a neurotypical: if you have noise sensitivity why do you listen to loud music?
me: one loud noise is easier than 20 loud noises all at once.
Me: Loud music that I can control is better than loud noises I cannot control
Me: Loud noises that are rhythmic, familiar, and pleasurable to me are better than sudden ugly chaos
Part 1 | Part 2
Please enjoy this cute sapphic comic about accidentally adopting a werewolf from the pound based on this post. (Except I made it gay.) Meet Sabine and Jazz as they fall in loooove.
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it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.
The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway
#my mom’s a historian#does a lot of research#one of the main takeaways from the census data of literally every US census since the beginning#is that the nuclear family has never been the actual norm#nobody really ever lived like that#and a lot don’t now#and it’s clearly artificial and not ideal for most people#every household in the census had at least a grandma#usually a cousin#some rando#someone living in the house who wasn’t mom or dad or kid#always someone#usually several someones#some uncles etc.#unmarried aunties#that sort of person#but often unrelated friends#we’ve never really lived alone#that’s not how families work#that’s not how humans work
tags by @bomberqueen17
Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.
It’s also super a capitalism thing.
With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.
The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.
Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.
this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity
In addition to the above factors scorning non-nuclear family households, there is a load of racism pointed at living arrangements including more than 2 adults.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and nearly every multi-gen/extended family (who were rarely ever white) in my quiet, uniformly lower-middle-class neighborhood was thought of as “dirty” and “taking advantage” of “the system”. The defacto impression was these households were drug dealing or otherwise out of control.
The amount of surveillance that white folks dedicated to the comings and goings of a BIPOC multi-adult household was disgusting, and this was *before* Next Door. And despite me being white, people often made clear to me that my own multi-gen household wasn’t How It Was Done because that’s what Those People did.
Fuck that post going around saying "you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don't need to explain everything :)" I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don't explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don't explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you
Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don't care about "themes" or "enemies to lovers with found family", I didn't ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don't try to change the subject, I'll stop pointing the gun when I want, I'm trying to have a conversation here,
gold in them there tags
Story idea when you try to actually write it:
Story idea when you first rewrite it:
Getting closer to what you saw in your head, eh? Keep at it!
Your story when somebody else sees it:
hhhhhHHHHHHH
(⚪д⚪)
This is a lovely post. It goes to show that when we percieve our own work, most of us have some type of insecurities about our own talents.
Also possibly relevant is that probably when Van Gogh finished Starry Night, he jumped up and down in frustration for a while because it didn’t look as good as it had in his head.
Tolkien used to complain that he could never write anything as well as he could imagine it. So you know, ‘good enough’ is definitely a thing.
A relative of mine is a professional author and every time someone asks him which of his books is his favorite one, he always says “The one in my head, because I haven’t messed it up yet.”
He’s written more than thirty books and several of them have been on the Times bestseller list, and he still thinks this way.
You’re always your own worst critic.
Okay, that last addition might be my favorite ever. I need a name so I can quote this genius
onpurposeilovehimonpurpose