Writing for writing’s sake! Long or short, if I take great pride in how something was written, it gets filed here!
I don’t consider myself a writer (and by that, I mean I’ve never done NaNoWriMo or anything like that), and don’t really enjoy writing…unless if it’s about a topic I actually enjoy like guinea pigs, small animals, (sleep) dreams and so on.
Me, personally? I’m not a native speaker, but I think it sounds dumb. 😬 The “gender neutral” form is Latino (ex. “celebrate Latino culture”). Latina is the feminine version. If you’re referring to a group of at least one male, the form is Latinos (ex. “a lot of my friends are “Latinos”). If you REALLY want to emphasis that you’re also including Latinas and feel that just Latinos isn’t cutting it, you can say “Latinos and Latinas” (or Latinos/as for short).
And just FYI, the masculine/feminine ending applies to almost every word, not just people. Chair = silla (feminine). Car = carro/aúto (masculine). If you wanted to say “red chair” = “silla roja” (with rojo being the masculine/gender neutral version). It’s literally how the language works.
Source: took Spanish for 2 semesters
Non-Binary People?
EDIT: I just thought of something. What if the person is nonbinary? I looked this up. When they say -o is gender neutral, they really do mean GENDER NEUTRAL. -o (as in Latino) should be used for nonbinary people. This is how it is, grammatically.
Source: native speakers on reddit (see link in above paragraph. The responses are kind of harsh, but they get their point across.)
Belle (f/5, going to be 6 next month) has some severe arthritis. Right now, she has extremely limited mobility in her back legs, along with some sort of grunty breathing. We went to see Dr. Fowell on Tuesday, who confirmed via X-ray that she has arthritis. As for the breathing, her lungs looked clear, so no respiratory issues. Dr. Fowell thinks it might have been caused by convulsions, from the pain. Along with the meloxicam (and anti-seizure/anti-convulsion meds), I’ve been doing warm water soaks (per vet) and rubbing her leg joints. She kind of flexes them a little and no longer does the loud breathing, as of Sunday.
But because she can’t completely move around on her own, I’ve been having to move her around the cage, putting new hay piles in front of her and hold the water bottle in front of her (if she’s not near one) so she could drink.Despite that, you couldn’t tell she has bad arthritis. Her face still looks alert and perky as usual, and she still gets excited for vegs and her urinary & vitamin C supplements.
And obviously, all of this didn’t happen overnight. Dr. Fowell thinks this was developing for a while now, but Belle was hiding it (as guinea pigs do). I remember her doing the grunty breathing last Thursday night, the night before I found that she having mobility issues.
And something triggered the arthritis, like maybe something scared her. And at the time, I couldn’t think of what could’ve caused it, but after contemplating and going through previous messages to contacts, I remembered, Friday night when they were getting their dinner, a loud plane flew over our house. Belle screamed from her hidey and at the time, I thought the noise just scared her and that was it. But after all this happened, I think the noise triggered the arthritis, and she was screaming from the sudden pain?
Timeline of Events
Apr. 22, 11:40pm — Noticed she had loud, grunty breathing. Thought she had something stuck in her throat and thought it would pass (based on what I read and my previous experience when hearing this sort of thing). [Actual probable explanation: Pain from the arthritis was making itself more known, but she was still trying to hide it.]
Apr. 23, 8:31pm — Loud plane flew over our house and Belle screamed/wheeked from her hidey. They were also getting their dinner, so I couldn’t tell if the noise scared her or if she was telling me to hurry up with the food (it wasn’t a loud wheek, more like “wheeeeeeeee!”, which is how she normally wheeks, unlike most guinea pigs who go “wheee wheeee wheeee!”). [Actual probable explanation: The noise triggered somehow triggered the not-able-to-walk part of arthritis.]
She ate her greens as usual (in her hidey—so at the time, I thought she was still freaked out by the noise).
Apr. 23, 11:50(ish)pm — Noticed that she having seriously trouble moving on her hind legs. Had a huge thing of messy 💩 stuck to her bottom, usually means she hasn’t been eating hay (probably hasn’t been getting up).
She did eat the hay I put in front of her though.
Apr. 27, 2:00pm — X-rayed, diagnosed with severe arthritis. Prescribed meloxicam (for the pain) and Gabapentin (for the convulsions from the pain).
A friend and I were in a city that was being invaded by demons and ghouls. We decided to use music to make them go away, and each bought an electric guitar from a music store. We thought maybe we could play Cura, (forgot the name of the second song) and Curaga, healing spells from the Final Fantasy games. The idea was that the healing properties of the songs would cancel out the undead nature of the bad guys and finish them off. I don’t know about my friend but I didn’t have any experience with playing music (ex. didn’t know what a chord was until a little while ago and didn’t understand the point). So I wasn’t sure if this would work and just enrage them further due to my bad playing.
My (literal) dream guitar
I then woke up and decided to get into guitar anyway and went to a guitar store. These two guys were at the counter when I showed up and I told them what I was looking for. They didn’t say anything and just looked at me expectantly. I got annoyed, thinking what I have to do this myself now? I demanded “WELL ARE YOU GOING TO HELP ME OR WHAT”. They both agreed to help me but the one sitting directly in front of me had to do some employee stuff so the other guy helped me. I repeated what I said before (“I’m a complete noob with guitar so something that’s easy to play would be best. But I generally prefer quality over ease of play”), and realized maybe I never actually told them what I was looking for out loud, and only said it my head, which is why they were waiting for me to say something. I felt bad but the store employee didn’t seem offended and was like “ah got it”.
He went over to look at their current stock and two of guitars he inspected looked like the same exact bright blue in my dream. I grew hopefully, thinking maybe I could have the same one from my dream. But he put them down and instead picked up another with a pale wood finish and said “with guitars, it’s better to have ease of play over quality” and proceeded to get the wood one ready for purchase.
My soon-to-be (very literal) dream guitar
I agreed and then noticed as he was gathering the parts, how dinged up it looked from far away. I thought “bleh, I hope I get a discount with this”. And also wondered if what he said about ease of play vs. quality was true and couldn’t help but think that he only picked the wood one just to get rid of it.
And then I woke up for real.
And noo this didn’t make me want to get into guitar for real. I actually tried taking up violin when I was a kid, despite having no musical background. And violin is probably one of the last things I should’ve tried. So…it didn’t go well. It lasted for 3 weeks, and I only listen to music but actually have no interest in playing it.
I’ve had dreams where I’m in Disneyland and I get lost, mainly when I get to a certain abandoned hotel. And in this dream, I wound up at Disneyland again, but this time, I was determined not to get lost!
