Appendix

simple self love jar ritual

ingredients 🔮large jar 🔮dried lavender 🔮rue 🔮white candle 🔮rose water

steps 🔮place a single white candle in the middle of your jar. your white candle represents the destruction of negativity. 🔮place your dried lavender and rue around the candle, for the lavender represents healing, and higher consciousness. your rue also represents healing and health. 🔮light your candle, and chant:

“my body is ethereal, too pure for this realm. i light this candle in recognition of myself, for i am one with the wind and sky, beautiful.”

It’s witchcraft????????? Like I would be burned at the stake if I lived in ye olde days knowing that information?????

It’s best to have someone do this for you while you stand up and relax your muscles as best you can, but if you’re alone, a tennis ball and a flat surface will probably work. Alternatively you can lie on the edge of a bed at the pressure point. (But no really do try to find someone to do it for you)

Find the area in your spine between either the first, second, third, or fourth vertebrae. It should be sore and uncomfortable to press down on, so look for the one that’s most painful, and press down with as much pressure as you can on that area for 30 seconds.

Realize that 80% of your pain has magically disappeared and keep the info secret if you live in a small puritan town, lest you be tried for witchcraft.

This is good for tension migranes and normal migraines, but actually pretty useless for sinus migraines. It’ll help for a hot second, but quickly come back. (These are usually the migraines behind your eyes, in your ears, and behind your forehead. Sometimes it can feel like jaw pain or TMJ) for sinus migraines, behind the ear in a divot. Press down firmly and pull towards your collarbone. That’ll drain your sinuses. Also, pressing around the eye socket on the cheekbones help. There is also a little triangle up away from the eye in the eyebrow bone. Press and hold pretty hard and that’ll relieve that behind the forehead pain. Also, ear pulling is great to help move sinuses around.

Don’t forget the temples too! Press firmly and hold. Open and close your jaw while holding your temples. It’ll feel weird, but it’ll help with jaw pain. It’ll work a similar way if you hold the jaw joint under your cheekbone.

So Matthew Broderick didn’t provide Simba’s singing voice (something I was already aware of)

You wanna know what else this guy is known for?

Ya Know;;; Toto, the guys who are responsible for the hit song Africa

It’s perfectly well known that people can only really “work” (in that they can only consistently and effectively perform tasks and create products) 3-6 hours a day, for 1 hour to 2 hours at a time. Generally speaking, the broad consensus among actual researchers is to aim for about 4 hours a day.

The rest of these work hours, and the associated sunken time necessary to get to and from these work hours, serves one purpose:

It exhausts people.

People who don’t have leisure time are stressed. People who are stressed need conveniences. People who need conveniences will pay for them.

People who are stressed also don’t have the energy to fight for their rights, having expended all that energy in just staying alive.

The wife is dead; long live the wife.

The wife has died and everyone comes to gather at her corpse to participate in the communal ritual of grief by which her body becomes a public monument. The dead body of the wife retains heat, a brick building that has soaked up the sun. People begin to rub up against it to warm themselves. A wife is a technology of pleasantness that all may enjoy.

“Her stroganoff was unparalleled,” says one person, leaning into the body of the wife and letting out an involuntary moan as the heat eases a shoulder pain. A dead wife is better than a rubdown with Icy/Hot.

Another man lies face down next to the body of the wife, such is his reverence for it. “I hear she followed her husband from job to job for eight years,” he says.

The body of the wife has expanded now and the mourners swarm. A man curls into her palm. Just before he falls asleep, he whispers, “She was an excellent mother. Amazing, given that I heard she also pioneered several advancements in some kind of science.” 

It is the woman who is gendered first, who is seen as the exception to maleness, the one who exists in the category of not-male. It is the woman who finds her “natural” state in marriage, as wife. Marriage is, in the popular imagination, something that a man must be coaxed into, as a wild animal must be coaxed into a cage with a bit of meat. The woman is happy to be the meat and thus, through a series of coaxings, also known as “feminine wiles” or “nagging,” she entices him to accept his cage. (For more insight into the deployment of “feminine wiles” aka “harpyism” aka “bitching,” “being a real c word,” “the use of mysterious titpowers,” “that Cold War thing she does,” and “shrill whining only the dog can hear,” please see every sitcom ever made.)

But why is this the popular narrative when, in fact, the state of marriage, for men, increases their happiness and wellbeing? Research has shown that masculinity as it is socialized in the United States is a life-threatening condition, produced via aggressive policing in homosocial environments, characterized by violence and limited emotional expression, one popular solution for which is the salutary prescription of taking a wife.