Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Sep 01

royalslayer asked: mY GOD IM SORRY IF I REOPENED OLD WOUNDS WITH THAT ASK IT WAS NOT MY INTENTION OH MY LORD IN HEAVEN THAT IS HORRIBLE KADSFJLADJS

Oh my god lol no you’re fine, tbh the commune situation was an unmitigated disaster but…like…sitcom-esque, in a way. I just currently have no filter and kind of aimlessly rambled in the tags for a while, which, yeah, looking back over them definitely seem pretty grim? But like no one died and they were mostly good people, just Very Confused About Life, it had its definite downsides but I’m also not exactly bearing trauma from the experience. Honestly, you’re totally fine.

Although on the other hand it’s given me some weird reference points for the world. Example: I can tell you the logistical maximum number of family units who can live in any given house, which is remarkably useful.  I can also spot a cult at 50 paces, which is helpful, and I’m implicitly familiar with what can be managed with holistic remedies and what really does require a medical intervention.

Anonymous asked: psst, would you accept a positive vibes spell from your local bored-with-no-idea-how-to-use-their-spell-time witch? wanted to ask before hand in case youre not confortable with the idea! love your blog and your tag rantings!!

My dude, I’m usually very wary of that sort of thing, but listen, I am taking the MCAT in literally under 36 hours, I’ll take whatever you’ve got.  Have at it.  

actualvampireang:

i just find the animorphs books dedication to body horror so charming. like, there was no reason that having kids turning into animals had to be horrifying and gross every time they did it. but ka applegate was apparently like, “no, this is what the children want.”

(via demenior)

kiralamouse:

thisisevenharderthannamingablog:

Dear the other two people on this site who don’t watch GoT,

How you doing?

Inadvertently watching almost all the show passively via gifset, how’re you?

(via skymurdock)

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Aug 31

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omejalomaniac: “i don’t want to hear that they’ve changed their sound for the money ever again lmao ”

omejalomaniac:

i don’t want to hear that they’ve changed their sound for the money ever again lmao

(via johanirae)

Life in Bikini Bottom; Or, At Least One Family Has A Pretty Weird Vacation Video of Me in the Bahamas | a trashbag full of donuts -

ofgeography:

you know, there are few things in this world that i am unequivocally sure of. what adult life has taught me so far is i don’t know anything about anything. it’s how i know that i finally made it out of that unbearable quarter of everyone’s life where they keep thinking they know things once they hit a milestone.

anyway, now i’m like, “i know nothing except that i’m afraid of the yellowstone supervolcano!” and that’s how i know i might almost be a real adult.

what was i saying? oh, right: i don’t know a lot, but i do know three things:

  1. dogs are good;
  2. eating is the best part of every day; and
  3. bikinis: why?

i don’t understand why we as a society have gone all-in on bikinis. i mean, okay, yes, they’re “““““sexy””””” and “minimize” “tan” “lines” and whatever whatever whatever, blah, but like, they are the least practical article of clothing mankind has ever invented and we all!!! just accepted it!!! we were all like, “yeah, this is fine, even though you can’t jump off anything without it falling off, you’re gonna get twice the sand stuck in the places you want zero sand, and the tan lines you do get are gonna be frickin weird once we inevitably evolve from bra-and-underwear style to like, aeonflux-inspired leather flesh prisons.”

i resisted buying bikinis for a long time, and because you are all my friends you will accept me at my word when i say it was for the above reasons and not deeply-rooted insecurities about being a woman in society. but at a certain point, it became like, more difficult to die on the hill of not wearing bikinis than to just accept my body for all of its flaws.

my first bikini was fairly lowkey, as far as bikinis go. it was blue and white, had pretty strong coverage, and tied on both the bottom and the top so you could adjust how tight it was. that was great for when i wanted to jump off things and needed it not to fall everywhere, but also sometimes wanted to lay out in the sun and didn’t want my legs to fall off from lack of circulation.

i caved and bought it because i was in the seventh grade and we were going on a family vacation to the bahamas. well, it was sort of a family vacation. my brother couldn’t come so i just brought a friend. that’s the same, right? her name was jane* and she was the kind of great that meant eventually we had to stop being friends, because she was into all the same things i was into but was slightly better than me at all of them.

as an adult i probably could have made that friendship work but as an insecurity-riddled  twelve-year-old, it was doomed.

this was way before the tragic but inevitable breakdown of our friendship, however, when jane and i were still thick as thieves. she came on vacation with my wonderful but admittedly weird family and was a real trooper, even when i made her dance the cha cha slide up to sixteen times in one day and insisted on wearing a billabong t-shirt with an orange butterfly on it everywhere we went. also, at the end of the trip, when she was sad because she’d met a boy and their love was doomed, i just said “aw, hey, bud, bud, aww, heyyyy,” over and over because i didn’t then and don’t now have any idea how to respond to people who are crying.

she even helped my mom talk me into swimming with dolphins, which i was excited about theoretically but, due to my well-documented fear of being in bodies of water that sustain life, couldn’t quite make myself commit to.

dolphin day arrived pretty late in the vacation, one of our last, which would end up being a good thing. and i was ready. i was fully committed to meeting my dolphin best friend, becoming a dolphin trainer, and living the rest of my life swimming in the ocean with an army of dolphins to protect me from all the scary things in there. i had even talked myself into believing that if i stared longingly at the ocean for long enough, someone–probably an attractive twenty-something man with a strong jaw and square shoulders, but i’m just guessing–would notice, and see that i was ~meant to be a dolphin trainer.

surely he would take me under his tutelage. i had a natural gift but it would need to be harnessed. would it be our fault when, during the process, we fell in love and got married and lived together in a house with a glass bottom where our dolphin friends could swim? no. it would not be. that’s just what happens when two people work long hours training dolphins.

but that’s not what happened.

what happened was: when my time came, my moment, i pushed off the dock and into the water, ready to meet my new dolphin friends with open arms.

but i didn’t get that far. i got about … five inches, and then my bikini bottom caught on a nail sticking out of the dock, and i got no further.

i hung there. probably knee-deep in water but very definitely not touching the ground. not really breathing, because have you ever gotten a wedgie so intense you can, like, taste it?

here’s the thing about having a wedgie that you get when you are suspended from a height: you can’t…fix it. i had no leverage. i couldn’t haul myself up enough to untangle myself, because i didn’t have that kind of arm strength and i’m frankly suspicious of people who do. and the longer i hung, the deeper the rip became.

on my left, my mother who bore me, who pledged to love me for the rest of my days, who fed me and cared for me and made sure i was vaccinated so that i would die of polio or infect some other poor kid with polio, was absolutely losing it. she was collapsed on the dock, hand over her eyes, laughing so hard that no sound was coming out.

“mom,” i said.

she flapped her hand at me to indicate that she had heard but that no help was coming.

on my right was a tall gentleman in floral bathing shorts. i’d guess he was in his late forties or early fifties. he was a dad. i knew he was a dad because a) he looked like he was born with a grill spatula in his hand and b) he’d been taking pictures and videos of his two kids all morning. he was still filming.

he was not filming his children, who his wife bore, who he pledged to love for the rest of their days, who he fed and cared for and made sure they were vaccinated so that they wouldn’t die of polio or infect some other poor kid with polio. he was filming me, wedgie mcwhygod?, flopping around on the side of the dock in an attempt to rip my bikini enough that it would break and free me from the dock’s clutches.

he was also laughing so hard that he was doubled over, hands on his knees, the camera only half-heartedly pointed in my direction.

“why?” i asked plaintively, and through his laughter he managed to kind of shrug his shoulders in that universal human way to signify i don’t know, i can’t stop.

the way that i got down, by the way, is not that either adult rescued me. my bathing suit just finally ripped. in fact, it ripped so badly i had to tie both sides of the rip into a knot so it wouldn’t fall off. the dolphins were unimpressed. i was not taken into the care of a dolphin trainer that i was destined to love.

i think, sometimes, about that dude and his vacation video. i wonder if it got weirder every year to have possession of, or if it’s the kind of thing that you just become used to. “here’s us at the beach, here’s us drinking daiquiris, here’s us snorkeling, here’s that girl hanging off the dock from her bikini, here’s that girl hanging off the dock from her bikini from a different angle when dad was bent over laughing, here’s that girl hanging of the dock from her bikini’s mom howling with laughter, here’s us riding jet skis.”

what does that family imagine i grew up to be?

well, whoever you guys are, if you’re reading this and still have it: i’d love a copy.

bymyprettyfloralbonnet:

tatterdemalionamberite:

words-writ-in-starlight:

elodieunderglass:

redcharade:

I guess I had so completely absorbed the prevailing wisdom that I expected people in bankruptcy to look scruffy or shifty or generally disreputable. But what struck me was that they looked so normal.

The people appearing before that judge came in all colors, sizes, and ages. A number of men wore ill-fitting suits, two or three of them with bolero ties, and nearly everyone dressed up for the day. They looked like they were on their way to church. An older couple held onto each other as they walked carefully down the aisle and found a seat. A young mother gently jiggled her keys for the baby in her lap. Everyone was quiet, speaking in hushed tones or not at all. Lawyers – at least I thought they were lawyers – seemed to herd people from one place to another.

I didn’t stay long. I felt as if I knew everyone in that courtroom, and I wanted out of there. It was like staring at a car crash, a car crash involving people you knew.

Later, our data would confirm what I had seen in San Antonio that day. The people seeking the judge’s decree were once solidly middle-class. They had gone to college, found good jobs, gotten married, and bought homes. Now they were flat busted, standing in front of that judge and all the world, ready to give up nearly everything they owned just to get some relief from the bill collectors.

As the data continued to come in, the story got scarier. San Antonio was no exception: all around the country, the overwhelming majority of people filing for bankruptcy were regular families who had hit hard times. Over time we learned that nearly 90 percent were declaring bankruptcy for one of three reasons: a job loss, a medical problem, or a family breakup (typically divorce, sometimes the death of a husband or wife). By the time these families arrived in the bankruptcy court, they had pretty much run out of options. Dad had lost his job or Mom had gotten cancer, and they had been battling for financial survival for a year or longer. They had no savings, no pension plan, and no homes or cars that weren’t already smothered by mortgages. Many owed at least a full year’s income in credit card debt alone. They owed so much that even if they never bought another thing – even if Dad got his job back tomorrow and Mom had a miraculous recovery – the mountain of debt would keep growing on its own, fueled by penalties and compounding interest rates that doubled their debts every few years. By the time they came before a bankruptcy judge, they were so deep in debt that being flat broke – owning nothing, but free from debt – looked like a huge step up and worth a deep personal embarrassment.

Worse yet, the number of bankrupt families was climbing. In the early 1980s, when my partners and I first started collecting data, the number of families annually filing for bankruptcy topped a quarter of a million. True, a recession had hobbled the nation’s economy and squeezed a lot of families, but as the 1980s wore on and the economy recovered, the number of bankruptcies unexpectedly doubled. Suddenly, there was a lot of talk about how Americans had lost their sense of right and wrong, how people were buying piles of stuff they didn’t actually need and then running away when the bills came due. Banks complained loudly about unpaid credit card bills. The word deadbeat got tossed around a lot. It seemed that people filing for bankruptcy weren’t just financial failures – they had also committed an unforgivable sin.

Part of me still wanted to buy the deadbeat story because it was so comforting. But somewhere along the way, while collecting all those bits of data, I came to know who these people were.

In one of our studies, we asked people to explain in their own words why they filed for bankruptcy. I figured that most of them would probably tell stories that made them look good or that relieved them of guilt.

I still remember sitting down with the first stack of questionnaires. As I started reading, I’m sure I wore my most jaded, squinty-eyed expression.

The comments hit me like a physical blow. They were filled with self-loathing. One man had written just three words to explain why he was in bankruptcy:

Stupid.
Stupid.
Stupid.

When writing about their lives, people blamed themselves for taking out a mortgage they didn’t understand. They blamed themselves for their failure to realize their jobs weren’t secure. They blamed themselves for their misplaced trust in no-good husbands and cheating wives. It was blindingly obvious to me that most people saw bankruptcy as a profound personal failure, a sign that they were losers through and through.

Some of the stories were detailed and sad, describing the death of a child or what it meant to be laid off after thirty-three years with the same company. Others stripped a world of pain down to the bare facts:

Wife died of cancer. Left $65,000 in medical bills after insurance.
Lack of full-time work – worked five part-time jobs to meet rent, utilities, phone, food, and insurance.

They thought they were safe – safe in their jobs and their lives and their love – but they weren’t.

I ran my fingers over one of the papers, thinking about a woman who had tried to explain how her life had become such a disaster. A turn here, a turn there, and her life might have been very different.

Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job. A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.

– A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren, pg. 34 - pg. 36

(Bolding mine)

I don’t want to derail this too hard. And I am terrifyingly, shakingly conscious that I live in the UK, with its mildly-socialist leanings and socialised healthcare and council houses for homeless families, and I know in my head that even if the locusts come for everything I have, if I just stay on this particular piece of land, I will be able to keep the baby alive -

I don’t want to derail too hard, but when people ask “why aren’t young people getting houses and babies” and so on: look at this post, the raw terror of this post. The reality of the locusts. The facial markings on the face of the wolf at the door.

Young people today, like the people of the Great Depression and the World-Wars-In-The-Arena-Of-Combat, know that these things can be taken away. Just. Wiped off the map.

A turn here, a turn there, and your life is over and your game is done, and you have to stand there in your shame, having lost everything.

So the response to that is: have nothing, and you can’t lose everything.

I can see the appeal.

But I wonder how deep in our hearts this nihilism can get. What its impacts will be. How can we plan for the future of the planet, when our brains can only focus on the £300 on our credit card, and panic.

What did this do to us? The children of the bankruptcy. The kids raised in this religion. can we make ourselves okay.

The most lingering comment I ever heard someone make about Millennials was an older man I was talking to about the way we think about finances–when he dreamed about being a millionaire as a young man, he talked about yachts and mansions and trips to the Bahamas; when I did, I talked about living debt-free and being able to buy dinner out without looking at my monthly budget.  He heard me out, took me seriously.

And at the end of it all, he nodded and looked at me and asked, “Do you know who you remind me of?”

And I said no, no I didn’t, and he nodded some more.

“My mother.  She grew up just before the Depression hit, and she saw people lose everything left and right.  And whenever she talked about finances, she sounded just like you.”  He paused for a moment, and said, “I never really thought about what growing up like that would do to a generation.”

He still brings that conversation up, years later.  He hasn’t made a single derisive comment about Millennials since.

^ This hit me hard.

This is how I feel about my student loans, honestly.  I’m very fortunate to have a job that pays the bills and a partner so I don’t have to pay the bills on my own, but staring down that number makes me feel like there’s no point in even trying.  I don’t want to buy a house, because what if I have to move and the market crashes again?  I refuse to put anything on credit beyond what I can pay off in full each month, unless it’s a true emergency (like a “the cat needs medical treatment” kind of emergency).  It’s a good thing I don’t want kids, because I could never afford them.  My dad talks about saving for retirement and I laugh, because barring some kind of miracle, I’ll still be paying those loans off at that age. 

I was always told growing up that going to school was the way to a stable future.  And in some ways it has helped.

but

It’s a hell of a price.  Literally.  And I know very well that the stability I do have could evaporate in an instant, like those people in bankruptcy court.

(via thebibliosphere)

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