Sapere Aude

Someday your hands will be old and wrinkled, the skin spotted and bunching over your knuckles. And a child will watch you make something. It's a simple task, you'll have done it a thousand times before. But to that child, the smooth, confident way your hands move will seem like impossible magic. You have to keep living.

[ID. Tags reading, "#i sat next to a student this week and played piano alongside them #and suddenly my hands were my father's playing alongside little child me. 38 years and 6 years sat next to each other #one teaching. one learning. #i remember sitting and admiring the confident way my father's hands moved on the keyboard #and i could see my little student stealing sideways glances at my hands. imitating my posture. envying my sureness #it was a weird mirror into my own past #i wonder how many generations of humans have had this parallel experience? #not only on the piano keyboard which tops out at about 10-13 generations #but on the guitar. the harpsichord. the harp and the lyre. the drum. the lute and the theorbo. etc etc etc". End ID.]

Sometimes the next step isn't caring less but it is to care somewhere else. Sometimes your care doesn't make people act better. I've had my boss claim I don't care about his opinion of me, and I do. But I am not going to show it to him because I know he's trying to find a weak spot. But I am not going to give it to him. In private I write about it in my journal, I vent about it to my mom but I stay calm and collected with him because he doesn't get to think that he holds power of my mental well-being. I don't want to have anyone hold that power over me again. It doesn't mean I care less, I always care but I care more about protecting myself. Prioritize yourself and mostly protect yourself. This is for the one where we can't choose the situations were in, obviously surround yourself with people who don't do this but we can't all pick and choose it!

why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit

Oh that actually makes a lot of sense! It’s like how it’s assumed in media that the southeastern Appalachian (‘hick’ or ‘redneck’) accent is audible shorthand for ‘this American character is stupid.’ That sentiment reinforces negative stereotypes about that region which has historically been home to a large working class population that has suffered from an underfunded education system and other systematic abuses. It is ultimately an underhanded joke, but not everyone from America (or even the region necessarily) considers it to be offensive despite its classist nature.

yes, that’s basically it! it grinds my gears when certain Very Online Americans will quite rightly say that europeans have no right to mock the us’ lack of healthcare/gun control and working-class accents…but then turn around and act like working-class british accents and foods are hilarious and should be mocked ‘bc of colonialism and the bp oil spill’ as though all british people are directly responsible for the oil spill. and then some of them conveniently forget that there are in fact british people of colour - in the wake of brexit, a smug american blog defended saying that british people upset by the referendum were getting ‘karma’ for the british empire, even when british poc pointed out that they were the ones most likely to be negatively affected by brexit, by saying ‘obviously i don’t mean you’, to which said british poc responded ‘THEN WHY DID YOU SAY BRITISH PEOPLE’

Putsimply when you mock “innit” you’re mocking poor people and often people of colour. Boris Johnson doesn’t say “innit bruv”.

I would like to add that there was a study by the Worcester College that found that people talking with a Birmingham accent were twice as likely to be accused of a crime as people who speak RP. Accents carry huge baggage in Britain.

official linguistics post

So what I think is that there's this default belief in patriarchy that men are superior to women and therefore the "masculine" sphere is superior to the "feminine" sphere. And so, as feminists have fought to expand the number of allowable female activities, men (on the aggregate over generations) have retreated from those activities because they're now seen as "feminine", and so partaking in them is incommensurate with their belief in their own superiority. And, unfortunately, as this has progressed, this has resulted in a lot of men sectioning themselves off from, frankly, everything that actually makes being alive worthwhile. It's a misery spiral, and the only way out is to abandon male supremacy.

#more women in higher education meaning fewer men is incredibly depressing to me. funny in a sad way#what happens when women will finally get into trades? will they just stop working

i think once u successfully win a debate there should be a period where they let you get out all the ad hominems you were holding back