40. Please remember that compliance with any or all of the aforementioned will not result in praise of any kind, cookies, medals, or otherwise. Thank you.
Reminded us about things like the shameful sinners trope -- in which people who have disabled children and say things like "Oh, I actually love them" sometimes get praised for how they treat disabled people
31. Intersectionality isn't a buzzword.
Contemporary conversations about disability including the over policing of disabled Black bodies
11. Don't use the word inspiration unless you're talking about Whitman, Langston Hughes, John Keats or Jesus.
Inspirational overcomers trope
25. Let me point out, Tiny Tim has been fucking me over since 1843. If I'm happy, it's taken for a miracle; if I'm not, I remind them of all they have and all the work they have to do. I could be a big smile, a raised fist, an eye glittered with tears.
This reminds us of the conversation we'd had about tropes like the "bitter cripple"
6. The words disability, disorder, and disease aren't synonymous. 7. And while we're at it, let's talk about language. You're here for that above all right? Me too. But I get to decide how it's done, not you. If I say cripple, it's because I like how the consonants break like bones. I'm not handing you a membership card. If I say call me "special needs" and I'll roll over your foot, it doesn't mean that softness won't comfort others. Political correctness is kind of like using correct pronouns. So many words have been made up and thrown onto my flesh. None were my name.
These emphasize that it depends on the person and what they want to be called. This might connect to the reading about the "Glossary of Ableist Terms" & Simi Linton "Reassigning Meaning" about "nice words"
35. If I fall, the way you gasp hurts worse than impact.
Connects to how the disabilities aren't always the problem, it's how society reacts to and views them -- social model
10. The phrase but you don't look sick can go fuck itself with a moving train covered in chainsaws.
Invisible disabilities -- just because you can't see the disability doesn't mean it isn't there
38. Even if you pity me, don't mess around when it comes to editing.
"We're not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about poetry"
30. I don't want to talk about me; how's my stanza structure?
"We're not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about poetry"
4. When asking about my disability, please remember you have Siri. What you really need to know will come up in the poems.
"We're not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about poetry"
28. Halle Berry, Harriet Tubman, Orlando Bloom, Clinton, Christie, Darwin. A lot of your faves are disabled. Just like a lot of your faves are actually bisexual. (More breaking news at 11.)
Certain presidents or politicans would hide their disabilities to avoid that being the main focus on them
3. This isn't the Whose Life Sucks More game. You have seen moments I can never imagine.
Absence of a disability hierarchy -- disability often put under one framework, but really that framework only holds true in some ways, disability awareness is often seen as only one thing, but there's a lot under that umbrella term
The first night
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First, y
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"Be careful with those machines."
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I've heard it in the chilliest land -- And on the strangest Sea -- Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb -- of Me.
Unconditional energy, it's just there
Yet, never, in Extremity,
Hope is persistent, it doesn't require anything of us, omnipresent
little Bird
purity, whatever this hope is did nothing wrong, 'little"
And never stops -- at all --
It's relentless, you can't stop the bird from singing even though it's caged
And sings the tune without the words --
She has hope but perhaps without reasoning & it's tenacious and stays there anyway
"Hope" is the thing with feathers --
Personifies Hope as a bird, something innate in her soul
Me.
Rhymes well
Gale -
What is with the capitalization
I've heard it in the chilliest land --
Comes back to the opening image
By an act of the American Congress,
Here, Douglass is referring to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This provided legal basis that escaped enslaved persons would not be considered freed if they made it to the North & allowed slavers to search for escaped enslaved persons within states where slavery was illegal & made it illegal for people to provide help to “fugitive slaves.” It resulted in the capture & enslavement of many people who were previously, legally free. See the image below from the New York Public Library (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-bbee-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99) 
"Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead."
Here Douglass quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm for Life." Read more here: https://www.favoritepoem.org/poem_APsalmofLife.html
the last waltz of Von Weber.
Here's a rendition of this for those interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtCPqJhiRDQ
USHER
Not the singer
The land
Test annotation. If you can see this, you're doing great! 