The Good, The Bad and The Weird

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

MEAN

Perseus named his daughter “Gorgon Slayer”

You guys on tumblr are so much more friendly than those on dA! You seemed to like my Guardians of Ga'Hoole fan art, so here’s more!

I haven’t watched Nolan’s odyssey (is it even out yet? Idk) and as a Greek girl who’s been obsessed with Greek mythology since early childhood I already know they’re gonna fuck it up (I mean, the fact that they erased EVERY bit of color from our very colorful heritage is already shitty -the white Ancient Greek marble statues used to be painted in so many colors! The Mediterranean has such pretty hues of blue!) BUT my one and only request is for them NOT to fuck up the situation of Odysseus and Calypso. In the sense that people always overlook that Odysseus was a victim of coercion/assault for seven fucking years (I remember studying the odyssey at school and Homer specifically mentioned “and at night he [Odysseus] lay with her despite not wanting to”). And I haven’t ever seen anyone portray that fact about the odyssey. But also it’s important not to portray Calypso as this malicious villain, because, and while this absolutely does NOT justify her actions, it is core part of her character that she doesn’t understand what she’s doing is wrong. And when talking about the Odyssey people either use Calypso (and Circe) as arguments about whether or not Odysseus cheated on Penelope, meanwhile especially in Ogygia he could not escape without a ship and he could not make a ship without Calypso finding out and-

I want you all the time.

Nolan's Odyssey & The Western View of Greek Culture

New mandatory-viewing video for the lovers of Greek myth and ancient Greek religion just dropped! If you're going to watch one video about how the West has mistreated Greek culture and people, let it be this!

It's an extremely informative and comprehensive essay by a non-Greek who knows the culture from the inside and has studied the historical trends of cultural misappropriation surrounding the West and Greek myths.