TheThingsIThinkOf

Aro and ace activism is healthcare reform, so that no one needs to rely on a spouse for health insurance, so that healthcare is available to everybody regardless of income, so that no one’s lived experiences or basic dignity are dismissed or overridden by doctors

Aro and ace activism is well-funded and expansive public transit, so that you don’t need to have someone on hand to drive you places if you are incapacitated, so that you don’t have to pay for an ambulance if you need to get to the hospital quickly

Aro and ace activism is disability and elder care services, so that no one needs a spouse to care for them, so that no one needs children to care for them, so that marriage is not a bind for disabled people, so that people on disability who want to and can live alone can

Aro and ace activism is community-building, it’s public events, it’s free social activities, it’s mutual aid, it’s activities that bring community members together without socializing relying on just a romantic partner

Aro and ace activism is developing a culture of believing when people tell you who they are and what they want rather than assuming you know them better than they know themselves

rivalries are the lifeblood of tennis. they are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the game: borg and mcenroe, federer and nadal, djokovic and murray. each pairing becomes more than a contest of forehands and backhands; it becomes a clash of philosophies, a myth written in real time.

today, the sport has crowned its new duel: carlos alcaraz and jannik sinner. their matches are packaged as destiny, their styles cast as yin and yang—chaos versus control, fire versus ice.

on the surface, this feels like a blessing. rivalries, after all, are accelerants. they give the sport narrative fuel, a reason for casual fans to tune in and for journalists to wax poetic.

carlos, with his exuberance, is easy to love: the drop shots, the fist pumps, the grin that seems to light up the court. jannik, by contrast, is framed as the quiet craftsman, the methodical builder of points, the one who wins not with fireworks but with architecture.

and yet, beneath the surface, the story begins to warp. because while carlos is celebrated as the sport’s savior, jannik is too often flattened into his foil. carlos is the heir, the prodigy, the boy who carries federer’s torch. jannik becomes the machine, the obstacle, the “other.”

for carlos, the rivalry is flattering—it sharpens his myth, gives him a foil against whom his brilliance shines brighter. for jannik, the same rivalry narrows him, makes him legible only as “the rival,” never as himself. this imbalance is not born of malice but of narrative laziness. sport craves archetypes: the hero and his shadow, the artist and the grinder, the angel and the machine.

carlos slips easily into the role of the chosen one, and jannik is left with what remains. even his victories are measured against carlos, his interviews parsed for warmth only in contrast to carlos’ openness. fan culture, too, reflects this imbalance: the “sincaraz” ship often functions less as a celebration of their bond than as a way to humanize jannik by comparison. he is rarely allowed to exist on his own terms.

and yet, jannik’s tennis is spectacular—just not in the way the narrative demands. his brilliance is not theatrical but architectural: rallies built with patience, punctuated by sudden violence. his matches—like his latest us open battle with shapovalov—are thrillers in their own right. to call him boring is not only inaccurate, it is a refusal to see.

even the sport’s elders reinforce the asymmetry. nadal praises jannik’s mentality, djokovic acknowledges his professionalism, but federer—ever the curator of tennis mythology—reserves his most glowing words for carlos. jannik is described as steady, reliable, disciplined. carlos as dazzling, destined, savior-like. one is admired, the other exalted.

it is no wonder, then, that jannik seems uneasy with the role of “carlos’ rival.” for carlos, the rivalry is a crown. for jannik, it is something heavier. he becomes defined in the negative: the quiet one, the contrast, the obstacle. his achievements are framed as reactions, his victories as upsets, his very identity tethered to what he is not.

and yet, jannik has never lacked ambition. he has said plainly that his goal was to be world number one, and he reached that summit not through theater but through methodical, patient work. but when he arrived, the crown was questioned, his legitimacy doubted, his achievement rewritten as provisional. the role he had written for himself—a champion built on steady excellence—was overwritten by others into something heavier, almost punitive.

this is the tension at the heart of his story: even when jannik defines himself, the narrative is hijacked. when he refuses to play along, he is branded cold, robotic, boring. but the truth is not indifference—it is resistance. his greatness lies not in mythmaking but in autonomy: the clarity to follow his own script, and the strength to keep playing it even as the world insists on casting him as someone else’s shadow.

perhaps this is why jannik resonates with me so deeply. i, too, am an introvert in a world that rewards theatrics. i know what it feels like to be underestimated because i don’t dazzle on the surface, to be asked to prove myself twice over simply because i won’t play the game the way others want me to. carlos enchants me; i will always love him. but jannik, with his quiet fire and uncompromising autonomy, feels like kin. his so-called “burden” is familiar—the weight of being misunderstood, of being valuable only as contrast to someone louder, brighter, easier to celebrate. and it makes his persistence all the more extraordinary.

what gets lost in all this is the essence of sport itself. tennis is not a circus. players are not required to entertain beyond their performance. jannik does not owe anyone theatrics, and his refusal to indulge in them is not a deficiency. his matches contain drama and spectacle, even if they unfold with tension rather than showmanship. to pretend otherwise is to impoverish our understanding of what makes tennis beautiful.

and so, the rivalry continues. carlos turns it into theater; jannik turns it into discipline. carlos feeds off the spotlight; jannik endures it. and endurance, too, is a form of brilliance. he shows that charisma can live in quietness, that greatness can be defined by autonomy, that you can reject the script others write for you and still shine in your own light.

carlos and jannik are not mirror images, not savior and machine, not chaos and control. they are two suns, not one shadow. to tell one story honestly, we must stop diminishing the other.

Apparently orange mr us president guy is gonna be present at the Sincaraz final, we can all agree that we don’t want our boys ANYWHERE CLOSE to that guy.

Now, we know that tennis isn’t political and we (players, fans, media and sometime journalists) all try to keep politics out of tennis, I hope you all realise this means Jannik and Carlos WILL have to acknowledge his presence in the crowd and ‘feel honoured’ and act neutral DESPITE their real opinions and feelings.

And if he does hand the throphy to the winner they will be OBLIGATED to SHAKE HIS HAND and ACT NICE.

This will all be done in the name of keeping politics away from tennis.

the online safety act is an insane privacy breach, and if that does not scare you then you need to think harder about it. it is going to end up in a massive data leak - all the information is getting collected by random third party systems. can we trust them? no. can we even hold them accountable? no. because the government couldn’t even make their own system to do these age checks.

and i hear you - it is important that kids don’t see porn. but even if all this was about protecting kids, it’s sloppy and useless. it’s easy (for now) to get around with a vpn and the only thing the act doing is censoring things that it shouldnt. if the government wanted to protect kids, they would do something concrete about it - they would be putting more funding into education, for example.

of course the policy isnt called “national surveillance”. they’re not going to call it that. everything will be hidden behind things that people want.

Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.

Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?

every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.

terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.

It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.