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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • I still feel like the nouns are in the wrong place when I read this.

    I’m reading it as “New York cows new York cows bully bully New York cows”

    When I want it to read “New York cows bully new York cows” which would be “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” which isn’t enough buffalo.

    I have to inset my own “that” to be able to get my head around “Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”


  • Both the battery and the charger are old and broken in my brain.

    If it’s too hot out the battery drains faster, if I’m playing music the battery drains faster. If I’m having to swap between conversations, bye bye battery.

    Sometimes the charger works fine but sometimes it just doesn’t charge no matter what I try, and the battery stays low even if I leave it plugged in alone.

    Some days there’s a process that’s absolutely and inexplicably guzzling power, but the next day that same process barely takes up any processing power.

    Some days it just doesn’t turn on at all, and then on rare occasions I can’t get the damn thing to turn off, it’s just blasting notifications and I’m trying to sleep.

    Related: personally I think “old phone battery” is a much better metaphor than the “chronically ill spoons” metaphor that is commonly used to explain the impact of chronic illness.


  • Yes and no, applying for accommodations is as fun and easy as pulling out your own teeth with a rubber chicken.

    It took months to get the paperwork organised and the conversations started around accommodations I needed for my disability, I realised halfway through I had to simplify what I was asking for and just deal with some less than accessible issues because the process of applying for disability accommodations was not accessible and I was getting rejected for simple requests like “can I reserve a seat in the front row because I can’t get up the stairs, and I can’t get there early because I need to take the service elevator to get to the lecture hall, so I’m always waiting on the security guard”

    My teachers knew I had a physical disability and had mobility accommodations, some of them knew that the condition I had also caused a degree of sensory disability, but I had nothing formal on the paperwork about my hearing and vision loss because I was able to self manage with my existing tools.

    I didn’t need my teachers to do anything differently so I didn’t see the point in delaying my education and putting myself through the bureaucratic stress of applying for visual accommodations when I didn’t need them to be provided to me from the university itself.

    Obviously if I’d gotten a result of “you cheated” I’d immediately get that paperwork in to prove I didn’t cheat, my voice over reader just gave me the ChatGPT instructions and I didn’t realise it wasn’t part of the assignment… But that could take 3-4 months to finalise the accommodation process once I become aware that there is a genuine need to have that paperwork in place.


  • I’m forced to because I make the most ridiculous spelling mistakes that completely change the comment.

    “With” autocorrects to “without”.

    “is” autocorrects to “isn’t”

    Finally worked out why though - my right eye is impaired and I type exclusively with my right thumb (on mobile) so I’m not actually pressing the keys I think I am and I’m often hitting the “predict word” button instead of the space bar.

    Looking forward to getting tactile keys on phones again!


  • My job somehow shifted from teaching IT to seniors to teaching SOSE to migrants

    It has simultaneously been the most challenging, and most rewarding change.

    I’m forced to edit myself down from my preferred 5000 word lecture to about 150 words with clip art.

    It’s slowly helping me become less of a rambler.

    Except for the “post restraint collapse”, I get home and I can’t hold it in anymore, cue the explosive verbal diarrhoea.

    At work, fewer words are better.

    But in my own personal life I feel that the fewer words I employ to convey the way I feel the less nuance I’m embedding in my message and what is communication if not the conveyance of the core message, failing to express myself clearly would be counter-productive so surely explaining in more detail is beneficial, hello? Are you still listening? Why have your eyes glazed over.



  • Call her doctor

    I should have been more specific. Find a time when she’s not doing anything urgent, tell her it’s time to call the doctor, pick up her phone and dial the doctor, put them on speaker and put the phone down next to you while you body double your partner as they gone through the motions of locking in the appointment.

    While on the phone your partner can also give third party authorisation. It’s the first thing I do when I meet a new provider, I give third party authorisation to my partner and mother so they can make appointments on my behalf (they can’t get results for me, but they can schedule things for me)


  • Every time I do a Bunnings BBQ for the community centre, it’s women run, we get the onions on ASAP because they need time to cook, and we’ll have people buying a plain onion sandwich in addition to a snag, because caramelised onions are so good!

    Every time I volunteer to help my partners football club run a sausage sizzle, I’m saying “put the onions on, they take longer” and I’m told by the guys “I’m a man, I know how to BBQ, go away little girl, go hold the sign and be pretty”

    Then everyone buying a snag is complaining about crunchy raw onions, and the guys are saying “why did we buy so many onions?” (because you were supposed to cook them down so they shrink!)

    These same men will unironically say “women belong in the kitchen” then won’t take cooking advice from a woman.

    (also, the footy guys always giving me flak for deglazing the BBQ plate with water to help the onions cook down faster. They’ll just keep adding oil, once saw a Rotary Club use 1L of canola oil to half cook 5kg of onions, when we’ve never needed more than 200ml to fully cook onions, because onions need water to cook down!)



  • Call her doctor, make an appointment, save it in her calendar, remind her in the lead up, drive her there, get the referral. Walk her to the post box to send it off, sit next to her to phone the intake office to confirm they got the referral, set appointments on her phone for every 6 months to sit with her and call to check the cancellation list until you get an appointment. Drive her to that appointment.

    If she has ADHD, the steps involved in getting a diagnosis are bigger than Mt Everest, she will need a neurotypical Sherpa.



  • I’d had the same recurring dream since early highschool. It was dream like in that it was a true labyrinth that mademoiselle no structuralism sense, walking around in the dream was ethereal, but the objects within were mundane, the toilets were broken or dirty in ways that could be reality not fantasy, but I always knew it was a dream, and for me it wasn’t panicked, it was just helplessly frustrating.

    Because it was so recurring (at one point I was having this dream weekly) I told every therapist I ever had and they’ll all suggested it was about performance anxiety, since many of the toilets were missing doors, or contamination anxiety, or even just having a full bladder before bed. None of that really resonated.

    It was in my 20s, having lunch with and old friend, they’d brought their new partner and we got talking about recurring dreams somehow. We covered the usual, the teeth falling out dream, the highschool exam you never studied for that you’re also naked for, etc. I start describing the toilet labyrinth, specifically mentioning that I’m not panicked in the dream, in just confused and frustrated, and this new guy excitedly exclaims “you’ve got an undiagnosed disability, I guarantee it”. He was half right, I was diagnosed, but I didn’t have any support systems because I’m broke.

    The toilet labyrinth is a very common stress dream, but everyone has a slightly different response to it, and it’s motivated by different factors. For some people it’s performance anxiety, for some people it’s health anxiety. Sometimes it’s a fear that your private secrets will cause public shame if they got out. In my case it was my subconscious asking the question “how is everyone else making this look easy? how is everyone else able to do this? The tools I’ve been given fundamentally don’t work! why do people keep staring at me like I’m the idiot for not being able to use a broken toilet? why is no one else talking about how to broken and unusable these toilets are? How is it everyone else managing to do this!?” because I in my real life I was trying to keep up with the able bodied peers while disabled with no support, and I wasn’t eligible for support so it was very much “but how do I do anything when I don’t have the tools? Stop asking me to jump, and punishing me for not jumping when I have no legs to jump with”

    (I have legs, that’s just a metaphor)



  • I’ve been out as queer since I was 14. I’m in my 30, he still hasn’t come around.

    Given his age and health, if he’s planning too come around he’d better get on it quick, at this rate he’s dying a bigot.

    I’m not waiting any more, I put my whole life on hold waiting for him to come around so I could live my life safely. If I need to cut him out of my life I will.

    I appreciate they kind words, but please keep in mind mind that it’s not always smart or safe to tell a trans person to be patient. The individual will know their level of safety, and advice to be patient and understanding can in some cases case be very, very harmful.


  • Yeah it’s pretty regulated here, you present your evidence for being a medical cannabis candidate to your GP/PCP (or they tell you they think you’re a candidate) who refers to you to a clinic that specialises in cannabis, the intake appointment was 2 hours long, they prescribe specific products based on your symptoms and needs, then script gets sent to a compounding chemist and you go and pick up the medication from the chemist, the same chemist that you’d go to for advil and beta blockers.




  • This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

    But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

    Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

    So do cars driven by humans.

    Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

    Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.


  • I can’t imagine they’d prescribe oil that needs to be further processed by the patient. The printed dosage instructions from my doctor just say to take 0.5ml sublingual, and the pharmacist didn’t say anything otherwise. It was topaz t25 oil, my friends tried some because I was convinced it was the wrong product or something, and it worked for them.

    I have issues with other drugs too, like I still puke when dosed up on ondansatron, and the reason Im prescribed cannabis is because I can’t take opiods for my chronic pain condition, even 8mg of codeine causes my respiratory rate to drop dangerously low. My chronic pain is the result of a genetic disorder, so I’ve just assumed I metabolised things badly, though Ive asked several doctor about it and because I’m in the public healthcare system I can’t access CYP2D6 testing to know for sure.