And this is why I loved being a community education teacher.

I get to decide where we’re going for an excursion/field trip. I choose which activities we do. I not only get to participate but I’m expected to actively get involved to encourage my students. I get paid to do it.

I’m literally living the dream.

I had a student ask “what’s the big red building on [Street]” and enough students were curious that we spent 20 minutes talking about the building. It’s the pipeworks and gas mains museum and I’ve wanted to visit for years but never had time or justification for the adult entry fee …so you bet we took a field trip the following week!

(another upside to community ed, we can plan and initiate a field trip on 20 minutes notice. Last week the toilets in the classroom started spilling over and we couldn’t physically be in the building, but class had just started, so we grabbed our bags, I grabbed the field trip kit, and we walked to the train and went to the beach. “Change of plans, maths class is cancelled, we’re doing environmental science today, who’s ready to learn about coastal ecosystems”)

A few staff members and I have joked that we’d save so much money just ditching our school building entirely and literally every class is a field trip. Field trips are some of the most fun, most engaging, and honestly sometimes the most effective ways to learn something. Place based learning and hands on learning utilises a different part of our developmental skills compared to classroom based learning, as well as community engagement and life skills developed from getting out into the community and learning how the world works.

But the way America does excursions and field trips is odd to me, because they’re often expensive and you get a chartered bus and it’s a curated experience. Vs Australian community ed where a field trip is often “walking to the local train station to talk to the station staff and learn about the ticketing system” it’s free and is like 40 minutes out of our class then we walk back to school and you do several things like that a week.

Lasik is a great example, thank you!

Though I wouldn’t put glasses in the same category because it’s not a cure, it’s a medical device to correct the medical issue and it requires you to use the device for the rest of your life, if you stop using the device your symptoms immediately return, that’s not a cure. Glasses are the equivalent of insulin for diabetes. It’s treatment, not cure, without it, the disease takes full effect, but with it, yes you will be functionally cured as long as you have your glasses/insulin available, but even when functionally cured, you will always be a person with low vision/diabetes and always need ongoing treatment…until there’s a “cure”.

If my poor vision was cured by getting glasses I wouldn’t be squinting while I’m typing this in size 18 font (my glasses are in the other room and I’m too lazy to get them), and I wouldn’t suddenly be completely disabled by my lack of vision when it rains (glasses need to come with windscreen wipers! I can’t see shit in the rain)

This, if anything it might clarify a few confusing exchanges we’ve had in the past, and it will certainly help me be a better friend in the the future.

If I already know you, I know you, I’m choosing to be friends with you because of how you treat me and how you treat others when we hang out together. If I had any problems with that, I wouldn’t be friends long enough to hear you tell me about your NPD diagnosis.

Now that said, I’ve had friends tell me about a diagnosis and it shouldn’t change anything, but now that the diagnosis is out in the open they want it to change things and I can’t offer that to the friendship, such as compromising on my own boundaries (eg: I had a friend who after explaining their condition asked me to provide tone indicators for everything I say, but I have alexithymia so that was really difficult for me to do and I couldn’t adjust my behaviour to meet the new expectations of the friendship, so we faded out of each other’s lives, they told people I stopped being friends with them because of their anxiety disorder… No it’s because I couldn’t meet the changed expectations of the friendship, describing my emotions every minute is hard for me and I choose not to be friends with people who require me to do that for their comfort)

I’m really struggling to think of any, most coming to mind are bacterial or viral, though I’m certain there are thousands of chronic human pathologies we’ve cured, some we probably don’t even remember curing because the terminology is so outdated (though sadly dropsy is still a thing, and frustratingly consumption isn’t eradicated yet …but it could be!)

Can you give me a starting point if you’ve got one on your tongue? I’d like to journey down the Wikipedia rabbit hole tonight!

Wait, what’s the internet definition of the word?

I thought hussy was a synonym for “loose woman”

What does it mean now days?

Edit: oh, it’s not that hussy has a different definition on the internet, it’s that it looks like “bussy” if you’re not looking closely?

Which I never read correctly anyway because I see it written like that and in my head I’m saying “bah see” not “buo see”

The “Bail out Bed” was a flawed idea because no one wants to get up and relocate in the middle of the night and interrupt their sleep cycles.

He snores, he always snores, tonight won’t be any different, so why don’t I just start in the bail out bed so once I fall asleep I stay asleep and the human freight train I shacked up with doesn’t wake me up.

He finally got a Cpap last year for his obstructive sleep apnoea.

but we’d slept in separate beds for 5 years, and I was used to sleeping alone and having full control over my temperature and I’m a fidgety sleeper, so we couldn’t get used to sharing a bed again.

I think both of us being well rested and refreshed each day is more important to the health of our relationship than sharing a bed. If we’re not fatigued, headachey and cranky, we can spend quality time together outside of bed.

And then you lose any loyalty or banked credits because it’s technically a “New contract”

I had 100GB of data credit in my pre paid phone plan. I got 2GB a month for $5 unlimited talk and text starting in 2014, it’s a good deal for me. And you can imagine how long it took to bank 100GB even with the occasional free bonus data promo… That plan was replaced with a more expensive one but somehow I got grandfathered in to the cheap plan.

So naturally I didn’t want to rock the boat when I was getting my phone for $5 a month (their cheapest plan now is $20)

But they finally caught on and moved me to the $20 this year, they automatically transferred my data bank and sent me the new terms.

I double checked and while this was their cheapest monthly plan the 6 month plan would save me $80 in the long term so I called to get swapped and they said that I’d lose my data bank because it was a new contract. I argued that they changed my contract and I should have had an opportunity to choose which new contract my data gets transferred to.

I spent ages debating it, but there was nothing the rep or their supervisor could do to reward my 10 years with their company or compensate me for the service I had pre paid for (data) that they now expected me to subscribe to on their new terms to be able to access despite the contract I signed saying something totally different.

Their leading budget competitor had the exact same overall rate but for a yearly pre paid plan, and new customers got a 150GB data bank start up bonus. So my phone bill is paid up for the year now and I’ve still got a decent chunk of data and it didn’t cost more than I was prepared to pay the old company.

(and yes I do use it, I’m a substitute teacher so I’m always using my phone as a hot spot when I’m at a different school)

In Australia cigarettes are sold behind the counter, all packets are identical brown with plain white text with the brand. You can’t smoke them in public, and they’re one of the highest taxed products (a 25 pack will easily cost you $50)

And yet we still have a major smoking problem here.

Mostly because of black market fags, $20 illegal import packs, and “vape wars”. It’s shocking when a tabbaconist shop doesn’t get fire bombed by a competing shop.

That said, the tax revenue is nice, if people wanna smoke the rest of the community may as well get something out of it.

Tax the birdie.

I teach community IT.

They really can’t.

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.

Gay lead; when being a stone top just isn’t hard enough.

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!)

No idea, he lives on the other side of the state and I only see him 3 times a year for his birthday, father’s day and Christmas. My brother used to live with him but he spends most of his time with mum now.

I’m certain my dad is getting this rhetoric from social media because he’s a lonely and isolated man in his late 60s with no friends outside of his male dominated blue collar job.

But it’s not my job to reform him, I don’t have the skill set or energy.

He’s also not a racist!

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)

Jesus, now that its terrifying!

What would even be the point of a link that allows you that? Like, why was it designed to do that!?

Props to that person who PM’d you the warning.

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.

As if there wouldn’t be a black market for menthols if they were the only product to be banned.