Weary Wordsworth

#2: "hi [professor], hope you're doing well! unfortunately, I'm [sick/stuck at work/dead] and won't be able to submit [assignment] by [due date]. could I please have an extension? if not, is there anything else I could do to make up this credit? thanks so much, [op]"

The FIRST SENTENCE is the thing you want the recipient to do. Do not make them guess.

I want to let you know about ... (This email is to inform someone of something not to ask them to do anything)

Could you please do ... (This is a request. You want them to do something).

I'm looking into x and wondering if you can help me (this is also a request but for information instead of an action).

People do not want to read an email and even if they do read it, most people are skimming and not interested. Tell them what you want first, then provide context or other information (when you need a thing is often key). If the email is informational, you can even add "you don't need to do anything, this is just to keep you informed!" People will appreciate not having to figure out what you want from them.

If you can't articulate what you want the recipient to do with the message, you are not ready to email them. I read too many emails where I have no idea what the person wants from me.

What does it take to make African mythology real? Everything we had. Over 70% of our Kickstarter Backers came from Tumblr. Thank you. Now it's yours.

past limbo; angeles national forest, california

Other people might not know what's important to you in the image, so while some people might decide to reblog your undescribed art with a description they've written, it might not quite fit your intentions- but when you describe your own art, you're in full control of what you highlight! It's your art, so you know what details matter to the piece!

I want to boost everything this person has said and add on.

The reason I call myself a tomboy now, despite it being seen as a childish word and having had someone swear at me over it because ‘tHeRe’S nO suCh thInG as BoY thInGs anD giRL thIngS sHut uP’ is because I couldn’t call myself that or be like that when I was a kid. It was seen as a negative thing and I was already bullied enough. “Looking like a boy” was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

And I’m not even 26 yet. We aren’t talking 30+ years ago, we are talking 2000s and even 2010s. It’s only since trans people have become more accepted in the past few years that gender nonconformity has too.

And the people who helped me accept my gender nonconformity more than anyone else? Were trans people. They taught me, “there’s nothing wrong with how you feel. You’re still a valid woman no matter what you wear, how you have your hair or what you’re into ❤️”

And don’t even get me started on how people treat gender nonconforming men. JK Rowling has a lot of nerve to be like “uwu boys can wear dresses and only us gendercrits accept that!” when she has, even in recent works, made femininity in men a negative trait, as well as making masculinity in women a negative trait also.

A lot of people still don’t accept gnc people even now. Just last year I had someone tell me they’d never let their daughter “dress like a boy”, and I’m always terrified to walk into a bathroom in case the next JK Rowling is in there, sees my gender expression and pepper sprays me or worse.

In the opening pages of Home from the War Lifton notes that when he began working on the project,' despite all of the American writing on Vietnam, very little was understood about what either GIS or Vietnamese really experienced there'. His book is dedicated to twenty-four people (presumably rap group participants), plus' Hoang', who is described as a child survivor of My Lai, but though Home from the War includes disturbing self-reflective testimonies from GIS about their role in the My Lai massacre, Vietnamese perspectives remain largely absent from its pages.

So vast is the psychiatric and historical literature on PTSD and US veterans of the American war in Vietnam that attempting to search library or academic journal databases for English-language materials that discuss the mental impact of the war on Vietnamese people is difficult. Among the huge volume of publications on US veterans, it is possible to find studies by psychiatrists based in the US and Australia that discuss PTSD in Viet- namese refugee communities (focusing on the trauma of fleeing and relocating). One can also find a 2012 paper on the long-term health impact of the war on people in northern Vietnam that concluded that both veterans and civilians may have been shielded from trauma by ‘moral certainty (that the war was justified), common purpose (fighting for independence), and victorious outcome', which ‘can lend resilience that heals and buffers from physical and psychological ills in the long run'. Though the latter paper acknowledges differences in context between the US and northern Vietnam, it does not frame the differences of experience in terms of culturally distinct vocabularies and practices for working through extreme experiences. It also fails to consider how much more devastating the war was for people in Vietnam, affecting the entire population rather than a small subsection of it; their home was the site of the war.

Anthropologist Heonik Kwon takes the 'simple fact' that however difficult and damaging the war was for some US veterans, it was self-evidently more violent and devastating for people in Vietnam where everything and everybody was impacted, as his starting point for asking if Vietnam therefore saw a similar surge of interest in the psychic impact of the war in its aftermath. After the unification of Vietnam following victory over the US in 1975, official commemorations encouraged by the socialist political authorities focused on celebrating revolutionary heroism. Memorials and cemeteries dedicated to revolutionary martyrs proliferated but the state rhetoric emphasised the bright and prosperous future over the dark and violent past. Public expressions of grief and sadness were discouraged and the lines demarcating mournable from unmournable deaths were sharply drawn. Kwon identifies a shift that came about as a result of liberalisation in the 1990s, when people living in rural communities in central Vietnam began to rebuild traditional ancestral temples and domestic shrines where they practiced their own commemorative rituals that related to war deaths in a manner that departed from the state-sanctioned image of heroic sacrifice.

At the same historical moment that humanitarian PTSD programmes were proliferating globally, residents of My Lai spoke of their experiences of violent conflict in a very different register. They described living alongside ‘grievous ghosts', ‘invisible neighbours' and ‘the spirits of the dead in pain'. They described hearing lamentations coming from the site of the killings. They reported seeing old women ghosts sucking the limbs of ghostly children as if to soothe them and young women ghosts carrying the limp bodies of small children in their arms. People killed at My Lai did not receive proper burials but were thrown into mass graves without funeral attire. Without coffins, their bodies became entangled and unidentifiable, making funeral rites impossible and severing genealogical lineages. Villagers in My Lai performed rituals and gave offerings to these ghosts, whose existence they explained through the concept of “grievous death” or ‘unjust death’ [chet oan]. The dead continued to suffer their traumatic experiences, ‘captivated by the memory of injustice', and the living had an obligation to intervene to help free them from their incarceration in an eternal present of historical pain.

Kwon claims that understandings of commemoration and grieving in My Lai evince a ‘culturally specific conception of human rights, the right of the dead to be liberated from the violent history of death'. This process of liberation that sets the dead soul free from repeating pain is called ‘disentangling the grievance' [giai oan]. The process of working through the violent past does not take the form of individualised therapy in this context but of a collective ritual practice; traumatic memory is not located in the individual brains of the living but in the ghosts of the dead generations who continue to exist as part of the social world. Kwon is clear that this relationship to the traumatic past should not be understood as a metaphor, nor can it be translated into the medicalised register of PTSD:

In this milieu of interaction with the past, the apparitions in My Lai are more than history's ruins or uncanny traces. Rather, these ghosts are vital historical witnesses, testifying to the war's unjust destruction of human life, with broken lives but unbreakable spirits. The sufferings endured by My Lai's ghosts are not the same as those we gloss over as traumatic memory. However, we can imagine that their collective existence is a reflection of the historical trauma this community as a whole suffered.

While the state favoured a triumphant celebration of revolutionary victors that emphasised the future over the past, the persistent presence of ghosts in My Lai suggests that moving away too swiftly from the experience of historic injustice and the horrors of violence, even when the enemy had been defeated, caused wounds to fester.”]