dead leaves, desperate summers

i am a complex organism brutally engineered by uncaring forces of nature

i am a product of billions of years and trillions of deaths

i am building a machine greater than myself

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

Second, an outdoor exploring brand not teaming with an environmental activist with a massive global platform is blatantly homophobic/transphobic (conservative people discriminate equally).

[Images description: A Twitter thread by Rabbi Mike Rothbaum (@ Rav_Mike) that says the following:

1) “Our local schools are plagued by antisemitism. There’s a speaker engaged by a local shul ostensibly to discuss antisemitism. ¾ of the talk is about defending Israel. My students aren’t targeted for Zionism. They’re targeted for being Jews. They need safety, not talking points.

2) There’s nothing here for my students who see swastikas in school. There’s nothing here for the kid who was told by a classmate that he’d buy him an “Easy bake oven” for Chanukah. There’s nothing here for the kid who had money thrown at them and told “pick it up you f***ing Jew.

3) You’re entitled to defend the actions of the Israeli government. You’re not entitled to hijack the topic of antisemitism to do so. It’s an abdication of our responsibility to support and defend our kids who deal with Jew-hatred every day. It’s a shonde.

4) The state of Israel has an army and a professional staff of PR professionals to defend it. All my students have are fellow Jews and our allies. Don’t abandon them.

5) After a desultory reference to Charlottesville, the speaker decried “Black Lives Matter,” Stephen Jackson, and Puff Daddy. Puff Daddy didn’t tell his Instagram followers to “like and subscribe to kill one Jew.” That was a white kid my students go to school with. [This tweet has a screenshot of an Instagram live with chat messages. The last message is from michael_13_0 and it’s pinned. It says “Like and subscribe to kill one jew”.]

6) Thing is, I KNOW this stuff is heavily funded by Jewish legacy orgs. And it really is the last thing we need to spend our Jewish dollars on. There’s so much we could be doing to support Jewish learning, students, families, elders, queer folks, Jews of Color. Israel PR ain’t it.

7) The last straw was when the speaker said we should be protecting Israel-advocating students on campus, not “counting swastikas in Idaho.“ Counting swastikas is EXACTLY what we should be doing. Jews live in Idaho – and Middlesex county – and we need to love and protect them.”

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.