Never Enough XP

Emos & scene kids got this close to abolishing gender for real. I try not to think about it too much.

The idea of a popular teenage subculture where girl & boys pretty much all dress the same feels impossible now but for a while it was reality and it was beautiful.

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

Pat Ningewance, a first language Ojibwe speaker, once commented that it was awfully hard to effectively translate a lot of English poetry into Ojibwe because there is no way to say things like “her slim arms” bc the only word in Ojibwe for anything like that basically sounds like “her arms were just skin and bones” while meanwhile there is a whole word that means “beautifully fat” (minogaamo) bc that was way more valued in Ojibwe culture than being skinny, which probably meant you were malnourished

For those expressing interest in Pat's work, I recommend her introduction and translation of Anishinaabe writer George Kenny's poems and short stories, Gaawiin Mawisiiwag Anishinaabeg / Indians Don't Cry, and the book she wrote of her mother's storytelling, Gii-nitaa-aadisooke. The second link goes to the publishing company she owns, which also has one of the best available textbooks for learning Ojibwe, titled Gookom's Language.

https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article316562024.html

it really is quite bad for your military to have an image of itself as a warrior class. what you really want is for your soldiers to think of themselves as boring professionals who will fill out a report form if someone gets a little too warrior ethos out there

If you don’t like a show, you can just stop watching. I don’t know when people forgot that but if a show makes choices you don’t like or don’t agree with you can drop it like a hot potato and move on. You don’t have to flood the tags of said show with bad faith criticism and doom posts about how “actually the whole show was always terrible and you’re terrible if you watch/enjoy it”. At that point just move on and find something more to your taste, it’s really not that hard.

buzz aldrin and neil armstrong liked to do a thing where they’d tell unfunny jokes at parties about being on the moon and when people were confused they’d go “guess you had to have been there”

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

it's me, boy, the small allotment plot of flax, talking to you from inside your brain

a thing about me is i basically never notice a wig or other kind of hairpiece in tv/movies. it has to be party city territory for me to even twig it. people will complain about characters' wigs looking bad and i will nod along but there is like a 90% chance i did not notice for a second while watching. i consider this mostly a blessing.