The Mona Lisa of Dumpster Fires

1. Mount Fuji from a plane window.

2. Arc de Triomphe, Paris

3. Aerial view of Kaaba, Mecca

4. A view of the Taj Mahal that you do not usually see, highlighting the stark contrast between opulence and poverty divided by a single wall.

5. Top down view of the Statue of Liberty

6. The backside of Tutankhamun's burial mask

7. The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica seen through Rome's most famous keyhole.

8. The worn steps of the Tower of Pisa

9. Photographer Alexander Ladanivskyy, in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, captured an extraordinary drone shot of the Great Pyramid of Giza from an unusual perspective.

10. The Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall of China meets the ocean.

Which is correct!

But this is often framed as me approaching the right wing naively by the respondent.

That's not the case at all. I know they're evil. The goal is to demonstrate that they're lying by exposing the way the rhetoric fails to line up with reality.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.

Just starting abortive medications already improved my quality of life so much and now that my doctor started me on preventatives, I might actually be able to have more than a handful of headache-free days each month.

Migraine is frequently misdiagnosed as chronic sinusitis or tension headaches according to research. Mostly because people have a very rigid (inaccurate) idea of what it actually is.

But even if it's not migraine, you still deserve treatment for your headaches. Just because someone else has them worse than you doesn't mean you don't deserve relief.

so here’s the floor planers. they’re workmen. they’re workmen. they’re not some rent boy you dolled up with a helmet to be achilles or adonis. artists have been hornily painting working-class models (and sex-worker boyfriends) into their portraits forever, but you’re supposed to frame your appreciation for the male form as an intellectually irreproachable appreciation for the heroic body from literature, or, conversely you could depict the humble beauty of peasants, if you must, but it had to be a sort of ode to nature and the simple life. peasants could be art, as long as they were… out there, you know. in a field. being a metaphor. so there’s your options for looking at a shirtless guy: he’s got to be mythic.

but no. look, here, at the workmen. the floor planers. the workmen’s bodies not dressed up in sandals and helmet, in flowers, on a pedestal. the workmen not employed as some distant paean to an arcadian countryside, not stacking sheaves or holding a lamb or elevating the beauty of nature. they’re here, they’re urban, they’re in a room just like you might have. the workers of your world, in your home, in this reality. the male body as a very real, very nonfigurative tool, humble and employed, but still gorgeous. the beauty of the men that the patrician class pays not to see. the men who come into your mansion through the back door and work unseen and leave unseen. those men. there, right there, this painting, glowing and beautiful.

not adonis. but beautiful.

anyway at the time everyone fucking hated this picture because it’s a direct slap across the classist chops. they were BIG MAD, this was filthy, it was an affront. they hated it. the paris salon rejected it. established intellectuals didn’t want anything to do with this kind of confrontation. it wasn’t art.

i just love that.

like, look at those hot guys go. look at the shine on the floor and the way their arms are. no virtuous framing, no classic allusions. just some regular guys making the floors nice for a rich fucker who never laid eyes on them at all. but here they are: look at them.

This goes for other symptoms as well: although pain can definitely contribute to people’s experiences of these symptoms, fatigue and brain fog are actual migraine symptoms, not just pain symptoms.

You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:

SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!

They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.

I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.