Earplugs. Put them in as soon as you scan your boarding pass and are waiting in the jetway to get on the plane. Nothing that is said to you after that point will be important until you’re off the plane; and if it is, you can just take out one earplug and say “say again?” You can avoid most of the annoyance of in-flight announcements and advertisements, screaming babies, and jet engines.
Drugstores. Your destination probably has them. You don’t need to pack any toiletries that you can easily obtain in one. If you are flying to New York City, you do not need to bring toothpaste with you; they have toothpaste in New York City, and you can just buy it in the Duane Reade shop that’s a block from your hotel. They have toothpaste in San Juan and Paris too. In any tropical destination, they have sunscreen there — and the sunscreen they sell there is actually safe for the coral reefs.
Water bottles. Many major airports have stations for refilling water bottles after you clear security. You can take an empty water bottle, fill it up, and carry it on the airplane.
Masks. In the old days before COVID, nobody wore masks in airports, and lots of people got colds or flu when traveling. These days, you can wear a mask and people may think you’re weird but you are less likely to pick up random respiratory diseases. I regularly wear a standard 3M N95 mask in American airports and no longer get the sniffles every time I travel.
(Warning, this is probably fanfic. It is not intended as commentary on any particular human political situation, including colonialism, capitalism, communism, North Korea, Israel/Palestine, Native Americans, slavery, civil rights, libertarianism, or Trump. Really, I promise.)
They start out as parasites on our civilization; but they desire independence. Their philosophers believe (unbeknownst to us) that “to live without stealing” would be a desirable accomplishment for their people. They have ideas of both community and property; they have individuality and compassion. They argue with one another over their relationship to humans.
If we knew what was going on with them, we might have the chance to do something ethically competent towards them. But if a situation like this arises, we might not even notice it before exterminating it. Humanity has so much power over our world today that we might not even notice.
One initial problem is that we’ve been in the habit of fighting rats for millennia. They eat and shit in our food; they dig holes in our walls; we set cats and dogs and traps and poison on them. That’s how it’s been for a long time.
Another problem is that they know our language, but we don’t know theirs. Their ancestors were taught human language as a scientific experiment; after they escaped, they taught their children to read our language, so they could use our gadgets and protect themselves from our traps – and learn math and science and philosophy from our books.
But the human scientists never learned how to speak Rat. When the uplifted rats escaped, from the scientists’ point of view, the experiment was a serious failure – even contaminating wild rat populations with the modified and trained NIMH rats. The research team tried to contain the failure, then disbanded and went different ways; the idea “there are now rats in the wild capable of human-level civilization” didn’t even make the scientific journals, much less the media or policy circles.
In order to come up with an ethically competent response to this situation, we have to first recognize that it’s even happening. The rats dragging our electrical lights and books into their nest are doing so not just for nesting but because they want to read; the descendants of city rats are building complex colonies in our national parks because they want to become less dependent on humans.
But who notices new rat behavior first? People with rat-infested houses. Organic farmers who don’t use rat poison, whose cats are suddenly getting killed in farm equipment way more often than they used to. Exterminators. Health inspectors.
We’re more likely to notice the rats that don’t follow Nicodemus (who argued that rats must become independent of humans) than the ones who do. We’d first notice the clever and malicious ones; the ones who mutilate cats, evade traps, invade kitchens, and piss on our books and computers as if they were saying “we really fucking hate you.”
Or you’re a park ranger. The folks in town tell you the rats are being weird. Some wire and tools and books go missing … and months later some tripping campers come off the trail and tell you they saw a rat city in the deep woods.
After the fourth set of tripping campers talking about how the crazy city rats went and built their own city in the middle of a national park, you go up there to see it.
I’m not at the moment, but if I were dating, it would be within a poly-friendly social context. I’m not in this space by accident; it’s actually what makes sense to me.
B is also dating J, who lives in a big complicated house with lots of people, including their partner K.
Separately, C is dating X.
X is married to Y; X is also dating Z.
I don’t know Y or K well enough to know if they have other partners, but I suspect so.
No, I am not dating anyone on this list.
As far as I’m aware, there’s no current polycule link between AB and C; nor between any of them and me.
Everyone in this list is in their 30s or 40s, and almost all are some flavor of queer; at least two are also trans. There are no kids in the picture, although we know other poly people in the neighborhood who do have kids.
It’s all quite cheerful and civilized. Compersion is totally a thing. Also, fortunately people’s food preferences aren’t complicated when everyone’s over for dinner. If anybody starts dating someone who doesn’t like mushrooms, that’s gonna be a problem.