Secretary Sugar

Your appearance, your empathy, your creativity, your kindness… these are all forms of currency. They hold value in the world. Even if you don’t recognize your own power, others will. And if you don’t learn how to protect and leverage it, there will always be someone ready to use it for themselves

Put down my deposit on my place. Beach front view all to myself.

If you have ever had to write a resume for work or for an application, then you know the hardest part is figuring out what type of words to use that sound professional and and intelligent.

Example: If an application asks you if you have any relevant experience for a job at a day care center and you have experience, like you have babysat children. You would look at the words in the columns to see what words you should use that will help your resume stand out. You might put down “Have supervised and attended to children on a regular basis.”

Frantz Fanon, one of the founders of post colonialism theory (along with Edward Said), wrote of the frustration that the French colonisers in Algeria had regarding Muslim women who wore the face veil (niqaab). His words, penned over fifty years ago, still carry much weight as we attempt to decipher why the West is so concerned about a small piece of cloth.

He said that,

“…this woman, who sees without being seen, frustrates the colonizer.”

By abjuring Western standards of liberation, she asserts an identity, and even power, of her own, thus refusing to acknowledge the validity of, and inherent power in, her colonizer’s unveiling, subjugation and rape of her own culture.

Ironically, in claiming to liberate women from the constraints of the veil, the colonizer is forced to do so with violence and force, thus becoming the culprit of the very crime that he purports to fight.

If someone is trying to build a huge fuckoff concrete thing - say, for instance, a giant wall - they’re going to need an obscene quantity of concrete, and that’s all going to have to be transported there from the nearest mixing plant. This means they’ll have multiple trucks coming by to decant concrete in consecutive pours while the workers place it and vibrate it to ensure it all intermixes and sets properly, forming a monolithic mass. If one pour is allowed to set before the next one is added, you get a big, ugly, possibly structurally unsound gap between the two called a “cold joint.” A bad enough cold joint can completely fuck your whole project because the next engineer or inspector who sets foot on that site is going to take one look at that motherfucker and immediately embark on a quest for blood vengeance. You will literally have to cut that whole section of wall out, slap some dowels in the nearest structurally sound bits, and re-form and pour the offending segment from scratch, which represents a fortune in cost overruns and will make everyone involved very upset. This is an especially bad problem in hot climates, because the concrete curing process is exothermic - that stuff sets much faster when it’s really hot out, and its 28-day compressive strength tends to be poorer as well.