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Sometimes It’s Okay to Not Follow Your Dreams

  (via sonnywortzik )

I’m glad someone put this into words. A woman I greatly respect told me this not long ago, and it is perhaps the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

(via dcg94-blog )

This seem particularly apt today.

(And “excuse me” or “pardon me” doesn’t cut it. you still have to open with bonjour)

[and I can’t speak for New England but coming from Chicago and then moving Out West where the culture is VERY influenced by the South and DETERMINED to think of themselves as small town folk… I HATE when I have to make small talk before ordering food??? Like, if it’s a coffee shop that’s pretty much empty I’ll chit chat for a few seconds, but I’m still not going to make inane conversation about the weather unless the weather is extreme.

This guy I knew in college worked with the campus d/Deaf/HoH group and told a story about the dinner they had to welcome everyone in. They were trying to tell this little old lady what one of the dishes was, something casserole I forget what kind, and she was getting really flustered. Finally they figured out they were speaking to her in ASL and she was from South Africa. The ASL sign for whatever it was (spinach maybe?) in South African Sign means sex. They were offering this little old lady a sex casserole.

There’s an Italian toast ‘chin chin’, mimicking the sound of the glasses clinking together. It becomes hilarious when Japanese folks are around since in Japanese chin means penis.

As for the South, I will bet you anything that how we have conversations at the register stemmed from the homestead days when a farmer would come in to town maybe once a month and this would be the only time they’d get to talk to someone they didn’t live with. I like talking with customers! If I can get them to smile then it’s a victory and I have a better day for it. It only becomes emotional labor if they’re an outright ass or are sexually harassing me. But in the big crammed city of New York it makes sense to take the get your shit and get out approach, people have a subway to catch. Out here I had to drive myself anyway since it’s fifteen minutes to the edge of town from where I live, so what does it matter if I spend an extra minute at the register?

It’s important to be aware of the differences and ultimately there’s a degree of ‘when in Rome’ that has to happen. Someone who moves from Greece to the US is going to be startled by the amount of thumbs up but ultimately they’re going to have to adjust. Someone from the US is probably going to be shocked that telling someone they did a good job was taken as an insult and they similarly are going to have to adjust. Mom’s a damn Yankee transplant and said it was weird moving to the South and having cashiers younger than her daughter call her dear, but that’s just what we do. Sweetheart, darling, honey, sugar, they don’t have overtly romantic/sexual connotations here. As long as there’s not a leer attached to it if a guy calls me ‘sugar’ when I’m at work it doesn’t parse as a flirt because it’s not one, it parses the same as if he called me ‘miss’. But when a busload of Californians came through it took me three people to realize that ‘baby’ was not flirting, it was just California. NOTHING is universal.

This is the biggest place I’ve ever worked so it took some getting used to, like any skill, but even being socially awkward it’s easy to tell what scripts to follow. Test the waters, if they don’t respond then okay this is a move them through kind of person, be quick and efficient and to the point, feel good when they smile at ‘last question I promise, do you want your receipt’. If they do then pull out the five small talk scripts, get a smile, feel good when they laugh at the cat small talk script.

It’s also important to note that claiming your culture’s way of doing polite right is a fantastic way to fall into some really bigoted nonsense. In Puerto Rico the personal bubble is much smaller than in the US proper, like RIGHT at your elbow close. I had a cashier who was super uncomfortable because our steward was getting in her personal space constantly and he was pissed off because he was trying to HELP her with moving orders why is she mad at him? Once I sat them down and explained the difference they both had this aw shit moment because from their own standpoints they were being polite and from the others’ standpoints they were being rude. After that they were fine, when he got a little too close she’d say ‘whoa man my bubble’ and he’d laugh and shake is head and step back.

I also just have a fondness for the way language can compact itself. We joke about “fuhgeddaboutit!” but…it can work like that. More or less. You wanna say Hi and then order something? Just keep going faster and faster:

Hi, What do you want? Hi, what’d you want? Hi whaddayawant? (Alternatively: canniaveyaorda?)

Hi, can I get a slice of pizza? Hi, can I getta slice pizza? Hi cannigetta slice?

It’s just compacted language: and I realize these are exaggerated examples but… Cannihavva, canigetta, yawanna'ava? Whadjalike? Whereyaheaded? Yoowanna take the six togettheah. Yoogotta go uptown.

The ugly, unfair truth about looking beautiful (via fucknosexistcostumes)

This is why I get infuriated whenever men talk about how they’re held to unrealistic beauty standards too, because it really doesn’t even compare. Men who aren’t attractive simply aren’t attractive and maybe that’s rough for them, but women who aren’t attractive are barely even people. 

As the call to prayer boomed over this midsize university town on a recent Sunday evening, rows of conservatively dressed Muslim women laid out their prayer mats, bowed toward Mecca and murmured prayers in Arabic. As dusk fell, it was a ritual being carried out in mosques and prayer academies across the city.

What set this academy apart is that most of the worshipers here had been born as men.

Tucked away behind a large mosque on a side street in Yogyakarta, Al Fatah Pesantren is, according to its leader, the only Muslim academy or madrasa for transgender people in the world.

‘My Hijab Has Nothing To Do With Oppression. It’s A Feminist Statement’

Not all Muslim women cover their bodies. Not all Muslim women who do are forced to do so. Like freelance writer Hanna Yusuf, who chooses to wear a hijab in a daily act of feminism. In a new video for The Guardian, Yusuf challenges stereotypes by setting out to reclaim the choice to wear a hijab as “a feminist statement.”

“[F]ilms like American Sniper are not meant to be relatable or accurate accounts of war. They are meant to push a particular worldview where America, as a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, “finishes fights” and frees the planet from the “bad guys”. The “bad guys” are, of course, whoever America says they are. No questions permitted. This is called propaganda. And propaganda like American Sniper has debuted with regularity in the maintenance of American imperialism.

Just two years ago Zero Dark Thirty (2012) was all the rave, a film which practically exonerated the CIA’s torture program in the eyes of the American public. But more than that, like American Sniper, it idolized the military exploits of American soldiers — specifically the men of JSoc (Joint Special Operations Command) and their intelligence operatives whom adopted gross disregard for Afghani and Pakistani life in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Arguably the film’s greatest purpose then was not to make money, but rather to anesthetize the public of any objections to the CIA’s blatant human rights violations (torture) and JSoc’s extra-legal operations.

[…] Much like Eastwood’s film, in Zero Dark Thirty we get a picture of Jsoc that suggests patriotism by ALMOST any means necessary. Indiscriminate violence is permissible, so long as it leads to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Since the audience already knew bin Laden inevitably would be killed, it follows therefore that any violence pictured was necessary. The reality, which we are never allowed to see, is Jsoc has engaged in grossly unnecessary and unimaginable crimes. As Jeremy Scahill, co-producer of the film Dirty Wars, explained in the Guardian:

“In Gardez, [Afghanistan], US special operations forces [Jsoc] had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. [On the night of 12 February 2010 Jsoc] raid[ed] the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US.”

Scahill then recounts the testimony of Mohammed Sabir, who watched helplessly as the Jsoc soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown by helicopter to another province, likely to be tortured at a black site — a tactic Zero Dark Thirty unabashedly displayed in theaters. Footage captured from survivors of the ordeal later revealed that the meeting had nothing to do with the Taliban, but was rather a lively celebration of a child’s birth. No charges have ever been filed against Jsoc soldiers for their crimes.

In the same year that Zero Dark Thirty aired, almost as if imperialism were in vogue, at the 2012 Oscars its primary competition was another piece of American propaganda. In this case, however, the CIA was out to save the world from another Muslim “threat” — the specter of Iran. And although Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) was historically centered on the Hostage Crisis of 1979, it conveniently hit theaters during a time when Israel’s beating of the war drums for US-backed intervention against Iran’s nuclear program had reached a head. It was no surprise then that Affleck’s revisionist film completely ignored the Hostage Crisis’ historical trajectory drawn directly from the United States’ overthrow of Iranian democracy in 1953. Accurate political sensitivity there might have told Americans the truth that Iran’s quest for international sovereignty is, to this very day, still a justified response to 1953.

Writing for Counter Punch, Joe Giambrone explained:

“Both films [Zero Dark Thirty and Argo] show wonderful Central Intelligence “heroes” acting to further US interests and take care of imperial problems. TheArgo scenario is a rescue, however, instead of a hit. The problem is that Iran, a country thrown into a bloodthirsty dictatorship after its nascent democracy was murdered by the very same CIA in 1953, is now the bad guy. There are clearly two sides, and the film takes sides with the people who destroyed democracy in Iran and propped up an illegitimate monarch in order to control its oil and its refineries. When this despotic monarch whose secret police disappeared, tortured and murdered the political opposition — with the help and training of the CIA — is overthrown, we are supposed to overlook all that, because America is always good. We rescue our people. We risk our lives, and we come up with elaborate creative plans to help our people. We are heroic and triumphant vs. the inferior wild-eyed Persians and Arabs of the world.”

The patriotism pumping blueprint has been used in other films too: Jarhead 2 (2014) Lone Survivor (2013), Act of Valor (2012), The Hurt Locker (2009),Jarhead (2005), Black Hawk Down (2001), etc. It is not a new concept. Hollywood’s history of supporting US imperialism extends as far back as World War I. But no matter how far back Hollywood and imperialism may go, the crux of the issue is as Giambrone suggested: America is and must ALWAYS be the good guy. Neither context nor details really matter if they corrupt that narrative. And the truth matters least of all if it would break the brittle myth that America is the Sheep Dog of the world.

Ok, I hate posts that say “Why aren’t more people talking about this,” and this is the first time I’ve been tempted to make one. Because seriously – there are so many stories lately about cis men playing trans women, and so many people saying that any man who gets cast as a trans woman should turn down the role. SO, let’s talk about Adam Lambert, and how he did that. He was offered the lead role of Frank-n-Furter in the new Rocky Horror production and he turned it down. And then, the showrunners responded by a) casting Laverne Cox instead, and b) giving Lambert a different role in the show anyway. In the end, everybody did the right thing and everybody got something good out of it. 

As a thin person, your privilege allows your voice to be heard much, much louder than the multitude of fat people that came before you. And when you use the platform that you’ve been allotted to speak solely for the hurt feelings of thin people, you ignore the experiences of fat people – and you concertize the oppression they face.

And that’s not a movement to be proud of.

So the next time you find yourself wondering why you feel left out of body acceptance, ask yourself why you need it in the first place. More than likely, it’s because you, like the rest of us, were taught to hate the way you look and to be fearful of having or actually being fat.

Body positivity and body acceptance are absolutely crucial to social justice activism and our work towards a more inclusive society. However, it is the rampant and systemic loathing of fat bodies that necessitate these as vital and radical concepts.

So if it’s fat that we hate so much as a society, then it’s fat bodies that need the most attention in movements working to fix that.

“I just treated her, really, like she was my grandma, to be honest.” ❤️

It’s been the same damn thing every time. Denigrating the princesses that came before to prop up the new one. There’s already so much cool and interesting stuff about Anna and Elsa and Judy and probably will be about Moana that I have to roll my eyes at the media still going with “not like the other girls!” over and over again.

I’ve seen a Judy Hopps article that derides princess dresses as “silly.” I saw an article that rated Elsa and Anna as “more feminist” than any princess that came before (how did they beat Mulan, the old usual title holder, you might ask? the article bashed her for “forgiving Shang for leaving her on that mountain” aka when he spared her life against protocol. yep–tons of reaching, just like today). It was a big part of Merida’s marketing too!

And now they’re doing it again with Moana and…what’s so feminist about bashing other female heroines again? About bashing feminine qualities a lot of little girls do honestly hold, like liking dresses or wanting romance or just generally being girly?

Anna and Elsa’s story was touted as “NOT a love story” because the central relationship was between the two sisters (never mind that the majority of the plot focuses on Anna’s relationships with Hans and Kristoff), which somehow makes it inherently more feminist? And again, with Moana - the story will not feature a love interest, and that has sent the media crowing about strong female characters and feminism. 

And you know what? That’s dangerous. Because even though it is well-meaning, these kind of declarations imply that love makes a woman weak. That having a “prince” makes a princess anti-feminist. 

The narratives of the Disney princesses have been twisted over the years in order support this anti-princess culture. People seem to forget that Ariel was longing to be human WAY BEFORE she discovered Prince Eric. That Belle had read every book in the town library twice, and risked her life to save her father before falling in love with the Beast. That Cinderella endured years and years of abuse from the only family she had ever known, and did so with grace and kindness - two qualities that Prince Charming saw immediately. That Rapunzel held a cute burglar at frying pan - point, and demanded that he help her escape from her tower. 

This is something we’re still culturally struggling with. For example, in the first season of Once Upon a Time Emma Swan has a great line about not needing to dress a woman like a man to give her authority. And yet some people who somehow claim to be fans of her character kvetch and moan whenever she wears a dress, claiming it’s the writers making their precious tomboy heroine act “too girly” when they’ve put her in the butch box in their own heads and want her to stay there. And bash her for being in love. seriously she’s been called “weak” so many times after getting a boyfriend that it’s insane. 

People need to remember that “strong female character” does not mean “woman who in no way acts feminine at all” just as it doesn’t mean “woman who gets into and wins fights”. It means a well-written, well thought out rounded character. A real person who shows strength of character.

Honestly, when the usual pack of mewling whiners and white-apologists that constitute an alarming number of the Malaysian “intelligensia” started moaning about our “repressive” government, cracking down on “poor lads stripping down and having some fun”.

And then we get bits like this:

The group of Australians arrested this week in Malaysia were mostly privately educated and had attended prestigious universities . There were cautioned and discharged on Thursday. Several of the men studied government and international relations overseas. They should have known better.

One of the nine, Timothy Yates, wrote in a recent Facebook post: “I have been privileged enough to grow up in international schools throughout high school years and what I treasure most is the ability to empathise and culturally understand those who surround me.”

Yates is the son of Australian diplomat Tom Yates, a former consul general in Tripoli, Libya. He is now the trade commissioner in Fukuoka, Japan.

You know what? Let’s get real here. We do have repressive laws that punish people disproportionately for desecrating our symbols. We do. It’s true.

But when you start loudly stunting for a bunch of white boys decide to use our country as some fucking dumbshit playground, again, and then get away with it with just a slap on a wrist, when other Malaysians are charged for even criticizing or mocking our Grand Institutions, you don’t give a shit about freedom of expression, you’re just big at sucking up to whiteness.

No, imagine if a bunch of rich young Malaysian men did something substantive towards, say, the Invasion Day protests, or, I dunno, donating money towards an Islamic Centre or some shit like that in Melbourne. You know, like, young, rich, subversive people do.

Muharram is an Islamic holy month, and is also the first month of the Islamic calendar. When Muharram falls varies each year, as the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar and follows the cycles of the moon. 

The practicing of Muharram varies amongst Sunnis and Shias. For Sunnis, the month is practices in a celebratory, joyful fashion, and for Shias, this is a month of mourning and sadness. Please remember this difference for when wishing Muslims a “happy new year” as for Shias, although still practiced passionately, is not a ~happy~ month, but a time of sorrowful and respectful remembrance. 

Significance of The 10th day of Muharram, Day of Ashura:

*For Sunnis, this day is of fasting in remembrance of the day that the Prophet Muhammad (swt) had fasted to commemorate Prophet Moses’ liberation of the Jews enslaved in Egypt. 

*For Shias, this is a day of sadness to mourn for the martyr Imam Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (swt), and his followers, who were murdered on this day during the Battle of Karbala/Karbala Massacre. A shrine for Imam Hussein is located in Karbala, Iraq, and many Shias make pilgrimage to the shrine on Ashura. Countries with a predominantly Shia population are Iran (95%) and Iraq (60%).