Minzy

Mario kept reminding me of someone and I couldn’t figure out who until it suddenly hit me.

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

I went out to lunch with my nephew, his wife, their baby, and my mom. All of them were on their phone (my nephew was letting the baby watch his phone) while I was trying to start conversations.

My neighbor's daughter came over so I could teach her to sew, I told her 'I'm fine with you checking your phone when you get a message but when we're working I'd like it if you focus on what we're doing so you can learn and don't hurt yourself.'

Know what she did? Told her friends she was going to be busy for the next hour and stayed off her phone. Even with one of her friends being an emotionally abusive dick head (He kept demanding she answer all his messages within seconds and was pulling crap like 'You're ignoring me because you don't like me anymore' NO DUDE. SHE WAS BUSY. That is 100% emotionally abusive!) she talked to me about it and I encouraged her to stand up for herself and warned her to watch out for that behavior. She ended up cutting him off a few weeks later and I'm proud of her.

the government does nothing for the silent dead, the humble dead, the polite dead. a dead body is shoveled into the ground and forgotten by the next business quarter.

safety regulations are not written in the blood of silent, disposable victims. they’re written in the blood of those who split their knuckles and screamed their throats raw for a better world.

It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!

To note:

FR: concentrer /EN: focus

FR: écureuil /EN: squirrel

FR: pingouin /EN: penguin

EUGHJJ

EUGGHJJ

"hug"

“Irish doesn’t have a word for hello you have to use a shorthand religious blessing” buddy do I have news for you about “goodbye”!

“In Polish the word for car is that which walks by itself” BUDDY what do you think an AUTOMOBILE is?

One time, I was talking to my kid, and because I am Like This, I said “apples, or as the French call them, the potatoes of the trees”. Haha. See what I did there?

Anyway, sometimes I tell this story to people, because I think it’s funny and witty. Twice so far, native French speakers have responded to this story with “… FUCK” or words to that effect, because they did not know this. They simply had a sound that referred to potato, and had no semantic content past “potato”. And then they said “potatoes of the trees? what?” and then they thought about French and potatoes and they thought about apples, and about “pomme de terre of the trees” and they actually heard the term “pomme de terre” as adults who knew about apples and etmymologies, and they said “FUCK”.

So English has this word – gall – that originally meant bile, but because of the 4 humours theory of medicine, came to also mean, like… spite and irritability, and then migrated into meaning impudence, boldness, nerve. It’s now found mostly in phrases like “I can’t believe he had the gall to stand there and claim…”

Unrelatedly, I was trying to find the Chinese names of acupuncture channels, cuz I wanted to trace their etymology (yes I’m a language nerd don’t @ me). So I happened to look up the gallbladder channel, which is 胆囊, and that one’s actually pretty straightforward:

胆 means guts, nerve, determination, courage

囊 means “sack”

So 胆囊 is “boldness bag”

whereupon I – for the first time in my entire life – actually considered what the word gallbladder means.

😐

Anyway, both Chinese and English are in agreement that you have a little pear-shaped container tucked in under your liver that’s where you keep your bravery. So if you’re ever feeling like you’re lacking in heroism and you don’t know where to find some…

(Context for the last one: it’s a WWII era sign posted around the soldiers’ washroom mirror, warning them to never discuss military plans in places where civilians could hear them and report back to the enemy, e.g. in restaurants and pubs in the country. “Loose lips sink ships”.)

I also love these two, which I would place in the category of “You already fucked around, now you’re about to find out.”