Growing up Culmari

sometimes an atom is permissible but celestially disharmonious, usually because it's too big. there's also an occult diagram that determines which forms of atom are harmonious, but it's usually because it's too big. when this happens, the angels take offense and break it apart. this makes atoms that aren't celestially harmonious into smaller atoms that are, and is where balloon gas comes from: the form of balloon gas is particularly favored by God.

that's all well and good, as such things go. there are rocks that make balloon gas because God thinks their atoms are too big. that's fine. we can use it for balloons. but there's another type of celestial disharmony, caused by a secret third force that does this, where a neutral part of an atom can break into a positive part, a negative part, and a secret third thing called an "anti neutrino", and the atom gets bigger. you can't use this to make explosions, that's a third thing, but you can use it to light exit signs. you probably can't use it to turn base metals into gold either; that's a fourth thing, which is maybe the opposite of the third.

61 percent of bisexual women, 44 percent of lesbian women, and 35 percent of heterosexual women experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

37 percent of bisexual men, 29 percent of heterosexual men, and 26 percent of gay men experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.

Approximately 1 in 5 bisexual women (22 percent) and nearly 1 in 10 heterosexual women (9 percent) have been raped by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

Among rape victims, bisexual women experienced rape earlier in life compared to heterosexual women, with 48 percent having first been raped between the ages of 11 and 17.

The rate of stalking against bisexual women is more than double the rate among heterosexual women, and affects more than 1 in 3 bisexual women (37 percent).

A higher percentage (48 percent) of bisexual women reported being concerned for their safety or injured as a result of intimate partner violence than lesbian or heterosexual women.

Another US report published in 2019 similarly found that 63 percent of bi women reported experiencing rape in their lifetime. They also found that when talking into account other social characteristics, including race, education, income, and whether people were out, sexual orientation was an independent predictor of sexual assault. What's worse, they found that the odds of repeat sexual victimization were particularly high. Bi women were 7.3 times more likely to be repeatedly assaulted than heterosexual women."

So I knew that the origin of "Hector was a great man, moral, noble, better than all of the Greeks" began as Roman propaganda that somehow has made it to now, the year 2023, and is still taught to high school students.

What I did not know was why scholars shit on Achilles as vehemently as they did (and still do).

My copy of Fagles' translation of the Iliad has a preface by a different scholar who I'm not going to bother to name because he's an idiot (and idk probably dead at this point). I read the entire thing, absolutely baffled, because he would cite a part of the text (that I admittedly had not read yet! at all!), quote it, and then come to the most batshit interpretation based on that quote I had ever seen in my life. His general take was that Achilles was a sociopath who had no feelings for anyone other than himself and his own pride, and every action he took (until welcoming Priam into his hut) was done in service of that pride. To support this, he decided that Achilles did not see Patroclus as a person, but rather as an extension of himself, and thus someone injuring Patroclus was them injuring Achilles, and so he did not care about Patroclus, he only cared about his wounded pride.

Yeah.

That sounded wrong before reading the book, and while reading the book all i could think was, "Did we read the same fucking thing???" Put in context, those quotations still did not support his conclusions whatsoever.

But i cracked open Caroline Alexander's "The War That Killed Achilles" last night, and she solves this mystery of "Hector good, Achilles bad" for me right out the gate (which is good because so far I've only read the preface).

It's like watching friends who you've seen be silly and have deep talks work jobs to the point of stress where they are incoherent and respond to messages like legit 6 days later and not in a rude way but genuinely they don't have the mental capacity to do shit anymore

Working jobs and paying bills shouldn't take everything out of people to the extent it really does