light up my darkest skies

ryuichi sakamoto as captain yonoi in merry christmas, mr. lawrence (dir. nagisa ōshima, 1983)

I work with kids. These kids are at my program before and after school, and then some of them have sports/dance/music sometimes all of the above before they finally go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat everyday, and games and more classes on the weekend, etc.

I’m all for extracurriculars, but this turns into the teen who is not only in the school play, but they’re on the newspaper, the football team, and seven different clubs. In college they take double the courseloads, and then once they graduate…what?

They work themselves raw because they arent used to downtime. They’ve been told they can always be doing something, and they don’t know how to relax. This turns into the adult that has anxiety because there’s nothing left to clean, the adult that desperately wants to watch that TV show but can’t force themselves to sit long enough for it.

Then they turn into the moms and dads who spend all their free time ferrying their kids to extracurriculars.

Like, these kids don’t know what downtime is? I told a kid I did nothing last weekend, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He asked what I was doing this weekend and I said “Probably sleeping, mostly,” and he actually gasped. Then he rattled off a bunch of things I could do, to which I had to stop him.

“No, you don’t understand. I plan on sleeping. I’m booked.”

“But you could–”

“Nah. I’m just gonna rest.”

It was as if I had said a bad word or something. I asked what he does when he gets sick, and he says he goes to practice anyway. I asked him what he does if he doesn’t feel like going, and he said he goes anyway. I asked when he takes time to rest, and he said when he sleeps at night.

Bring back lazy Sundays. Bring back Saturday morning cartoons. Bring back the idea of relaxing and soaking in your day before moving into the next thing. Bring back the right to breathe, the right to rest.

Bring back mental health days, and taking a break. Bring back taking a walk or watching a show or setting a timer to remind yourself to stop cleaning and relax.

Go take a fucking nap.  You’ve more than earned it and you deserve it.

Heck, the head writer on Avatar: The Last Airbender has co-created a show on the same level as ATLA and no one seems to know.

So this is a message to all Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra fans. Aaron Ehasz, the previous head writer on ATLA, is the co-creator of The Dragon Prince (AND co-founder of Wonderstorm, a new animation company), a netflix original that is every bit as genius as ATLA.

The only problem? Netflix never advertises it and it’s constantly carrying around the threat of being cancelled. Not because it’s a bad show, but because no one even knows it exists.

The show has a vibe extremely similar to ATLA, with the opening being accompanied by “previously on...”, a similar style of humor, and one of the main trip being voiced by the same actor who voiced Sokka. Even in the first episode it’s hard not to tell that it’s created by the same person. The characters are extremely diverse, with different races, different disabilities, different sexualities, etc. There’s a blind pirate, a deaf general (whom is our queen and we whorship accordingly), lesbian queens, gay elves, characters working to overcome toxic families, etc.

The main antagonist? I still have no idea. The line between “good” and “evil” is so blurred that even though there’s a war, it’s impossible to choose which side is right and which is wrong. The man who’s originally seen as an antagonist,,,,, we don’t even know if he’s in the wrong or not anymore.

The animation is a little wonky in the first season, sure, but they saw the complaints and changed it accordingly. Heck, even with the animation the way it is every single frame looks like a painting, and you become so engulfed in the story you hardly notice what might’ve bothered you in the first episode.

Fjdkkdkdkf i maybe rambled a little to much, but listen—

actually femme is a lesbian term but bi women can use stag/tomcat/doe!

Just a few notes!

1. Tumblr is the ONLY place I’ve ever seen it claimed that “butch” and “femme’ are lesbian-exclusive. EVERYWHERE else–LGBTQ+ organizations, wlw magazines, drag shows, pride parades, academia–recognize that while many different groups under the LGBTQ+ umbrella have had special histories with the words “butch” and “femme”, the terms actually originated in straight culture and have been used by people of EVERY sex, gender, and sexual orientation, for decades.

2. Bi women CAN use stag/tomcat/doe, if they want. But overwhelmingly, we DON’T want to, and ACTIVELY resist having those terms shoved on us. The doe/stag/tomcat paradigm was invented in 2014 by two bi teenagers who were bowing to pressure from lesbian exclusionists; bi women have called themselves butch and femme for as long as lesbians have. (Until the 1970s, ”lesbian” historically meant “a woman who has been known to love/have sex with another woman” and wasn’t very strict about its definitions; historical “lesbians” include people who today would be recognized as bi, asexual, trans, or nonbinary) And if a large number of bi women WERE willing to give up the identities they’ve carried since forever, which is dubious, it would NOT be for terms as dehumanizing, and sex-essentialist, and hypersexual as doe/stag/tomcat..

3. I’m really disturbed by how much this claim is being pushed on Tumblr, because a lot of Tumblr’s audience is teenagers and people newly discovering their LGBTQ+ identities, who don’t have a ton of LGBTQ+ and allied friends to give them support and community. And, well, a lot of LGBTQ+ people, a lot of lesbians, really disagree with the idea that everyone should get scolded for using words they’ve always used. But Tumblr discourse primes teenagers and newbies to think “Anyone using butch/femme incorrectly is bad,” so when they go to their local pride parade or safe space or LGBT center or queer community, they’ll see ways those groups have talked about themselves for over fifty years and assume these are bad people who won’t support them. It teaches new/young people to look with suspicion and distrust about people who can be really valuable in their lives, and to interact with them in ways they don’t know come across as really hostile.

This isn’t just lesbians saying bisexual women can’t start using a word we’ve never used before; this is them saying that a bisexual woman who’s been monogamously married to another woman since before it was legal has to STOP using an identity she’s had for decades, because sometime around 2014, Tumblr decided these terms were “lesbian-exclusive”.

this is literally an app that is supposed to have children track their food intake, and their energy output, every damn day, with the purpose of them losing weight. it does before and after photos, and uses this system that is a “stoplight system”, so bad foods are red, medium is yellow and good is green.

when you sign up you have to put in your goal and one of the choices is “to make my parents proud”.

this is basically an app designed to shame children, and indoctrinate eating disorders into them.

what the hell is wrong with people????!!!!

also, apparently oprah is supporting this shit so screw her.