A Raven's Chant

I am a trained street medic and I’ve personally been tear gassed more times than I can count.

- Do not use soda or water to wash tear gas out of your eyes. Use a combination of liquid maalox and water, 50:50. That’s what works. 

- They can literally tear gas you anywhere you stand in relation to the police because riot cops have gas masks. I’ve been tear gassed within five feet of the front line of police. They do not care. 

- Before my very first protest I asked my friend who’d been doing this for over 5 years if I should soak my bandana in vinegar. She laughed and said, “I have no idea who started that rumor but it’s never done shit for me or anyone I’ve ever known.”

- If you are bulimic or have chronic vomiting, please keep in mind that the mucus membrane in your throat is a precious tender baby and you will be much more effected by tear gas than everyone around you and you will feel it in your throat for weeks afterwards and NO ONE EVER WARNS YOU ABOUT THIS.

- The police probably won’t zip tie you with your hands in front, they pretty much know how easy it is to break out of those.

- People with asthma should always carry their inhalers because that shit is real bad when you get sprayed with tear gas. 

- Never go to a protest alone. Always have a buddy there and always let someone who isn’t going know where you are, your legal name, and your birthday so if you get snatched they can check the jails and the online database for you. (note: this does not work when they grab hundreds of people at once or sometimes they just never put your name in the database yay!)

Water (or saline) will be just as effective to flush your eyes with. Use L.A.W. (liquid antacid and water) as a secondary resort because your supplies could be used more effectively; and if you’re helping other victims you will run out. It’s better to rely on water. Flushing your eyes is the most important step, not the actual substance. Antacids can soothe pain while your eyes are still being chemically burned, which will cause more long term damage.

Stay calm. Stress increases irritation. Get upwind or out of the area.

Tear gas can cause respiratory distress. Once you’re out of the gas, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. If you have trouble breathing, try breathing in for 3 seconds, out for 4. Slowly increase the seconds you’re breathing in and out (4:5, 5:6, etc). If your breathing doesn’t get better seek medical attention.

If you are asthmatic and you get tear gassed you should get medical attention immediately.

Flush them for 20 minutes if you can with consistently running water/stream of saline. Wash your hands and hold the lid open, if you can’t do that yourself have someone assist you. Remove contact lenses and dispose of them ASAP. They cannot be cleaned after exposure. Exposed skin should be washed.

communal organization is all, quite literally ALL that has stood in their way. no upper-echelon political maneuver has yielded any sort of immediate result. they were important pre-coup, when it was time to use their political channels to expose illegal machinations, but that’s over now. what has yielded results in turning public opinion against the fascists is students occupying their schools to avoid the proposed education bill passing. what has yielded results is people occupying the buildings of the Ministry of Culture to stop its complete extinction, which was one of the first moves taken by the state after the coup. what has yielded results is people organizing frequent meetings in their workplaces, in their neighborhoods, in their schools and universities to decide how they can effectively and immediately disrupt daily life in the country. it’s people going on strike and going out into the streets and blocking traffic until the city comes to a standstill. it’s people working with each other to expand their networks - “here we are gathered now, but who else do you know who’s not here and who could come? where else can we go to unite politically with more people?”. it’s people taking violent action and busting up buildings, getting into fights with the police and preparing themselves more and more for the escalation of direct conflict.

Gordon Dahl at the University of California, San Diego and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley noticed more than a decade ago that men are more likely to marry, and stay married to, women who bore them sons rather than daughters. In an analysis of American census data, they found that men were more inclined to propose to their partners if they discovered that a baby in utero was a boy, and they were less prone to getting a divorce if the first child was a boy rather than a girl. In the event of divorce, men with sons were more likely to get custody [ie to ask for custody], and women with daughters were less likely to remarry. […] This effect can be seen in data on households across a number of rich countries, which show that adolescent boys are more likely than girls to live with both biological parents.

Highlights:

“Results from the most recent poll, in 2011, were startlingly similar to those from the first [from the 1940s]: Americans said they favour boys over girls by a margin of 12 percentage points. This preference is driven mainly by men; women are largely agnostic.”

“Mothers usually lavish the same amount of time on their sons and daughters, at least when they are younger, whereas fathers devote more to sons from the get-go.” A study found that “fathers were twice as likely to take paternity leave for a son than a daughter”, and “married fathers with a child between six and 12 years old spent nearly 40 more minutes per day with sons than with daughters. In married families with two children of the same sex, fathers with sons spent between 22 and 27 minutes more per day on child care, and said they had less leisure time than those with daughters.”

“This extra help has a measurable impact on the quality of a marriage. When Giuliano delved into the reasons why more couples with a son stayed together after three years than those with a daughter, she found that fathers of boys were not only more likely to say they were excited to become a parent, but also more helpful around the home. Mothers of boys, in turn, were more likely to praise their husbands as fathers, and were happier in their relationships than those with only girls.”

“Sons also seem to push fathers to be more productive. Studies of Americans and Germans born after 1950 found that having a child of either sex spurred fathers to bring home more bacon, but the difference between a son and a daughter was considerable: nearly 110 hours a year for Germans and around 70 hours for Americans”, which suggests that fathers are “keener to provide for families with sons. Parents of sons seem not just to earn more but also to spend more. An analysis of American consumer expenditure data from the 1990s found that married couples with one son aged 18 or younger spent 4-7% more on housing than those with a daughter, and consumed more of everything from plane tickets to meals in restaurants. Intriguingly, families with sons also spent more on “women’s goods” such as jewellery and personal services (eg, manicures and hair salons), indicating that mothers benefit when there is a boy around.”

“Men are much more gendered in their behaviour, and in their expectations of the behaviour of their kids, than women are”

A dad saying “I’ve taken my daughter to ballgames, but she doesn’t really know the difference between basketball and baseball. If she was a boy, I have this feeling that it would’ve been easier to interest her in those things.”

Another dad saying men want a son so they can have a friend because men are incapable of making friends? and women can’t read the newspaper over breakfast? (”The possibility of shaping [my son’s] preferences to match mine is attractive. It’s why we play sports together, why we read together. I’m already envisioning trying to get him to read the newspaper over breakfast. I think that there’s a very significant desire for friendship that’s heightened for fathers with sons given how few other outlets we have to create friendships.”)

One man was relieved to have a daughter because having a son would have made him nervous about having to “constantly prove his masculinity around him” men are honestly such a joke

His father told him: “Do not fly too high, because the sun will melt your wings, and you will fall. Do not fly too low because the salt water will soften the wax, and you will fall.”

He didn’t listen, because he never listened. He didn’t listen.

If he had - he would have realized. No matter what, he falls.

He falls.

~

Apollo was very pretty. He kissed Icarus’s skin and called him a darling boy, and soon every time sunlight hit his skin it felt like a lover’s touch. He said come to me, come to me, and I will worship you, my days are full and busy and I will not have much time for you - but my nights are yours.

Who could refuse a god? Who could have god offer to worship them when they are nothing more than an aging inventor’s child, and say no?

If he’d listened to his father, he would have known - the sun never truly sets, there is no night, only places where the sun is absent.

Maybe if he’d listened to his father he could have refused Apollo, could have told the golden god of sunlight that he was happy where he was.

(He wasn’t, but if Apollo was going to lie to him it only seemed fair that Icarus did it in return.)

But he never listens.

~

So Icarus flies too high, leaving his father behind. He thinks if he can fly high enough fast enough then Apollo will be able to catch him, pluck him from the struggles of this mortal world.

But Apollo doesn’t come for him, and his wings melt. He goes crashing into the sea, and he doesn’t even have the time to tell his father he’s sorry.

He would have told his father that he was sorry.

~

He doesn’t die.

Poseidon is powerful and curious and considers Icarus to be a beautiful, curious thing.

Icarus did not know he was beautiful. Poseidon runs powerful hands over his hips, and Icarus doesn’t think Poseidon and Apollo know the same definition of beauty that he does.

When he thinks of beauty he thinks of his father’s machines, of stone walls that have been smoothed down so perfectly that they almost shine silver, of shadows dancing elegantly from a fire’s grasp.

He doesn’t think he’s any of these things. He doesn’t know what they mean when they call him beautiful, but he doesn’t think he likes it.

~

He is tired. Poseidon is very demanding, and every time the god comes to his bed Icarus feels likes he’s dying. It would be easier if Poseidon were a worse man, but he’s kind and thorough and Icarus always ends up having been satisfied but never really feeling satisfied.

He expects Poseidon’s wife to be angry with him, to hate him. He bumps into Amphitrite in the hall once. He bows low at the waist immediately, “I’m deeply sorry, my lady.” He wonders if she’ll kill him. He wonders if he’ll care.

She laughs, and it sounds like calm waves lapping at a shore. She presses two fingers underneath his chin and forces him to rise, then gently tilts his head to the side so she can see the trail of bite marks her husband has left down his neck. “Better you than me, my dear.” She pats his cheek twice and walks away.

What does that mean?

~

He doesn’t know how long he’s been here. Not more than a decade, he thinks, though he hasn’t aged.

Nothing ever changes. The bite marks never truly fade before Poseidon adds more.

Icarus waits for Poseidon to be slumbering beside him one night before wrapping the sheet around his hips and tip toeing out of the room. He doesn’t hesitate before stepping outside of the palace walls, and instantly he’s drowning. He’s so deep in the sea that it’s a toss up about what kills him first, the pressure on his tender organs or the lack of air in his lungs.

Not that it truly matters. No matter what, Icarus dies.

~

He wakes up. Again.

“My lady,” he greets, bowing before a goddess with skin the color of potting soil and hair the richest red, like rubies, or - “Pomegranates,” he finishes, and Persephone, queen of the underworld, smiles.

She says, “I’ve had my eye on you.”

She says, “Amphitrite speaks well of you.”

She says, “I am gone six months out the year. My husband gets lonely.”

He’s dead. There’s nowhere else for him to go.

“Okay,” he says.

~

The snow begins to melt. Persephone leaves, and the underworld itself seems to mourn her absence. He waits tense in his room that first night, but no one comes.

Nor the second night.

Nor the third.

He can think of nothing more unpleasant than Persephone’s wrath, so on the fourth night he goes to Hades’s room. When the god answers he bows low and says, “Your wife the Lady Persephone sent me.”

Icarus doesn’t dare look up when Hades says, “My brother is quite cross with me. He came demanding you back. I was willing to hand you over, but my wife said she had use of you.”

He can’t return to Poseidon. It’s cold and dark and makes him feel worthless. Even if Hades is a harsh lover, he’s better than his brother. “She wishes me to provide you company. She says you get lonely.”

“Does she,” Hades drawls, and Icarus cringes. “Boy, look at me when I’m speaking to you.”

So Icarus does. Hades has nothing to the perfect symmetrical beauty of Apollo, nor the wild strength and power of Poseidon. Hades has skin like bleached wood and hair the color of machine oil, with dark, expressive eyes and a nose a little too strong for his face.

He looks like a person. Like Icarus’s father might have looked as a younger man. Like Icarus might have looked if he was allowed to grow old. He looks beautiful.

“Come with me,” he sighs, “if my wife wants you to keep me company, then you shall.”

~

He follows Hades around everyday. As he maintains the circles of the underworld, the lost souls, attends to the gods and other non-dead things that make their home in his domain.

Icarus starts helping. Hades is without his queen, and what he would normally do with her he now does alone. So Icarus looks over the passenger logs for ferry over the River Styx, addresses the complaints that are grave enough to filter their way through the palace, and when Hades looks particularly tense and lost Icarus brings him pomegranates.

Hades still doesn’t sleep with him.

Icarus doesn’t know if he’s disappointed by that or not, but he thinks he’s happy here.

~

“You know,” Hades says one day while they’re looking over reports, “they call you Thanatos.”

Death god. “Why?” he demands. He’s not afraid of Hades anymore. When Hades is upset he screams and yells, then he goes and sits in the garden Persephone made for him. He doesn’t lash out to hurt.

Hades smiles and doesn’t answer.

~

Icarus is there to help Persephone off of the ferry. “He’s missed you,” he says, holding out his arm for her to use as balance while she steps out of the boat.

She raises an eyebrow, “You know, they used to call me Kore.” She stands on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, “Thank you, Thanatos.”

~

Two hundred years later, in the midst of summer, Icarus gathers his courage and kisses Hades while both their hands are stained with ink and another war has made the lower levels of the underworld smell like corpse rot.

Hades kisses him back.

In two months, Persephone will kiss him for the first timeas he helps her out of the ferry. Sometimes when things get stressful or Hades is upset, Icarus will climb into his lap and kiss him slowly.

They never sleep together.

Because Rainbow Fish can be retold like this: 

A fish has a part of their body - their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with - that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them. 

The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story. 

The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions. 

And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it. 

And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body - all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of - and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share. 

Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.

What the book says is: 

1. if you are born with something nice - like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever - and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean. 

2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of - again, I hate to belabour except I don’t - your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends. 

To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends. 

This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something. 

The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do. 

And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child. 

This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time. 

(Okay, I overstate. I am sure - at least I fucking HOPE - that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.) 

Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or - heavens forfend - the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem. 

Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children - whatever those are! - from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way. 

(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.) 

Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people - our parents, our friends, even The World - excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough. 

We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces - pieces of our selves - for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way. 

Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.** 

That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish. 

Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either. 

*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well. 

**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right. 

It’s a story about the virtues of conformity, as well as being a story asserting gifted people have no sovereignty over their own bodies and minds.

The rainbow fish had to mutilate himself until he and the other fish were identical in order to be allowed to be happy and accepted. And this was presented as a good thing, a right thing.

While I’m at it, here’s another thing I hate about this book: okay, like, the rainbow fish thought he was inherently superior to the other fish because of a special attribute he had, and that special attribute was the only valuable thing about him. Then he got his come-uppance and learned he could only have value by being unselfish and giving away the only thing of value he had.

The book does NOT challenge the idea that his special thing – and his sacrifice of it – was all he had of value. In fact, it props that idea up by suggesting he needed to give the other fish his scales, that they needed his scales, that they would still be lesser unless his shared his specialness with them.

And that is horribly untrue. He has value because he’s a person. Each of the other fish also had value because they are persons. Take all his scales away and he would be hurt and grieving but would still have inherent worth and dignity. That is WHY it was wrong for him to be a jerk to the other fish: he was disrespecting their inherent value as people.

Large (Clark Art Museum)

Harry Wilson Watrous painted this, The Chatterers, in 1913.

The Metropolitan Museum writes of Watrous, “About 1905 the artist’s eyesight began to fail, and he shifted from exquisitely rendered, tiny genre scenes recalling seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to larger canvases containing idealized female figures.”

There certainly is something ideal in the work, with the well-dressed woman gazing at a crow, apparently sitting up from where she has been reclining on a bench.

2. While Caster Semenya has been publicly diagnosed with hyperandrogenism (in 2009, as she was suspected not to “qualify as a woman” for the race she’d just won), neither Francine Niyonsaba nor Margaret Wambui are known to have that condition. People think they do because they have muscular bodies that are deemed unfeminine, so clearly testosterone must be in play.

you know how far you can get into eurasia and africa by sailing up rivers from the baltic and mediterranean seas? pretty fucking far, and that’s what vikings liked to do to trade

then, you know, people are people, so love happens, business happens, and so ppl get married and take spouses back home to the frozen hellscape that is scandinavia (upon which i’m guessing the horrorstruck new spouses went “WHAT THE FUCK??? FUCKING GIVE ME YOUR JACKET???????”)

and sometimes vikings bought thralls and brought them home as well, and i mean, when your indentured service is up after however many years and you’re a free person again, maaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a bit hard to get all the way home across the continent, so you make the best out of the situation and you probably get married and raise a gaggle kids

so yeah

Why?

Check that out: the goods Vikings and Scandinavians were getting from their trade with the rest of the world was so important they buried themselves with it, as part of their treasure hordes.

We KNOW this.

Vikings in Persia

Black Vikings

Vikings in North Africa

Buddha statue in Viking hoard

Vikings brought Native American woman to Europe

Unflattering texts in Arabic about Vikings

Original text by Ahmad ibn-Fadlan

More about the Islamic World and Vikings (some Vikings converted to Islam! sort of sketchy site tho)

Viking technology came from Afghanistan

More on trade route determination via metallurgy