k.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

Other things? Job, Food, Car, Home, Health, Money. Plus a request form.

Time’s Monster: How History Makes History by Priya Satia

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe by Hayden White

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Past is a Foreign Country by David Lowenthal

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler

Dust: The Archive and Cultural History by Carolyn Steedman

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

This quote was taken from a podcast interview which Menakem participated in, which you can find here.

except that in the version i read, it was a guy asking the generations of women in a family why they cut off the ends, and the great grandma answered that it was because when she was young her family was so poor and didn't have a big enough oven to fit the entire ham in

the point was that often if you go back far enough, the origin of bizarre, backwards and even harmful traditions/rules of society were often the result of people in that time period making the best of what they had, not because they thought it was the "right" way

the family in this story now has a big enough oven to fit the whole ass ham but its tradition to cut off the ends, its just how its done and the crazy part is that two fucking generations removed don't even know why but they do it without questioning it because thats. how. we've. always. done. it.

the winter of civilisation

fruits we'll never taste, languages we'll never hear: the need for needless complexity

emily dickinson and the creative solitude of space

the lost art of looking at nature

the bowl, the ram and the folded map: navigating the complicated world

ada limón on preparing the body for a reopened world

before it was 'bittersweet', nostalgia was seen as a parasite

why alien languages could be far stranger than we imagine

the fig leaf, benjamin shane evans

cat pianos, sound-houses, and other imaginary musical instruments

of shark moves, shell shocks, and trash landings on the moon

as bright as a feather — ostriches, home dyeing, and the global plume trade

getting ahead, jonas karlsson

do these florida dolphins have a language?

the form of a demon and the heart of a person: kitagawa utamaro's prints of yamauba and kintarō (ca. 1800)

who needs ai text-generation when there's erasmus of rotterdam

when memories from fiction become part of who you are

Later, after my parents split up and my mom’s bff’s spouse died, mom’s bff moved in. Mom would come home from work and the house would be clean! Dinner would be ready! Laundry done! Homework checked!

In usd today a housewife is worth 278,431 and 14 cents.

2012 dash

uh so i don't think "summer thought" is a thing BUT

zhuangzhi (inner chapters)

heraclitus fragments

wolf's "moral saints"

but most importantly, "the man who loves wisdom must be acquainted with very many things". i think the most influential stuff on my conception of the world is just a ton of different ethnographies, to get a sense of how different human lives can be. my ethnography reading list is

nisa: life and words of a !kung woman (you can skip the biography if ur not interested)

wayward servants: the two worlds of african pygmies

kwakwiutl ethnography by boas

for three perspectives on hunter gatherers. most humans were hunter gatherers but there's no way to be "representative" of what that life was like because it was very diverse

metraux's voodoo

jim wafer's the taste of blood

clendinnen's aztecs: an interpretation

for three perspectives on the way religion can form intense, altered, sort of mythopoetic experiences

on hinduism by doniger

vedic hinduism by s.w. jamison and m. witzel

HOPWAG "history of india" segmenty if ur a podcast guy

for three perspectives on india, the other extant written tradition very concerned about god

uhhhh if ur not an ethnography guy read a lot of other nonfiction. preferably high on description, low on theorizing and interpretation (altho obviously the necessary summarizing of a huge amt of reading and interviews requires some theorizing and interpretation). biology is good, also expresses the main idea

go to a lot of art museums, unless you don't like art museums i guess. in which case, read diverse fiction, fiction of different types, rather than mostly one genre

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

Bakola, Emmanuela. 2014. “Interiority, the ‘Deep Earth’ and the Spatial Symbolism of Darius’ Apparition in the Persians of Aeschylus.” Cambridge Classical Journal 60: 1–36.

Griffith, Robert Drew. 1988. “Disrobing in the Oresteia.” Classical Quarterly 38 (2): 552–54.

Johnston, Brian. 1993. “The Metamorphoses of Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus.” Comparative Drama 27 (3): 271–85.

Marshall, C. W. 2003. “Casting the Oresteia.” The Classical Journal 98 (3): 257–74.

Mueller, Melissa. 2011. “The Politics of Gesture in Sophocles’ Antigone.” Classical Quarterly 61 (2): 412–25.

Ormand, Kirk. 1996. “Silent by Convention? Sophocles’ Tekmessa.” American Journal of Philology 117 (1): 37–64.

Skouroumouni Stavrinou, Aspasia. 2014. “Inside and Out: The Dynamics of Domestic Space in Euripides’ Andromache.” Hermes 142 (4): 385–403.

Starkey, Jennifer. 2018. “The Origin and Purpose of the Three-Actor Rule.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 148 (2): 269–97.

Stehle, Eva. 2002. “The Body and Its Representations in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai: Where Does the Costume End?” American Journal of Philology 123 (3): 369–406.