aphrodite’s mentat

And now at our table my mom explained this because it was my first time going, and she wanted to make sure to warn me it was liquor because she knows I don't drink- she just said "if he offers to shoot at your mouth, say no because it's alcohol".

And so the chef does his thing and it's all very impressive, but the time does come where he pulls out this squeeze bottle of booze and asks me if I wanna try

I of course say no, because I really don't do alcohol, so he moves on to someone else

And I watch, and slowly come to understand that this is some sort of game, because once someone is drinking from the continuous flow the chef starts counting "ONE! TWO! THREE!"

I realize that we're trying to see who can keep drinking the liquor from three feet away without choking or spilling, and its a bummer cause i kinda wanna try and I CAN'T

But he goes around the table with everyone there, and I think my mom makes it to three, one friend makes it to five, I think my brother got to three as well, and he comes back to me

And I'm REALLY bummed out now but I will not drink alcohol, so I sort of sadly repeat that I can't when he pulls out a SECOND BOTTLE and grins and goes "juice?"

And Im like FUCK YEAH LET'S GO and I'm a bit worried he's gonna spray it into my eye or something but he doesn't, it hits me right at the back of the throat, and I start drinking while the whole fucking table counts "ONE! TWO! THREE!"

And like

It just sorta

Kept going?

And Im looking at the chef and he starts freaking out by the time we get to six, and at around seven I kinda start looking around and my auntie is staring back in shock, my brother is laughing his ass off and my mom has her face in her hands

And then at like nine or ten it gets like. Super tense and quiet, and only the chef is still counting

And I guess it got too much for even him cause we're at eleven and I don't believe in quitting early and it is almost painful how awkward it's getting

So he cuts me off at twelve and raises his hands in the air and everyone else cheers and claps like a dumb movie

and I just sit back in my seat to look back at my mother staring at me surrounded by everyone she knows, bright fucking red in the face and choking with honest to god tears in her eyes and she puts her face back in her palms and starts chanting "I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't want to know"

So I give her the biggest, proudest grin and tell her, "I won."

So now every time something suggestive happens in a movie, or in conversation, or something shocking happens around us and she goes to jokingly cover my ears, I just ask her, "Remember when I won?" And she goes face-down and groans, because I know EXACTLY how she thinks I trained to develop that particular skill and she HATES knowing that about me

The truth is though, I'm a whole ass 28 year old virgin. I've never so much as kissed anyone in my life. I had no idea I could do that trick until that exact moment

Oh wow... she's at it again!

The Boundary of Love by Luo Li Rong

African American Studies

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Revised and Updated Edition

Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies: Theories and Transgressions

J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings

The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny

African Studies

Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa

Lagos Never Spoils: Nollywood and Nigerian City Life

American Indian Studies

Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality of Indigenous Book History

The Urgency of Indigenous Values

Anthropology

Graceful Resistance: How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement

Lacandón Maya in the Twenty-First Century: Indigenous Knowledge and Conservation in Mexico's Tropical Rainforest

Maya-British Conflict at the Edge of the Yucatecan Caste War

Neobugarrón: Heteroflexibility, Neoliberalism, and Latin/o American Sexual Practice

Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America

Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land

Voices of Indigenuity

Archaeology

Living Ceramics, Storied Ground: A History of African American Archaeology

New Deal Archaeology in the West

The Cretan Collection in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, volume III: Metal Objects from Gournia

Violence and Inequality: An Archaeological History

Architecture

Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos

Asian Studies

Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963–1985

Communication Studies

Covid and…: How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic

Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches: The Promises and Perils of Women's Rhetorical Adaptivity

Influential Machines: The Rhetoric of Computational Performance

Migrant World Making

Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting

Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907

Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives

Cultural Studies

Cultural History of British Alternative Cabaret (1979-1991)

Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect: Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel

Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis

Toward a Gameic World

Development Studies

Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Education

Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland

The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education

Environmental Studies

Ecologies of Imperialism

Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Protests and Land Conflict in Brazil

Feminist & Women's Studies

Reclaiming Time: The Transformative Politics of Feminist Temporalities

Recovering Women’s Past: New Epistemologies, New Ventures

Film Studies

Han Heroes and Yamato Warriors: Competing Masculinities in Chinese and Japanese War Cinema

Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream

The Rise of Central American Film in the Twenty-First Century

Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity

Food Studies

The Visible Hands That Feed: Responsibility and Growth in the Food Sector

Gender Studies

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940

Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918

History

Captivity's Collections: Natural History and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade

Our People Are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization

Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World: 1685-1896

Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi

Language & Literature

Abraham Lincoln and the Bible: A Complete Compendium

Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early American Literary History

Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism

Faking It: Victorian Documentary Novels

Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China

The Lost Texts of Confucius’ Grandson: Guodian, Zisi, and Beyond

Understanding Agatha Christie

Latin American Studies

Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution

Law

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America

Linguistics

Cantonese Since the Nineteenth Century

Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field

Middle East Studies

Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces

Music

Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism

Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson

Lieder in America: On Stages and In Parlors

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone

Peace & Conflict Studies

Remaking the World: Decolonization and the Cold War

The Coup and the Palm Trees: Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras

The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

Uniting Against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe

Unwilling to Quit: The Long Unwinding of American Involvement in Vietnam

Performing Arts

Sonic Strategies: Performing Mexico's War on Drugs, Mourning, and Feminicide

Staging Existence: Chekhov's Tetralogy

Philosophy

Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges

Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious: Vol. 2 The Affective Hypothesis

Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis

Political Science

Beyond Othering: A Gandhian Approach to Conflict Resolution in India and Pakistan

Local government and democracy in the United Kingdom

Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece

The Cost of Voting in the American States

The New Star Chamber and Other Essays: Annotated Edition

Population Studies

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century

Psychology

Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe

Public Health

Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1870

Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011

Religion

Christan Colleges and Universities: An Empirical Guide

From Jesus to J-Setting: Religious and Sexual Fluidity among Young Black People

The Hispanic Faculty Experience: Opportunities for Growth and Retention in Christian Colleges and Universities

Science & Technology Studies

Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City

Sociology

Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence

As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity

Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa

Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana

Research as More Than Extraction: Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies

The Souls of Jewish Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois, Anti-Semitism, and the Color Line

Technology

Transnational Families in Africa: Migrants and the role of Information Communication Technologies

Urban Studies

Based on an off-screen scene from Retired Assets 1-5 “Broken Things Can Be Mended Anew”

Process here and here

(The WIP name was Link Appleheart)

Alt version below:

freedom