I called the benefits place that was supposed to have an interview with me 20 minutes ago and I could not get a real person and I can’t log in to their website and I’m just sitting here with this paperwork that has like 75 conflicting due dates on it and realizing that this is not only my food stamps but my medical coverage and I’m just going to maybe have a nervous breakdown today
[Call a friend. Let them know right now that they are lethal.]
Have you been thinking that there’s a real lack of hopeless strangers on your dash asking for help lately? ☆Congratulations, I have arrived!☆
I feel obligated to a certain level of jesterdom while doing this, like perhaps I can earn my keep by entertaining people. It’s bleak and humiliating, but we’re gonna Have Fun With It! :D This is perhaps more a note to make to self and to a therapist rather than note here, but it segues well into the important point of:
~.•°¤.°•○~☆ I Can’t Afford Shit ☆•*.°○.•°*×
let alone a therapist
I’m currently stuck in a weird position, both physically and situationally, because I have some sciatica scoliosis spinal bone spur nonsense that decided that now was its time to shine. I’m in pain all the time at every angle and position, so I’m not doing Great?
I’m in the middle of the process of filing for disability and if you’ve ever applied for a job and been frustrated that you gave them all of your information and then the application asked you to give them the same information all over again, applying for disability is like doing that, but times 40, and with information you don’t have memorized the way you have your phone number and home address. They also insist on doing it through the mail. My next step is to be evaluated by some kind of impartial physician. My appointments are in mid to late July. I am unsure what they want me to do with myself until that time.
The work I’m trying to do is not enough. I’m making buttons like crazy but in the end they are just buttons and they sell for 2 to $4 and so you really need to be someone who is absolutely psyched about buttons and buys 40 of them or I need to tap into a market that is Larger in order for this to be reliably sustaining. I do not know what that market is. I was the weird kid in school - what is popular, I don’t know, I was never meant to know, it is a mystery.
Do not get me wrong, I am currently holding my face above water because of some really enthusiastic fans of buttons.
But I can’t sell a month’s rent worth of buttons. I don’t even think I have the supplies to make that many.
My rent is USD$670, which is hiked up an extra $70 from where it was last year because my landlord wanted to bleed me dry while the world is on fire. Despite how poorly insulated and badly maintained this house is as a structure, I do enjoy having even a badly insulated roof and a place to put all my shit.
If you’ve got a need for $700 worth of buttons for some reason, hit me up.
If you don’t, then hey, I’m another artist in crippling pain on your dash hoping people in better situations than I can help out. I would love to cover my rent to remove that anxiety for myself for another month, but Every Bill keeps happening, so more beyond that it going to my electric which hasn’t been paid since February, and my internet which will keep me afloat in nearly every way possible. I’m also almost at the bottom of the bag of Science Diet food that keeps my beloved cat, Onyx, healthy. I do not know how best to keep a ticker tape of a goal, because there isn’t one? I need to survive until at least July. It’s June 17th as I write this. Two months rent and some cat food? Don’t know, I’m five minutes from a phone call which will determine if they will still allow me food stamps.
SO.
Ways in which I can dance for your amusement so that you may throw coins in my direction:
Art Commissions! I can paint like a motherfucker! I have an extremely ill-advised expensive piece of paper saying I can do it!
Check it out, man. There are COLORS and everything.
And a Ko-fi! I sell buttons on Ko-fi, in case you were wondering when that plot point would come back. It’s not very satisfying narratively, I am sorry. Thinking about offering prints there, as well!
I have other options in my sidebar - RedBubble, Society6, etc!
There is also paypal.me/ladyyatexel if you just want to give money to my literally actually broken ass without getting a cool item in return.
And yes, if you’re thinking this all looks and feels kinda familiar, I had to dance and beg on the internet in Dec 2021, and I made that go as far as I possibly could. It’s six months later and everything I’m trying to do to better my situations is just taking Forever. I’m trying to come up with a way to stay afloat while rescuing myself takes its time.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far, friend. Even just knowing someone listened to you yelling for a minute is helpful.
No need to feel obligated, especially if you don’t feel I deserve a second round of help, I understand. But if you wanna spread this around and let me ‘Will Art For Food’ on someone else’s dash, that would be sick.
Take care of yourselves, friends, it is brutal out there.
Kestrel-dad not sure how to dad but he’s trying his best.
Dad loves you and feeds you. But he is also dumb and feeds you a wonderfully done wagyu steak. You are 3 days old.
Okay, but check out this video from mid-May 2022 of a Kestrel Dad who just kept piling up voles and mice beside his babies when the mom was injured/killed/mia’d by owls…but then watched one of his babies just swallow a lizard and went “OH. I can feed them small food!” and learned to tear it apart!
EDIT: There’s a not-zero percent chance that this could be the same dad???????? The source is the same–Robert E Fuller–but they could be different birds.
UPDATE: Not only has Mister Kes learned to feed his chicks all on his own…
….the three chicks who were taken out of the nest for intensive care after the mom disappeared were put back in, and he just started feeding them, too.
He’s a single father of six who does not possess the instincts to feed even one of his offspring, but he learned and adopted that behavior without difficulty and is now hunting and providing for six kids all on his own.
Apparently all of the babies have grown up and have left the nest. This video shows the last one leaving the nest with a bit of help of the same person that took care of the other three chicks in the previous video.
This lady I follow on tiktok has been creating character designs to encourage people to make fantasy characters who wear a hijab and they are so incredibly cool!
This is a compilation of looks they have done so far and they are all really awesome
