Eclecticism At Its Best

some scenery drawings of pride and prejudice

“Practical Magic” Is 20 Years Old And Just As Relevant As Ever by Alanna Bennett (full article).

[#tw abuse #tw domestic violence]

“The image of a woman suffering because of a man’s violence is, unfortunately, a timeless one. Practical Magic’s 19th birthday took place only two weeks after the Harvey Weinstein stories broke, and just a day after #MeToo rose to mainstream prominence. It’s relevant on its 20th birthday, too, with Brett Kavanaugh recently sworn onto the Supreme Court. The anniversary falls so shortly after women all over the country watched Christine Blasey Ford testify in front of Congress, already so sure of her own annihilation, forced to relive her trauma decades after the fact in an act of public violence. A community rose up for Blasey Ford around her testimony. That testimony and the conversation around it were a stark real-world reminder that we all live next to survivors of abuse every day, that the process of healing is a rough road, and that our moments of trauma still live in us, intruders in our lives.”

Bonus: Nicole and Sandra reunite at the 2018 Oscars:

It was while watching this movie that I first thought to myself, “Hey you know what? I wanna be a witch.”

I practically know it by heart and I still can’t rewatch it enough. I used to watch it as a matter of course as background sound during the early days of my serious practice. At one of the lowest times in my life, I cast a spell based on Amas Veritas and I firmly believe it led me to my true love. We just celebrated our second wedding anniversary.

This is the movie I turn to when I need inspiration and nothing else is working. When I can’t remember how to witch. When I can’t remember how to be strong. When I can’t remember how to focus on the positive in the midst of grief or pain or sadness. This movie is there for me. It is visual comfort food, friendly and familiar and safe.

i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.

so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.

it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved

the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.

No, seriously. Before Starbucks, America was a coffee wasteland. Coffee was a thing you got at diners and drivethroughs. It was a cheap hot thing you put made palatable with tons of cream and sugar, and most people (but waning!) had a coffee machine at home.

Starbucks told us that we could like coffee. That coffee could be an enjoyable thing, that it could be a status symbol and a ritual. That there could be a place where you go for coffee, and you enjoy it.

As a coffee snob, I think Starbucks’ coffee is awful. But Starbucks is why we have better coffee. Starbucks created the market space for third wave coffee shops and artisanal roasters. They reintroduced “espresso”, “latte” and “cappuccino” to the American lexicon.

He said “it’s all in your head” and I said “so’s everything”