normal woman with a normal amount of hobbies

instead of watching the abuse on screen, we hear about it through the interactions between the wives. they tell us what happened, and in that way they take control of their own narrative.

rather than being voyeurs witnessing the wives’ trauma played out onscreen, we were an audience listening to their story.

“So instead of showcasing the specific treatment we were told of it, which is the contrary philosophy of most filmmaking (show, don’t tell)”

demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea behind “show, don’t tell.” I would argue that Mad Max: Fury Road DOES show us how the Wives were treated by Immortan Joe. However, it chooses not to do so in the obvious way (which would be showing the abuse), but rather by showing us in other ways.

We’re shown the message the Wives leave behind: “We are not things,” from which we can infer that’s exactly how they’ve been treated for God knows how long.

We’re shown that they wear flimsy white fabric that leaves their bodies on display, unlike pretty much everybody else in the film.

We’re shown them using boltcutters to rid themselves of chastity belts, devices which pretty much exist solely to remove a woman’s ability to choose her sexual partners.

We’re shown rage from the Dag when, even though time is of the essence, she takes the time to run back and kick one of the discarded belts as hard as she can before running back to join the others at the War Rig.

We’re shown Angharad using her pregnant body to shield Max and Furiosa from Immortan Joe, because she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt he won’t shoot her or her unborn child because he still views her as his property.

We hear Furiosa’s “Remember me?” before she kills Joe, and there’s so much fury and anger in those two words that you know she was a Wife before she was an Imperator.

on top of everything else i got going on i thought it be a fun project to just buy this couch and restore it.

the fabric got here this week and i just finished staining all the wood

just gotta wax it tomorrow and than i can start putting her back together

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

"i have to water the shitbird wait a minute"