really fuckin tired

“I think they’re very risk-averse,” El-Waylly told Business Insider. “I think that more people of color are going to be more visible in food media. That’s more of a progressive thought, but Condé is a bit conservative and risk-averse. Maybe they’ll do it in five years after someone else makes it cool.”

I do want to highlight one quote: “More importantly, views dropped from an all-time high in April of 91.7 million to 12.9 million in July, an 86% decrease.”

“May the flesh of kings feed the earth”

I do not know how to do these things. I have a masters degree and I have no fucking clue how to operate a deep fryer or make coffee drinks. I’d probably not be very good at it, because that kind of hands-on, fast-paced work is very hard for me.

Like in addition to it being physically demanding (standing up for 4-6 hours straight, carrying heavy ice/coffee, constantly getting burned by boiling water and an oven, a lot of reaching and squatting (like a lot a lot I lost 40 FUCKING pounds in a year okay this job demands a lot from the body)), there are actual skills required. Also your skin splits from using so much antibacterial soap.

Do you know what temperature different foods have to be to prevent contamination? If it’s a “cold” or “hot” plate?? Do You know how long food can be out before bacterial contamination can happen?? Do you know the difference between say 1% and heavy whipping cream? Can you teach a chemistry class using milk????? That’s p much what you gotta learn to be able to do. My friend who works as a medic was surprised, because I do more in my day than they do, and THEY told me that. They were shocked how much I actually do; I am on my feet more, talking to more people, I have a working knowledge of food germs food born illnesses and chemistry, I gotta do the same shit with sterilizing my tools the same exact way a doctor sterilizes theirs. Etc etc.

They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”. 

But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.

Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.

Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.

Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.

Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.

So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.

I have never seen so many suits and khakis IN MY LIFE. People who accidentally wore jeans went home and changed.

The community took it as a rebuke. We drew in closer to eachother, and felt unwelcome everywhere we thought we had friends before.

And I had people later tell me “You know I support you, just… I didn’t want anyone to think I was.” First off, I DON’T know you support me. Not if you refuse to, for one day, change nothing about your life to show it. Second off… why is that such a terrifying thought to you?

I remember before rainbows were a “gay thing”. They were everywhere. Church walls next to arks. School walls next to sunshine faces. People have VOLUNTARILY abandoned every other use. I have HEARD PEOPLE SAY they just couldn’t use rainbows anymore because people would think of “gay stuff.”

So I know this is a joke, and a stolen one at that, but you’ve done this to yourselves. If someone is so terrified of being perceived as queer that they will INSTANTLY abandon something they like if it has queer germs on it now or something, then they don’t deserve refracted light.

There’s a largely apocryphal association of violets as a symbol of love between women as “dating back to Sappho.” This is not really true – Sappho did write poems about violets, but apparently the association really gained traction in America with a 1926 Broadway play called The Captive (adapted from the French, by Edouard Bourdet). The story is about a woman trying to deny her same-sex desire and love, marrying a man in the attempt. Spoilers for a nearly century-old play: it ends happily for the lesbians, it’s pretty cool. Unfortunately because of this, the play was shut down after 17 weeks on charges of obscenity.

Anyway. The heroine’s lover is never actually seen on stage – but in her final, victorious attempt to lead the heroine back to her side, she sends a nosegay of violets. 

After the premiere, shutdown, and subsequent court hearings, violet sales plummeted. In an act of what can only be described as “intense hetero panic,” people stopped buying violets. Because of a play. A play where there isn’t even any “enacted” same-sex physicality onstage. But The Captive ends with the women happy, and together. And they exchange violets. 

And that was all it took! Again, there are stories that lesbians and queer women took inspiration and used violets as signals after the play popularized the association – and I don’t doubt it, although I’m pretty sure we can trust that was mainly women who could afford to do so, financially and socially. But again, that’s largely apocryphal. What is on record is the violet farmers and florists going, “yeah, this play has really fucked us.”   

Obviously queerness is not infectious, but there’s a bone-deep fear of ever being subject to the same treatment queer people receive, even for a second. And the fear of association with such innocuous, even generic symbols like flowers – like rainbows – means those same people somewhat invest in the idea that treatment is deserved. Because gay symbols are not created by a sexual minority exerting their oh-so-massive cultural influence, but by the dominant majority being more terrified of association than outraged by condemnation.  

(That’s Katara on the left and Hakoda on the right)

When twelve-year-old Aang sees the skeleton of Gyatso, he reacts (appropriately) by going into the Avatar State, but you’re going to mock Katara for being traumatized after seeing her mother’s dead body, when she was eight, after just talking to her?

Not to mention the fact that Kya was wearing the necklace:

Which means, you know, an eight-year-old most likely took the jewelry off of her mother’s corpse and put it on, in a combination of shock and grief, but sure, let’s make jokes about how she’s overreacting when she emotionally clutches that same necklace from time to time. How did you think she got it?

Did I mention she was eight? Because she was eight.

I was just going to end the post here but one last point: she was eight and she was a civilian. You know how This Is War has the lyric “The soldier | The civilian”. That’s Sokka and Katara. Even at the age of 9/10, Sokka was clearly in Soldier Mode. He didn’t hesitate in joining the other soldiers in fight. Meanwhile, Katara didn’t hesitate in making sure that the other civilians were safe. While Sokka obviously loved Kya, of course he loved her, he was probably already a little disconnected by the reality that most soldiers have to face: that people die in wars. Then there’s the fact that he wasn’t the one who had to run to get Hakoda (”I ran as fast as I could,” Katara says, as she wished she had been faster), the fact that he was on the other side of the village, the fact that he had celebrated a victory with the other soldiers at having turned the Southern Raiders back, and the fact that he didn’t rush into the tent to immediately be confronted with her dead body…Katara’s line, “You didn’t love her like I did” is obviously incorrect, but I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t experience the trauma of losing her like Katara did, due to a variety of different factors including all of the above and the sheer fact that tragedies affect people differently, regardless of the actual variables. 

I keep thinking about how Briar started the books on trial for his last strike of crime and getting tattooed for it, having way too many weapons, and being annoyed that Tris got traumatized by things like pirate attacks.