Yeah sorry I can't come into work today. I accidentally heard Primadonna by Marina formerly of and the Diamonds. So I need the day to be a primadonna girl. Yeah it's going to be the whole day.

"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.

It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.

[Start ID: tumblr tags that read "#ohhh fuck that's a really good way of lookking at it #it forces the relative nature of it all to the forefront #it *makes* the listener pay attention to the fact that their context isn't THE context #and removes the assumption of Default]

Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the “gay Taco Bell”, but since I was coming from the “gay Howard Johnson’s” I wasn’t shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they’d worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the “gay Taco Bell” on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven’t changed much in 20 years. I’m still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city’s version of the “gay Taco Bell” is key to survival.

Thank u for sharing this with us

when ur like 5 or 6 a not insignificant amount of your time is spent fucking with wood chips. like those are your homies. they smell bad when it rains and sometimes people throw them at you or just in general. everybody knows that one kid who has a favorite wood chip. i don't know if that's true i don't fuck with being 5 or 6 at this point in my life anymore. but it feels like stuff like that used to happen. but then one day u don't mess with them at all anymore. the alternative to a woodchip when ur a kid is sometimes like weird asphalt foam stuff that is slightly colorful and gets too hot. where does all of that stuff go? it gets chemically turned into cardboard boxes that contain things like "door dash orders" and "100 copies of the new nintendo game". there's kids out there right now eating wood chips. or like sometimes a wood chip would get into a place where a wood chip wasn't supposed to go: such as, the bathroom, or maybe even, the class room. you gotta think about stuff like, does the principal of a school, call the wood chip place? i need some wood chips down here? or like a church? when i was a kid i imagined there was some sort of playground manufacturing position and maybe a hard hat government employee would come and he would handle all of the wood chips forever. but by like the 6th year of a school's life time it might be safe to assume any singular wood chip has been inside of at least half of the school's mouth. what if you took a wood chip home and did weird stuff with it? that's just the kind of possibilities that are extant in wood chips, and i'm afraid not a single person is going to think about any of this stuff in as soon as 100 years.

if we're getting into Why do woodchips exist it's like. we're cutting down trees all the time and we have just all this fucking garbage shit that doesn't matter for anything useful and some Other guy was like Oh i got it we're gonna have children be in a pile of wood debris all day. but then it's a question of like, who was the first guy there? did a guy at a paper company invent this? ok imagine Mr. Paper brings his son to work like in there will be blood and a tree falls on him LOL. no don't imagine that. Mr. Paper brings his son to work and his son is fucking around in a big pile of woodchips and hes like. my word. i can sell all of this fucking garbage to schools. i've just saved the company. or even a Second guy, Mr. Playgrounds, was like, well if i want to mail premanufactured playgrounds everywhere in america by november (playground season), i need to create something dirtlike but which isn't dirt, for some fucking reason, why would Mr. Playgrounds collude with Mr. Paper in this way?, to fill all my special playgrounds. is the actual idea of wood chips that because they're like loose they're not going to hurt a kid as bad if they fall off the monkey bars? because wood chips fucking hurt. you can get like a sharp woodchip and probably kill someone with it. somebody, somewhere, is doing something crazy to obfuscate the purpose of woodchips, in order to save their bottom line.

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

I am deeply uncomfortable with this man's corner

The Spiral

Home decor hacks for if you hate yourself and want to die

everything is changing and maybe that’s okay

as you get older you realise that anything that helps you stop feeling stuck is welcome even if it hurts at first

YOU don’t have to be perfect to be loved. but I do

This is actually such a huge thing for an actor to do. Like we know he is wonderful and correct about this and not afraid to say so but when was the last time an actor this famous called for a boycott of a series this popular on a network THIS BIG.