oh lord

cleversimon:

(I’ve been kicking around a half-finished draft of this for a while. Theresa inspired me to finally finish it. Thanks, T.)

I try to be a positive person. I try not to talk shit about people behind their backs. I try to find silver linings. I try to fix problems instead of just complaining about them. I try not to use sarcasm as a weapon. I try not to hide behind passive-aggression. I try to give the benefit of the doubt. I try to step back from things when they make me too angry. I try to focus on the big picture, the long game, the grander scale at which things tend to work out okay. I don’t always succeed, but I try.

I feel things more deeply than most. When I’m happy, I’m ecstatic; when I’m sad, I’m heartbroken; when I’m mad, I am fucking furious. I also have a powerful sense of empathy. It’s why I love going to parties, even as an introvert, and why I prefer my movie theatres crowded, and why I can’t bear overhearing arguments. I soak up the emotions of the people around me whether I want to or not.

And so I try to surround myself with people who lift me up, who support, and create, and rejoice, people around whom I thrive. My fiancée; my friends; my internet people: they’re the reason I smile and laugh and feel warm and fuzzy inside every single day, the reason I’m strong enough to face obstacles head-on instead of ducking out, the reason I can get up every morning and work on building this life that I have and that I love.

I’m not perfect. A few weeks ago I snapped and sent a nasty email to someone who’d been pissing me off since the summer. Unloading months of rage should have been cathartic as hell, but I spent the rest of the day cranky, sullen, shiftless. Responding to negative people—engaging them at all—only drags you down to their level. You can’t talk them out of their pit. You can’t show them the error of their ways. You can’t deliver the crushing bon mot that convinces them of your superiority. You can’t beat them at all—you can only join them.

People who live in an emotional gutter, who whine about problems they do sweet fuck-all to solve, who ooze snide disdain for anything that doesn’t meet their personal standards of worth, who hide their fortresses of irony and rip on other people to make themselves look funnier, smarter, more enlightened—those people are cancer, and they get cut out of my life accordingly.

I try to be a positive person. It’s not always easy, but it is so fucking worth it.

oh lord

@marcoarment:

“I have no idea how Javascript works.” –David

oh lord

cleversimon:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

— Richard Dawkins

oh lord

cleversimon:

“Ordinarily I wouldn’t question others’ parenting choices. But the problem is literally one of live or don’t live. While that parent chose not to vaccinate her child for what she likely considers well-founded reasons, she is putting other children at risk. In this instance, the child at risk was my son. He has leukemia.”

— Stephanie Tatel in Slate (via indefensible) Ubiquitous vaccination eliminates footholds for infection. It’s what wiped out polio, for Christ’s sake. Vaccinating my kids means yours won’t get exposed to the biohazard of the month, and vice versa; it’s part of the social contract. If you want to opt out of the social contract, I think the rest of us should be allowed to opt you out of society.

oh lord

cleversimon:

“The only extent to which hate-crime protections pertain to “thought” is in the way that all criminal law does, which is to say that motive matters. If you truly believe that the law should make no distinction between accidental manslaughter and premeditated first-degree homicide, because you truly believe that any such distinction constitutes the establishment of “thought crime,” then I will accept that you are making this “thought-crime” objection to hate-crime legislation in good faith. (I’ll think you’re kind of an idiot, but at least a sincere idiot.)”

— slacktivist: Oh, and Tony Perkins? He lies. A lot. For money.

oh lord

peachcherub:

And people are joking about it. About a 6-year-old child’s possible death.

I’m losing faith in humanity.

oh lord