By: Revanche

Good Things Friday (144) and Link Love

November 26, 2021

1. With some trustworthy help with the kids, I feel the hardened shell of my soul softening some and swelling with a trickle of much missed patience for JB. I hate that I’ve been so closed off but under this much constant duress it’s been impossible to unclench my emotional grip.

It’s not going to last, this is a very temporary help, but I’m observing and taking some heart that maybe the frozen feeling of despair we’d been existing in can and will pass when we have more balance in our lives, when we aren’t holding on for dear life or fighting back to back just to survive.

Challenges this week: suffering from the lesser plague. Not happy about this.

Direct aid needs:

1) The GoFundMe has been set up for a friend of friend escaping a DV situation.

2) I had intended to be done with all our Lakota Giving for this year two weeks ago but we had a huge outpouring of donations and I’d been steadily working through fulfilling needs for families. Last night I took a last look at the list and ran across an individual whose situation really wrung me out. This young man, at the age of 30, is a paraplegic with limited use of his hands. He lives alone and it sounds like he lacks any mobility aids as he lives mostly in the dark, being unable to reach the wall switch. I’m inquiring into what he has and what he needs. I strongly empathized because my chronic pain threatened to leave me alone and immobile at a very young age but even if you didn’t have that experience, I’d think that would sound like a miserable way to live. JB sure thought so. I very much hope we can help set him up with sufficient aids to function reasonably well. Ideally I would love to be able to outfit him with a wheelchair if he could use one. If you’re able to pitch in, a gift (since donations and payments are charged fees) to admin@agaishanlife.com through PayPal would be going to a really good cause.


Just a little link love

As I was feeding Smol and reading this, Our Biggest Challenge as Parents, a thought struck me: when our kids are infants, we’re supposed to figure out why they’re unhappy and fix it. When they’re unhappy, we need to feed them or change them or do something that materially helps them feel better. So in addition to the cultural norms that we don’t value or make space for feelings, the starting bit of parenting when starting at Day 0 is a whole lot of stuff that I’m having to unpack so that I’m not immediately reverting to the norm of “what’s wrong fix it” and instead making some space for the idea that we can have feelings and that’s ok. Heck, I’m still working on the idea it’s ok for ME to have feelings.

I seriously struggle with this question because I can’t stand the environmental toll that Bitcoin requires and I don’t see how the other cryptocurrency is any less damaging: Is It Ethical to Invest in Cryptocurrency?

Reading this article and this excerpt really makes me hate conservative Christian American politicians (more than I already do). Why is it ok for them to impose their so called values on the rest of us? How Child Care Became the Most Broken Business in America: Instead, conservative politicians discouraged women from working, calling any form of state intervention communism. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower castigated women who “prefer a career to the active career of real motherhood.” Richard Nixon took a similar tack when he vetoed a 1971 bipartisan bill that would have created a network of federally funded child-care centers—a sort of permanent Lanham Act—claiming it was a “dangerous proposition that the state take the place of the family to raise the kids.” Fifty years later, in March, Idaho lawmakers rejected a $6 million early childhood education grant for the same reason. “Any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home,” state Representative Charlie Shepherd said during a debate, “I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going.” Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn recently tweeted, “You know who else liked universal day care,” linking to a 1974 New York Times article on subsidized care in the Soviet Union.

Image From Space Shows Downtown San Francisco Sinking Slowly Around Millennium Tower

The haunted summer of 1816

It’s Time to Fear the Fungi

Every time my therapist says she thinks I’m a friendly person I’m going to be thinking of this piece on Terry Pratchett for I have always been primarily fueled by rage at the injustice in the world and I really don’t see that changing anytime soon.

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