ATL | 22
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I was sitting in the corner of his hospice room, engrossed in this stupid fucking jigsaw puzzle. I finally realized how quiet it had become. I dont know how long it had been like that before I noticed. I couldn’t hear his rattling breath anymore. I glanced over to his bed and my dad, white as a sheet, was dead. Simple as that.
I was passed out from my sleep meds when my dad pulled out his oxygen. I was awoken to hearing him tell the nurses he gives up and them trying to convince him it’s not keeping him alive, just comfortable. This is after he redacted his DNR earlier today. We needed to be in hospice like yesterday and get out of this goddamned hospital.
There’s a woman who has been sleeping in the waiting room since I’ve been here. Today I smiled at her and the next time I passed by she started talking to me. At night, her mother takes the recliner in her father’s room and she gets the chair in the waiting room. I tell her how my sister and I have crammed into the one recliner in our father’s room and joked that now she has returned to work, I’m looking forward to getting it all to myself. Does my sister live close, she asks. “No. She’s in New York.” Then she asks about my mother, of course. They always do and I’ve never figured out a good response other than the truth.
“No, it’s just…”
“…just you guys?”
In the self-preservation part of my brain where I’ve comparmentalized the fact my father’s already practically dead, I think,
it’s just me.
And it’s to this random stranger I realize and confess how alone I am.
BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. - Hurricane Irma uncovered a piece of history from the bottom of the Indian River when a dugout canoe was brought to the surface.
Officials from the Florida Department of State’s Bureau of Archaeological Research in the Division of Historical Resources said they are working to preserve the the canoe, estimated to weigh 600 to 700 pounds.
Randy Shots shared the news of his discovery on Facebook with his friends.
“I got to it before it was picked up by the county with all the other storm debris and placed in a landfill. I’ll certainly keep everyone updated on this progress, promise,” he said in his Facebook post.
The Indian River is apart of the Sovereign Submerged Lands, meaning all objects of intrinsic historical or archaeological value abandoned on state-owned lands are owned by the state with the title vested in the Division of Historical Resources, officials said. (source)
There is only this moment and what you make of it. No best life arrives. You will always be half-hearted, lopsided, annoyed. Be a lopsided conquistador anyway, indignant and industrious, generous and pushy and bold. Show yourself to the world — your real, lonely, exasperated, generous self. Build a life from the rubble of your dreams. Spend the afternoon listening to the rain, untangling your fears, satisfied but a little melancholy, melancholy but oddly satisfied, knowing that it’s all up to you.
I haven’t been on Tumblr since I graduated college. Funny, when I had the least amount of spare time is when I wasted it the most. I spent the huricane hunkered down in a hospital watching over my dad. I’m still here, running out of non-productive distractions and amazed I remembered my login (of course there are tons of productive shit I could be doing). Nurses are awesome. Their super powers include, but are certainly not limited to: night vision and squeezing in small spaces.
To The Moon is not only beautiful game with a fantastic story, it’s also got two realistically written female autistic characters!
I think it needs more awareness in the autism community. Please, everyone go play it (or watch someone else play it!)
Photographer Lloyd Meudell captures surrealistic images of breaking sea foam.
Interestingly, the sea foam is essentially a three-phase fluid made up of air, water, and sand. Yet despite the surrealism of its forms, the foam bears strong resemblance to other flows. The shapes the foam forms are reminiscent of vibratednon-Newtonian fluids like paint or oobleck. Momentum deforms the foam into sheets and ligaments smoothed and held together by surface tension until droplets snap free. You can find more of Meudell’s work at his site. (Image credits: L. Meudell; via freakingmindblowing; submitted by molecular-freedom)
If you don’t know who Johnnie Tillmon was, look her up.
Welfare is a Women’s Issue (1972) by Johnnie Tillmon
I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.
In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic.
I am 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me. Some on welfare. Some not. And some, really poor, who don’t even know they’re entitled to welfare. Not all of them are black. Not at all. In fact, the majority-about two-thirds-of all the poor families in the country are white.
Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.
And that’s why welfare is a women’s issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare it’s a matter of survival.
Survival. That’s why we had to go on welfare. And that’s why we can’t get off welfare now. Not us women. Not until we do something about liberating poor women in this country.
Because up until now we’ve been raised to expect to work, all our lives, for nothing. Because we are the worst educated, the least-skilled, and the lowest-paid people there are. Because we have to be almost totally responsible for our children. Because we are regarded by everybody as dependents. That’s why we are on welfare. And that’s why we stay on it.
Welfare is the most prejudiced institution in this country, even more than marriage, which it tries to imitate. Let me explain that a little.
Ninety-nine percent of welfare families are headed by women. There is no man around. In half the states there can’t be men around because A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) says if there is an “able-bodied” man around, then you can’t be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat, and the man can’t get a job, then he’s got to go.
Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you.The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On A.F.D.C., you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare.
The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things-rent, for instance-really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. He’s always right.
That’s why Governor [Ronald] Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them “lazy parasites,” “pigs at the trough,” and such. We’ve been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is because there’s something wrong with their character. If people have “motivation,” if people only want to work, they can, and they will be able to support themselves and their kids in decency.
The truth is a job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one. Why would a 45-year-old woman work all day in a laundry ironing shirts at 90-some cents an hour? Because she knows there’s some place lower she could be. She could be on welfare. Society needs women on welfare as “examples” to let every woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man. So these ladies stay on their feet or on their knees all their lives instead of asking why they’re only getting 90-some cents an hour, instead of daring to fight and complain.
Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. We’ve already started on our own welfare plan. Along with other welfare recipients, we have organized so we can have some voice. Our group is called the National Welfare Rights Organization (N.W.R.O.). We put together our own welfare plan, called Guaranteed Adequate Income (G.A.I.), which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no “categories”-men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids-just poor people who need aid. You’d get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up.
As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of N.W.R.O. are the front-line troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women-the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.