look at the skill and spirit

- it’s fun to be awake & in an upright position

- consciousness is a gift

I'm having trouble articulating my point around this, but:

Thinking about the "abused wife" archetypes you often see in older media (not to say these don't still crop up nowadays, but they were much more blatant and accepted in decades past). Particularly the following two flavors: 1) the irritating, stuck-up, "bitchy" wife whose suffering the audience is expected to find funny/cathartic, because she "deserves" it, and 2) the long-suffering "good" wife (not framed as "deserving it") who the audience is meant to view as a tragic but morally-upstanding (and therefore aspirational) figure of Christian womanhood

and

knowing Tamsyn Muir's propensity for pulling the old gendered-trope-switcharoo

thinking about how neatly Babs and Colum slot into those archetypes

-----------------------------------------

Notably Muir is not only inverting these tropes on a gendered axis but subverting them, too, on a narrative axis, given that Colum is clearly positioned not to be a figure of aspirational cavalierhood to an audience of literally anyone outside of his Eighth House cultural context, let alone the reader, and that she has Pal outright state that Babs didn't deserve what he got.

So I had a job interview today and there was a dude in the waiting room who was chatting up every AFAB person in the waiting room whether they responded or not, and kept going “Hey I’m real good at Origami Swans you want one?” and then writing his number on sticky notes before making paper cranes and handing them to his latest target before turning his attention to the next lady in his vicinity.  A little sad, a lot annoying, but unlikely to be dangerous.  Whatever.

Dude gets to me.  We have half a conversation where he asks me personal questions and I don’t look up from my phone.  I get my “Swan”.  I’m the last AFAB person in the room so he’s kinda sitting there.

I get to a post about a friend needing moral and/or spiritual support before a medical procedeure, so my ADHD ass goes Oh hey, we have an animal effigy we could sacrifice to the relevant gods! So I take out my lighter and burn the swan roughly 23 seconds after the dude gave it to me, and crush the ashes in my hand because I belatedly realize there’s no sink for me to throw this in.  Oh well.  Purell the ashes off.

I look up.  Dude, and everyone else in the waiting room is staring at me.

“You, uh.  Smoke?” Dude tries.

What I Meant To Say: “No I just carry a lighter as a holdover from survival camp as a kid, and if I’m wearing synthetic fabrics that start to ravel, I can use the flame to melt them a bit so they stop.”

What I Actually Said: “No I just have one in case I need to set something on fire.”

I put the lighter away.  The hiring manager comes out and calls my name.  I go back and have what I think was a reasonably sucessful job interview.  I come back out.

Dude, and half of the other candidates are GONE.

Flora, 24

”I’m wearing an embroidered top from the Rose Bowl Flea in LA with a pair of Levi’s jeans and my favorite Fluevog heels. I’ve been really drawn to cartoons recently, for color and pattern inspiration.”