus. They year after Berthus was born, Bertha Sr. had a female calf, whom they also named Bertha. This April the 9th, Bertha had yet another little Berthus. Amazingly, as of April 9th of this year, Bertha Sr. has given birth to four boys, and one girl, ALL born on April 9th. My dad’s family consists of four boys, and three girls, so my uncle predicts that the next two April 9th’s will have Bertha Sr. giving birth to two more little Bertha’s. I love this so much.
Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.
(Source: the-simple-life-fan, via golden-renegades)
Progress! Day 5.
When Compulsive Thoughts are 'Triggered' (NPR)
via NPR’s Talk of the Nation:
From a young age, Fletcher Wortmann spent countless hours absorbed by his obsessions. In third grade, he became consumed with the idea that every nonwater substance on the planet would soon freeze. He spent hours laying plans for how he and his family would survive. Over and over, he replayed an imagined apocalypse.
Though he wouldn’t be diagnosed until many years later, in retrospect Wortmann realizes the episode marked his “first full-blown bout” with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In his memoir Triggered, Wortmann examines the origins of his anxieties and how he came to be overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts.
“One of the most … misunderstood aspects of OCD,” Wortmann tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “is that many people believe that it has to involve visible physical compulsion, such as hand-washing or counting or organizing things.”
After his sophomore year in college, Wortmann was diagnosed with purely obsessional obsessive-compulsive disorder — also called “pure O” — where the compulsive behaviors are entirely internal, intrusive thoughts.
“I think everyone experiences these kind of things. Your mind will just sort of settle on something really distressing and upsetting, and … most people are able to shake it off. Unfortunately, with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the thoughts take on kind of a life of [their] own, and you begin to wonder: ‘What do these mean? How can I make them go away?’ “
“I’d had a number of therapists growing up. I eventually had a breakdown and was brought to McLean Hospital, and up to the point of that hospitalization, people misunderstood, misdiagnosed. They would try to reassure me … those thoughts don’t mean anything, which ironically is the worst thing you can do for someone with OCD, because trying to reassure them and tell them that they are safe, it doesn’t help with the fundamental issue of uncertainty and just sort of serves as another ritual, another metaphorical hand-washing that can’t really give them the absolute certainty they would desire.”
(listen to the entire interview here or find out more about Fletcher’s book, Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder here)
My brother Photoshopped the rash out of this picture. Thanks bro!
