being a taylor swift fan is like living in an escape room. i don’t know what’s going on and i am not contributing anything ever at any time but i am having a good time when i’m not extraordinarily stressed out. and it’s all the time.
Reblogging again because I just realized that if I had this advice in high school I would’ve never made a tumblr account.
Also works for most of those news sites like WSJ or NYT that only let you read a little bit, or block adblockers. Also some disable the scroll bar but if you go to the right side of the console after hitting F12 and look for the CSS element “overflow” and change it from “hidden” to “visible” then you can continue scrolling for free. Might have to click around on different parts of the page to find it, but it should work.
There’s also a Firefox/Chrome extension called Behind The Overlay that does all that with one mouse click. Used it for years; what a time saver.
And if you encounter a true paywall, use Archive.Today to bypass it. Just paste the paywalled url into the blue “search archived snapshots” box near the bottom:
This hack will save your teeth: there are no “right” and “wrong” times to brush your teeth.
It gets in your head that you brush after eating when you wake up and when you go to sleep. Yeah that’s all well and good, but those are times that don’t have a lot of motivation and control…So just…brush your teeth at a different time.
You go to the bathroom in the middle of the day and are like “I should brush my teeth” DO IT!!!! Don’t listen to the other half of that sentence that says “shit but it’s not the right time”
I don’t care if you’re about to eat, or get coffee, or whatever.
If you are there and you want to…do it.
Honestly this hack will solve most of problems. Just stop assigning meaningless “right” and “wrong” to tasks and start saying “I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want and society and its expectations don’t really matter to me”.
If there’s no barrier in the first place you don’t have to get over it.
huge ADHD hack. if you can get over the “all or nothing”, moralizing, judging aspect of every action you “should” take, you’ll discover you can get more done than you expect.
I’m a big fan of the 2 PM shower. spend a whole morning feeling lazy and guilty, then just decide to start the day over again, even if it is lunchtime.
you can always begin again. any hour, any moment can be the beginning. you can choose that. the clock doesn’t run you, you run the clock
you can always begin again. any hour, any moment can be the beginning. you can choose that
“Oh [other profession] wants better working conditions? WELL [MY profession] is HARDER I work TWENTY HOUR DAYS and I am NOT ALLOWED BREAKS and I’m PAID FOR SHIT and I have NO INSURANCE and I NEVER SEE MY CHILDREN so WHY are YOU COMPLAINING LOL”
have you considered that maybe YOUR job ALSO should not suck that much
Story time. This is not so much for OP but for anyone else who might not have union experience: Bear in mind that there is a strong propaganda effort to get people to this viewpoint. They’re not being willfully obtuse.
I spoke to a neighbour the other day. She’d just taken voluntary a lay-off from her factory job because she had an ongoing injury and they wouldn’t let her adjust her hours in a sensible way. She’d been struggling to make it work anyway but her back was getting really bad. So when they put the word out that they were looking for volunteers to take lay-offs, she put up her hand. Still, she was proud to tell me that she was considered one of their best and fastest workers, even with the injury. She was frustrated that one of the newer workers seemed to have gotten various accommodations, even though that worker was nowhere near as good.
I could tell that she’d been having similar conversations with her coworkers on the factory floor for years. Who got extras they didn’t “deserve.” Who was a shoddy worker and made life harder for everyone. Who came in to work even though their parent had just died to make sure that nobody had to pick up their slack. And all of that pervaded with propaganda about “greedy unions” who slim down your already-skinny paycheque just because they’re all lazy slackers who don’t want to pull their weight and don’t appreciate the nice boss for hiring them. (This is the same across all types of jobs. Next story time I’ll talk about two university profs who grew to fame and fortune via unions and the social safety net and yet both engaged in union busting.)
My neighbour’s injury, incidentally, was a result of her work at the factory, but she didn’t want to try for compensation or anything else. She’d “never taken a single sick day in 20 years” and wasn’t “the kind of person who made waves” so she was just going the regular unemployment route but finding the systems obscure and challenging. She was hurt and shocked that her old employer would treat one of their best workers this way and leave them to deal with the fall-out by themselves.
Meanwhile, Canadian (federal) government workers were striking in Ottawa. And she expressed frustration that they felt “entitled to strike” when the (provincial) services she was accessing were so shoddy and difficult to navigate. Why did they “get to” strike if their work was apparently so poor? She had no sympathy for them.
I pushed back gently. Her factory floor job wasn’t union, but the admin staff was union. They seemed to get a better deal. We spoke about strength in numbers, and how hard it is to try and get your due from your employer without anyone to help you. And how they make all these forms complicated on purpose so it’s easier to deny you money or other support. And how it would be great to have someone to go to meetings with you, who knew all the legal stuff, and who could help you with the forms, and get you the money for the medical services you needed.
She wasn’t pro-union by the time I left, but we’d agreed on a few things, and I’d framed a few of her concerns in a way that made her more ambivalent about strikes (rather than outright hostile). Still, as we were saying our goodbyes, she said, “let’s hope they hurry up and get back to work eh!”
Because imagine what it would cost her to turn around and agree that unions are good, and strikes are good, and you should fight your employer for your fair compensation and your rights. Twenty years of taking no sick leave, working herself to the bone on not enough money, laid off and struggling with the system for basic support. She’s proud of her suffering, all the times she didn’t complain, all the times she pushed on even as the going got harder and harder.
Because if she can’t be proud of it… then what? She’s dumb for taking a non-union job? She should’ve organised and could’ve had better pay and a severance package and free physiotherapy for life? If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.
So. Don’t put up with union busting and do talk to the people in your life about solidarity, but do realise that being anti-union isn’t just folks being aggressively wrong for the sake of it. They’ve been lied to. And they possibly have a lot of complex grief and identity and other experiences tied up in this.
“If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.”
This.
And this applies to a lot of other things you might want people to change their minds about.
I pushed back gently.
That’s the key. You talk to people like they deserve your respect, and like they’re smart worthy of time because THEY ARE. Otherwise you’re just another person trying to use them for your own ends without consideration for what they want or need.
