I took that sugar cube as a child. I also remember the March of Dimes sign on the easel at many stores, all with dimes stuck on them.
I’ve told this story more than once, and I’m telling it again because it changed my life. When I was a kid I was terrified of needles, and hated getting all my shots. I was a sick kid with a lot of undiagnosed disabilities, and my gramp picked up on the anxiety I had and decided to talk to me about it. He offered to take me to get my flu shot for a christmas gift that year, and when I grumbled about getting a flu shot he said, “well, I had scarlet fever when I was your age. My parents didn’t believe in doctors so I wasn’t allowed to get my shots, and so I got very sick and almost died.”
It stopped me in my tracks. I was 6. I had heard from adults my whole life that shots were important, but I didn’t really understand the consequences of not getting them. I asked him to tell me why his parents didn’t believe in doctors. He said he grew up out in the midwest on a farm, and his parents were “a type of christian” that believed people got sick because god wanted them to get sick, and going to the doctor was going against what god wanted. His parents were terrified of making god angry, which was something I could understand considering I was raised evangelical. But I was confused because he HADN’T died. I asked him how he’d made it this far if he had never been allowed to go to the doctor and he’d been so sick.
And he told me that when he turned 15 he’d run away from home, hopped on a train that took him all the way up to New York, and started asking door to door where he could get these new vaccines he’d heard about. Everyone told him the air force base was the place to go. He went in, asked around, and got his vaccines. At 16, he had his very first annual physical. Shortly after he met my gram, who was the telephone operator for the doctors office he went to every year for his checkups. And he told me as we sat there in the doctor’s office that he was the ONLY person on both sides of his family to live past the age of 60.
I was both horrified and amazed. I went in, got my shot, and he held my hand and said he was proud of me because what I was doing was important. I was still very scared of needles, but it was easier to deal with the sore arm knowing I was keeping myself safe. He lived to be 90 years old, and he was proud to be the first person in his assisted living facility to be vaccinated for covid. When we went to visit him for his 90th birthday just before he died I asked him what he was proud of doing now that he was 90, and he said he was proud of living this long because as a child no one believed anyone could survive the things he could. He said he was perfectly happy to have married, had kids and grandkids, and eat his Applebees knowing he’d cheated death 15 times over.
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An opinion piece I photographed from an 1860s small press periodical from Hartford Connecticut.
Get your fucking vaccinations.
I’d like to translate a tiny bit. “Guilty of his own blood”, a phrase the letter-writer felt strongly enough to repeat it twice, is an old way to say the person committed suicide, with the implication that you made yourself a permanent social outcast and couldn’t even be buried with your family.
This letter is saying: Refusing vaccination (when you can safely get it) is suicide. One could easily add: Denying vaccination to others is murder.
*by “pre-screening”, i typically mean any sort of behavior that exists on a spectrum of “actually watching/playing/reading the thing before you played it” to “doing any sort of research on it before letting you watch it”.
feel free to share your experiences in the tags or replies or whatever!
admittedly, i am a little obsessed with like 65% of the tags on this post so far basically saying “my parents didn’t pre-screen things but they [describes behavior that DEFINITELY qualifies as pre-screening]”. i kinda hope maybe this post and others like it wake some people up to the fact that yes, even YOUR parents were controlling what perspectives and ideas you were and were not being allowed to access.
#my ancestry consists exclusively of people from places whose names are also cheeses and this is too fucking white for me
Actually I’m not fucking done with this.
Again, this is not a color. In light, white is all colors combined but your are a consulting firm that teaches people how to keep a consistent color through the manufacturing process, which means this is a recommended color for Pigments. And in pigments, white is the absence of color. If this is a color, it’s the color of nothing, when therr REALLY should be something.
It’s the color of Cowardice.
This is the color of ghosting someone because you’re too emotionally immature to have an uncomfortable conversation like an adult. This is the color of not telling your coworker that the boss is underpaying them because you think they ‘deserve it’, because admitting otherwise would mean having to actually think about ethics. This is the color of staring into your mashed potatoes in silence when your family starts saying racist bullshit at thanksgiving.
Okay, maybe you weren’t intending to dog-whistle racists with this. You probably weren’t thinking about to social and racial implications of your big ad campaign (which is also pretty racist tbh) but you’re instead sucking the fat hog of the demon called Rental Estate, because FUCK OFF with that name. “Cloud Dancer” my fat fucking mozzarella-colored ass, that’s Landlord-Painting-Over-Structural-Problems White. This ugly nothingburger of a 'color’ looks like it was chosen to appease the cheap and deceptive sensibilities of humanity’s most rampant parasites. Y'all are at least getting a kickback from every leech that slathers this botulism-laced mayonnaise slop on their overpriced fire code violations, right?
That said, one should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Maybe this smog-tainted snowfall is not the result of bigotry or capitalist brainrot, maybe it’s just rampant incompetence! Maybe this is the color of the coke y'all were snorting off each other’s dicks during your Color-Of-The-Year-Selection-Meeting/Orgy in Orlando Florida or some other city far from the light of God’s Grace.
…Nah, y'all aren’t cool.
What this does look an awful lot like is that you were trying to take a screencap of the ChatGPT answer to an email that you lack the intellectual capacity to answer without sounding like a chimpanzee on ketamine, and instead took a rectangle of blank background color and called it a day.
I mean, its almost more embarrassing if it really is a, to quote your website Pantone, “one long, continuously flowing conversation among a group of color-attuned people.”. Because then you really did all that work and “thoughtful consideration” and worked all year-round and came up with this. A Sour Cream Flavored Felony.
When I was early on in my transition I got in a Lyft, and the driver was this big country guy. I was a little nervous so I just sat quietly in the back.
After a moment he changed the music on his phone to what sounded like a Hatsune Miku song. Curiosity got the better of me, so I finally spoke up and said “is this Hatsune Miku?”
And he said “Yep. You looked uncomfortable, and I know Transgender women like Hatsune Miku, so I thought it might help.”
Unless it’s a serious emergency, always start every interaction with another person by greeting them first no matter how brief the interaction might be.
Going up to, for example, a store employee or a co-worker and just blurting out a question or request you have for them without greeting them first can come across as you just see them as a means for getting what you want instead of seeing them as a human being first. If you just say even a simple little “hi” first (or whatever a standard greeting is in the local language might be) before asking them a question or asking them for help, you are acknowledging that they are a person instead of just a means to an end.
Based on my experience working in the tourism industry I should probably also point out that although “excuse me” is considered sufficient in some cultures, this isn’t universal and in some cultures just saying “excuse me” first without any greeting word like “hi” or “hello” is considered rude.
So if you are from somewhere “excuse me” alone is sufficient, keep in mind that might not be the case when you’re traveling, and you might come across as rude if you only say “excuse me” to get an employee’s attention but nothing else while you’re traveling.
I hope it’s ok to riff on this a bit and add that starting with a greeting is also important on the phone, especially in the dreaded scenario of making a cold-call. I know my generation and forward do not like to make phone calls at all, but sometimes you simply have to, and if you do a good greeting, that’s half the battle won. I have to make cold calls a lot at work and I’ve found that best practice is to begin any outgoing call you make by doing the following in this order:
Greet the person who answered (Hello, good afternoon, etc.)
State your name and your organization or relationship to the business or person you’re calling.
If you’re feeling friendly, ask the person who answered how they are doing or how their day is going.
Compare these two examples:
Answerer: Hello? Caller: Good afternoon, my name is scarylullabies, I’m a tumblr user, how are you doing today? Answerer: Fine thank you, how are you/how can I help you? Caller: I’m doing well, I’m calling to confirm the colors of the tile you’d like installed in the children’s hospital…
vs
Answerer: Hello? Caller: Hi, can you confirm the colors of tile you’d like installed in the children’s hospital?
One of these is way more abrupt, and with no context for who you are or why you’re asking, it can really throw people off, even if the question is or seems innocuous and inconsequential to you.
I can’t emphasize enough how much stress this greeting method has saved me. Starting calls this way makes the rest of the call a total breeze and has made it so much easier for me to handle my personal outgoing calls (for appointments and whatnot) as well.
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