tall people: if we are walking together please take into consideration my tiny legs. i cant keep up with you. please think of my tiny legs i dont want to be jogging to keep up with your leisurely stroll you TITANS
Just get a pair of roller skates and hang on to my sleeve, we don’t have all day.
Emotional labor is often invisible to men because a lot of it happens out of their sight. Emotional labor is when my friends and I carefully coordinate to make sure that nobody who’s invited to the party has drama with anyone else at the party, and then everyone comes and has a great time and has no idea how much thought went into it.
Emotional labor is when I have to cope, again, with the distress I feel at having to clean myself in a dirty bathroom or cook my food in a dirty kitchen because my male roommate didn’t think it was important to clean up his messes.
Emotional labor is having to start the 100th conversation with my male roommate about how I need my living space to be cleaner. Emotional labor is reminding my male roommate the next day that he agreed to clean up his mess but still hasn’t. Emotional labor is reassuring him that it’s okay, I’m not mad, I understand that he’s had a very busy stressful week. Emotional labor is not telling him that I’ve had a very busy stressful week, too, and his fucking mess made it even worse.
Emotional labor is reassuring my partner over and over that yes, I love him, yes, I find him attractive, yes, I truly want to be with him, because he will not do the work of developing his self-esteem and relies on me to bandage those constantly-reopening wounds. Emotional labor is letting my partner know that I didn’t like what he did sexually last night, because he never asked me first if I wanted to do that. Emotional labor is reassuring him that, no, it’s okay, I’m not mad, I just wanted him to know for next time, yes, of course I love him, no, this doesn’t mean I’m not attracted to him, I’m just not interested in that sort of sex. Emotional labor is not being able to rely on him to reassure me that it’s not my fault that I didn’t like the sex, because this conversation has turned into my reassuring him, again.
Emotional labor is when my friend messages me once every few weeks with multiple paragraphs about his life, which I listen to and empathize with. Afterwards, he thanks me for being “such a good listener.” He asks how my life has been, and I say, “Well, not bad, but school has been so stressful lately…” He says, “Oh, that sucks! Well, anyway, I’d better get to bed, but thanks again for listening!”
Emotional labor is when my friend messages me and, with no trigger warning and barely any greeting, launches into a story involving self-harm or suicide or something else of that sort because “you know about this stuff.”
Emotional labor was almost all of my male friends in high school IMing me to talk about how the girls all go for the assholes.
Emotional labor is when my partners decide they don’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore, but rather than directly communicating this to me, they start ignoring me or being mean for weeks until I have to ask what’s going on, hear that “I guess I’m just not into you anymore,” and then have to be the one to suggest breaking up. For extra points, then I have to comfort them about the breakup.
Emotional labor is setting the same boundary over and over, and every time he says, “I’m sorry, I know you already told me this, I guess I’d just forgotten.”
Emotional labor is being asked to completely explain and justify my boundaries. “I mean, that’s totally valid and I will obviously respect that, I just really want to understand, you know?”
Emotional labor is hiding the symptoms of mental illness, pretending my tears are from allergies, laughing too loudly at his jokes, not because I’m just in principle unwilling to open up about it, but because I know that he can’t deal with my mental illness and that I’ll just end up having to comfort him because my pain is too much for him to bear.
Emotional labor is managing my male partners’ feelings around how often we have sex, and soothing their disappointment when they expected to have sex (even though I never said we would) and then didn’t, and explaining why I didn’t want to have sex this time, and making sure we “at least cuddle a little before bed” even though after all of this, to be quite honest, the last thing I fucking want is to touch him.
I want every man I know to read this and really think about how it might apply to you because if there is one overarching theme among you all it’s that you read this stuff and share it and nod and go “yeah wow men suck” and NEVER THINK THAT IT IS TALKING ABOUT YOU. IT IS.
That is, unfortunately, very true. So many times I’ve posted these articles and men have “liked” them and they were the same men I’ve had these issues with.
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” and another one appears. And dodges the downward sweep of claws, darting to the side, bouncing off the pentagram’s barriers, and tripping over the demon’s tail. “In the Vatican!” she cries out as she moves, using the State Farm Agent summoning charm to modify the situation as she was taught, and mentally thanking her trainer for expecting her to be fast enough to do it on the first incantation.
Most State Farm agents, when they run into trouble, have to get the customer to do the jingle a second time. That guy with the buffalo was lucky.
The magic takes hold, and she materializes in the aisle of St. Peter’s Basilica, still holding the demon by the tail, in the middle of Sunday morning Mass. The music clatters unprofessionally to a halt as laypeople, deacons, priests, monks, nuns, and the Pope all turn their attention to the surprised demon whose fifth course of dinner has turned, unaccountably, into a visit to one of his least favorite places on Earth.
There is chanting in Latin, and vaguely cross-shaped gestures, and clouds of incense, and the demon vanishes in a puff of smoke, whether from the efforts of the clergy or of his own volition no one can say. The Agent doesn’t wait, fleeing towards the doors and escaping in the confusion.
She gains the exit and walks, purposefully, toward Rome proper; there, she ducks into the nearest alley. A burner cell phone comes out of one of the less-used pockets of her purse, and she dials a number from memory.
“Allstate,” says a smooth masculine voice after three rings.
“State Farm,” she answers. “I’m calling in a favor.”
“Yeah?” Interest. “What sort?”
As she talks she’s pulling out her smartphone, keying an app that was activated by the summoning, and pulling up the policyholder data that enabled the incantation to work.
“Insurance fraud,” she said, and can almost hear teeth sharpening on the other end of the line. She gives him the name, the address, the policy number. “Someone needs some mayhem.”
“That’s my name,” the man says.
She smiles. “Someone needs all the mayhem.”
He chuckles. Slow. Evil. Even with the echoes of demonic laughter ringing in her ears, she’s impressed. “Don’t worry,” he says, almost purring.
“You’re in good hands.”
OH MY FUCKING GOD I just read insurance commercial fan fiction and it was so good, bless you, I’m going to remember this day forever.
so there’s this terrible spotify ad (i don’t have premium because unemployed. boo) from biore, about their ridiculous nose strips, and i want to throw something across the room every damn time i hear it. FIRST OFF, those “blackheads” on your nose usually aren’t even blackheads, they’re sebaceous filaments. if your skin is properly washed and exfoliated, then they’re not dirt, they’re supposed to be there. they’re just going to come back and biore KNOWS THAT, so they have that awful ad telling you that they look “dirty” and disgusting (their words!!! idk about the word disgusting but i know they used dirty and the entire ad is very very self esteem-killing) so you’ll keep on buying the damn nose strips for a fake condition that isn’t going to go away. you can diminish their appearance using AHA exfoliants, but they will be back within 24-48 hours if you try to remove them.
in other words: fuck you and your predatory scam, biore. throw out ur biore strips guys.
I NEVER KNEW THIS IF ONLY SOMEONE TOLD ME WHEN I WAS 12 I MAY NOT HAVE DEVELOPED DERMATILLOMANIA.
FOR FUCKING REAL
From the Wiki article on sebaceous filaments: “Unlike blackheads, however, they cannot be removed and are a permanent part of the human skin.”
This has honest to god changed my life okay thank you OP thank you so much
holy shit, you guys, i just had the most exciting breakthrough on what the fuck is happening with the playful manipulation, deconstruction, and recombination of language you see on tumblr and twitter. like i’ve been chewing on this for years: is it post-modernism? is it post-structuralism? is it absurdism? is it surrealism?
it’s cubism.
“In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.[6]” (wikipedia)
look at birds_rights, fruitsoftheape100, or rate-my-reptile. it’s not simply oversimplified grammar like lolcats. every sentence is set up to fully convey meaning, but in as absurd a jumble as possible. like this birds_rights tweet:
“hi Merica. I know it your birtday. But maybe you can a little less TRY TO EXPLOSION ME OUT OF THE SKY???? Thank.”
or a rate-my-reptile comment:
“EXCUSE ma, lamma go!!! Got get to to work! Gots a interviu, and a Jobberpumpipty!9.6271/10 Babbie Businis is Still.. Busness!(try a not hold lizats by they tails! but, just a touche is usual fine tho!)”
see, you know what they’re saying, but if you sat down to mark what was formally wrong it’d be exactly like trying to redline the anatomy of a woman in a picasso painting: rendering a clear communication of a single thing, at a single point, from a single perspective isn’t the priority.
“Aimed at a large public, [Salon Cubists’] works stressed the use of multiple perspective and complex planar faceting for expressive effect while preserving the eloquence of subjects endowed with literary and philosophical connotations.[4]” (wikipedia)
every part of rate-my-reptile’s post is being approached from a different grammatical angle, but it’s ungrammatical in a different way each time. and then you have the employment of misspellings, typos, and melodious abstraction, respectively ‘lamma’, ‘interviu’ , and ‘jobberpumpipty’
cubist dialogue.
oh my god not only did you fucking nail what’s happening rn with regard to this particular branch of internet linguistics but you also made me go “wait i should go have another look at cubism it’s been a while and maybe i’m in a place where i can appreciate it better now”
Caesuria 