Knuckles out

it’s okay if you’re just on tumblr to have fun and reblog things you like or that make you happy.

scented candles are comforting and nice, sweet coffee drinks and black coffee drinks are both valid, romcoms are called “feel good” for a reason and you can watch them to feel happy it’s not a crime, decorate your room with fairy lights, drink hot cocoa with marshmallows, listen to that cd that everyone talks about and that you hear playing in the Starbucks all the time, popular things become popular because a lot of people like them and it’s ok to also like those popular things it doesn’t make you boring. I could go on but you know what I mean.

your interests and simple pleasures are meant to entertain you, not meant to make you look entertaining to others.

women of colour are hypersexualised and objectified in different ways because of our race, but our universal experience is based on how our culture promotes the idea that our bodies are for male consumption. as an asexual woman of colour, it means that our lack of sexual attraction is seen as something to be conquered, or fixed, or a wrong to be righted. for white men, it’s another space to colonise. 

so when the predominantly white ace discourse brings up again and again that “acephobia isn’t real” calls ace people “straight people who don’t have sex”, you’re erasing the way many ace woc are trying to navigate our bodies and sexual agency as asexuals. don’t derail this by saying what we face “isn’t acephobia, just misogyny”, we’re facing intersections of both that have arisen from a culture of compulsory heterosexuality and white supremacy. many asexual women of colour have talked about it and you do not get to silence our voices. 

Hamlet: I can’t I’m hiding a body

Ophelia: my dad isn’t home

This was the crossword puzzle in the New York Times yesterday. 

Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a Schrödinger puzzle, select squares have more than one correct letter answer: They exist in two states at once. “Black Halloween animal,” for example, could be both BAT or CAT, yielding two different but perfectly correct puzzles. Only 10 such puzzles have now been published in Times history.

It’s the theme of Tausig’s puzzle, though, that makes it special. Four entries in Thursday’s crossword can include either an “F” or an “M.” Both are correct; neither is wrong. For example, “Part of a house” can be either ROOF or ROOM. The long “revealer” answer, tying those select entries together and spanning 11 squares smack-dab in the middle of the puzzle, is GENDER FLUID.