Call me Red

you should also never ever unplug the air conditioner and stick a flashlight in the vent that blows air to see if we're in there. it's very bad, that place should not be checked

and whatever you do, if you've already made the mistake of unplugging it, don't remove it from the window for cleaning if possible. and whether it's possible to remove the unit or not, don't carefully disassemble the front panel, document where the screws go and plastic bits go, and open up the vent more to be able to get into it easily

as black mold, i'm an expert on this. you should heed my warnings: now, if you've somehow made the mistake of doing all of the above, you should not use warm water and dish soap to CLEAN the inside of the vent thoroughly. DON'T ever use a bottle brush to get into the hard to reach places. and certainly don't rinse and dry the cleaned area before carefully putting it back together

there's nothing wrong with us, black mold. we don't cause or exacerbate breathing conditions like asthma or other illnesses. it's cool, we're cool

furthermore, if you're capable of removing the window unit, DONT take a hose with the same soapy water and wash the portion of the window unit that sits outside the window and is therefore weatherproofed.

whatever you do, don't allow the air conditioner to dry before plugging it back in and turning it on again

and if you have a central air conditioner, you will definitely never ever consult a manual or sources online to perform a similar cleaning procedure on the cooling unit outside.

It is a lot of elbow grease and definitely not just spraying a can and waiting. Especially do not use the ones that are self rinsing via the natural condensation of water around the coils where all you have to do is let the foam settle a couple hours before turning the unit back on. These foaming cleaners are also terrible to use on the removable air intake vent covers. You definitely do not just have to spray the opposite side of all the trapped shit on the plastic mesh and let the foam push it off. Also that stuff on the cover is great for you and your air conditioner.

guy who's about to push the PC-98 sound card to its absolute limit and create the most heartachingly beautiful music you've ever heard: Yeah okay

Good parents forgive this debt. Bad parents expect it to be repaid, one way or another. The accepted currencies are varied and cryptic and might be mostly innocuous or they might be horrifically criminal.

Many families don’t realize that there is a debt until the child defaults on it somehow. That could be for any reason—the child simply fails to deliver on the parental investment by not adequately being the child they paid for.

pros: yay! i finally look like a guy! people think im a man!

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

The awning in front is two cotton throw blankets, sewn together by hand with an overlap of about 2", so there's a channel in the center that the guyline from the tent door can run through. I did replace the original guyline here with one that's roughly 8 ft longer, to accommodate the awning. I sewed eyelets into the corners of the blankets, and added tassels for fun. The center post for the awning is just a 2x2 furring strip, painted with random extra house paint and paint markers. It's 6'6" tall, and there's a groove in the top to keep the rope in place. The awning is not enough to totally block rain--I really just wanted a sunshade--but it does decrease amount of rain coming through. It does actually need two more posts on the front corners to make the space inside tall enough to stand, which I just did with sticks the next time I set this up.

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?

Luxurious cars by Metal Art workshop Vrbanus

Lou Sullivan- FTM Pioneer in the US

Louis Sullivan (June 16, 1951) was a Milwaukee-born author and activist known for his work on behalf of trans men and the gay community generally. He is credited as one of the first transgender men to publicly identify as gay and is largely responsible for the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity as distinct concepts. Sullivan moved to San Francisco in 1975 in hopes of finding community and medical support, although he was repeatedly denied hormones/surgery because of an expectation that transgender people should be heterosexual in order to ‘correctly’ transition. This contributed to Sullivan’s life work of bringing attention to the existence and needs of both straight and gay trans men.

Sullivan was a pioneer of the female-to-male (FTM) movement and was instrumental in helping individuals obtain peer-support, counseling, endocrinological services and reconstructive surgery outside of gender dysphoria clinics. Sullivan wrote Information for the Female to Male Crossdresser and Transsexual for this purpose. The second edition, printed in 1985, serves as a guidebook for trans men, providing definitions of identities, tips and tricks for gender presentation, and a list of print and film sources for further study. The selections shown here comprise the history of trans men that Sullivan pieced together and interspersed throughout the guidebook.  

Sullivan was diagnosed HIV positive in 1986 and died from AIDS related complications on March 2nd, 1991. Even after his passing, Lou continues to make a significant impact on the contemporary queer community. His papers can be found at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

This book can be found in the Eldon Murray UWM Manuscript Collection 256, in the UWM Special Collections, and in UWM’s Digital Collections. 

- Julia, Archives Graduate Intern