Breaking news! Fic author starts writing a fic thinking it will be short and it turns out to be long! It is not the first time nor will it be the last!
‘The Magic of Jingle Sleigh Heights’
Or: Hallmark Christmas movie turned horror lol
I often refer to my bottle-raised lamb as my adopted daughter, because it’s mostly true, it temporarily keeps nosy strangers from knowing I’m an eeeevil childfree woman, and it’s hilarious when people find out. And by that time they’re usually too disturbed by the “her-daughter-is-a-sheep” thing to get on my case about the “woman-with-no-husband-or-kids-oh-the-horror” thing.
Most of my friends are aware that I do this, and will back me up in conversations without batting an eye when I reference my daughter. And the best part is that they literally never drop the story. They just 100% all the time accept that I have a two-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that she happens to be a sheep is an unimportant detail, not worth mentioning until an anecdote gets too weird to plausibly be about a human toddler.
Which actually takes much longer than you’d think, since human toddlers apparently have absolutely zero sense. “She bites if you stop paying attention to her” is believable, “she tries to eat rocks out of the landscaping” is believable, “she stuck her head through a fence and couldn’t get out” is believable. “She jumped a five foot fence and came screaming back into the house through the dog door when I left her outside in the pasture” does get some strange looks, though usually not for the right reason.
Occasionally the joke gets turned around on me, though. I posted a picture on my not-tumblr blog of her wearing my glasses, and every comment was “Oh my gosh she looks just like you!!!” “I would never have known she was adopted If you hadn’t told me!!” “Are you sure that’s not an old picture of you?!”
So apparently this is what I look like:
At least she does look cute in glasses.
[ID: a close-up photo of a brown sheep, stylishly sporting a pair of glasses. End ID]
btw if youre young and scared of doing adult things without your parents ive learned that like 90% of the time you can just tell the doctors office or the dmv "haha sorry ive never done this without help before... can you show me how to do this?" the employee will not care. if that means anything to you
Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I’m always like “why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day.”
But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you’re inside the car, inside the situation, it’s easy not to notice all the extra work you’re doing just to maintain the status quo.
There’s all sorts of type of work that we think of as “free” that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.
The next time you think you’re tired from “nothing”, consider instead that you’re probably in situation where you’re doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.
opening my body’s task manager to see what’s taking up all my cpu
Also, just to add: we should not lose sight of the fact that the mammalian brain is a ridiculously energy-hungry organ. A human brain makes up 2% of the body’s weight and volume and 20% of its caloric requirement. Thinking is physical work.
Competitive chess players carb-load before tournaments. And lose weight in the process.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that thinking physically takes up energy. I would be like “why don’t i have energy I’ve been sitting inside studying all day” ma'am it’s because the phrasings, evidences and vocabularies in your brain are eating the energy
If I’ve been really focused on crafting or something, there will invariably come a point where my brain is just like “Warning! Warning! Out of Energy!”.
Getting a snack usually fixes it.
I get post-exertional malaise from just… Going places. I sit in a wheelchair, I take one bus and spend some time in a different building… And when I get home, I’m sick.
This post helped a little cause I always feel bad about it.
Relatedly this is very reminiscent of getting sober. It doesn’t feel like “not doing something” (i.e. drinking in my case) is a lot of work, and yet.
god it’s so sad living in an allocentric world. There are so many relationships that are so complex and nuanced that are all put under the label of ‘romantic’ and immediately all the intrigue is taken from it. Like don’t you realize that these relations are actually ENHANCED by the fact that they are not romantic or sexual?
NOOO DONT PUT THE CHARACTERS IN A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP YOURE TAKING OFF THE SEASONING!!!!
yall gotta learn the difference between "this character is an asshole" and "this character was supposed to be super cool but the author is an asshole" and "this character is a teenage girl who was mean once"
