When September and October are nearing and you’re planning an event: google “Rosh Hashanah *year*” and *Yom Kippur *year*” and then, and I cannot stress this enough, don’t plan your event on those days. In fact, don’t plan any events starting sundown the night before. Those are the three most important days of the Jewish calendar, and, once again, I cannot stress enough how much this little bit of forethought and kindness will make every Jew you know cry tears of joy.
in 2023, the night before Rosh Hashanah is Thursday evening, September 14.
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
learning that self depreciation isnt cool and just makes the people around you uncomfortable unironically improved my mental health a lot. like if you just stop saying negative shit about yourself you will genuinely like yourself more and other people wont be repulsed by your attitude and you will have more friends. it’s true.
Wild how the queer community has been fighting tooth and nail for generations to have some semblance of inclusion and just the desire to not be beaten, arrested, or killed for existing.
Then there is less than 10 years of policies put in place to help us start being treated more humanely and the Conservative party is like “Actually we rather you die again” openly and proudly.
Wild how allowing ppl to live has made them so angry and more open about their fascism.
Meanwhile half of the younger queers online are too preoccupied with terminology and gatekeeping fandom engagement while our country actively works to eradicate the community honing social media to propagate propaganda.
It is going to sound mean and im not gonna sugarcoat it:
Telling other lgbtqia members that using the term “queer” is problematic and bad is more aligned with conservative’s views of hiding and destroying queerness. When you get that gatekeeping towards your own community you are making it easier to break us apart.
They aren’t going to stop with “don’t say gay”, they aren’t going to stop with “no trans healthcare”, they aren’t going to stop with bathrooms or sports teams or “parental rights”. They want to revoke your marriage, they want to take away your kids, they want to fire you for being gay, they want to arrest you for being GNC, they want to re-educate you for being ace, they want you poor, homeless, despairing and dead–and they want all that as an example to the next generation of queer people, so they stay closeted and paranoid.
And if they get everything on that wish list, they’ll come for more. You’re not safe as a rich white gay man; you’re not safe as a middle-class femme lesbian; you’re not safe as a “passing” transperson with all your paperwork legally sealed. Stand with the entire queer community or sooner or later you’ll be on the right’s chopping block.
Being openly not-straight, of any variety, was punishable as a CRIME in much of the US until 20 years ago. Lawrence v Texas was in 2003.
We’ve had 20 years of safety - based on a SCOTUS ruling based, in large part, on Roe v Wade.
Which, y'know, they overthrew recently, just before it could reach its 50 year mark. And in doing so, Alito mentioned that Lawrence and Griswold were both potential future targets.
Griswold v Connecticut is the 1965 case giving married people the right to access to birth control. They want to overturn that, too.
The conservative & alt-right movements are thrilled to see so much infighting among leftists and the queer communities; it’ll make it so much easier for them to drive in the wedges they’ll use to go after all of us.
