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Naomi Nagata is played by Dominique Tipper.

More information about this painting series below the fold!

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I am old enough to be a parent to a college-aged kid. I made it. It sucked. It was hard. I lost parts of my self I may never get back. But I made it.

You can make it too. You DON'T have to change who you are. You might have to hide things from time to time, but I want you to know that it shouldn't be about shame. It's about protecting those beautiful parts of yourself from harm and having the joy of them robbed from you. It doesn't make you any "less". Eventually all of those 'secrets' will be like spring bulbs. Beautiful bursts of color and life just waiting for a good, safe, warm day. You just gotta hold on.

You can make it. One day you'll be an old weirdo with creaking, crunching, knees. You will live long enough to see your own crow's feet. You'll stop caring about what other people think and honestly other people will stop caring about what you do. Eventually you get the "adultier adult" pass, and barely anyone gives you a second look. And if they talk shit you've got decades of practice under your belt and you can verbally eviscerate them for it. You can make it.

Of all the bugs in the sea, the lobster bears the crown;

The rising of the sun, the wheeling of the gulls,

Lady this is a skinny influencer in a frilly white dress that's never had dirt on it, with her hair in professionally-done beachy waves, doing a photoshoot in a field using a basket of strawberries bought at walmart as a prop.

southern states are gerrymandered to hell--specifically to prevent the majority from overthrowing the conservative political chokehold. this is by design and a direct inheritance of the civil war (to keep former slaves and their descendants as politically disenfranchised as possible). Southern politics do not reflect southern reality. And neither do media portrayals. there is a reason the media wants you to think of the south as white, conservative, poor, and uneducated: to keep southern progressives isolated. to alienate northern liberals from disenfranchised southerners (especially southerners of color).

it's just another divide-and-conquer strategy. because that's what conservatives are good at--controlling the narrative in order to rewrite history and sow discord between groups that should be helping each other. Because unity is powerful, and it makes us dangerous.

Look, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. The Klan exists. Racism--huge, pernicious, ugly racism--exists. Antisemitism and anti-Catholicism and Islamophobia exist. Sexism exist. Homophobia and transphobia are all prevalent. But.

BUT.

When you survey the people, you wind up with Southern states that are a hell of a lot more purple than their governments suggest. Gerrymandering is a huge problem. So is voter access. So are the fucking churches. God, the churches. People are so, so, so afraid of going against their pastors, and their church's culture of surveillance and fear, that they vote against their own beliefs all the fucking time.

As an aside, that is why school board elections are so fucking important. SO FUCKING IMPORTANT. Because the religious right wants to pack those boards, and that affects what books kids get to read and what they get taught in school, and everything, every FUCKING thing flows from that. Because it is so much harder to wake someone up in their twenties or forties or sixties than it is just teach them how to be a decent human being in kindergarten instead of a mindless slave to white nationalist patriarchy and capitalism.