baital

Poet Taylor Steele captures the problem with appropriating Black slang.

In her poem “AAVE” (which stands for African-American Vernacular English) Taylor Steele explains why appropriation of Black slang is the worst.  African-American culture is being popularized on a daily basis and while Black people are judged and mistreated for using something they came up with ages ago, White people come off as cool and original when they use it.

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You meet them at Northampton Pride. They greet you with, “I’m into orcharding.” You do not know what that means. They continue to speak with words like “oiling antique furniture. Hot yoga. Beetles. Wetland delineation.” By the end of your date at the Roost, as you suck at the dregs of your almond-milk Smoothie Criminal, they touch your arm and look deep into your eyes and say, “I work on an organic farm.”

It is funny, you do not actually like almonds.

The potholes are deep, so deep that when passing by you can hear a faint whisper of song being sung in a tongue that you do not understand. The song has words, you know it does, but you cannot parse what they might be except that they are very old and oddly familiar. You may have already heard it at the Calvin.

When your car inevitably succumbs to a pothole, you cannot explain to the mechanic why there are claw marks in your tires. He does not ask. He will not look you in the eye as he does your alignment, and he sends you away with a bag of fiddleheads.

s̸̥̭̭͎͕̍ͨ̽ͅp̡̰ͩͥ̇̿ͫ̈r̫̜̐́̐̎ͩ̾͜ĭͯn̩̻͍̪͈̖͆̑̉̅̽ͅg͎̝͚͑̓̏̇̚?̷̩̗̿̿̌ͦͅ

“I cannot use wifi,” says the aging hippie, her wild salt-and-pepper hair smelling of hand-pressed lavender. “It presses hard at my bones. I buried my phone in my garden when Mercury was in retrograde because I felt the electricity gnawing at my essence.” She’s sitting in Haymarket, holding her iPad. “It hurts,” she whimpers, as she downloads Neko Atsume.

The Ethiopian Yirgacheffe from Rao’s causes you to speak Amharic for six hours. You are unable to converse with anyone other than the raving, homeless old woman on Main Street. She is fluent. She offers you her sober crafts and you are compelled to buy them, and it is then that your affliction immediately disappears, leaving you disoriented outside of The Hempest, wearing multicolored, lumpy hand-warmers.

“Wicked,” say the natives. All of them. The weather, the Bruins, the potholes, the coffee milk. It is all wicked. You don’t say it. You can’t say it. So long as you don’t say it, you think, you can still leave this place.

You wake up one day and your car has become a 2001 Volvo. There are Shop Local and No Farms No Food stickers on the bumper and reusable grocery bags from Trader Joe’s in the trunk. There’s a reclaimed bicycle strapped to the roof. You look up at Mount Tom and a single word forms, unbidden, in your mind: Soon.

Your beard is lush and magnificent, regardless of your gender, and smells delightfully of cedar.

Your fingers itch to go bouldering. You have never climbed.

This summer is wicked humid, you think, and it is done.

The person from Pride messages you on Kik, telling you of their new kayak. You meet one Sunday at the Bike Trail. They take your hands in theirs and say, softly, so softly, “stay out until the dawn and breathe in every part of the universe.” Their hands are worn and warm, and you are surrounded by hundreds of rescued dogs. There is compost under their fingernails. You are charmed, and it should be unsettling but you are too far gone. You can hear the numbers in your head, a tattoo, a heartbeat: 4-1-3.

The trees burn. Violent reds and orange and yellows draw in hordes of people from the southern places. The air is crisp, and no one is seen without a bushel of apples. The geese flee through the sky, screaming their farewell. You step outside your farmhouse share, pleasantly full from a breakfast of corn-cakes and organic agave syrup, and smell at the air. It’s there, hiding behind woodsmoke and the faint scent of pumpkin-spiced medical marijuana. It’s there, waiting. Waiting.

Don’t fall into believing that, “if they’re a true friend they’ll drop everything and run to be by your side!” crap.

As a responsible adult there will be times that your friends are hurting and you won’t be able to go to them.

There are times that you will have to go to work, or take your sick kid to the doctor, or do many other things that will prevent you from being there for your friend.

When your friend calls you and they’re falling apart and it’s ten minutes until you have to leave for work, you’re not a bad friend for saying, “Look, I love you. I’m sorry this is happening, but I have to go. I’ll call you back tonight when the kids are asleep.” Or “I’m so sorry this is happening. I love you and I want to be here for you but I’ve got to get to work. I’ll call and check on you during my lunch.”

Adult life is hectic and busy with important things all the time and unfortunately it’s also full of shitty things happening to people we love.

In addition to the above: sometimes, someone simply does not have the energy to help. Maybe they’re coming out of a rough patch themself, maybe they have been busy all day,maybe a chronic illness is flaring up. There are a myriad of reasons someone may not be able to be there.

The world’s neatest bats (in my opinion). In order: hoary bat, sword-nosed bat, painted bat, bumblebee bat, common vampire bat, and last but not least, honduran white bats aka reanimated cotton puffs. 

the story of how anakin skywalker fell to the dark side when there was so much good in him could’ve been amazing, and the changes needed to make it so aren’t even that big. give me an anakin that’s actually damaged from being a slave his whole life; an anakin that latches onto padme not because she is “beautiful” but because of her compassion, strengths and beliefs; give me obi wan meeting anakin w/ his master and actually bonding with him, agreeing about his potential even if he doesn’t quite believe an old prophecy; give me padme’s simmering fury and protectiveness over a child who fell into slavery which she thinks is disgusting but she can’t concentrate on that right now because her whole planet comes first. give me an anakin that gets to react to the jedi’s fears of him; give me the child that goes from being a slave to being sworn to an order that’s strict and tells him no; don’t fear, don’t form bonds, be better. give me anakin and obi wan bonding scenes. give me palpatine actually being subtle in his manipulations. have padme and anakin keep interacting through the years and anakin falls into slow love with her without realizing, because she is justice and compassion and strength.

 you can keep so many scenes if you just tweak them. so many plot points still work with some background added to it. give me anakin asking if he could see (/free) his mother and beind denied by the council because jedis can’t have connections, anakin, you can’t be attached. have obi wan reluctantly agree that they can’t do it. have him still have the dreams and still protect padme, but when she catches him dreaming and he tells her the truth (that he dreams of his mother in trouble and he’s not supposed to see her but he can’t stop thinking of her, how he abandoned her to that life–) and she’s the one who says they should go to her. because padme never believed in slavery and never wanted to leave her behind in the first place but she had bigger problems then, and maybe she feels guilty about that. have anakin realize he loves her then. and she’s watched him grow and watched him toy the line but she’s not there yet, and he goes to his mother and fails, that’s fine, that’s fine, but he doesn’t kill the entire camp. he’s not there yet. he does it by the code, but then he comes back to padme and he tells her the truth; he wanted them dead. he wanted them all dead. he wanted to kill them with his own hands. she tells him the same thing– that anger is human, that it’s normal to feel– and he says he is a jedi. he must be better. and then he admits; he still wants them dead. he is unsatisfied with the justice he got. he’s scared of how much he wants them dead. isn’t he a jedi? isn’t he good? and padme tells him he is so good. he is allowed to have feelings, she tells him. anger and fear don’t lead to bad things by themselves, letting them control you does. he tells her he loves her and she sees the man he could be and says they can’t. but she wants to, too. 

give me a padme that is just as annoyed at the jedi way as she is any other injustice in the world.give me an anakin that struggles with his feelings and not being allowed to feel them. give me an obi wan that doesn’t understand that struggle and those feelings because he’s never hated, not that much, but anakin has hated his whole life. he has been angry and afraid. give me a palpatine that says things just like padme does; that validates anakin when he has feelings he doesn’t want to confess to obi wan because he is just that much on the side of the jedi order that tells him to just not. give me a obi wan that has failed a friend; a brother, for real, not by convenience of absence but by failing to question his teachings. give me an audience who can sympathize with anakin and can almost fall for palpatine too because he isn’t so obvious the jedis should’ve seen him coming ages ago.

give me an obi wan that listens to count dooku’s warnings and feels torn, not because he doubts the ways of the jedi, but because he’s seen what those ways can do. give me padme and anakin in a slow burn love, with no wedding but with careful stolen moments through time where they let themselves feel, where they both love each other’s passion. where they are both a bit afraid of what it could all mean. give me a yoda that feels actual fucking shame when he realizes his speeches about fear and attachments and feelings is what drove anakin right to palpatine’s waiting treacherous words. give me a yoda with a reason to exile himself and to not want to tell luke the truth; not because the truth is hard for luke or might tempt him, but because the truth is hard for YODA to admit to.

anakin falling to the dark side out of fear of being powerless to save padme– to save his family– just like he failed to save his mother works, tbh. but  give me a padme who doesn’t die in childbirth because she “couldn’t go on”, like she didn’t have two kids, like she wouldn’t have fought tooth and nail to bring back democracy and been the first to lead the rebellion? give me a padme that doesn’t die in childbirth and raises leia for a few years so her fucking comments about her mom makes sense. give me bonding scenes between anakin and people, and superimpose that with the jedis telling him no. you can’t. 

have your audience start to agree with the dark side too, and then when they’re starting to think darth vader was fully justified pull the rug out from under them. have him go too far. it doesn’t have to be child murder, because that’s easy. that’s cheap. but have him be the direct cause of the jedi falling so easily; betraying them from afar because he knew all these people and their weaknesses and he is giving them away for one person. have obi wan and him fight with legitimate feelings; “what you’re doing is wrong” and darth vader asks why? when he has control. it’ll be better. he’ll fix it. and obi wan realizes he failed him because anakin still deals in absolutes, still deals in how slavery hit him; the people who can do anything are the ones with power. the ones who own things. is it greed? it is fear and anger and hate, and that turns to greed, sometimes. sure. 

give me a vader who drives away padme but searches for her because he wants her and his child; doesn’t she understand? she doesn’t, she can’t, she has never wanted one person to rule all. give me a padme who, like luke, still believes in anakin skywalker but who never gets the chance to say it because the rebellion is snuffed out. give me a padme who fakes losing her child so that anakin doesn’t know he has two because she can’t while he is vader. while he is under palpatine. give me a padme who dies fighting, tired and sad but still ultimately hoping for anakin to come back. to be good.

give me an anakin who thinks he’s lost everything and who hates the emperor for it but who’s given up; who lets himself be everyone’s fucking darth lapdog because what is the point? until he realizes luke is alive and then, then he thinks, he has something again. something worth fighting for. 

give me a story where i understand and nearly sympathize with anakin skywalker, where i feel for obi wan’s loss of his pupil, where i see the good luke saw in his dad from the get go but also what caused him to be so twisted. give me the start of the empire as slow and methodical, dark and the result of both sides of the force pushing and pulling instead of weird political moves that makes no sense. where i understand why padme fell in love with him and believed in him. where the jedi order meant well but was so obviously fucked up they were doomed from the start. 

Want to join the food revolution? Build yourself a flatpack urban farm

Forget flatpack furniture. Also forget traditional agriculture. Coming soon to a city near you – it’s the flatpack farm. At least, that’s the ambition of Mikkel Kjaer and Ronnie Markussen, a pair of young entrepreneurs who run Human Habitat, a Danish “urban design lab”.

“We wanted to make urban farming even smarter,” says Markussen over a coffee in central Copenhagen. The duo’s aim, he says, was to design a unit that would increase food security in cities, lower the ecological footprint of food production, create jobs and easily adapt to changes in the urban landscape.

What they came up with was the so-called Impact Farm – though it’s much more fun to describe it as a flatpack farm. That’s because it’s built using an assembly-kit of ready-made components that arrive in a saved-from-scrap shipping container. Put them together and you’ve got a two-storey vertical hydroponic (or soil-free) farm, which certainly beats a Billy bookcase.

Designed to be self-sufficient in water, heat and electricity, the farm requires a footprint of just 430 sq ft – though once the shipping container has been unpacked and the farm installed, the production area stretches to 538 sq ft. Crops include greens, herbs and fruiting plants.Human Habitat was born when childhood friends Kjaer and Markussen discovered they shared a similar goal. “We wanted to reconnect people to food by giving them a green space that brings nature back into our cities,” says Kjaer. As a student of development economics at Roskilde University, Kjaer had become interested in “small-scale solutions to the most fundamental of problems – providing food”. Markussen, meanwhile, had trained as a carpenter and worked on ambitious projects such Upcycle House, which was constructed using recycled and upcycled building materials.