Are you satisfied with an average life?

Okay so, one of the things that is kind of a big deal in Feminism (which is totally part of philosophy) is this concept of intersectionality. People run around calling themselves “intersectional feminists” or with slogans that say “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” or brandishing their “intersectionality” like it protects them from bullshit, but most people don’t even know what it means.

Now, I have to confess, I was kind of nervous about doing a definition of intersectionality because of the way that people are using it are almost totally different from the way that Kimberle Crenshaw intended. Pretty much, intersectionality has been used by so many people in so many ways, that it’s almost lost its meaning. To avoid all of the issues that come with the different (and wrong) ways people have used it, I’m pretty much going to be translating Crenshaw’s work straight from her articles, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, and Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.

Okay, let’s start with this foot note on Intersectionality in Crenshaw’s article, Mapping the Margins. She states:

I consider intersectionality a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory. In mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable. While the primary intersections that I explore here are between race and gender, the concept can and should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color.

Okay so, “provisional” means that it is something that is going to be used for the present but it can be improved upon later. When Crenshaw says this, she doesn’t mean that intersectionality will eventually be thrown away: she means that intersectionality, as a concept, is subject to change as situations change. Further, given the content of Crenshaw’s work, I believe that she intended intersectionality to temporarily bridge the gap between current politics and postmodern theory until a more permanent concept can come into being that takes its place, which leaves open the possibility for other scholarship to generate concepts which might supplant or enhance the work that intersectionality was intended to do. But before we go further, we need to talk a little about postmodern theory.

Postmodern theory, without writing an entire article on it, is a set of theories that challenges the fundamental assumptions about philosophy and the kinds of things that philosophy builds. The postmodernist thinkers tended to talk about things like “power” defined variously, and how institutions and oppressive institutions kind of organize how and what we think about things. Pretty much, when someone says they’re a “postmodern whatever,” at least in philosophy, they’re dealing with creating stuff that doesn’t depend on the binaries and the claims about the world (you should prolly look at epistemology and metaphysics) that are usually made by philosophy up to that point. Foucault is one of those postmoderns.

So, based on this footnote, intersectionality is supposed to connect postmodernism and current politics together so that they can do something. Here, Crenshaw is saying that intersectionality is supposed to bridge politics and postmodernism in order to disrupt the assumptions that race and gender or gender and sexuality or other categories that we’re forced to deal with, are separate from one another when people are moving around in the world. Further, Crenshaw says that intersectionality is supposed to be a “methodology,” which means something specific. It’s supposed to be a way of doing something that disrupts our tendency to see categories as separate and not affecting one another. So, to do something “intersectionally” is to do it in a way that makes reference to, and engages with, multiple parts of a person’s identity.

Now, while Crenshaw intended intersectionality to be present for the time being, the way in which feminism and other disciplines have started to use intersectionality has pretty much meant that it is not provisional, but a permanent part of the way that we do scholarship. However the other part of Crenshaw’s footnote has come to pass in a sense. Most people now using intersectionality now use it to talk about the way that multiple points of identity come together when someone is moving around in the world (and you can look back at the piece on phenomenology), and the way that these points come together when people experience oppression. So, where people have brought class and sexual orientation and age into intersectionality, they’re participating in Crenshaw’s ideal of intersectionality needing to be expanded to talk about these other factors.

This kind of leads me into one of the things about current uses of intersectionality: if it’s a method that keeps people from looking at identities as isolates and separate, then to do “intersectional (insert thing here)” is to do it in a way that makes full reference to the way that engages in multiple parts of a person’s identity. So, intersectional feminism, for example, needs to come up with feminist theory that can address all aspects of a woman’s lived experience, and not merely gender. Further, “intersectional feminism,” if we’re going to be real about it, needs to disrupt the category of woman when it creates theory: intersectionality requires challenging a dominant notion of woman as essentially something (e.g. possessing certain body parts), and therefore must be open to the possibility that woman itself is subject to intersectionality.

Basically, if someone’s going to adopt intersectionality as a method, they need to do it all the way down. If someone’s going to claim “intersectional feminism,” they must be prepared to recognize Transwomen as women positioned uniquely, they must be able to expand their theory to encompass women of color in their particularity, and they must be willing to treat their stable categories of “woman” as fundamentally unstable. Crenshaw actually makes this point in Demarginalizing:

When feminist theory and politics that claim to reflect women’s experience and women’s aspirations do not include or speak to Black women, Black women must ask: “Ain’t We Women?” If this is so, how can the claims that “women are,” “women believe” and “women need” be made when such claims are inapplicable of unresponsive to the needs, interests and experiences of Black women?

Now, having said all this, much of Crenshaw’s work is focused on black women. In Demarginalizing, she offers this reason why she’s focusing on Black women:

I will center Black Women in this analysis in order to contrast the multi-dimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. Not only will thies juxtaposition reveal how Black women are theoretically erased, it will also illustrate hoe this framework imposts its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and antiracist analysis. With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework eraces Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experience of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women.

Okay, so Crenshaw’s starting point is Black women, and this is something that is central to the how and why of intersectionality. When Black women tried to deal with issues of race discrimination through the legal system, they were treated either as women or as Black people. What’s the big deal about being treated as a Black person as opposed to being treated as a Black woman? Well what Crenshaw found in reviewing legal cases of discrimination against Black women was that the discrimination was defined solely by the experiences of Black men. Because of this, the legal system really didn’t recognize Black women as having a fundamentally different experience of being Black then Black men, which pretty much meant that any experience of discrimination that Black women faced wouldn’t be dealt with unless it was close enough to the experience of Black men. That’s fucked up.

What about the other way around, Black women being treated as women instead of Black women? Surely they’d be protected by gender-discrimination laws? Well that wasn’t the case in Crenshaw’s research. When Black women sought representatives in class action suits (cases where a whole group is represented), as in Moore v. Hughes Helicopters, the courts pretty much said that because Moore was making a claim of discrimination as a Black woman, they weren’t sure that she could represent all women. Okay, so? Well the issue was that Moore’s claim wasn’t seen as  being in alignment with the accusation that Hughes was discriminating against women. Again, so what? Well the point is that making a claim of discrimination against women doesn’t really talk about how Black women face different kinds of discrimination by being black and women.

So pretty much, the court was basing its understanding of gender discrimination on the experiences of white women, which is assumed as the standard. What this means is that, for white women, if they weren’t discriminated against as women, then they’d have no problem doing the things that they wanted to do. Because they don’t have to think about race, white women don’t need to talk about it when making claims of discrimination. On the other hand, Black women can’t ignore the racial dimension of their discrimination and therefore have to deal with it. However, the courts pretty much didn’t see Black women as having “actual” claims about gender based discrimination because of the racial component which, in their opinion, pretty much said that they couldn’t use any of the statistical data (you know, the only kind of evidence that people accept about discrimination) that spoke to both gender and racial discrimination.

What Crenshaw is pointing out is how the failure to see Black women as Black women erases the experiences of Black women’s discrimination. But Crenshaw doesn’t stop there (she’s a law scholar so she kind of needs a lot of evidence to make a point): Black women also had issues making claims of racial discrimination because Black women couldn’t represent Black men in cases of discrimination. Now, this might not seem like a big deal, but it follows the same logic as in the example that was just described. Pretty much, if a Black woman makes a claim of racial discrimination, she can’t represent the interests of all Black people because she’s a Black woman and their interests are different. Which is okay, until you get to the point where there’s a smaller number of Black women in a case than Black men, and the Black women don’t get any justice because the discrimination is based on the experience of Black men. This forces Black women to choose between engaging their discrimination on the basis of their race or on their gender but not both, and erases their unique experience.

Too complicated? Maybe an analogy will help. Crenshaw gives this analogy in Demarginalizing:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all for directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

Further, let’s consider yet another analogy from Demarginalizaing:

Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling… In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that “but for” the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room…Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch.

The first one is pretty simple to understand. Being positioned at the intersections of marginalized identities means that people are positioned to suffer oppression on multiple fronts, which means that something that deals with oppression on one front might not be able to deal with it on another front. Also, the metaphor of the intersection is important because it recognizes that just because someone’s standing in the intersection doesn’t mean they’re going to be hit by all the cars at once: the might just get hit by someone turning left at the intersection of race and gender, and be totally missed by the dude speeding straight through on the avenue of sexuality. What I’m trying to get at here is that intersectionality says that all of these facets exist, but they’re not all the basis of oppression at the same time. However when they are, it kind of sucks.

Let’s keep with this metaphor: so someone is hit by the car at the intersection of race and gender, but the person speeding along on the avenue of sexuality doesn’t see them and just mows them down. It’s not like the injuries this person experiences when being hit by the first car magically disappear before they’re hit by the second car: these injuries are compounded by the additional car accident. Now, when people call the ambulance to report what happened, if all they can see are the injuries caused by the first car, they might not think to report any other injuries from being hit by the second car. Even worse, when the city decides to keep this from happening again, they might not see the other street as an issue: the intersection of race and gender might get a stoplight, while sexuality, race and gender might get a stop sign that everyone runs.

That’s how intersectionality works to figure out how oppression is or is not missed. It’s a way of pointing out how people are multiply oppressed, and need help on all their aspects of oppression.

Now, the basement metaphor is something that people always ignore because the car accident metaphor is SO much more exciting, but this one is actually just as important. Boiled down to the basic understanding, the basement metaphor pretty much says that the people who are helped by antidiscrimination efforts are usually the people who already have some privilege. So, here we can look at white women, Black men who can be argued to only be held back by the fact that they’re women (white women) or that they’re Black (black men). Now, the people similar to them, white men, will occasionally reach down and help out these people on the basis of recognizing how they’re oppressed, which is the “but for,” that Crenshaw is talking about:

…the dominant message of antidiscrimination law is that it will regulate only the limited extent to which race or sex interferes with the determining of outcomes. This narrow objective is facilitated by the top-down strategy of using a singular “but for” analysis to ascertain the effects of race or sex. Because the scope of antidiscrimination law is so limited, sex and race discrimination have come to be definite in terms of the experience of those who are privileged but for their racial or sexual characteristics. Put differently, the paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experience of the most privileged Blacks.

Crenshaw is saying that the way in which the law deals with discrimination is totally rooted in the experiences of those who’re the most privileged in respective groups, which is where that whole “but for” issue comes up. Black men, it is argued, would be privileged if they weren’t Black; white women would be privileged if they weren’t women, and this is the basis that the law used to figure out how to deal with claims of discrimination. You can see the problem, right? What about Black women who are both women and black? They either receive full protection under one aspect of their experience, or they receive no protection when they tried to claim both.

That’s where the whole “squeezing through the hatch” bit comes in. In order to be protected from discrimination and oppression, some people are forced to constrain their identities such that they fit into one of the recognized categories, which leaves out whole parts of their identity. If we’re basing how we understand racial oppression on the experiences of Black men, both socially and legally, then Black women can only be protected when their oppression can be explained through how we understand Black men’s oppression; if we understand gender based oppression only through how we understand white women’s oppression, then Black women (or any other women) can only be viewed as oppressed when we view them through the lens of white women’s oppression, which means we can’t talk about the unique way in which racism affects sexism.

Intersectionality is intended to reframe how we address discrimination and how we help fight discrimination. Through intersectionality, we can remove the ceiling and make it so that people don’t have to squeeze through a hatch opened by the people who’d built the ceiling in the first place. Intersectionality, as a method isn’t intended to make whole new hatches and holes, which only serve to demonstrate how to make new categories for people within the existing structure. What intersectionality is supposed to be doing is showing how our existing structures and frameworks for identity are insufficient for engaging with the ways in which oppression operates on individuals who experience oppression along multiple axis of identity.

That’s actually something I should talk about, the whole concept of multiple axis of identity. Now, Crenshaw isn’t the only Black woman to generate a concept similar to intersectionality: Barbara Smith, Patricia Hill Collins (whose use of intersectionality made it popular in current literature) and the Combahee River Collective all contributed to the development of what would eventually become intersectionality theory. However, what all of these thinkers has in common is this concept of identity existing along multiple axis that all intersect to give us a rough idea of the “position” of the person in society. If you look up at the second quote, the one about Crenshaw using Black women to talk about intersectionality, she uses the term “categorical axis,” which I think is really helpful when explaining what we’re calling “axis of oppression.”

So, we can talk about categorical axis as the adjectives we use to define ourselves: male, queer, cis, trans, hetero, bi, asian, black, white, female, and so on. Each one of these axis has a particular social value which came about through history and the organization of society. Being Black and Trans and Queer all at the same time means that they’re perceived differently than someone who is Black and cis and hetero, and that perception means that certain kinds of social actions can be done to them that can’t be done to the Black Queer Trans person. They’re positioned differently.

Remember the phenomenology article where it was explained that we can think of the social world as a space that people move through? Well, one of the ways that intersectionality has grown and become more defined is as a way to figure out where people start from in that social space. This is why the whole axis thing is important because if we think about the social world as a three dimensional plane, then these axis are the kinds of things that we would use to figure out a position.

So by finding out where these lines of identity intersect, we can figure out the way in which society acts against them and enables oppression. We can also see how the structures of society miss people because of the way that they’re positioned. So, if anti-discrimination laws are like a safety net to catch people when they fall, intersectionality can show us where the holes in that safety net are by looking at how the net misses the intersections that make up certain individuals, which is what Crenshaw is pointing towards in her articles as she discusses the way that anti-discrimination laws fail to protect individuals who exist on multiple axis of oppression because the way that these laws are established is based upon a single axis of oppression as opposed to recognizing that identity is multiple.

Now, as I close, I want to remind everyone reading about the intellectual heritage of intersectionality and its related concepts. Patricia Hill Collins, in her piece, Learning From the Outsider Within, indicates many of the thinkers what contributed to what would eventually become intersectionality: Frances Beale, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Pauli Murray, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and others. These are also among the thinkers that Kimberle Crenshaw comes to reference in both her pieces where she develops her understanding of intersectionality, and it also happens to be the case that all of these thinkers are black women.

So, like I said before, intersectionality is thoroughly grounded within the intellectual tradition and the lived experience of Black women. So while Crenshaw says that the concept of intersectionality needs expansion to cover other axis of oppression, and is provisional, this shouldn’t be taken as a reason to remove the concept from Black women’s intellectual traditions. What I’m saying here is that intersectionality can be applied to multiple marginalized groups, and is intended to: Crenshaw successfully uses intersctionality to discuss sexual and domestic violence against undocumented immigrants, as well as indicating the way in which social institutions in our society that are supposed to protect them actually fail to do so.

Which is one of the problems that many Black feminists have with the current use of intersectionality in Feminist and other philosophical circles: thinkers use intersectionality to talk about the multplicity of their oppression, yet they do not make reference to the Black women’s intellectual tradition that gave rise to it, merely the secondary texts that clarify them. Doing so actively divorces the concept from its intellectual history and serves to make it appear as though the concept “belongs” to the theorists and traditions that are using it as opposed to Black women’s intellectual thought.

Now, the other problem with intersectionality as people normally us it is that… People don’t really use it the way that they’re supposed to. When Crenshaw says intersectionality is a method, she means that intersectionality is supposed to guide how someone does work that is “intersectional.” Too often people claiming to be intersectional attempt to use the concept to avoid criticisms of their work. By claiming to be intersectional, or using intersectionality in their work without actually doing the work to use intersectionality as a method, these thinkers actually manage to keep in place the very structures that intersectionality is supposed to challenge. And that’s fucked up.

‘Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.’

spider silk IS actually significantly stronger pound-for-pound than the same amount of steel, but only in one direction! and coincidentally, it's the same exact direction that got a bunch of people killed in a submersible last month.

see, when people talk about the "strength" of spider silk versus steel, they're specifically talking about tensile strength:

which is specifically the measure of the strength of a material when two forces are pulling at it from the ends, like when a steel cable is holding up a bridge support, or crane cargo:

or like when a strand of silk is supporting the entire spider.

that's tensile strength, baby!

but there's another type of strength that's very important to take into consideration when you're actually building things like bridges and submersibles, and spider silk and similar materials like carbon fiber are absolutely garbage at it! and that's compressive strength.

this is basically the inverse of tensile strength, where instead of being yanked at from both ends, the forces are crushing inwards at the material from both directions instead.

you can expect to see these kinds of forces involved in road surfaces, vehicle engines, and again, submersibles.

now steel and its more competent cousin titanium are fucking GREAT at compressive strength! the harder the outside forces are compressing them, the stronger the metals get.

NOT TODAY, FUCKERS

but strand-based materials like spider silk and, again, carbon fiber, are fucking garbage at this. they can take a certain amount of pressure, but each round with compressive forces snaps some of the strands that makes up the material! and those don't grow back, so basically you're just gradually reducing your poor overstressed carbon-fiber hull into a completely useless shell of shattered thread fragments over time as the strands of fiber that actually give it strength die off one by one.

and eventually, something's gotta give! and then people die about it.

this is why, even though spider silk IS stronger than steel in one specific way, we're never going to stop using steel in industrial applications and switch over to spider silk or carbon fiber full time. these materials all have their areas of use, and steel just covers a wider base of applications.

my psych book:

many romantic works that are labelled as romanticising abuse simply focus on the wrong aspect of this equation, where they make him an ACTUAL rich inconsiderate arse. Twilight falls in this zone (Bella has only one personality trait which is she loves Austen, how obvious can it be) and so does, consequently, fifty shades.

but that doesn't change these fact that the CRUX of the liz-darcy formula is this: a man will listen to what I have to say and apologise for his behaviour and put my needs first. a man will love me for the bits (headstrong nature, a preference for solitude) that society asks I change. that's the female fantasy. a rich handsome dude will love me for who I am and put my needs first.

and straight women have been mocked for this! for decades! because of wanting to be seen and heard and loved by the men they're dating! and I say straight because while self indulgent romances exist for wlw's and queer men, I have never, in my life, seen a queer person mock another queer person for reading romance. this derision only exists by straight men for straight women because the idea that they could dare to have standards in their relationships deserves to be mocked and shamed.

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

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Jack Mirkinson on 27 Jan 2023 posted:

a lot of people will say that these things are very complicated but it’s actually pretty simple: this is who the cops are and this is who they will always be

the cops have been indiscriminately killing and brutalizing black people for approximately their entire existence. at a certain point maybe people might want to accept that this is one of their core functions

Bree Newsome Bass on 27 Jan 2023 posted:

“How can it be racist if the police are Black?” BECAUSE THE INSTITUTION OF POLICING ITSELF  IS RACIST

This is why it never works when people try to deflect from the fact that policing itself is the problem & therefore can not be reformed into a solution

There were Black people who worked on the slave patrols & who were hired to help kidnap Africans too. What is difficult to understand?

my love! let me ask you this - did you eat breakfast today? this tiny moment in your life. just think about it. did you?

for some of you, the answer is yes and for some of you it is technically and for some of you it is does coffee count. some of you reached for cereal or gmo-free overnight oats or frozen waffles or 3-day-old pizza. sometimes we eat the same thing, every day, for weeks. i get tired of eggs randomly, only to go back to craving them desperately. i'm cuban; i take my coffee like my father showed me, very milky and sweet.

some of us ate in a hurry. some of us hate eating breakfast but if we don't we will get nauseous later. some of us took our meds first or took our meds after. some of us have a kitchen 5 feet wide and sometimes it's the biggest room in the house. some of us are confident there will be food in the pantry and some of us flinch and say well, the paycheck is coming. some of us turn on a podcast while we eat or we scroll our phones or write in our diaries.

some of us are choosing, specifically, not to eat breakfast. some of us are too busy. some of us are pretending we "just forgot," but we are ignoring the warning signs that everything feels too-heavy. some of us are so consumed with anxiety or grief that we can't eat. some of us can't stand up long enough to make our coffee. some of us have no table to sit down and eat.

i cannot tell you what an artist "meant" by their choices. but they did have to make a choice, conscious or otherwise, to give you information. to give you a little bit more light. each of these choices are little stars of data; connecting speckles for you to weave through, drawing a line.

you cannot use a mirror in a dark room. for some of us; we will not care that the curtains are blue, because that will just be a data point and not enough light to see by. for some of us, the blue curtains will be the same as our childhood bedroom. it will make us seasick. for some of us, blue will be the color of frostbite. it might look like a pixel up close; but from a distance, oh! the picture blooms.

i cannot tell you what will stick out for you. what will carry meaning. some of you will read the sentence "i didn't have breakfast today" and say "this means nothing." some of you will read that and say "oh, me neither." some of you will say "this means the character is probably a little grouchy." some of you will say "oh, i wonder if they're okay. why didn't they eat anything?" ... art is a mirror. i am holding hands with you, over space and time, and asking you to feel something with me.

i want you to read my work and find a blue pair of curtains. i want you to read my work and find things in it that i never imagined placing. i have no way of knowing what will resonate with you, that's true. and maybe i just was hungry while i wrote this, and thinking about the eggs in my fridge. but if you found meaning, that meaning is yours. it cannot be erased just because i didn't "intend" it. you created a different world by interpreting my work. it's collaborative! that's beautiful! that's stunning!

just! imagine looking at the night sky and saying - it's stupid to have a favorite constellation or a favorite star. they're just there.