hirquitalliency

"My turtle follows me and seeks out affection. Biologist have reached out to me because this is not even close to normal behavior. He just started one day and has never stopped. I don’t know why"

Which seemed really dumb to me, like people couldn’t be that stupid, until I got walloped in the face by a memory from freshman year of college.

It’s almost 10pm in the dead of winter right before Finals, I’m out at college in a high altitude desert in the biggest city I’ve ever been in during my life. My dorm is on the second floor of one of the newest buildings, which are still surrounded by construction zones for the other new buildings going up. Just past the construction zones is one of the city’s major roads. There is still snow on the ground outside, the sidewalks are ice and rock salt, and the parking lot is a slush pile. (All of this is relevant in a minute I swear, stay with me here.)

We get a knock at the door. One of my roomies answers it. There’s 2 creepy looking muscle dudes asking for another roommate, E. E is creeped out and doesn’t want to go see them, but they won’t leave, insisting they see her and talk to her out in the hall. My spider senses are tingling, the social anxiety override kicks in, and I go full Mom Friend and ask them who they are and how they know her. And dudes just take off for the stairwell.

And I took off after them.

I need y’all to understand that I was an asthmatic at altitude in a mountain city in winter at night in shorts and a t-shirt and no shoes whatsoever, and I somehow made it down two flights of stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk, across a construction zone, across the parking lot, and halfway to the road screaming at two beardy dudebros twice my size to “get back here you little creeps”, all before I had consciously realized that I had left my apartment. Something about watching two creepy guys run for it triggered something in me, some latent instinct to Search and Destroy. Like Fight or Flight but I wasn’t the one being threatened, they were the ones doing the Flight, and I had this deep, ferocious need to FIGHT.

I full on blanked out, y’all. I literally have no memory of getting down the stairs or across the parking lot or anything at all until I was watching the headlights on the road thinking “wait, where are my shoes?” It’s a little black hole. I was in the apartment, they took off running, and then bam, there I was. It was like an out of body experience, I was hearing myself shout at them and thinking “I sound like such an idiot right now omg,” and then I realized What I Had Done.

Not only was it stupid, it was super dangerous. Even aside from all the environmental dangers, if they were some kind of kidnappers they could totally have snatched me. And yet there I was, barefoot in the snow and road salt with no phone, no inhaler, and I was still hollering after them like a dog on a chain when one of my roommates came down in boots and a coat to drag me back inside.

And honestly? I’m still miffed I never caught the guys. That was my takeaway from that incident.

Next thing I know I’m at a full sprint in my neighbor’s yard with an axe in my hand chasing the bear into the woods and I stopped and slid like a fucking cartoon character and said out loud to myself “what the FUCK are you doing?”

this is emmett and cullen they are best friends

like, what other song can make that claim?

The crowd cheering after the first stanza when they realize what they’re all doing

So many people audibly ‘doing the guitar parts’… like ya do

The sheer number of voices joining the rediculous falsetto (thanks, Roger)

How they all start jumping at the ramp-up “so you think you can stomp me”

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

87 year old grandmother from India brings joy into the hearts of transgender people all over the world

Kali published the following Instagram post on the role of her grandmother in her life in this Instagram post:

The necklace I’m wearing in this photo was the first gift my grandmother gave to me after I came out to show her support for my transition. My grandmother was and is still my biggest support in my life. 

When I came out to her, I was scared she may not understand it and our relationship getting ruined. She was extremely worried at first about how society would treat me and had some health issues because of the stress, but she never let me know that she was worried. 

Slowly with time, she started getting better and now Fully loves me as the woman I am. She was the one who helped me make my mom and other relatives understand and accept me. 

I asked her if she wanted to be part of a reel for @officialhumansofbombay and she was so excited to do it with me and she said she wants to give a strong message to society to help every Transgender person out there to gain acceptance and love from their family.

I have included the video from Humans of Bombay above.

The 87-year-old says that she no longer cares about “log kya kahenge” – a Hindi phrase meaning, “what will people think.”

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like... actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We really need to stop thinking that some jobs are ‘beneath’ people.

If you can’t/don’t want to do something that needs done, hire someone.

Always use more garlic than the recipe calls for

"Ehhh fuck it close enough" is a great measurement tool

Find like 5 recipes that you like, adjust them how you like them, make them until you hate them

Clean as you go

If a recipe is from a mommy blog, you will need more spices